De Ja Vu All Over Again

It's hard to believe that on the 3rd anniversary of Katrina New Orleans is being evacuated for another Hurricane. Gustav has caused destruction in Cuba and now appears headed for Louisiana. If the levees fail again I'm sure many folks will not return. Three years later the levee system is still not completely rebuilt to pre-Katrina specs, and the poulation is only at 70% of pre-Katrina. The good news is that most everyone does seem to be evacuating.

We’re on YouTube!

It’s been over a year since we all drove down to New Orleans to gut houses and see first hand the devastation from Katrina and the levee failures. I think about the people we met struggling with daily life. I listen to WWOZ to cvatch the sounds of life in NOLA. I see my New Orleans tattoo when I get dressed in the morning. And this morning I got an email from Jerry Wilkerson that he’s made a video of our trip and uploaded it to YouTube. Check it out and leave Jerry a comment. And if you can here from YouTube, leave a comment about the trip!

Promised Aid Not There from Bush

Last April President Bush put his arm around 74-year-old Ethel Williams at her flooded home in the Upper Ninth Ward and stepped in front of TV cameras. She was elated, thinking the media attention and the president’s apparent affection for her would help get her home back. Four months later her home still stands gutted and empty on like thousands of others. A report on All Things Considered today recounts Bush’s visit and follows up on his promise.

“We’ve got a strategy to help the good folks down here rebuild,” the president said that day. “Part of it has to do with funding; part of it has to do with housing; and a lot of it has to do with encouraging volunteers from around the United States to come down and help people like Mrs. Williams.”

Hmm. Let’s break that down....

• “Funding”: Promised Federal funds coming through the states “may take awhile,” according to the White House.
  
• “Housing”: Thousand of FEMA trailers are still sitting unused beside the interstate north of Slidell, while Mrs. Williams stays with her daughter.
  
• “Encouraging volunteers:” Camp Algiers, a FEMA-funded camp where we stayed as volunteers, was closed this June with thousands of homes still waiting to be gutted.

In the mean time, Ethel Williams and thousands like her are still waiting for the president to keep his promise.

Slow Rebuilding in New Orleans

Today NPR covered recovery in New Orleans with this story about the long, slow recovery a year after Katrina nearly destroyed the city and the Gulf Coast. I was just talking to Julie Belcher of Yee Haw Industries last night. Her partner Kevin went to Jazz Fest in April to sell their posters and found stores just outside the Midtown festival site still boarded up. In June Chloe and I rode the streetcar to the end of the line on Canal and found the same thing. The displaced population and government neglect has made recovery in NOLA very slow.

As usual, NPR does a great job of covering this story in depth, bringing out the character of a city that will not die. The Rebirth Brass Band is shown at the Maple Leaf Bar in an audio slide show, and Lower Ninth Ward resident Ronald Lewis is rebuilding in the Lower Ninth. Out in St. Bernard Parish Donald and Colleen Bordelon are rebuilding room-by-room. Everywhere, the emotional burden of living and working in neighborhoods that still look like disaster areas is overwhelming. Many are beginning to show the strain. Read the whole feature story here.

Getting the Job Done

This guy and his partner were working in the Quarter one morning fixing a gas leak, for Entergy, the Fortune 500 utility company delivering gas and electricity to New Orleans homes and businesses. According to this employee, Entergy has repaired over one million leaks since the storms. After the levee breaks there were gas fires and water in the lines all over the city. Now they are almost all fixed. But even Entergy lacks capital to upgrade. According to this article, they are seeking funds through the state.

By contrast, the publicly-held Water Board has made little progress repairing the many water leaks featured in national news stories recently. This press release explains how they’ll use new equipment to detect leaks instead of, oh I don’t know, just driving around on a hot day looking for water running down the street! We saw lots of leaks in March, and we weren’t even looking for them.

NOLA Summer Reading

I’ve read two books about New Orleans this summer, Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans by Roy Blount Jr., and Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza. Both personal takes on a unique American city. Blount’s book was published in ‘05 just before Katrina, and made the NYT bestseller list, while Piazza’s came right after Katrina and was written to defend the city. Both are short, offering first-hand stories written in a warm, conversational style.

If you are an NPR listener as I am, you may recognize Blount’s name as a panelist on the quiz show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. His book gives this slow-talking southerner a chance to stretch out, talking about everything from the best place to get cheap po boys and gumbo to the oyster dancer who did far more exciting things with molusks than just injest them. Feet on the Street is neither a guidebook nor travel writing per se. But I plan to thoroughly annotate and highlight a copy for my next visit.

Piazza is a novelist and jazz critic originally from New York who is among the many Crescent City transplants who came down for Jazz Fest and never went home. In Why New Orleans Matters he avoids the easy fare for a book on Katrina. Although he mentions a rape witnessed outside the Convention Center, Piazza is more interested in winning the hearts and minds of America, which he does with warmth. How can a pair of broken glasses contribute to falling in love with a city? Read Why New Orleans Matters and discover all the little reasons and Piazza’s two Big Reasons why the City That Care Forgot must be rebuilt.

Got Tim, Got Faith, Got Hope

My mom just told me that Country music couple Tim McGraw and Faith Hill played a benefit concert in New Orleans after criticizing the government’s slow response to Katrina. Their charity Neighbor’s Keeper, donates money to qualifying charities helping with Katrina recovery. Here’s a quote from the story in the Times-Picaune:

Both McGraw and Hill, who is from Star, Miss., have criticized the government’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people along the Gulf Coast and flooded 80 percent of New Orleans. In interviews, Hill described the post-Katrina progress as “embarrassing” and “humiliating” to the country.

“It’s wrong,” she said. “It really gets us fired up. That’s our homeland.”

Before they show, the two toured the destroyed Lower Ninth and St. Bernard Parish. They opened the show by saying “It’s good to be home.’ McGraw is from Louisiana and Hill is from Mississippi.