Hello from New Orleans!

The Janet Tuttle service group has now been in this incredible city for over 24 hours, and we definitely have some stories to tell. We arrived yesterday (Sunday) afternoon and spent some time acquainting ourselves with the lovely and charming St Charles Guest House-- run by MHC alumna Layne Hilton's ('06) father.

We then hopped the St Charles street car down to Bourbon Street and the French Quarter, one of the hot spots of the New Orleans social scene. Bourbon street is hopping with plenty of Jazz, Blues, and Zydeco music, as well as incredible food and (of course) bourbon.

We found some of that Zydeco at the Tropical Isle in the form of the dynamic Bourbon Street Boys. They seemed excited that some "angel girls from Massachusetts" came and sat in the front row and even selected a couple of us up to play the washboards. Maria tore it up with the washboard and spoons, and then Anni and Lindsay had washboards put on them and sat (looking mildly alarmed) while the washboard player played on them (video forthcoming).  We then met up with most of the group at the famous Cafe Du Monde for cafe-au-lait and beignets. Delicious!  After dinner in the French Quarter, we headed back to the Guest House for the night.

 

Today we went on a walking tour of the Garden District, saw some incredible Louisiana architecture and ate lunch at a po-boy restaurant on Magazine Street. Then we met up with Sandy Rosenthal '79, who took us on a tour of the city, specifically looking at the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

It's difficult to express to someone who has not seen the destruction what it is really like down here. Even now, over two and a half years since Katrina happened, many parts of the city are still completely and utterly devastated. And there were two very significant points about this disaster which came up time and time again: 1) no matter where you go, no matter how many miles you drive through the city, in every single part of the city there has been incredible damage; and 2) that it was not Hurricane Katrina itself which caused this devastation, but was in fact a combination of numerous human errors which resulted in the floods that wiped out so many formerly vibrant and thriving communities.

On the first point:

We started out near the Garden District where the flood damage was minimal, and moved into the Lakeview neighborhood which suffered fairly extensive flooding and damage. We visited the 17th Street Canal, where one of the famous levee breaches occurred. Evidently the flooding in Lakeview was only a few feet-- six feet or so-- but because the water sat at that level for days and days the water damage and mold damage was more than enough to cause many, many houses to be damaged beyond repair. Sandy pointed out a few of the famous "X"s, which were spray-painted by various relief efforts and denoted which houses had already been searched and how many people had been found dead in them. As we drove to the canal, we saw many empty lots which had houses on them before the flooding. We then moved across the inter-coastal waterway, catching sight of the despised MRGO (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet). I'll talk more about the MRGO in a moment, but first I want to get to St Bernard Parish, which was our destination across the inter-coastal waterway.

We went into the Arabi neighborhood in St Bernard's Parish, which was eerily empty of people and depressingly full of badly damaged houses and empty lots where houses used to sit. We noticed signs on many of them, nearly every fourth or fifth house, which were a curious yellow rectangle with a red "X". Since neither Sandy nor Glen (our driver) knew what they were, we decided to get out of the van to investigate. The signs turned out to be involuntary demolition orders.

As we wandered among the condemned houses, we were struck by the emptiness and desolateness of the neighborhood. It is hard to imagine, having seen it today as almost a ghost town, that it had been a thriving, busy neighborhood full of families and businesses. Now, those businesses are closed, most of the families have left, and the few people still holding out are struggling to reclaim their lives. We were lucky enough to meet a couple of residents standing outside one of the houses and listened as they told us about the immediate aftermath and how their lives have been affected since then. 

Mr. B is a firefighter and was a first responder to the Katrina disaster. As we gathered around, he told us about the 16 feet of water that stood for 11 days in St Bernard's Parish, and spoke eloquently about the ill-conceived engineering which resulted in such widespread tragedy. He stressed that this was not a natural disaster-- it was man-made, from the construction of the levees and the MRGO to the straight-cutting of the cyprus marshes. He told us that the reason St Bernard's Parish and other parts of the city were hit so hard while the French Quarter was spared was because the levees were built that way. On the French Quarter side the levees were 14 feet, while on the St Bernard's side the levees were 13 feet, which directed the water away from the French Quarter and into the residential areas. He further told us that the real tragedy was that the levees would have held the water if the natural buffer zone of 65 miles of marsh had still been intact.

Which brings me to the second point: that this was a man-made disaster and not a natural one. Since the 1930s or so, there have been canals cut into the cyprus marshes for shipping and pipelines, primarily for the oil industry. The canals allowed salt water to intrude into the marsh which killed the cypress trees and caused the erosion of the marshes. Then in 1968 the MRGO was completed. The construction of the MRGO resulted in further destruction of the marshes, so that what once was a 65-mile natural buffer zone now only extends 2 miles. The marshes had for centuries protected the gulf coast from hurricanes, but when Katrina hit, this protection no longer existed.

For us personally, it was astounding to drive mile after mile, from one end of the city to the other, and see uninterrupted signs of devastation and destruction. In some places the houses and businesses have been restored, but next door might be gutted home or a vacant foundation where a home stood two and half years ago. Neighborhoods which were adjacent to less-impacted communities had an easier time getting back on their feet. Neighborhoods where the devastation was so widespread that they were isolated from supporting communities and infrastructure have struggled to recover, if they have recovered at all.  It is heartbreaking to think about each on of the families in these homes - their lives will never be the same.

We're anxious to get to work, and make whatever difference we can.

Marguerite, Peg, and the late night crew