Hurricane Katrina's landfall on August 29, 2005 was the most catastrophic day in our country's history. In one day, 90,000 square miles of land, an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom was devastated. A total of 118 square miles of coast was lost forever and 1836 people were killed. The hurricane itself and the subsequent failure of the New Orleans levees led to the destruction of 851,000 homes. In Louisiana alone, 2.5 million people received FEMA assistance after the hurricane. Certainly more lives were lost on Dec. 6, 1941 and on Sept. 11, 2001 and both of these events served as catalysts for wars; but more was destroyed and more was lost on Aug. 29, 2005, a lot more. Before Hurricane Katrina, the scale of destruction seen on a single day in New Orleans and in Mississippi could have only been caused war. Millions of people are struggling right now in New Orleans, Mississippi and spread across the country, with the storm's effects on their lives. I went back to New Orleans 133 days after evacuating from the city on Jan. 7, 2006. This time I saw New Orleans first from the road, driving in from the east on I-10, the coastal interstate that connects Florida to California. The I-10 bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, connecting the north and south shores of the lake was immovable and enormous. It is as wide as the I-95 bridge across the Piscataqua River connecting New Hampshire and Maine but 20 times longer. On my return trip into the city I saw the bridge had been warped and ruined like a balsa wood bridge in shop class when one too many weights were attached. Its guardrails were missing, with rough, chewed concrete edges where they had been anchored. Lengths of bridge decking, countless tons of concrete, steel and asphalt had been ripped from their pilings and dumped into the lake. That day, and presently, there are erector-set-like prefab metal spans to carry traffic across these huge holes. On the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, still about 30 minutes from New Orleans, the landscape is bleak and dismal. It's a swamp. Drainage ditches run alongside the road to catch and channel the water from the area's regular torrential rains. Small bushes and shrubs line the ditches on the side opposite the road. Beyond these shrubs, green grass and blue water weave together towards the horizon. After a few more miles of driving, a large white concrete sign reading "New Orleans East" appeared and I-10 crossed the threshold into über-urban density without any indication the swamp was ending. A city sprang from the muck. Thousands upon thousands of houses, apartment complexes and town homes abutted the highway and expanded in every direction to create the cityscape. Dusk gave way to the darkness and my awe about this surprise city in a swamp evolved. I was transfixed by all the gruesome details I had initially overlooked. In cities like New Orleans, you aren't supposed to see the stars because there is too much light pollution. I was driving through a city, but the stars in the sky were brilliant.
The houses disappeared into the blackness except those that were immediately adjacent to the highway where I saw that roofs had been ripped off and windows were missing. No house stood whole. The cars parked in driveways were covered in grime, like what accumulates in your shower when you don't clean it. Some cars were lying in the drainage ditches alongside houses that had been deposited there by the rising and receding water. Closer to downtown New Orleans was the commercial district for this area. It looked like the malls, Wal-Mart and grocery stores in Newington and it took ten minutes to drive through at 70 mph. Signs had been shredded by Hurricane Katrina's winds and they stood with their metal skeletons exposed. Wal-Mart was "W______rt" now and the store was only recognizable by its blue and grey color scheme. Acres upon acres of parking lots were filled with debris instead of cars. There weren't any red, green or yellow lights managing traffic on the roads that used to be busy enough to require four lanes in both directions. A few months after this drive, tornadoes ripped through New Orleans East. This part of the city was free from the clutches of tourism but was still home to hundreds of thousands of people. When the tornadoes hit New Orleans East, there wasn't anybody left there to be in danger because there wasn't anywhere left for anyone to live. I walked into the dorm room at Tulane that I had slept one night in, and where I was supposed to have slept every night since. I saw two boxes sitting in the middle of the floor and asked my roommate what he had in them. He replied that he didn't know because they were my boxes. I opened them and remembered that I had books, class notes and anything else I wanted but didn't want to haul back up north. I had stored more boxes in the basement of a friend's house. I called him but he told me his house had been flooded and it was being gutted.
At UNH, people only considered dead bodies and wet houses. I accepted these and used them as my criteria to judge my own loss in New Orleans. I couldn't help it. I heard them so many times. In doing this, I gave up my own memories and my own experiences which was why I was surprised to find those boxes waiting for me where I had left them. I had been separated from New Orleans and subjected to the media's interpretation of what was happening and what was important there along with everybody else. I wanted to reclaim a first-hand and original account of what was going on and what had gone on. I needed to educate myself. So, I woke up early and set out to see the city. In the Garden District, along Saint Charles Avenue, the delicate complex leaded glass windows in the mansions survived the storm undamaged. The lush gardens were vibrant. The most striking difference was the absence of the gas lanterns on the porches of the mansions. The gas infrastructure was damaged during the flooding and consequently there were light bulbs buzzing where flames had burned. The damage in the Garden District was unremarkable and wholly superficial. I wondered if this was what "rebuilding" looked like. A few blocks closer to the river was Magazine Street, a Mecca of restaurants and shops. Here, too, buildings were intact, people were on the streets and there was traffic. Over the course of the next six months, I would get to know this area again. Businesses ostensibly open, kept erratic hours posted next to "Help Wanted" signs. Often times these places would close or be closed during hours that were posted as open. People weren't available to work. Competition for labor was ravenous. Burger King advertised a $10,000 signing bonus for a one-year contract coupled with $20 per hour for a job that used to earn minimum wage. I kept driving away from Tulane. Beyond the French Quarter and beyond the grasp of tourism, the situation was dire. I understood immediately that everywhere I had just passed through, everywhere tourists visited, had never gotten wet. By comparison, it had all survived unscathed. As I drove along, I noticed an "X" spray painted on the front of every house. The "Xs" were as big as the reach of the FEMA agent who had searched the house. The "Xs" were a sobering symbol of the exhaustive process undertaken after the city was drained of water and a house-to-house search was required. Each of the "Xs" four quadrants had a meaning. One represented the dead found inside, one the living, another the date and lastly a code corresponding to the agent who had personally stepped inside the house. Every house was uninhabitable, structurally dangerous and a threat to human health. Still though, there were signs of life. Tent cities were erected in open spaces by volunteer groups. The National Guard was patrolling in sand-colored Humvees, carrying automatic rifles. Red Cross vans distributed free meals to everyone around. I watched volunteers, clad head-to-toe in white suits with respirators, gut houses. They ripped the contents of houses out and dumped it all into the streets to wait for the Army Corps of Engineers to collect and haul away the refuse. I saw them rip sheetrock from studs, wrestle with carpet and demolish kitchen cabinets, disemboweling homes and leaving behind the shell of a house. In the streets, pink fiberglass insulation, rancid carpet and crumbling sheetrock was piled alongside photo albums, furniture, children's toys, clothes, shoes and a wedding dress still on its hanger, colored every shade of mold and brown. It was all garbage now. Through all this, I didn't see any locals. I learned then that "house" is not synonymous with "home." At the end of the gutting process, houses stood intact, ready to have their insides replaced. But there was no trace of what had made these houses homes: People, children playing, memories, neighbors, churches, corner stores, gardens, navigable roads and walkable sidewalks. The people once home on these streets, were trapped with nothing to return to in cities foreign to them across the United States. These people became 'refugees' outside of New Orleans. A few times at UNH I was victimized by the pop-media label "Katrina refugee." Usually, I was polite no matter how ignorant or misinformed the question was. Yet with this label, I got angry. I wouldn't allow myself to be called 'refugee,' no matter how common or popular it was, I knew it was not okay. Refugees are on TV, they are far away and powerless, cared for by some government agency. Refugees got our attention for a few minutes at a time on the news, maybe a few of our dollars (usually a small price to pay to free ourselves of guilt) and were then forgotten about as we assumed, naively, they were being cared for. Refugees get our pity. Pity couple with inaction is useless. If you allow yourself to be called "refugee" you cannot help but see yourself as whatever you conceive a refugee to be. I was no refugee. Being told time and again, every day, how to judge the loss in New Orleans by the news and people informed by the news destroyed me a little. I didn't lose my life, my house or my loved ones and so I thought I didn't lose anything. I know now that this is absurd. What is more absurd is how blindly everyone watching the news accepted what he or she was shown without asking questions. Nobody I knew considered what it might have been like to lose your home, your identity and then to hear that you are now a "refugee." There was only pity for the people of New Orleans, no empathy. Houses were wrecked, but still whole in this first neighborhood beyond the French Quarter. The situation was unbearable and heartbreaking. Across the bridge over the Industrial Canal into the legendary Ninth Ward, the situation was unspeakable. House after house had been torn from its foundation stacked on top of one another on a single lot or in the road. There were cars that had floated into and remained in trees and boats were marooned on land. Discomfort was tangible and drivers were hesitant to slow down, to take pictures or to make eye contact with other drivers. These weren't just ravaged houses, they were lives destroyed. We weren't sure if it was okay to be in the Ninth Ward because it was like walking onto a field after a battle to watch the decay. On the way back into the city, I was scanning the roadside for any sign of structures that were being 'rebuilt.' I was looking for hope and for a symbol. There, alongside the bridge, at the edge of the Ninth ward was a shiny new billboard. The billboard was the tallest, brightest and only new structure that I saw in the Ninth Ward. Its bright, colorful advertisement invariably drew the eyes of every motorist leaving. It was an ad for Taaka vodka. I quit school the next day, but stayed in and around New Orleans until July that year. I watched the same news as the rest of America, on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was living what they were "reporting" on now on behalf of America. Gradually, New Orleans fell out of media vogue. Furor reignited a few times over the course of those six months. Once when Mayor Ray Nagin said that New Orleans would be a 'chocolate city again,' there was public outrage and again when five teenagers were killed at once and the National Guard was recalled to the city. However, America's attention span for New Orleans had largely expired by the time I went back to New Orleans. There was and is no outrage that New Orleans was not a 'natural disaster,' but rather a disaster of planning, neglect and of failed budget appropriations for decades. Rather the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is a national disaster in which thousands and thousands of people for decades participated. After Sept. 11, 2001 the media was willing to parade the turmoil of the crying wives and families of the firefighters and police officers who died in the towers because television ratings, we the collective, were responsive to these images. After Hurricane Katrina, stories about the brave people who risked their lives to save strangers in the first hours of the floodwaters were absent. In their place, images of violence, looting, exaggerated stories of crime and chaos ran rampant because the media understood perfectly what Americans would watch. None of us asked why we were only shown these gratuitous images. In England during World War II, average citizens opened their homes to Polish people fleeing the Nazi invasion and invited them to stay for the duration of the war. Some people graciously put themselves out to help the people of New Orleans, but most did not; if only the people of New Orleans had been born a different color. A few dollars to the Red Cross or a keg party was 'charity.' It was easiest but totally incomplete to blame George Bush, Ray Nagin or the sacrificial lamb, Michael Brown of FEMA, because it's all of them and even more. The failure to deal justly with New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is a failure on the part of our country and its citizens, every last one of us. New Orleans isn't an isolated or distant problem; it's a symptom of everything that is wrong with our society. If you are looking for answers, or wondering about a way forward, you should start your search in a mirror.
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