Greetings, OUUC members and friends,
The email below is an excellent first-hand description of the current situation in the city of New Orleans written by one who lives there. While the North Shore congregation with whom we are partnered lives almost entirely across the lake from the city, New Orleans is very much a part of their lives. One of the things we can do to help them is to continue to be informed of what is happening… or not happening in that area. PLEASE READ THIS and share it with your friends. Thank you. Ginny Taylor
Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 2:18 PM
Subject: life in new orleans
January 30, 2006
Dear friends,
Many of you email or call, wanting to know what it's like living in New Orleans these days. Sometimes I muster a few paragraphs and comments, but the situation here is so overwhelming, that I usually just shy away from responding with any depth. Today, five months after the hurricane hit and the levees broke, I'll try to update you.
Big picture in New Orleans: 3 out of 4 people lost everything….house, contents, probably a car, possibly a job. Imagine what that is like. If you were a family of four, and three of you lost your homes and all your worldly possessions, it would be a mammoth blow. It also puts a great strain on the one person left standing. That is our city now. Three fourths of the residents have been displaced. We had 470,000 people on August 29, and five months later, we have around 110,000. About three-fourths of the city is uninhabitable. There are miles and miles and miles of houses, shops, fire stations, schools, hospitals, playgrounds….gray, smelly, moldy, destroyed. There are mounds of debris…soggy couches, sheet rock, bicycles, clothes, appliances, mattresses…piled up and strewn about in all of those desolate neighborhoods. Some of those areas are in poor parts of town, some are in elegant lakefront areas. The bulk are in working class and middle class neighborhoods…the places where people paid taxes and had
lived for several generations.
Loss is the overarching fact of life here. Katrina was a huge storm, and vast parts of the region suffered terrible wind and rain damage. But the breaches in the Army Corps of Engineers-built levees are what did the real damage to 75% of the city. The critical distinction in how individuals fared in the storm is whether they had flood, or just wind, damage. Those of us who live on high ground….along the naturally high ridges of land where the city was originally developed in the 1700's and 1800's…only had wind
damage from the hurricane. We live in what's called "the sliver by the river", and we are the lucky. For us personally, we have about $55,000 worth of wind damage, and are making some headway in getting the broken windows and missing roof tiles and caved in ceilings fixed. In fact, we should be almost back to where we were pre-K by Mardi Gras, February 28.
Daily life in our little bubble of normalcy is not too bad much of the time. Many grocery stores are now open, though lines are long and supplies are somewhat scarce. Traffic is astoundingly clogged. The city is crawling with thousands of pickup trucks filled with Mexican workers and ladders. Fewer than half of the stop lights are working, so there are stop signs resting on street corners everywhere. Traffic accidents are common, but you better hope you don't get hurt. There are just 120 hospital beds in the
entire city! Only one full service hospital, one children's hospital, and a makeshift emergency room in a tent downtown. The hospital where Larry and our children were born, and where all our doctors were, flooded 14 feet and cannot be salvaged. It will be imploded this spring, and hopefully a new hospital will be built in its stead someday.
The 911 emergency service is severely compromised; the police and fire departments are understaffed. Our neighbor had a kitchen fire and 911 never answered. We now have a cell phone number posted in the kitchen for the nearest temporary fire station should we ever need it. In addition to inadequate essential services like police, fire, medical care, garbage pickup, telephone service, street lights in inhabited neighborhoods, even mail service (we now get mail delivered five days a week, but no magazines or newspapers. There are still not enough mail carriers to support the few neighborhoods that are getting home delivery…in other parts of town, people have to go to a regional post office station to pick up their mail), the most critical problem is the lack of housing.
Very few of the flooded houses have been repaired enough to live in yet. Some folks are able to live on the second floors of their homes, above the gutted-to-the-studs first floors. So thousands of people are still living out of town, or bunking with relatives or friends… five months later. (My friend Hortencia has been living with her husband and 16 year old daughter in a married daughter's small house…staying in one bedroom that the rest of the family has to walk through to use the bathroom, since October, with no hope of moving in the foreseeable future. Like thousands of others, she is awaiting a FEMA trailer.) Apartments are scarce, with long waiting lists. Since only 25 % of the city stayed dry, and much of that still has wind damage, the housing shortage is extreme.
FEMA trailers are beyond scarce. It is disgraceful. Fewer than 10% of the needed FEMA trailers are operational. Some people have room in their driveways or yards to park the trailers and want to live in them while they rebuild their decimated homes. Others are looking to live in FEMA trailer clusters of several hundred so they can return to the city. One reason the city cannot get functioning is that there are no places for people to live. There are not enough workers to staff gas stations or grocery stores,
restaurants or dry cleaners, doctors’ offices, and on and on and on.
So. Daily life for those 25% of New Orleanians blessed enough not to have flooded, is far from normal. We do not put on blinders and hide in our bubble. There is too much pain all around. The sadness is palpable. Much like during the Depression, the movie theaters are jammed (despite long lines with the shortage of ticket takers or popcorn sellers) and lots of people have taken up jogging and yoga and any other physical diversion they can manage.
And for the 75% still displaced, still homeless, still wondering when and how they can ever return home…I cannot even imagine. When they visit their old neighborhoods and see the ruins, it must seem a hopeless future indeed. For all New Orleanians, spells of weepiness at unexpected times are
common…the slightest remark or sight or smell can trigger a wave of despondency. And no one will wonder why you are crying; we all have our moments.
Enough of the gloomy. What of the future? Why do we live amidst this despair and desolation? For us there was no question of moving. Larry has a business here with 42 employees, so he can provide jobs, and health insurance and stability for a group. His business is solid, and he is a lifelong local who has always been an advocate for the city. And me, I'm alongside Larry. I cook comforting foods and there are friends around the kitchen table several nights a week. We have folks staying with us often, and I am repairing our house. I thought I was easing on into a lazy life in Pass Christian [west of Gulfport, MS], but Katrina changed that. So, I am a civic activist again. Some days I weed and plant in the botanical gardens of our suffering City Park. Lately, I've been training as a volunteer lobbyist and will spend much of Feb 6-18 in Baton Rouge, lobbying our state legislature to pass levee board and levee district consolidation.
This has been a fascinating side effect of the storm…citizen involvement in government reform. Our grassroots levee reform group got 54,000 signatures on petitions statewide and the issue is agenda item #1 in this special session of the legislature. "United we stand, divided we flood." There is another group of young women I play tennis with who have started the Katrina Krewe. Every Wednesday and Saturday mornings, they gather volunteers (240 of them last Saturday) on a different street and collect and bag debris. This is not candy wrapper and beer can litter, this is heavy duty storm debris…roof shingles, hubcaps, tarps, boots, paint cans, sheet metal, whatever. The city sends a garbage truck and street cleaning machine out behind them and it's astounding what a sensational job these folks are doing
cleaning up the city. Concerned citizens are engaged across the city. Those of us who are here are the hard core committed.
There are so many opportunities in this crisis to change our community for the better. For us to build decent low income housing, to overhaul our miserable public education system, to consolidate our assessors and dock boards, our criminal and civil courts, to reform our notoriously corrupt government. And the great thing is that people truly are involved. We have a mayoral and city council election April 22nd, and issues of reform, race, and rebuilding are the hot topics.
Our son James is in southern California, where he will get his master's in sports management next month and then look for work out there. Our younger boy Brittin jumped into storm recovery work just weeks after Katrina. He spent six weeks doing debris removal on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and for the past few months has been supervising a crew of 30 men rebuilding the largest employer in Plaquemines Parish, the Daybreak fish processing plant. His clothes smell remarkably bad, but he's out the door at 6 every morning, making money and accomplishing work that needs to be done.
I hope this hasn't seemed too discouraging or too down. We are truly among the blessed and know it. But it's somehow important to let you know that life is not normal, even for those of us who whose homes were relatively unscathed. Our community is torn apart and our neighbors are in pain. We probably all wish we could wake up to discover this was all an incredibly bad dream, and that we can have our pre-Katrina lives back. Despite all the anguish, though, we do have remarkable opportunities to remake our city, especially its school system and governance. I'll write again in a few weeks to try to justify why we are having Mardi Gras. It was a tough sell to me, but I'm now agreeing that we need to celebrate our uniqueness, and since it's going to happen anyway, we may as well be on board. But I also hope I'll be able to report on a wonderful project some friends and I are working on in a new charter school… horticulture, nutrition, science.
Again, this is clearly not a situation anyone would have wished for, but it is what it is. So we put one foot in front of the other. As Winston Churchill said, "When you're going through hell, keep going."
Love to you all…and keep New Orleans in your thoughts, and in front of your congressmen's thoughts too.
Karin G.
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