New Orleans: One Year After Hurricane Katrina

While visiting family in Lafayette, Louisiana the last week in July, we decided to visit New Orleans for a night. It was the first time we had been there in six years. We missed the people, the places and, yes, even the smells. Even now, almost a year later, the residual effects of Hurricane Katrina were plainly visible all the way across the twenty-four mile Lake Pontchartrain bridge. Trees showed the effects of the horrendous wind and rotting trash was heaped up on higher ground.

We arrived around four in the afternoon and as we made our way into the city we were relieved to see that it was there at all. After the constant news coverage of the terrible aftermath, in the back of your mind, you wondered how anything could still be standing. We drove by the Superdome and couldn’t help but relive the live footage of dead bodies, huddled families and women holding their crying infants up to the cameras for the world to see, pleading for someone, anyone to help them get out of what was surely a death trap.

At the entrance to the Business District there was a watermark about eight feet high on an underpass with a sign reading, “We’ve had it up to here with the Levee Board, the Levee Board the Levee Board and the Levee Board.” A not so subtle dig at the agency mired in a slew of controversy over dubious pet projects that diverted funds away from the levees that broke and left the very citizens they were charged to protect, clinging for their lives.

Driving down Poydras Street, windows were still blown out of countless buildings. Evidence of construction was everywhere – scaffolding, cranes, lumber, but no workers to be seen. We had decided before we went that we weren’t even going to venture into the hardest hit areas, more specifically the Ninth Ward. The area left decimated by the water and the site of so much loss is still said to look like the day after the water receeded from all the first hand accounts we had heard. We just couldn’t bear to see the tangible documentation of a system failed.