Dead pine trees tagged for removal at Davis Bayou - Gulf Islands National
Seashore
We were up around 6:45 this morning and quickly showered and packed things up. We had breakfast at the motel, which was had a minimally better selection than the one in Rochester. I tried one of their do-it-yourself waffles. I’ve honestly never cared a lot for waffles (I don’t think I’ve ever had one at Waffle House, for instance), but this one was okay. It would be all I’d eat for most of the day, too.
We set off east on I-10 and headed east to Ocean Springs, which is across the bay from Biloxi. We drove south to highway 90 and then headed east to Davis Bayou, the mainland section of Gulf Islands National Seashore. Margaret and I went here on Christmas Day when we were down on the Coast a few years back, and we were interested in seeing how it had changed.
Honestly, it felt a lot like Christmas this morning. The locals were complaining about record cold, and with temperatures in the 30s it was definitely jacket weather. That was actually kind of pleasant, though, as in summer this area can get unbearably hot and humid. We parked the car by the old visitor’s center (now boarded up) and did a bit of hiking. Then we came back and walked down to the new visitors center (a portable building, with another trailer serving as restrooms). There a young female ranger spoke with us and invited us to see the three exhibits they had salvaged from the old building.
Gulf Islands had suffered a lot of damage from the storm. The trail we had hiked
at Christmas (a boardwalk that went out over the water) basically no longer
exists. (We had hiked a different trail today.) Besides that and the damage to
the visitor’s center, the main loss was trees. We had noticed literally
thousands of trees with white tags bearing numbers while we hiked, and the guide
explained the tags were to quantify the loss for government records. The park
contains mostly live oaks and flash pines. The oaks survived the storm, but the
pines could not take the salt brought in by the storm surge. Virtually all of
them are dead. Even with that,
the losses at Davis Bayou are less than at other parts of the park. On Ship
Island, the park’s main recreation area, every single structure except a
historic fort from Civil War times was destroyed and the island was essentially
split in half.
We used the restroom and then drove out by the campground (now a FEMA village, one of the nicest in the area) where we hiked a pleasant little nature trail. We then left the park and had coffee at a nearby McDonalds. The coast at Ocean Springs is mostly swamp rather than beach, and highway 90 is a little ways inland here. Because of that most of the business here wasn’t destroyed by storm surge (which the swamp absorbed). They suffered wind damage, but for the most part the structures are still standing and everything is still open for business.
We headed back to I-10 and drove west to the next to last exit in Mississippi, which leads down to Waveland and Bay St. Louis. Katrina made landfall just west of here, essentially at the Louisiana/Mississippi state line, and I was expecting this area to be the most damaged we would see. It turned out that wasn’t the case, though. Waveland and “BSL” were indeed almost totally leveled, but what we saw 19 months after Katrina was some of the most intense reconstruction you could imagine. It’s like a whole brand new community has sprung up. The welcome sign in Bay St. Louis notes that the community was first settled by white men in 1699 and that it was re-established in 2005. There’s a similar sign hailing Waveland’s rebirth.
Almost all the homes in this area are being built on stilts. Apparently there are government regulations that require how much homes must be elevated if people want to rebuild in the coastal area. In Waveland floor level appears to be from five to ten feet off the ground. The stilts are concrete piers located in each corner of the house and halfway along longer walls. Those that are completed have long staircases leading up to their front doors. Most aren’t quite done yet, and a trailer still sits in the yard in front of the construction project.
These homes (locally called “Katrina cottages”) are very small. Most are not much larger than my apartment, and some are quite a bit smaller. Margaret suggested people were hurriedly erecting some sort of permanent home and that they’d likely build on as they could afford to. That’s probably a good bet, particularly since I know that most of the insurance settlements went directly to mortgage companies—leaving lots of people with nothing but empty land that they owned free and clear.
While the homes aren’t completely done, the business is definitely back in Waveland and BSL. The main business I remembered from that area was a K-Mart that I went to on several occasions. While K-Mart has closed stores across the country, they’re back in Waveland with a vengeance. They replaced their pole building (which was almost certainly completely leveled) with a brand new concrete building. Right next door are a Home Depot and a Lowe’s that’ are both doing tons of business. There’s also fast food, convenience stores, supermarkets, and every other kind of business lining highway 90 through the area. Some have their new buildings done, while others are temporarily operating out of trailers; but everyone is open for business. Like K-Mart almost all the new businesses are in better buildings than they used to be. They aren’t elevated (which would be next to impossible to do with a building the size of a commercial structure), so they’d still be prone to flood damage, but they are reinforced against the worst wind storms.
We drove right down to the old BSL bridge, and I snapped a couple pictures of the damage. They have a ferry running across the bay at the moment while they build a new five-mile span. We checked out the area and then headed back up to I-10.
We drove west into Louisiana and then headed up I-59 toward Hattiesburg. This is essentially the route the hurricane took when it went inland. Southwest Mississippi is called the Pine Belt, and the interstate basically makes a big tunnel through the woods. The Hattiesburg American reported that before rescuers could get down the interstate, they had to clear out twelve feet of tree branches had piled up in the roadway. They were, of course, cleared away by now, but the forest did look notably thinner.
We drove up to Picayune, the first town in Mississippi. I stopped in Picayune for food or gas many times when I’d head down to New Orleans from Hattiesburg, so the place is pretty familiar to me. They had a lot of wind damage here, and today the place has the damage and reconstruction you might see if a tornado went through up north. Otherwise Picayune is unchanged, though.
Right at the Louisiana border is an exit called “Pearl River Turnaround”. It’s basically an exit to nowhere right at the state line, and when I was in college I wondered why they bothered to build it. After Katrina, the exit made sense. It’s part of the “contraflow” operation they use for hurricane evacuation. In contraflow they close off the interstate to southbound traffic and run all four lanes northbound. [One of the places] they can end contraflow ... is at the state line, which is the point of the turnaround. There are similar set-ups on I-10 running both directions from New Orleans, on U.S. 49 heading north from Gulfport, and on I-55 north of Mobile. They’ve only used contraflow a couple of times, but it’s likely to become more important as part of the re-development plans. You may remember that one of the problems they had during Hurricane Rita was that Texas didn’t have a similar plan leading out of Galveston and Houston.
We stopped at the Louisiana welcome center on I-59, mostly for the purpose of using the bathroom. For that purpose, the welcome center really wasn’t the best choice. They had the kind of toilet I’d imagine they have in prisons, bare metal basins with no seats on them. Fortunately my need was for #1, but Margaret tells me the women’s room was the same—which wouldn’t work well for any need the ladies might have had.
While the bathrooms were bad, the welcome center itself had lots of helpful brochures and information. It also had far too many employees (or perhaps volunteers), and they all seemed to feel a need to justify their being there by being overly welcoming and helpful. It was as if there were a competition for which old lady could get the most visitors to sign their name and write their zip codes in her book. Old lady #1 (the one on the left) won that honor for us, simply because her desk was closest to the men’s room. We signed in, picked up a bunch of brochures, and were on our way again shortly.
We drove southward to Slidell, the largest of the suburbs on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain. When I was in college and drove down I-59, Slidell was essentially the start of New Orleans. Slidell is located at the mouth of the lake, right where it meets the gulf. The town is pretty much entirely surrounded by water, so it’s no surprise that just about everything was flooded by Katrina. In terms of damage per capita, it was one of the worst-hit communities in the area. Like Waveland and Bay St. Louis, though, Slidell was quick to repair and rebuild. While much of the place looks like a construction zone, a lot of it looks completely normal.
Just west of Slidell are the I-10 Twin Spans, a seven-mile bridge across the mouth of the lake. When I’d go down to New Orleans in grad school, this was always the prettiest part of the drive. The eastbound bridge survived Katrina with only minor damage, but the older westbound bridge succumbed to storm surge from the lake and was ripped apart in several places. I-10 is such a critical link in the area that literally the day after Katrina passed, they began working on repairs. They finished a temporary patch less than a month after the flood water was drained out of New Orleans. There’s technically a 45 mph speed limit westbound, as opposed to 60 mph eastbound. No one seems to obey either limit, though, and cars sailed by doing more than 70 as we headed west. The temporary bridge has narrow lanes and no shoulder, and it’s honestly a rather scary affair. This definitely wasn’t the relaxing scenic drive I’d remembered from college, but we did make it across safely.
There’s a swamp area just west of the Twin Spans that always has looked scrubby and still does. This is probably where they’re doing that illegal dumping we heard about on the news. In the middle of this area are two other exits to nowhere that are closed. People who hadn’t been here before might think that’s due to Katrina, but in fact they’ve been closed for at least seventeen years.
The west end of the swamp is a place called Chalmette, the last suburb before you get to New Orleans. The most noteworthy thing here didn’t even exist when I was in grad school—and it doesn’t exist today, either. That noteworthy thing is Six Flags on the Bayou, an enormous amusement park built in the middle of the swamp. The park looks like it should be a historic ruin. Looming over its east end is an enormous LED sign with Coca-Cola advertising at the bottom. That sign could probably withstand the apocalypse. (Some would say it already has.) Also seemingly undamaged is an enormous roller coaster that stands rusting at the west end. Everything else is just overgrown rubble.
Just beyond Chalmette you cross a canal and enter Orleans Parish, otherwise known as the City of New Orleans. The area near Chalmette is known as New Orleans East. I remembered this area as a vast sprawl of cheaply built ranch homes, strip malls, and warehouses that looked a lot like Moline. You’ll note the past tense in that previous sentence. That’s because New Orleans East was just about the single most heavily damaged area of the city. Even just casually looking out the window from the interstate we couldn’t help but notice that the area wasn’t anywhere close to normal. We passed strip mall after strip mall after strip mall with absolutely nothing open. There was a closed-up Wal-Mart, something that’s a familiar site up north. The difference, though, is that this one hadn’t relocated and become “super”. I couldn’t count the number of abandoned factories, warehouses, and even churches. The sea of empty parking lots is just unending.
Until quite recently New Orleans East was part of what they called “the dead zone”, an area encompassing almost half of the city that was virtually uninhabited and some said uninhabitable. That is starting to gradually change, though. New Orleans has an advantage over the places further east in that its damage was almost all due to standing water floods. Most of the structures are still there; they just need a lot of repair work. There are a few businesses that have re-opened in New Orleans East. We saw a Home Depot, a Walgreen’s, a couple of fast food places, one gas station, several liquor stores, and an adult video parlor. Housing is starting to come back, too. They’ve built a fairly large new public housing complex just north of the interstate in New Orleans East, and we saw a couple of other brand new apartment complexes. Some (maybe 20%) of the single family homes have FEMA trailers parked out front, a sign that they will eventually be rebuilt.
We continued on to the city center and turned off onto U.S. 90, which here is called the Westbank Expressway. This was the elevated highway you saw people evacuating to as they escaped the flood waters. We went past the gleaming white Superdome and then exited onto historic St. Charles Avenue. When I’ve been in New Orleans before I mostly took the streetcar down St. Charles. That wasn’t an option this time. The trolley poles were blown down by Katrina, and flooding caused damage to the tracks. They’re re-building the entire line, and so far they’ve just got the part in the downtown area done. The rest is expected to be up and running sometime late this fall.
Even when it does re-open in full, it’s not likely the St. Charles line will offer the level of service it had before the hurricane. That’s because the cars themselves are spread very thin. There are two other streetcar lines in the city, and the cars for both of those were stored in flooded areas and were damaged beyond repair. New Orleans got special permission from the government to re-distribute the St. Charles cars (which are not handicap equipped) to the other lines. Service is very infrequent on all the lines today, and it is likely to remain so for years—until they can afford to buy “new” old cars that have been abandoned by other cities.
You may have heard news reports saying that the tourist part of New Orleans is largely unchanged. Surprisingly, that’s pretty much true. The biggest difference I noticed was serious potholes and rough surfaces in a lot of the streets. Much of the tourist area (like the entire French Quarter) was not flooded at all, and brick and stone buildings that had already made it through 250 years worth of hurricanes found nothing particularly unusual in this one. St. Charles was flooded, though not to high depths. It’s also an extremely wealthy area with the means to recover quickly. As we drove down the grand boulevard, our sense was that things looked just a bit seedier than before. That could as easily have been due to the time of the year as to flood damage, though.
* * * * *
We headed out to Loyola University (where I’d twice been for national quiz bowl tournaments) and on to Tulane. The manicured campuses look exactly as they always did, perhaps even greener from all that excess water. We turned on Broadway and made our way down to Magazine Street. Just east of there is one of my favorite places in New Orleans, the Audubon Zoo. I’d thought about the zoo after the hurricane, particularly when I saw animals from there that had been temporarily “loaned” to zoos I’d been to in Omaha and Nashville. I’d heard they mostly came through the storm all right, but obviously not everything was normal, or they wouldn’t have sent any of their animals away.
There was unusually much parking available at the zoo for a weekend, and once we were inside the crowd was fairly thin and almost entirely made up of local people. Besides that, though, things were pretty much normal. When Katrina hit several of the zoo’s staff members stayed in the solidly built reptile house. The zoo grounds are right on the banks of the Mississippi, which surprisingly is one of the highest areas of the city—just about the only part that’s not below sea level. They had a lot of “botanical damage” (downed trees and the like), but not much else. Only a couple of their thousands of animals died. Since the hurricane their biggest challenges have been financial. They’re in a Catch 22 situation. With reduced attendance, they don’t have the money to hire a full-time staff; but without a full-time staff, they can only operate at limited hours, which in turn reduces attendance.
It was still a bit chilly as we went around the zoo, but that actually made for a lovely visit. I’ve been there several occasions when the place was unbearably hot or when it was overrun with insects. Today was very pleasant by comparison. The cool weather also meant more of the animals were outside, and with smaller crowds we could see things better.
We saw pretty much everything there was to see at the zoo (the reptile house being the major exception) and spent some time going through their two gift shops. I bought a few things, most notably a couple jars of Tabasco chili mix (not their hot sauce, but pre-made chili you can mix with beans and/or meat). I realized just after I bought it that this was a stupid purchase to make these days. Chili is, after all, a liquid, and this would force me to check the bag I had brought as a carry-on for the trip down—slowing things down considerably at the airport.
When we finished at the zoo, we did something I’d never done before. We drove down Magazine Street. This is one of those areas that all the travel books say you’re supposed to see. Having seen the place once, though, I can’t say I have any burning desire to rush back. Magazine is basically a collection of old shotgun houses (long, narrow rowhouses) that now house businesses that are best described as “funky”. These include places like Buddha’s Belly, an establishment that combines a laundromat with a bar and has a décor to fit its name—only in New Orleans.
Before long we reached the warehouse district, that next-to-downtown area every city has that is trying its hardest to gentrify. In New Orleans one of the main establishments bringing gentrification to the warehouse district is the National World War II Museum. This place opened about ten years ago under the name “D-Day Museum”, and it’s expanded at least twice since its start. It’s another thing I’d never seen, and I was glad to get a chance to check it out.
At first we thought the museum would be disappointing. That’s because what we thought was the entire thing was actually their special exhibits building. Strangely that building is also where the main entrance is located. Among the special exhibits were a DC-3 fighter plane hanging from the ceiling (with an AV display on how they got the thing there) and a rather encyclopedic display on a New Orleans company that built the landing boats that were used to ferry soldiers from ships to beaches in during the war, so they could get to land without having to go into a port. We made our way through that stuff fairly quickly. They were interesting, but they wouldn’t have made much of a museum on their own.
The main museum is enormous and fascinating. They begin with an exploration of the origins of the war and then go through the beginnings of war in Europe and Manchuria. Then there’s a full treatment of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ decision to enter the war. They describe what life was like during the war—both for those on the battle fronts and for people back home. It was interesting to contrast this section with what we had seen in Britain a couple years ago.
The single largest part of the museum is devoted to D-Day, which makes sense given its former name. For me this part was almost excruciatingly detailed and frankly the most boring part of the place. War buffs would probably love it, though. I was glad to get past that and on to the liberation of Europe and the fall of Berlin.
The War in the Pacific was more interesting to Margaret and me, mostly because our father fought there. They treat each of the islands separately and explain that each one had its own D-Day, with an invasion plan similar to what went down in France. I must confess there were many island battles I’d never heard of, but it was interesting to see how they all fit together.
They had a display on the bombing of Japan that showed what percentage of various Japanese cities was destroyed. Beside each Japanese city they listed an American city of comparable size to give an idea of just how many people were affected. The city of Kobe happened to be paired with New Orleans, which made me remember the earthquake they had in Kobe a few years back. Visiting New Orleans after its disaster made me wonder what Kobe was like after the quake.
The museum was about to close as we reached the end of the pacific part. This is one of the few museums I’ve visited where I could have used more time. I enjoy museums, but I tend to go through them rather quickly. Here I actually felt rushed. Limited hours are part of the “new normal” in New Orleans, though (mostly due to a desperate shortage of workers), so we had to finish looking at the exhibits, give the gift shop a quick once-over, and get on our way.
We ran into those limited hours again at our next stop. After strolling down Poydras Street in the Central Business District (the “new downtown” as opposed to the Vieux Carré or French Quarter), we stopped in at the Riverwalk. This tourist-oriented mall is located in a remnant of the world’s fair New Orleans hosted back in the early ‘80s. The mall used to be open well into the night, but now it closes up at 6:00.
… Not that there’s all that much to close. Riverwalk has never really been much of a mall. It’s more a collection of gift shops—the same stuff they have in the French Quarter, but under an enclosed roof. You can buy T-shirts, mugs, pralines, cookbooks, plastic alligators, Tabasco boxer shorts, voodoo dolls, Saints jerseys, and Mardi Gras masks. You can’t buy a lot of real merchandise, though, and that’s a real problem with tourism lagging. The place is definitely struggling to survive. They’ve got lots of empty stores. They try hard to hide that fact by placing artwork in the empty spots, but probably half of the leasable space is available. Even at the stores that are open, the clerks just seem to sit there bored waiting for people to come in. It reminded me of the Old Capitol Center in Iowa City, which used to be a thriving mall but now has virtually nothing there.
We had chicory coffee and beignets (square French doughnuts buried in powdered sugar) at the Riverwalk outlet of Café du Monde. We also each picked up souvenir mugs. I got a green travel and white travel mug which is probably standard equipment for commuters around New Orleans. Margaret got a stoneware mug that commemorates the hurricane with the message “Katrina couldn’t blow the sugar off our beignets”. My other purchase at Riverwalk was a Saints T-shirt. I figured since the Superdome was what started this trip it was an appropriate souvenir.
We tried to have dinner at Riverwalk, but pretty much every restaurant was closed—some for the night, others permanently. Even one place that seemed open (a cheesesteak stand) had an employee who told us they were closed, even though it wasn’t 6:00 yet. So we went back to our parking space by the World War II Museum and made our way out of town.
We drove back east on I-10, past the devastation of New Orleans East and Chalmette and on across the Twin Span bridge. Just across the bridge (about twenty-five miles east of downtown New Orleans) we exited at Oak Harbor Boulevard in Slidell. This is a mostly residential area with extremely expensive homes, each of which has its own private dock on the lake. Mixed in with the pretentious homes were a convenience store, a Waffle House just slightly older than those brand new ones on the Coast, and our home for the night, the modest but attractively built Sleep Inn—Slidell.
The Sleep Inn predates Katrina, but only slightly. I wonder if it might not have suffered some damage in the hurricane, too. While our upstairs room was fine (except for an awkward door lock and a bathroom light that didn’t work), all the public areas of the hotel had a decidedly musty smell that could well be leftover from flooding. I can’t imagine a place so close to the water didn’t get some water damage.
The check-in process tonight was extremely slow. The college age girl who worked as the night manager was perfectly willing to take my scrip cards, but her computer wasn’t able to register them correctly. She ended up calling a processing center on her own cell phone (because their office phone wasn’t working), manually entering the numbers for each of eight different cards, waiting for a verification, and then entering the verification number into her computer. It took forever, but thank goodness she was pleasant about it.
Since Waffle House was the only dining option in the immediate area, we had another dinner there. This time I had ham and eggs, while Margaret had a hamburger. There’s always a bit of free entertainment when you eat at Waffle House, but tonight there was more than usual. We were the only customers there when we entered, but the employees (two waitresses, a cook, and a dishwasher) were all flustered because a large to-go order had been phoned in, and they were having trouble getting everything together. The cook had burnt an order of bacon before discovering the grill was set to the wrong temperature, and the employees argued with each other as to whether they should serve it or not. (The person making the order had apparently requested “crispy” bacon, but this was definitely beyond that; in the end they threw it out.) When the guy who placed the order arrived, there was a long discussion because he didn’t want the grits that automatically came with his order. The waitress couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want something that was free. She even offered to give him a free soft drink instead of the grits so he’d have his “lagniappe” (LAN-yap or “little something extra”—an essential New Orleans business concept). Watching all this was interesting, but it certainly slowed down service. It took forever for us to get our check.
Back at the hotel we called Paul and had a pleasant visit even though the cell service kept cutting in and out. We then read through the area newspapers. One of the big stories in the Times-Picayune was about cars that had been abandoned at New Orleans International Airport during the hurricane and were still sitting there unclaimed after accumulating almost $9,000 each in parking fees. Apparently none of the owners could be located, so the cars just continued to sit there in the airport ramp.
We had a leisurely, but enjoyable evening and turned in for bed fairly early.
We were up at 6:30 this morning and quickly showered and dressed. This hotel’s breakfast was the most minimal yet, not much more than frozen muffins. Since there wasn’t much to keep us in Slidell, we headed back west. This was a rainy Easter morning, but even so we had an easy drive into the city.
Today we exited at Canal Street, right in the heart of the city. From the freeway the buildings around this exit looked fairly normal, but almost the second we exited we entered devastation. Right next to the exit ramp was a building that had once been either a motel or an apartment building. Today it was boarded up and nearly falling down. Almost every other building in the immediate vicinity was in similar shape. We turned onto Canal Street, the main business strip in the city proper. There’s not much business happening on this part of Canal these days, though. The area by the interstate was struggling even before the hurricane, and Katrina was pretty much its death sentence.
As we made our way down toward the river Canal Street looked more and more like its old self. A few businesses were still closed, but most were open. They’re restoring the sidewalks with new tile walkways and decorative palm trees. The area is still very much under construction, but it’s definitely on its way back.
We parked at Canal Place, right behind the Aquarium of the Americas on the border between the old and new downtowns. I got out an umbrella I’d packed (a giveaway at one of the baseball games I was at last summer) and we walked quickly through the cold, dripping weather. We made out way down Decatur Street to the French Market where we stopped at the original location of Café du Monde. The whole patio area was closed off, so for the first time in my mind I went into the original dining room of the Jackson Square institution. Since the Sleep Inn’s breakfast was disappointing at best, we again had beignets and chicory coffee, this time in the standard stoneware cups they always use in their French Quarter location.
After breakfasting we made our way back to Toulouse Street, at the upriver end of the Jackson Brewery mall. JAX is also missing a lot of business from its pre-Katrina days, but it appears to be doing better than Riverwalk. We went past the mall and on to a little fake lighthouse built on the levee at the foot of Toulouse Street by the river. We had arranged to take a tour, and we needed to come to the Gray Line office here to check in. We had to wait a while, because the only employee was apparently answering the phone in another room from where the ticket window was located. Eventually we got checked in, though.
The woman who checked us in was surprised to hear we were staying in Slidell. She had apparently lived there in the past and commented, “It’s a great place to raise the kids. There was nothing going on when I lived there, and there’s still nothing going on.” Slidell is basically a small town that has grown into a suburb, and for the most part it’s a positive thing that not much ever happens there. New Orleans, on the other hand, often has far too much going on—and far too many ways for those kids she spoke of raising to get into trouble.
Once she checked us in, the Gray Line lady commanded us, “Y’all go inside and warm yourselves up.” It was in the upper ‘30s, pleasant jacket weather had it not been raining, but by the standards of Louisiana it was frostbite weather. Apparently there had been snowflakes in the air on the north shore of the lake yesterday, the first time in decades anyone down here had seen the white stuff. I’d have definitely traded with them a month ago when we had far more snow than anyone would care to see in a winter.
The woman had told us that the food court at Jackson Brewery was open for breakfast. That wasn’t entirely true. The mall’s doors were open, and we could take the elevator up to the food court. However most of the stands there appeared permanently closed, and only a single place—a fried chicken outlet—was open for breakfast. We used the restroom and bummed around a bit, and by the time the bus had shown up for our tour it had stopped raining.
The tour we had booked was called “Hurricane Katrina: America’s Greatest Catastrophe”. It was established by Gray Line in January 2006, just as people were starting to rebuild in New Orleans. At the time it was very controversial, with many critics claiming that all the tour company was doing was profiting from the misery of others while providing the tourism equivalent of gawking at a traffic accident. Over time the tour has gained respectability. Residents who are rebuilding have said over and over that they’d far prefer that tourists come by in one big group on a bus than snooping around in dozens of separate cars. Local officials have said that the tour was one of the best ways of truly educating people about New Orleans as well as a way of employing people and opening up the tourist industry. ... After reading numerous reviews of the Katrina tour, I decided it was something we should do. I’m very glad we did.
For the tour about fifteen tourists boarded a minibus that could have held up to about twenty-five. Our guide was a twenty-something man named Brad with shaggy fake blond hair. ... It was interesting that we had this particular guide, because the Lonely Planet guidebook I had brought along mentioned him specifically in their glowing write-up of the Katrina tour. Brad was a life-long New Orleanian who lived on the Esplanade (ESS-plun-aid), a well-known avenue that marks the far end of the French Quarter. (He complained that the military police who have been assisting with keeping the peace in the city disturb his roommate and him by jogging down the middle of the boulevard early in the morning.) Brad had stayed in his home (which, like the everything else along the riverbank, did not flood) during and immediately after the storm. ... When it became clear that electricity and water would be out for quite some time, they evacuated by driving over the Greater New Orleans Bridge to the west bank of the Mississippi—the only route out of town that wasn’t under water. Brad returned fairly soon and has lived through every phase of the Crescent City’s rebirth. That personal experience, combined with good communication skills, made him an outstanding guide for this tour.
Brad packed the three-hour tour with endless information. He anticipated everyone’s questions and answered most of them before they were asked. Above all he was concerned with explaining why—why people settled in this area to begin with, why the levees broke, why there were people (like him) who didn’t evacuate when they were told to, why the tourist areas didn’t flood when most of the city did, and why it’s important to rebuild the city rather than abandoning it. Before I go into the details of the tour, I’ll try to explain those “whys”. Most of them I already knew, but a lot of people don’t.
French explorers originally built New Orleans on the natural levees on the banks of the Mississippi, as close to the great river’s mouth as it was practical to build a city. The original site of New Orleans isn’t below sea level and isn’t a swamp. In fact, the river bank around New Orleans is just about the only place in southern Louisiana that isn’t natural swamp, so it made sense to build a city there. The city remained just along the natural levee (in and near today’s French Quarter) throughout its days under French and Spanish control. After the Louisiana Purchase, though, it the port city rapidly expanded into the largest and most important city in the South. All the new people who worked in New Orleans’ port and factories needed somewhere to live, and the only nearby land that wasn’t developed was the low-level bowl of swampland between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. They drained the swamp and then built canals through the area to carry away water that accumulated in the below sea level bowl. New Orleans today has three times the canals of Venice—some for navigation, but most for drainage.
Brad made a point of telling us that New Orleans is far from the only major city in the world that has the bulk of its land below sea level. In addition to Venice, he mentioned Rotterdam and Delft and noted that the Dutch have been much better at working to prevent flood-related disasters than we have been in America. Holland is protected by a vast network of sea walls. The barters are redundant, so there would have to be multiple failures in the Netherlands before a storm surge could affect a populated area.
New Orleans, on the other hand, is protected by a single network of levees. The levees along the river and the lake are enormous earthen barriers that didn’t come anywhere close to failing during Katrina. Unfortunately the levees on those drainage canals are the weak link in the network. The canals are lined with thin concrete barriers (literally thinner than the sound barriers along the interstate) that are stuck in a base that is basically landfill. When the storm surge pushed into Lake Pontchartrain it rushed up into the canals and put enormous pressure on those very weak levees. In most cases the concrete technically held, but the landfill base rapidly eroded and sent water rushing into the bowl. Pretty much everyone knew this was a disaster waiting to happen, and on several occasions there had been attempts to prevent it. Most recently under the Clinton administration ... millions of dollars were allocated to strengthen the canal levees in New Orleans. Unfortunately that money was diverted elsewhere when Bush took office. Given that the Bush administration has already spent billions of dollars on Katrina aid (and the final bill is likely to be several hundred billion), I’m sure today they regret not spending those millions on the levees. Pretty much all the flooding in New Orleans can be attributed to the failure of eight different levees on the canals. In Louisiana as a whole there were thirty levees that failed, none of them on major bodies of water.
As to why most the tourist areas remained intact while other areas flooded, there certainly wasn’t any sinister plot as some have suggested. It’s really simple geography. Water always finds the lowest point, and the tourist areas in New Orleans are on comparatively high ground. I had a hard time explaining this to one of our secretaries at school, who couldn’t believe that Café du Monde in the French Quarter could possibly be open today. She had relatives who lived through the Red River flood in North Dakota, and she assumed that the New Orleans flood was similar—a river overtopping its banks and spilling out around. The water in New Orleans didn’t come from the river, though; it came from Lake Pontchartrain and spilled into the bowl via the canals. Since the tourist area is on the far side of that bowl, it was understandably high and dry.
Brad suggested several reasons why it was important to rebuild New Orleans and why it’s important that the burden of rebuilding be shared by all Americans. Besides its historic importance and touristic value, New Orleans remains extremely important to the American economy. The oil industry is the single largest business in Louisiana, and we all found out after Katrina just what happens to gas prices when refineries are shut down. New Orleans is also one of the world’s largest ports. Most foodstuffs (coffee and fruit in particular) that are imported to America come through New Orleans, and when Midwest grain is exported overseas it goes by barge down the Mississippi. People are needed to man the ports and the refineries, and they need somewhere to live. If we don’t rebuild New Orleans, we’ll end up spending more to relocate all these industries somewhere else.
In addition to the economic reasons, Brad said something that some on the tour seemed to scoff at, but that I think is the best reason of all. Helping New Orleans to rebuild is simply the right thing to do. If a similar disaster happened in New York (which is a lot more vulnerable to hurricanes than most people think), there would be no question that we’d all chip in to help out. It shouldn’t make any difference that this particular disaster happened in a more obscure part of the country, in an area with a lot more dark-skinned people. The people of the Gulf Coast are Americans, and we as Americans have a duty to help them recover. It’s amazing how many “moral” people don’t want to do the right thing, though.
It was clear from the guide’s expression that one of the most common questions he gets is why people didn’t get out of town when there was a theoretically “mandatory” evacuation order. The first answer to that question is that most people did evacuate. More than 80% of the 400,000 people in the city left before Katrina hit—we just never hear about them. So why didn’t everybody else? Many of them literally couldn’t. New Orleans has the third highest percentage of households without cars in America; only New York and San Francisco have more carless people. Since no provision had been made for any sort of emergency public transportation, those without cars had little choice but to stay. (The Mississippi Coast, on the other hand, is very car dependent. That’s why even though the damage was actually greater there, a higher percentage of people could get away and fewer were killed.) Others stayed because they had to care for infirm relatives or because they didn’t want to abandon their pets. Still others were scared of abandoning their homes to potential looting in this very crime-ridden city.
For a lot of people, including Brad himself, the reason they didn’t evacuate basically boils down to “boy who cried wolf syndrome”. Numerous times before they had found themselves stuck in stand-still traffic trying to evacuate for hurricanes that in the end didn’t come anywhere close to the city. After all those previous false alarms, they had no reason to think Katrina would be anything different. I mentioned that to one of my co-workers at Iowa Lakes, and she agreed that we all do that with whatever weather phenomena we face wherever we live. In the Midwest we rarely pay much attention to tornado or blizzard watches because we’ve seen far too many of them never materialize. Even when we can see a storm on radar, we’re more tempted to just watch the weather channel than to take any real precautions. Whenever I hear people criticize the New Orleanians who didn’t evacuate, I wonder if they’re familiar with that Bible passage “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”.
The background music on this page is the country classic "Adalida", with the final line to its chorus "Id swim the Pontchartrain".
(c) 2007 davidmburrow@yahoo.com