Notes From the Edge of a Continent: Dead Orleans?

I decided to put all the pictures except for this one at the end of the post. This image is Lake Ponchartrain in New Orleans, LA. Before hurricane Katrina some of the most famous jazz clubs in the country rested on top of these posts.

I just returned yesterday to Los Angeles after spending the past week in southern Louisiana at the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History. The conference itself was in the capital Baton Rouge, home to the tallest state capital building in the country. My previous university – the university of Wisconsin – is home to the largest and best environmental history program in the country, meaning there were a lot of old colleagues in attendance that I was able to catch up with. The lecture presentations and roundtables were excellent – I met some important people and got lots of good ideas for my dissertation. In addition to the normal conferencey stuff there was a one day guided, three-bus tour of New Orleans for interested parties. It was an incredible and rare opportunity to see the city 18 months post-Katrina as narrated by local professional historians and geographers. The New Orleans tour was one of the main reasons I wanted to attend the conference – one’s feelings of care and dismay can only be so tempered by television and newspaper reports before a devastating situation becomes old forgotten news. Seeing and touching the disaster renewed my humility and made me feel the gross inequalities that exist in the United States. I hesitate to use superlatives to describe the experience out of fear that I would represent the trip as fun and exhilarating. It instead gave me a still-going bout of insomnia, sadness, confusion, and helplessness.

Of course a weather phenomenon such as a hurricane that directly hits any human settlement will leave most things destroyed. This is like any risk that we adopt when we enter planet earth as life forms. Our lives are surrounded by all kinds of things that we categorize as “dangers,” from violent neighborhoods to tornadoes to earthquakes to deathly cold to deathly hot to automobile traffic to shaky ladders…and to hurricanes. We experience these material interactions on a daily basis, accepting some small risks and avoiding other large risks. The acceptability of risk is wholly situated with the individual. Some people feel safe and comfortable skydiving, while others feel it is a death wish. Some people drive on freeways every day, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of multi-ton chunks of metal moving feet apart from one another at high speeds, sometimes being controlled by half awake drivers trying to do three other things at the same time. Mark Schleifstein has been the leading hurricane reporter for the major New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, from before Katrina hit until today. During his presentation at the conference I asked him what he would characterize as the biggest concerns and talking points for New Orleanians today. Among many responses he said “the return home,” “defining a 100-year storm,” “defining a category 5 hurricane,” “how to rebuild wetlands,” and “what to build next and where to build it.” The many answers he gave, trying to cover the complicated nature of the issue, shared the theme of renewal, and planning for the future. One of the most logical solutions to planning for the future is to move everyone out and cease efforts to rebuild the city there, an answer that has crossed most everyone’s mind who is not from New Orleans. With rising ocean levels, the erosion of the protective wetlands, and the certainty of more frequent and stronger storms in the future, this is no doubt the rational answer. Yet it isn’t the best answer for thousands of New Orleanians. Geographer Nigel Thrift and others have noted that for as often as it is repeated in historical rhetoric that we have been living in the age of rationality since the Enlightenment, we are still intensely driven by irrationality. For example in many governments around the world, including the United States, religious bodies drive policy to often confusing and totalitarian solutions, using what they perceive as immutable and ancient manuscripts to define society. We still celebrate the existence of ghosts, an act that defines irrationality, with holidays such as Cinco de Mayo, Halloween, and Easter. We also still operate on an attachment to place that doesn’t necessarily make rational sense. The overwhelming sense I got from being in New Orleans was that locals are committed to and intent on rebuilding the city right where it is, demonstrating abounding hope that the risks of life in a deltaic environment such as southern Louisiana are not too high. They see the now-quantifiable swallowing of the city by the Gulf of Mexico not as a sign to leave, but as a sign that they need to organize and get their political act together to build stronger and higher levees, engineer sturdier and bigger canals, and even design floating homes. Living with the environment for most of the people of this city is not about flexibility across space, but is instead about innovation and adaptability in place. Place is irreplaceable. Lives, and the memories, social interactions, and materials that constitute them, are, at least for half of the population of New Orleans, not worth living if not lived in the site where they have been forever.

As my friend Dave Waskowski pointed out, nostalgia has no antonym. We are always drawn to home. Travel more often than not has a boomerang effect. I was restless during my nights in Louisiana out of sadness for New Orleans, but also because I was surrounded by pieces of home. People from my former life in Madison made me homesick, even though I know that going back will now never be the same. It made me realize that even if Madison were destroyed by a hurricane, or more realistically a tornado, I would still want to go back, and in fact would most likely want to go back immediately to comfort and help rebuild the place that sustains its residents. I imagine that the people of New Orleans have gone through similar, if much more intense emotions, in the past 18 months. Sacrificing home for risk is not an option.

During our tour stop at the infamous lower ninth ward in New Orleans I witnessed a landscape that looked like nothing less than what one imagines after a nuclear bomb explosion. The artifacts of people’s lives were burned, soiled, and scattered across the below-sea-level floodplain, including little girls’ swimsuits, broken fishing reels, cracked toilet bowls, and porch steps that now lead to nowhere. Houses were upside down, and a few trailers were scattered around that housed die hard oil rig workers and their families. We talked with one man who told us he lost nine family members in the hurricane. He was there doing construction, though it was unclear what he was building, what materials he was using, and who was paying him. Seemingly he simply had nothing else to do. We found him next to a temporary tent with a sign asking for building tool donations as basic as hammers and nails. As Rich Campanella, a geographer and Katrina expert at Tulane University, said, “the beginning of the end of a society is when risk must be assumed on an individual basis.” In that part of the city there has been no support except for the residents who are working together as best as they can. Our “interviewee” told stories of men who had worked for 50 years for the oil companies, paying taxes and buying into disaster insurance all the while. The insurance companies are gone – working night and day to create loopholes that allow them to withhold payments to their former customers. The insurance companies took a risk by collecting money from these people, and now are unwilling to face the consequence of the worst case scenario. As of now there is no institutional support, and people like the man we spoke with are left there to work with nothing, and for nothing except the hope of being able to remake place.

The Superdome. The storm proof design of the stadium wasn't enough to keep winds from ripping off the roof while over 10,000 people were living inside without sewage, drinking water, food, lighting, or air conditioning. There were false rumors propogated by the now-fired police chief that people were being murdered and raped during the week long stay that victims made while evacuation took place. In fact only six people died, four of "natural causes" and two of suicide.

Shells are a sign of flood and destrucion throughout the city. The storm surge churned them up and deposited them everywhere in sight.

The gate to someone's driveway in the lower ninth ward.

Behind these two houses that were spared in the lower ninth ward you can see the gray concrete canal wall. This is exactly where a 900 foot chunk of it broke off during Katrina. The houses are two of the very few still standing because of a barge that went through the hole in the wall and got jammed in front of the houses, redirecting the flow of the water around them.

The front porch steps to nowhere.

Standing on top of the 18 foot clay dirt levee on the south side of Lake Ponchartrain.

You can see the flood line at about eye level on this house near the French Quarter. On nearly every structure in the city you can see these Xs spray painted on. They were used as a code amongst rescuers so they knew who was there, when they were there, and how many dead bodies were found. The bottom quadrant is the number of dead bodies.