New Orleans

[gfish]

On Saturday we drove over to New Orleans from Houston. corivax and I did the same thing 3 years ago, but things have changed.



Will 'Superdome' ever be non-ironic again?


This is just east of downtown, in the Bywater area.


This neighborhood was still very busy, with lots of pedestrian activity. The spraypaint left by the teams searching for dead bodies was very visible, most of them also marked TFW for Toxic Flood Water. These still had people living in them, without much evidence of remediation.


The levee as we cross the Industrial Canal into the Lower 9th. It broke just to the north of this bridge.


Up until now, while there was damage, there were still people. The Lower 9th was mostly deserted.




The water was 12 feet deep through here.






This is approaching the levee breaks between Florida and Clairborne. There were fewer houses here because many of them had washed away. Something like a square mile of complete devastation.








On the way back to downtown we were passed by a National Guard humvee carrying armed soldiers. And then it was back to downtown, just 2 miles away, with the casinos and flashing neon and the desperate, non-stop party of Bourbon Street.

Our response to Katrina was an obscenity at the time, and it is an obscenity that so little has been done a year later. This isn't part of America, it's part of the third world. Where is its Marshall Plan?

Comments

[red-pen-theory.livejournal.com]

blah blah blah

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

Earlier this year I was attending a Medieval Women's Choir concert centered on the lost city of Ys. Somewhere in the middle I was thinking, "That's crazy, this could never be based on reality. How incompetent do you have to be to lose an entire city under ... water ... oh." :(

[adularia.livejournal.com]

The realization that there's a HOUSE on top of that CAR pretty much drove it home.

The impromptu memorials in vacant lots, too.

[hello-mike.livejournal.com]

oh. I don't think my brain understood that picture the first time.

There really is a house on that car.

....

[triskadekaphile.livejournal.com]

I didn't even process that until I saw this comment, and then I had to go back and look. Wow.

[ivy]

Yeah, I was pretty much thinking of New Orleans the whole time, but ours was stupidity and not malice. (Arguably, so was Ys... but their design was better than ours.) There are all kinds of Drowned Lands myths out there, and I'm continually reminded of the place New Orleans currently occupies in the collective unconscious. It's really sad, and I'm so worried about the folks still down there in houses like that and facing another hurricane season.

[hello-mike.livejournal.com]

The grass and trees seem to be doing well, at least.

That humvee would have scared the shit out of me.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Sadly, trees took a lot of damage, from wind and from root-soaking, and a gob of them are still struggling.

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

And this storm wasn't even the "worst-case scenario" projected by meteorologists.

If I were mikado I'd be tempted to condemn great low-lying swaths of the city and rebuild it as Nouveau-Nawlins on higher ground inland, with a train running to the Port and remaining neighborhoods.

(Arguably this has already happened... without the rebuilding.)