AREAS AROUND NEW ORLEANS ARE GHOST TOWNS, WITH SOME TRYING TO SALVAGE WHAT THEY CAN

AREAS AROUND NEW ORLEANS ARE GHOST TOWNS,

WITH SOME TRYING TO SALVAGE WHAT THEY CAN

CHALMETTE, LA—October 2, 2005 should have been a busy Sunday afternoon on the streets of Chalmette, St. Bernard’s Parish.  On a main highway there was some traffic, some vans and cars or trucks pulling small trailers.  People should have been going to the store, taking a ride, going to dinner, going to church.  On side streets, in the quiet, neat neighborhood with mostly one-story brick homes, cars parked by them, people should have been mowing their lawns, having a barbeque.  Instead it was almost a ghost town. 

            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, thinking about home.