Two Year Anniversary of Katrina

This is one of the public housing "ghettos" that I pass almost on a daily basis and every time it makes me reflect. It reminds me of the empty Warsaw ghettos from the 1940s. It makes me question what the observers of those ghettos thought about where its previous inhabitants had gone.

The inhabitants of this ghetto have not been sent to such a horrific fate but they have still been shipped away. When I talked to a NOPD cop a few months back he said that when the army was brought in, the way they treated people reminded him of Poland in the 1940s.

This ghetto reminds me that there are 90,000 New Orleanians now resident in Houston. This ghetto reminds me that there are people who called this place home for generations and had never left it until Katrina forced them out. I look at the empty gaping windows and wonder who lived there and what they brought to the city they belonged to. There were no doubt criminals and drug lords in this ghetto and whether it was a pleasant or unpleasant place to live is a whole other discussion on American public housing, but there must have been plenty of people who were not those things, who were trying to scrape by, trying to make ends meet anyway they could. There must have been some people who helped create the chants of the Mardi Gras Indians, who encouraged their kids to learn the brass band music of generations and who cooked red beans and rice on a Monday. Where are these New Orleanians now and how to they feel today?

I always wonder how these people coped after what happened to them at the superdome and the convention center. I wonder what they thought as they couldn't get out and faced surviving that huge storm. These are the people this country abandoned, the people who were not important enough to get water to in five days. I always wonder if these people have been offered the chance to return home to this city or not. I wonder if their hearts have been broken living in the total other universe outside of New Orleans.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder (or the blog grow duller)

No, I haven't been away on exotic travels. No, I haven't even really been having much fun to be honest. So ... hence my absence from the blogs of late. I've been feeling considerably uninspired. And I have to admit to having been wasting a great deal of time catching up with long lost dear friends on that newfangled thing 'facebook'.

But I've been looking at my stats and I feel a twinge of guilt that people still visit though there is no one here to offer them the hospitality of a good read and sometimes funny story of NOLA goings on.

So here are some photos of Dazza and I's trip south of N'awlins - we drove 75 miles south to the gulf hoping to stumble upon some rural gem of a town but instead found what we suspected, a drawn out Katrina disaster tour. Hardly a house was to be found. All there was were foundations with Fema trailers where small towns and villages once were. It was sad. So much so I couldn't bring my self to take photos (I have an idea that I've got for a collection of photos I'm going to post on this subject nearer the 2 year anniversary of Katrina).

The landscape was rural marsh and swamp that gradually gave itself over to more and more water. We never "arrived" at the Gulf - and the road got smaller and smaller passing oil industrial plants (and "Halliburton Road"!!!) that we eventually turned around and came home. But we first stopped in Venice (nicknamed 'the end of the world') for some fresh Gulf shrimp from a Vietnamese woman who had hundreds of chickens outside (I guess her family were likely bored with seafood!). The shrimp were huge and gorgeous and scrummy with garlic and white wine. We also stopped at a small roadside market and got HOT pickles and pepper jelly. So the trip was not wasted.

Post-Traumatic-Stress in Post-Katrina New Orleans

A very good friend of mine from the BBC sent me an email this morning. In it is details of a paper “Prevalence of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Following Hurricane Katrina” by Lisa D. Mills MD and Trevor J. Mills MD. This paper will be presented at the 2007 SAEM ( Society for Academic Emergency Medicine) Annual Meeting, May 16-19, 2007, Chicago, IL on Friday, May 18th, in the Psychiatry poster session beginning at 9:00 AM in the River Exhibition Hall A & B of the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers.

This paper is to report that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is ten times the national average in New Orleans. 38% of people who have visited the Emergency rooms in New Orleans exhibit signs of PTSD compared with 3.6% for the national average. Dr. Peter DeBlieux, MD,
Director of Emergency Services at Louisiana State University in New Orleans was asked about this study and commented:
“The incidence of PTSD in our population post-Katrina reported in this research study is noteworthy and worth following as recovery efforts move forward. The prevalence cited in this study is not alarming to those professionals caring for patients who have been traumatized by the storm and challenged by the recovery efforts.”

This should come as "news" to no one. Katrina turned this city into a war zone and most people involved in war suffer PTSD. Big parts of this city still look like a war zone. I drive up Louisiana Avenue to Clairborne to get onto I-10 and every time I do I look at the huge housing project on the right hand side. It is empty and abandoned after Katrina. The windows are cracked, the roof starting to crumble and it is quite eerie. It always reminds me of photos of war torn Germany during the 1940s. That's what Katrina did. She left big swathes of this city war torn.

I don't know if this paper will include this - although I hope it does - but I look at that housing project and the size of it and its emptiness and I wonder where all those people ended up. The PTSD in this city is 38% but what about all those other souls spread throughout the US? They surely also have PTSD. But being the poorest in society are they getting adequate care? Being the poorest in society they were the ones who didn't leave. They are the ones that really experienced the war zone and all its wrath.

The magnitude of loss here is staggering. It is present on a continuum from the smallest possession to loss of a loved one. As part of the story in my friend's email stated:
"The magnitude and duration of even a single mental health care diagnosis after this disaster demonstrates the need for long term, coordinated mental health response as part of disaster relief. Interim or temporary mental health response is not adequate for this population."

The scars from this disaster run deep. The rate of suicide is up. The number of people who are dying from stress is up. This city needs to be rebuilt but not just physically. Souls are hurt and they should be cared for and helped to heal as best they can.

A Katrina Cop's Story

I have just read a moving and heart breaking story about one Katrina survivor on Tim's blog. I urge you to read it.

There are so many stories here and they generally vary only in the degree that your heart breaks for the main protagonist. I spoke to a NOLA cop the other week who told me some of his experience in Katrina. He joined the force two weeks before the storm!!

There was no evacuating for him. As he said, as a cop his job is to go towards the danger not away. He said before the storm hit he cleaned his house from top to bottom. Yes that's right cleaned it. He filled his tub with water, left a big bowl of dog food for his dog and, rather crazily, drove through the storm to work in Uptown. He said they kept seeing great big pieces of metal slicing up the streets and they wondered where they were coming from until someone reported seeing the copper on one of the church steeples was being peeled off and hurled by the storm.


This man grew up in one of the projects as one of twelve kids with a single Mom. He grew up dirt poor, as so many have, and got himself out of the ghetto and bought a house. That house was flooded with the ugly waters from the lake and his precious dog perished. He had to explain to his elderly Mother why she couldn't go home and find a way of storing her precious possessions. He was lucky, the rest of his family had evacuated.

But his job meant that he witnessed the chaos, the suffering of the people he had grown up with and lived alongside all his life. He said that when FEMA was claiming they knew nothing about people at the convention center they were rescuing people and taking them there - on orders. The police had to commandeer any vehicle they could. He said the ones that worked the best were school buses - apparently they are easy to hot-wire!!

I told him that one of my colleagues had a mini-van with about 250,000 miles on it that was commandeered by the cops. Painted on the side was a huge Saints fluer de lis. My colleague saw his van on the TV footage and was proud that it was doing something to help someone somewhere in this city.

The cop told me that for days they went on like this - commandeering a vehicle and using it until it ran out of gas. It wasn't until the army arrived that there were supplies of gasoline for the vehicles and boats.

He said that the people at the convention center were huddled in the heat by the thousands. I learnt when I first saw the convention center here, that the national TV footage did no justice to the sheer numbers of people on the street out side it. The convention center is huge and goes on and on like a snake along the river. The cop told me he saw people inside the huge halls, outside on the sidewalk, camped out on the neutral ground (NOLA term for grass median) and on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

He said that he had mixed feelings about what happened once the army arrived. Whilst they definitely needed structure and action they also needed sympathy and empathy. He said he saw the army dividing the men from the women and children, splitting up families and then herding them onto buses. He said it left him feeling very unsettled because he saw people being treated like a problem that had to be fixed, treated as if they had no humanity left. He said he never thought he would see scenes in New Orleans, his home, that would remind him of films he's seen of Germany during the 1930s and 40s.

He told me an interesting fact from New Orleans' history. He said that New Orleans traditionally should have very little violence. The tradition was that if two men had a problem to resolve they would fight hand to hand. To use any form of weapon was regarded as cowardice. Guns, he said, should not in New Orleans tradition even be in this city. But they are. He said that it was people from outwith the city that brought guns and their ensuing violence. He said as a New Orleanian it makes him very sad.

It also was a reality the cops had to face once the city was emptied. There were some people who managed to evade the mandatory evacuation of the city and they were generally armed and holed up in small pockets throughout the wreckage of New Orleans. He told me it was a situation he hopes never to experience again.

I think what the emergency personnel did during Katrina was astounding. During 911 the firefighters, and police were heroic, running towards the danger. In Katrina all those personnel were a part of the tragedy - they were already in the danger. They lost their communities, their homes, their pets and some, their loved ones. The cop didn't get back to see his house and confirm his suspicions of the level of devastation until fifteen days after the flood.

He said he didn't blame any of the cops that abandoned their posts. It was too terrible an experience and as he said, some people are just not equipped to handle such a situation. He also, sadly, told me that he doesn't know how long it will take him to recover mentally or even if he ever will.

The irony for him was that he had been discussing with his wife only the week before the storm that he wanted to raise his house at least six feet. He acknowledged that that wouldn't have saved his dog but it was pretty eerie that he somehow knew something of what was coming, even if only subconsciously.

Flood Damage - current

I am planning on doing a big Katrina post - especially as Dza and I just watched the National Geographic film on Katrina - my blood was boiling and eyes a rollin - but I want to watch it again and take notes and write something with some substance, with some semblance of communicating to others what happened here.

Until then I urge you to go to these photos of school that were taken a week ago- only a week ago!! Here are Scout's from First Draft and here are Ray's.

Thanks to Jeffery at Library Chronicles for the links to these.

The Way Between The Worlds

I have just left another comment about NOLA as "Third World" and my distaste for the classification on Travelling Mermaid's blog (she has an excellent post on Dr Blakely's comments contrasted with some volunteers who came down here). I have been thinking about this term since I posted on the subject a month ago and got some thought provoking comments.

I was talking on this subject to one of my very good friends who is also Scottish and lives in the US. I have come to the conclusion that another classification is needed. One that communicates the richness, the magic that is almost tangible here. N'awlins often makes me feel like I'm in a novel in the style of Magic Realism. I feel like the upside down craziness of Jeanette Winterson in Sexing the Cherry, or I'm following Alice down that rabbit hole.

The rules here distort somewhat. Expectations are different. People are different. Its on the edge between things. Its like everywhere else and like nowhere else. I said to my friend that it feels a bit like the most magical place from my childhood: "the way between the worlds" in the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I think this is a better classification of this place than "Third World".

I know that this still leaves other aspects of this place (crime, FEMA failure, federal flood, hurricane relief and recovery, school system) not front and center but I think that's OK (as long as we make sure that no one ever forgets what happened and what is still needed here). The problem with the "Third World" description, for me lets the politicians and people in power off the hook (or at least not working as hard on NOLA's behalf as they could). It says we know we're doomed because this is how we classify ourselves and our position as a city. We need to advertise in our own classification of this city why this city needs to be saved, what is so special, why it matters to the world.

I think it would be good to say farewell to the Third World mantra and take on a more magical definition. Something that tells of the magical mystical NOLA that gets in your blood.

I know I am a newbie but I believe NOLA can be feisty and satirical without being self-defeating in the classification. The third world has no NOLA.

NOLA is the way between the worlds.

Gun Crime in NOLA and the US

Ever since Hurricane Katrina rolled through people have been talking and speculating about crime in NOLA. There was indeed zero crime in the city when the city was empty. But now it is not - the general figure for the returning population in New Orleans itself is around 230,000.

There has always been crime in this city (no doubt a correlation with there always being a lot of poverty in this city). It was bad before the storm and it is bad now. The figures per head of population make this city one of the most dangerous in America. There are tales of shootings, murders and muggings. My boss was robbed at gun point (that's AK47 gun point) on his own front doorstep in front of his wife and child on New Years Eve.

I was prompted to write this post by Mark's excellent post about his wife witnessing guns brandished a stones throw away from NOCCA where one of their children goes for dance classes. This is the comment I wrote on his blog:

Yet again a brilliant post - although one I would have rather you had not had to write!!!

As a legal alien from a civilisation without guns, American gun violence has always shocked me. I'm not stranger to it - a man was shot and killed at our laundrette two weeks before we left for the summer, in Cincinnati and we used to listen to the gun-fire and wait to hear the accompanying ambulance sirens from our deck.
I know there is the whole (in my view preposterous) right to bear arms thing here but really hows it working out? In the UK we have a tiny fraction of the gun violence (yes, we have some - but its tiny compared with the US - even per head of population). The police don't carry guns (we have a gun squad if needed). Its very hard to own a gun (after the Dunblane massacre the laws were tightened).

What scared me most though, was when watching a British TV program recently the person (a cop) was in danger and my automatic reaction was "oh no they don't have a gun"!!! So quickly we become used to guns and them being a necessity. When I first came to this country I was freaked out and scared everytime I saw a cop with their gun - now I'm scared if they don't have one.

We as humans are easily persuaded and our fear often clouds our judgements. The rise in crime in NOLA scares me and I have no answers. But if guns were not a "right" in this country I think it would be a lot safer.

I will never understand the American obsession with guns. Guns kill people and that is their purpose. I understand the right to bear arms if you are a pioneer fending for your life but we do not live in pioneer days. It is anachronistic. Yes, I know people now view guns as a necessity to defend yourself from all the criminals that patrol our streets, but this is the cycle this country is stuck in.

I wish I knew an easy answer to this, but I don't. I just know that I hate that aspect of this country.

The crime in this city is bad and the drug-lords have returned but without their normal ghetto enclaves of business their violence has spread to other normally, safer areas of town. I think the other issue is that when you have so many people so profoundly affected by such a catastrophic event as Katrina you have a population whose mental health is unstable and therefore more prone to extreme behaviour. Now I'm not saying that this means that everyone who lost their belongings, is living in a FEMA trailer, or is displaced, is waving a gun and robbing people!! - just that those with a predilection towards such behaviour are more likely to exhibit such behaviour as a result of their experience.

I think it is another symptom of loss in this city and a way of lashing out. This city could really benefit from an army of mental health professionals.

I understand why it is the way it is, I do not condone it and it makes me sad and angry.

I hate guns!

Moses you ain't - "They" know!

I have just read Chris Rose's recent article in the TP. I have also been reading a lot of NOLA bloggers posts on this issue. The issue is our wonderful, colourful major (yes, that's sarcasm).

He is famous for speaking his mind, only his mind is becoming something very few of us want to hear from. He is sounding completely nuts. He famously ranted during Katrina and woke up the Feds. He famously referred to this city as having always been a "chocolate city". He panders to the colour of the skin of his audience and says whatever inflammatory thing he thinks they wish to hear.

The latest Nagin saga has been his raving and ranting against "They". "They" want to divide this city up and remove the African Americans from the city. "They" see the aftermath of Katrina as a perfect opportunity to rid the city of the elements they dislike. "They" is a mass conspiracy. Mark at Wetbank blog puts it so well:

What's happening here is not happening to you in particular, or to the people you believe you represent. Listen, man: you're not Moses, the annointed leader of the Children of Isreal. The entire aftermath of the Federal Flood was not Pharoah out to get you and your people, and acting like that's the story line isn't going to bring about biblical miracles to restore the city to what it was. That's the PTSD and whatever else you have going on talking. Somebody who cares about you needs to take you aside and talk to you 'cause your messed up, and every time you open your mouth you mess us all up.

I have always been one (perhaps naively) who has thought that it should be the local leaders that would be those classed in the "They" category. After all if there was a conspiracy wouldn't the major be best placed to head it off, to provide the resources and structure to bring back the very people the so called conspiracy wishes to banish?

Major Nagin seems to be spending so much time these days looking for reasons to New Orleans problems that he's cross-eyed. Maybe its just my naive self but should he be looking for solutions to the problems instead of reasons.

I know Louisiana is famous for corrupt, inept politicians but really isn't Nagin too ridiculous for office? I know, I know, I'm naive.

Pumps, Levees .... I'm curious

I found out recently that we are going to be here for a while - my contract with work now extends for another two years and may become tenured. We could very well end up being here for several years. This is great. Its good to have a job. I love this city. We have friends here. We are happy living here.

So I'm curious about what exactly has been done for the protection of this magnificent place should (or when) a hurricane should roll through again. I know that it was the levee failure that flooded the city and that Katrina didn't hit New Orleans head on. So a chancing blow from a hurricane was enough to overpower the levees and flood the city.

I was talking to a friend the other night and he said that he thought what New Orleans needs to feel more secure and to show the world that it is more secure, is for another hurricane to come through and for the city not to flood. I have to agree this would indeed show that this city is on the path of regeneration. (don't get me wrong here - I'd rather a hurricane never came this way again ever - but I know I'm asking the impossible)

My friend was telling me that they have done "so" much to the levees that he thinks this may be a real possibility. So I'm curious if this is indeed true. I've been reading a lot about the failure of levee pumps on da po blog and on blogging new orleans.

So I'm wondering if I can find out more. Now that it looks like we are going to be calling this wonderful place home for the future I really need to know (I was interested before - don't get me wrong - but its just that now the need for knowledge feels more urgent).

I'm hoping that some of the wonderful N'awlins bloggers might drop by and point me in some useful directions. Until then I'm going to keep my ears pricked for any news on securing our home.

Gentilly Girl has a brilliant and succinct post on the subject!!

The guts of New Orleanians

Please read this - N.O. - It's Just Me: It's Easier Than Being Here - it breaks my heart and it is literally breaking the souls and lives of people in this city.
There is so much neglect and injustice going on down here and it really feels that the rest of the country is saying "oh just get over it" when they have no idea what is going on down here.

Everyday I learn something new and wonderful about this city. It feels right now that everyday I also learn something heart wrenching too. People here are still living in FEMA
trailers. People are having insurance companies deny their claims when they have spent decades paying premiums. People are working hard everyday to afford the spiralling costs of living here (the latest Entergy bills are outrageous!) and then return at night to rebuild their homes. The levee situation is still a mess and we are fast approaching another hurricane season. Peoples' mental health is poor and sleepless nights all too common. The stress is affecting the death rate in this town - see here.
And pay particular attention to this:

Dr. Kevin Stephens, New Orleans’ health director, told members that his analysis shows a 42 percent increase in the mortality rate in the city since the disaster, “strongly suggesting that our citizens are becoming sick and dying at a more accelerated rate than prior to Hurricane Katrina.”

Where are the news journalists reporting this? Oh yeah, they're on the other side of the planet reporting a war that should never have happened. They're reporting where all our tax dollars are going - into a bottomless pit of despair and misery and death. Now what could those dollars be doing instead?.... Oh ...... perhaps building levees like those that keep Holland dry?

And just yesterday I was reading about how the business of war is booming. And Dazza pointed out something he heard about an armaments producer developing biodegradable BULLETS!! Yes, bullets that are good for the "environment"!!!

Where is the outrage? Where are the mass protests?

America is asleep, drugged by the media, the command to shut up in the name of being patriotic.

Meanwhile I am amazed by the guts of New Orleanians who everyday get up and rebuild their lives in the face of such adversity.

Here is a link to one such story.

"Third World" New Orleans?

There is an issue that has been conspicuously absent from this, my blog of New Orleans. The issue, of course, is Katrina.

The issue of Katrina is huge. So big that I've been daunted at the prospect of posting on it but I knew it was something I would have to do. So I'm going to do it in bite size pieces. I was inspired to finally begin this endeavour by a comment that Darren got at work and one I have often heard myself: "Welcome to the Third World".

I was puzzled upon hearing this the first time and attributed it to the response (or rather lack of one) to the Katrina aftermath. It was a phrase that the national media latched onto to describe the scenes of homeless citizens crying out for assistance. I have to admit I remember asking at the time if this was pounced upon so eagerly because most of these poor suffering people were black? The correlation of the circles of enslavement, debt and exploitation of African countries certainly fits with how the black community of New Orleans has been treated.

But this term also annoyed me. Yes the suffering was terrible and yes it should never have happened. But this suffering was different from that of people who have walked for days with little food or water for months on end through the African desert to get to a refugee camp. This suffering was First World! It was so awful because in America these people should have had government assistance, should have had proper levees protecting their homes, should have had water flown in to help hydrate them in the stifling heat. If this tragedy is looked at in the classification of Third World then there is done a great disservice to the magnitude of the wrongs that were done and the injustices suffered.

Yet I think there is more to what these people have meant when Darren and I have been met with the greeting "Welcome to the Third World" and I think its a greeting we would have heard had we come to this city prior to Katrina. This phrase is said almost with a degree of pride. I find it very odd.

I realise it is in reference to how inept and corrupt things can be run down here. I realise it refers to the way the rest of America has always neglected New Orleans. I don't realise how it can be accepted here. Or how flippantly it is bandied around. It has a degree of fatalism about it. If New Orleans is the Third World then its doomed to always fall behind other American cities.

If it was being used to describe the abject poverty that the New Orleans poor live or rather exist in, then I can understand it. The projects were slums (they are presently sitting empty waiting for either the old occupants to return or to be torn down). The poor live in housing which is totally unacceptable and try to eek out a living on next to nothing. And, of course, like the Third World, the poor here were/are mostly black. And like the Third World, they are OK when confined to their neighborhoods but condemned when they dare to misbehave and invade the richer areas. But this is also true of most big American cities: 'over the rhine' in Cincinnati, east Cleveland, Detroit.

It makes me mad when I hear (white of course) people claim that it is 'unfortunate' but you have to admit most criminals have black skin. This is something that the national media have been good at projecting and, of course, it goes back to slavery, segregation and civil rights. Instead of associating the color of their skin as a reason for their behaviour, we need to see the common thread of poverty. The don't turn to crime because they are black but because it is a means of surviving because you are poor. Perhaps if this reality was addressed the crime in America could be properly addressed.

New Orleans is not the Third World. Katrina was devastating but it wasn't a Third World event. Yes, some people lost their lives (close to the same figure as 911 - this is another post), yes some people were treated live animals, yes there was too little too late. But what people lost were homes with running water and electricity, they lost possessions, they lost pets, heirlooms, photographs. In the Third World when there is a crisis they don't have such things to loose.

There are some other articles on this issue I found online here and here and a blog post here.