AREAS AROUND NEW ORLEANS ARE GHOST
TOWNS,
WITH SOME TRYING TO
SALVAGE WHAT THEY CAN
It looks
like a quiet Sunday afternoon, until you look closer. The cars aren’t parked in the driveways. They are sitting sideways on lawns, upside
down on top of one another, crushed under a shed, hanging from a fence, under a
boat – and rarely near the house their owners lived in. Trees and branches have fallen
everywhere. Blackened sections of lawns
and burned branches show where wires fell and started fires. Boats sit in highway medians, on lawns, on
the shoulder of the road. A bus is
crossways in the island between lanes of a boulevard, another in the middle of
a field with its front end smashed. At a
small fuel stop tractor-trailers are tossed like toys.
There are no street lights; there is
no power. All the businesses are
closed. Most have open doors and broken
windows. In the parking lot of a drug
store a tent is set up where people are handing out water and supplies. There are rows of ports-potties set up in
strip mall parking lots. There are piles
of rubble: tree branches and furniture, grills and toys. A couple of dozen cars
are lined three rows deep alongside the highway, dragged there to clear the
road probably-all with dents, damage and dirt on them. And more boats.
And in front of some houses
beautiful rose bushes bloom, bright red and pink and yellow that only accents
the destruction they now sit in.
The National Guard has set up an
emergency first-aid station at the school sports arena. The American Red Cross office is closed,
rubble thrown against the fence around the parking lot and a wheelchair sitting
in front of it. The animal shelter is in
a field near that, two huge tents with cats in cages in one and dogs in cages
in another, and an emaciated horse and a goat tied in the shade of a building
out back. People are walking through the
cages, looking and hoping for their own pets.
The water has gone down. It was about 8 to 9 feet deep here, “Up to
the rafters on the bottom of the attic”, according to one resident. Windows are
broken, doors are open, belongings are strewn across the yards, lying in dried
muck.
The muck, a
mixture of oil, mud, and no one dares think what else, is dried and cracked
into chunks of a solid gray to black mass two to three inches thick and from a
few inches to a few feet across. It is
everywhere, on lawns, streets, inside houses and cars.
Each house
has spray painted on it an ‘X’, with a date and symbols indicating it has been
searched. Some say ‘animal inside’ and
then a date the pet was rescued. Some
have sadder messages of the number of animals – or people - found who did not
escape the floods.
Some have messages the owners have
sprayed on “Looters Welcome”, “Goodbye”, “Thanks for the Memories”. A few have ‘For Sale’ signs in front.
Some people are salvaging what they
can. Some have piled what they can’t on
the front lawn with a sign “Free”.
Inside the houses everything is in ruins. Refrigerators lie on couches, small furniture
is piled in the corner of a room. In one
house a crayoned sign over the doorway from the living room to the kitchen
gaily says “Welcome Home!” There is a
display case, the glass broken but for a wonder upright, with a collection of
lovely dolls inside it; more dolls line the mantle. In the yard is a small pile of ‘G.I. Joe’ dolls. All covered with the muck.
At one house we stop and offer
water to the family that is hauling boxes into their front yard – on top of the
dried muck. A tire and a baseball glove
sit next to each other in the corner of the yard, where the water left them. The Pohlman family has salvaged what they can
– all things that were in the attic – an old radio dating to the 1930’s that
had been his father’s aunt’s, a box with a collection of salt and pepper
shakers, some Christmas ornaments. They
had just gotten new furniture. They were
planning a trip to Las Vegas ,
the honeymoon they didn’t have 25 years ago when they married. She had new clothes, but made sure to take
them when they evacuated-they were lucky, the family and their pets got
out. Their son had their new car, with
only 1,200 miles on it – but his Mustang that had been in the carport was now
on the neighbor’s lawn halfway down the block.
He says “It’s not the first time
we’ve lost everything – when the kids was young we had a fire in our trailer
home – we almost lost the kids. That’s
what’s important, we got out and they got out and we got our pets.” She says “I’d invite you in for coffee, but
the house is a mess.” He shows us the
flagpole in the back yard, bent to the ground from the base - “I had Old Glory
flyin’ on that every single day.” He
tells us about the neighborhood, blue collar hard working people. He is a policeman. “Those folks over there, he was a barber and
she was a hair dresser. I never paid for
a hair cut the whole time we lived here, and they never had to cut their own
grass – they was older”, he sadly remembers.
He shows us a gun case lying on the street, the gun gone, stolen. “I don’t know where that came from”, he says,
“but I don’t know how they think they can use it, it was all rusted”.
“They say they’re gonna bulldoze it
all down, because the land is contaminated”, he says, telling us that they are
near the water, near the broken levee and near where the oil storage tank
ruptured from the water pressure and mixed with the flooding lake water that
inundated the neighborhood.
When we leave he asks can we move
his truck around front so he doesn’t have to get into it with his mucky
boots. They tell us to go to the church
a few blocks away, and look at the statue of St. Anthony. A stone at the base dedicates it to his
parents – and the statue and stone are unharmed, but the watermark shows that
the floods came up to St. Anthony’s neck.
In another
neighborhood, closer in to the city and more affluent, with older, more ornate,
more ‘New Orleans
looking’ homes, the water was not as high, only 3 to 4 feet. A woman tells us “We got water in the
basement, and if they’d let us back in we could have saved some things, but we
were kept out so long everything got moldy”.
They are airing out and seeing what they can salvage. They left their ‘Doberman diva’ and her 7
month old puppy with food and water when they left town on Sunday, thinking
they would be back in a day or two.
After 16 days of trying to get permission to go back and get the dogs,
the husband found someone with a boat, someone who could get around the
National Guard checkpoints and went in.
The puppy was barely alive; it had pressure wounds and it took it 12
days to be able to stand up again-it has been in a vet clinic intensive care unit
for 3 weeks. They took the dogs to the
animal triage center at the shelter set up in the nearby Winn Dixie parking
lot, and from there to clinics in other cities.
“As soon as we can we’ll have our pets back” they smile and say. Their cat was in the house for 26 days, “She
wouldn’t let us come near her”, but it is doing well now.
The husband
saw destruction everywhere, and on one corner, two bodies tied to a stop
sign. “They said the National Guard was
doing that, so the bodies wouldn’t float away and could be recovered”, he says.
They told
us that some places in the Latin Quarter are
open – and the famous New Orleans
coffee and beignets are being served out of the back of a truck on Sunday
mornings.
On Elysian Fields Boulevard
the Theological Seminary has used fallen branches to block off driveways, and
an armed guard stands behind one pile of them.
Many exits off the interstate highways are blocked by police cars. The ‘Animal Rescue’ signs on our van get us
through check points. Other exits are
barricaded off, but cars go around the fences.
People are trying to get home, trying to salvage what they can, to see
if they can go home again. There is a
curfew in parts of the city.
On the way
out of the city we see a military convoy heading in, to take over the nighttime
guard. An old man drives a pickup truck
slowly north on the interstate, the bed and a small trailer behind filled with
a few pieces of furniture, and things in large trash bags. We drive back to Camp Katrina
