Ninth Ward
December 14, 2005

I’m in a sitting room of a suburban house in west New Orleans. It’s where we’re staying tonight, in the midst of a five-day tour through the Gulf Coast.

The rain is pouring down, waves hitting the windows, lights flickering from time to time, thunder rumbling.

We’re in Phyllis Bodin’s house because Holiday Inn, Best Western, and Comfort Inn say the closest hotel room is miles away. Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Every hostage room for 95 miles is occupied, most by the former residents of New Orleans. Driving on I-55 from Baton Rouge to New Orleans is to see almost every hotel lit up. All the rooms are full – some sort of modern, U.S. squatter settlements . . . buildings, floors, corridors, vending machines, rooms, bathrooms, beds meant to house different persons some night now house the same families every night for months. Shadow cities.

And I wonder what it’s like in the Lower Ninth Ward. I wonder what that place is like in this rain.

I wonder what it’s like, and I spent the afternoon there with traveling colleagues Olon, Nihal, and Gaurab. In this rain, it must be returning to some sort of original state – a kind of marshland or swamp, muddy now, quiet. Original state and Augustal state.

After two days of hard driving to get here, we lazed through the French Quarter this morning. Oftentimes we were the only tourists for blocks and blocks. Businesses are still closed. Even though there was no flooding in the Quarter, none, many employees are gone, the tourists are gone.

In nearby neighborhoods, ten or so FEMA trailers hooked up in driveways and front yards, connected to the host house’s waste lines with odd wireframe configurations of white PVC pipe, with 4x4 posts driven into front yards for new electrical junction boxes.

But the Lower Ninth Ward is why we came to New Orleans, and after some asking for directions, after a number of wrong turns on the Crazy 8 interstates and city streets, we were here.

We knew we were here when the water lines stained on the houses started to move up the walls – four feet, six feet, eight feet, above the roofs, even. Houses sitting in this toxic gumbo for weeks. Hot summer weeks in New Orleans. Stains, strained, trained, betrayed, beyond, belief.

We knew we were here when we saw more and more piles of rubble along the road. “Rubble” is wrong, actually, these were the things of people’s houses and lives: tables, chairs, TV sets, computer monitors, rugs, sofas, rocking chairs, baby cribs and carriages and playpens, framed pictures. Block after block, mile after mile, large banks of summer snow, the streets relatively clean and clear, but the stuff of lives set outside. Done. Gone. Wrong.

We knew we were here when we saw houses shifted off their foundations. Houses crushing into the house next to them. Houses, we eventually figured out, that had floated down the street and crashed into other houses or utility poles. We saw many backyard “barns,” the sort people buy prebuilt from Sears and Lowe’s, we saw a number of these upside down like small Noah’s arks, floated who knows how far, crashed into houses, denting roofs, up against utility poles, ensnared by swingsets.

We knew we were here when we saw cars in the air, setting atop chain link fences, suspended, weightless.

We knew we were here when we saw a squad of four Allstate claim agents, no doubt trying to figure out how to deny payment, messing with an extension ladder. This is considered not wind or rain damage, but flood or storm surge damage. This is a categorization that allows the insurance companies to dodge most if not all responsibility, as no one ever anticipated levees breached, flood gates opened. Insurance companies don’t want any part of complete system breakdown.
We knew we were here when we turned down one street, only to be blocked by a house that had floated into the street, and as we edged around it, we saw five more houses that had floated behind it, also blocking the road, at angles to each other, at angles to everything.

We knew we were here when I cautioned Nihal not to step on any downed electrical wires and then remembered: there is no electricity in the Ninth Ward, not even now over 100 days since Katrina, not now when huge sections, big neighborhoods in New Orleans are still without electricity, police protection, citizens, and hope. In the worst slums of south Asia and Latin America, there is electricity.

We knew we were here when we found the houses that were no more, just platforms where homes had been, where families had lived.

The City of New Orleans and the Army Corps of Engineers inspected more than 120,000 houses in New Orleans. The great majority of the 5,534 described as “house is unsafe to enter or in imminent danger of collapse; occupancy is prohibited” are in the Ninth Ward. Everywhere it’s “unsafe” and “imminent danger” and “collapse.”

We knew we were here when we climbed a levee, when we were atop this new levee, when we saw Lake Pontchatrain in the distance, and looked back, and realized we stumbled upon the place, the Industrial Canal breach, the moment where people’s lives had been changed, where the levee broke, where the water crushed, where the tables had turned -- water was free and people were trapped, where the Lower Ninth Ward was, and is. We came to the spot where the big white bags dropped from helicopters and barges (Olon stood atop one of the bags), where the scramble was to plug the break in the levee. We stood there, where the effort was abandoned and the neighborhood was given back to the marshes and the swamps and the mud and the toxic sludge gumbo that the water soon became. We stood there. There. We were there. It was here.

We knew we were here because we saw just one electrical crew all afternoon. One.

We knew we were here because we saw just one front end loader dumping debris into one open-topped semi-trailer. One.

We knew we were here because we saw one crew “guttin’” a house of all its belongings and all its carpeting and wallboard and ceiling materials. Everything. One.

We knew we were here when we saw one animal all afternoon – a sad, beat dog that paid us no attention. Even the animals are dazed, doomed. One.

We knew we were here when we realized: no one was here.

No one.




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_image.preview: dumpster gallery