Several members of my team* and I took a trip to the Lower Ninth Ward to survey some damage. I didn’t take any photos there, since I not only dislike disaster tourism, but I remember getting very pissed off at the people who posed for pictures in front of Ground Zero. But I felt it was important to give a description of the damage.
Things were bad in St. Bernard Parish, which borders the Lower Ninth Ward and Bywater (NOLA natives correct me; for some reason I have a hard time getting a handle on the geography of the area). There’s a waterway connecting Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borges which got inundated when Pontchartrain overflowed, sending a 20- or 30-foot wave through the area. But a lot of houses are brick, and except for the ones that were the first hit, didn’t have a lot of structural damage. I heard about, but never saw, a brick house that had been lifted up and floated into the street because of its waterproof foam insulation.
The Lower Ninth Ward was another story. The houses were mostly of wood, and wood does not stand up well to rushing water and falling trees. Every house I saw had been obviously damaged, and most had orange tags denoting that they were structurally unsound. With the way the houses were damaged — just snapped in the middle, lifted up and thrown on top of cars, knocked onto their sides, caved in, roofs torn off, trees driven through them — I can see why it was difficult to search them for bodies.
However, it was apparent that the searches in the Lower Ninth Ward were conducted very late in the process. On nearly every house in the area, there was a big X in orange spray paint, with the date searched in the top quadrant, the search team in the left quadrant, the number of bodies found in the bottom quandrant, and what I’ve variously heard as the floors searched or the number of people found alive in the right quadrant. The dates in St. Bernard were in the 9/12 to 9/17 range, while the dates in the Lower Ninth Ward were at the end of September, a month after the storm.
But what was really freaky was seeing what looked like an open field, wondering what that was doing in the middle of an urban neighborhood (albeit one that looked suburban to my NYC-adapted eyes), and then noticing the slab foundations and cinderblocks, and looking at the levee and realizing that that was where the levee had broken. As bad as the damage had been in the rest of the neighborhood, the houses in front of the levee break were simply gone. I’d heard so much about how the damage in New Orleans had really been from slowly-rising floodwaters rather than from high winds that I suppose I never gave much thought to the fact that even if the rest of the city had a steady rising, the area where the levee had broken would have been hit with much more force.
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*I realize that I’ve been talking about “we” but not explaining who I meant. “We” refers to my Habitat team. We went out in groups of 10, ideally at least. The first day, we had all 10: me, Duane from Wisconsin, Debbie from Jersey City, Becka from Orlando, Chris from Cambridge, Cindy from Maryland, Sophie and Marley, two high school seniors from Berkley, and John and Ginny, a father-daughter team from Rochester, NY. We lost John after the first day because he was an electrician and needed to set up the new camp, and Ginny was tapped to do plumbing the next day. We picked up Yael, about whom the less said the better, and also lost Chris, who had had problems with the heat and with the idea that we were potentially stirring up carcinogens (her husband had died of lung cancer). Chris went to go work in the community soup kitchen, where much of her job was to listen to the residents who came for meals because they really, really needed to tell their stories. On the last day we picked up Ashley, who was a student at Tulane and had rotated into the project since January as her class schedule allowed. All were great workers and terrific people except the one about whom I will follow my mother’s dictate not to say anything at all if I can’t say anything nice.