Lower Ninth Ward
Even your cell phone will die as you cross the bridge over the levee into the Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans, Louisiana. As you approach the bridge, driving down St. Claude Avenue, the destruction becomes more and more evident: wind-torn buildings plywooded closed, houses sagged into collapse, buses abandoned and water-logged pushed onto the median of the boulevard along with tree limbs and garbage and chunks of metal and plastic signs, burned-out stores, home after home after home bearing the spray-painted orange X’s of the search and rescue teams. There are a few signs of life and hope: at one house the tag indicates a fish has been rescued from the flood, and here and there, business owners are stacking the contents of their stores onto the curb, but mainly it is one destroyed block after another after another.
However nothing you see here, as bad as it is, will prepare you for what waits on the other side of the levee. Eight weeks after the hurricane, the water is gone, leaving only ruin and silence behind. Near the levee, the ground looks cracked as if it had been baking under a brutal sun for decades, until you look closely and see it is the remnants of several inches of the muddy goo deposited when the water receded. The cracked mud covers every horizontal surface: sidewalks, lawns, and the hoods and trunks of cars which are scattered about randomly where they came to rest after floating through the neighborhood. Most houses still stand, although a few are only a roof lying on a pile of lumber. Others have skidded off their pilings, some block the streets. The tiled kitchen floor of one projects straight up into the sky. Curtains blow outwards through shattered windows. A girl’s tattered party dress is caught in the chain link of a fence and dirty Mardi Gras beads are draped across another. Stuffed animals lie in the yards of many houses, stiff with dried sediment. I am told that further down, in the restricted zone, a dead dog still dangles, caught in a fence.
The doors of the houses hang open, broken. Inside they have been ransacked by the waters that reached up to their roofs and later they were gone through by the searchers with their cadaver dogs. Some homes are graffitied with three or four or more tags of different search teams, painted in different colors, with notes to each other. Most houses were searched in mid-September: 9/11, 9/12, 9/13 and 14, weeks after Hurricane Katrina, when the water had finally been pumped out. Many were searched again in early October perhaps after Hurricane Rita reflooded the area, and the animal rescuers have been through several times: dog under porch, 2 cats seen, dead dog with a long arrow pointing below the house.
The area north of Claiborne Avenue, all the way up to Florida Avenue, is restricted, with side streets blocked by police barricades and the National Guard. They are still removing bodies from this area, the closest points to the breaks in the levees. At Poland and N. Claiborne, in the parking lot of a senior center and across from Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, people gather under two white tent canopies. Most drift in from the surrounding streets wearing dust masks below their haunted eyes. These are the people who can get to their houses, who have been inside them, trying to salvage from the mud and mold what they can of their former lives. A woman clutches the dirty contaminated pictures of her niece in a plastic zipper bag under her arm. “We lost her,” she says, “but at least we still were able to get the pictures off the walls.” Others are not even this fortunate. A woman is still looking for her frail grandmother who is ill from Alzheimer’s. “She was in St. Margaret’s nursing home,” she tells me. “I don’t know where she was evacuated to. I haven’t heard from her since.” Her family’s home lies in the area where it is forbidden to go. A family, too shocked to cry, tells about finding their relative’s wallet in a pair of shredded pants just down the street. They were looking for him and saw his work pants caught in a fence a block from his home. His body is nowhere to be found, eaten by alligators or perhaps food for the packs of starving and traumatized pet dogs slowly turning feral. I hear stories of the packs chasing people after dark, along the levees. I hear stories that the bodies of children not being found. “The alligators eat the smallest ones,” I am told. At least three bodies have been found stuck in the sewers and others have washed back into Lake Pontchartrain. In the few weeks I am there, at least 25 bodies are recovered. It is likely no one will ever know the full death toll.
There is a gray-brown lifelessness about this place that is hard to describe and even harder to stand in the midst of. Low-lying plants and grass are covered with mud, shrubs are dead, trees uprooted with children’s tricycles and plastic toys caught in their branches. Except for a few pigeons downtown, it appears that there are no birds in New Orleans and the very air feels empty. Paint has begun to peel off the wooden houses, and brick houses and cars are covered with gray deposits from the water, stripping the color from the landscape. There is no movement except for the wind. The only sound is the buzzing of flies. I am told that some mornings, the tables and ground under the tents on N. Claiborne are covered with maggots, and sometimes when the truck bringing the bodies out is parked nearby, the area smells of death. There is no electricity or running water. Occasionally, trucks roll down the road spraying water to keep down the dust. Military humvees patrol the empty streets. Street signs and debris lay where they fell, sometimes across the road. The neighborhood is a ruined record of past lives abruptly ended and abandoned. It is hard sometimes to tell the living ghosts from the dead; even the people who find their way to the tent in brand new replacement cars without license plates, get out and wander aimlessly as if they aren’t really there, searching for the faces of friends, searching for something recognizable from before, searching and searching and searching, with inwardly-looking eyes. And there is little they will find in the devastation.
I stand under the tent helplessly hiding from the relentless pulsing sun, with a bottle of Purell. Some big sturdy men, dust masks hanging around their necks, suddenly notice and grin at me, large enough of a smile to show their shiny gold teeth, not large enough that the smile reaches their eyes. They come, palms outstretched, for me to squirt purification into their hands. They rub their hands together, then grab some MREs and bottled water from the table and drift back into the desolation. We don’t speak; there is nothing that can be said, words are faint and fleeting in the vast and terrible destruction.
Crossing back over the bridge, if you look north along the no-man’s land beside the levee, and you look quickly, and you know what to look for, you might be able to see the red rusted hull of a barge lying crookedly on its side with a school bus underneath, where it came to rest after breaking through the levee and letting the flood waters pour in. As you cross over, your cell phone relocates its signal and comes back to life, and you leave behind the lingering echo of the screams of those stranded on roofs when the waters rose, crying into the starry sky for the strength to stay awake and not roll into the flood. You have escaped the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, October 2005.
However nothing you see here, as bad as it is, will prepare you for what waits on the other side of the levee. Eight weeks after the hurricane, the water is gone, leaving only ruin and silence behind. Near the levee, the ground looks cracked as if it had been baking under a brutal sun for decades, until you look closely and see it is the remnants of several inches of the muddy goo deposited when the water receded. The cracked mud covers every horizontal surface: sidewalks, lawns, and the hoods and trunks of cars which are scattered about randomly where they came to rest after floating through the neighborhood. Most houses still stand, although a few are only a roof lying on a pile of lumber. Others have skidded off their pilings, some block the streets. The tiled kitchen floor of one projects straight up into the sky. Curtains blow outwards through shattered windows. A girl’s tattered party dress is caught in the chain link of a fence and dirty Mardi Gras beads are draped across another. Stuffed animals lie in the yards of many houses, stiff with dried sediment. I am told that further down, in the restricted zone, a dead dog still dangles, caught in a fence.
The doors of the houses hang open, broken. Inside they have been ransacked by the waters that reached up to their roofs and later they were gone through by the searchers with their cadaver dogs. Some homes are graffitied with three or four or more tags of different search teams, painted in different colors, with notes to each other. Most houses were searched in mid-September: 9/11, 9/12, 9/13 and 14, weeks after Hurricane Katrina, when the water had finally been pumped out. Many were searched again in early October perhaps after Hurricane Rita reflooded the area, and the animal rescuers have been through several times: dog under porch, 2 cats seen, dead dog with a long arrow pointing below the house.
The area north of Claiborne Avenue, all the way up to Florida Avenue, is restricted, with side streets blocked by police barricades and the National Guard. They are still removing bodies from this area, the closest points to the breaks in the levees. At Poland and N. Claiborne, in the parking lot of a senior center and across from Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, people gather under two white tent canopies. Most drift in from the surrounding streets wearing dust masks below their haunted eyes. These are the people who can get to their houses, who have been inside them, trying to salvage from the mud and mold what they can of their former lives. A woman clutches the dirty contaminated pictures of her niece in a plastic zipper bag under her arm. “We lost her,” she says, “but at least we still were able to get the pictures off the walls.” Others are not even this fortunate. A woman is still looking for her frail grandmother who is ill from Alzheimer’s. “She was in St. Margaret’s nursing home,” she tells me. “I don’t know where she was evacuated to. I haven’t heard from her since.” Her family’s home lies in the area where it is forbidden to go. A family, too shocked to cry, tells about finding their relative’s wallet in a pair of shredded pants just down the street. They were looking for him and saw his work pants caught in a fence a block from his home. His body is nowhere to be found, eaten by alligators or perhaps food for the packs of starving and traumatized pet dogs slowly turning feral. I hear stories of the packs chasing people after dark, along the levees. I hear stories that the bodies of children not being found. “The alligators eat the smallest ones,” I am told. At least three bodies have been found stuck in the sewers and others have washed back into Lake Pontchartrain. In the few weeks I am there, at least 25 bodies are recovered. It is likely no one will ever know the full death toll.
There is a gray-brown lifelessness about this place that is hard to describe and even harder to stand in the midst of. Low-lying plants and grass are covered with mud, shrubs are dead, trees uprooted with children’s tricycles and plastic toys caught in their branches. Except for a few pigeons downtown, it appears that there are no birds in New Orleans and the very air feels empty. Paint has begun to peel off the wooden houses, and brick houses and cars are covered with gray deposits from the water, stripping the color from the landscape. There is no movement except for the wind. The only sound is the buzzing of flies. I am told that some mornings, the tables and ground under the tents on N. Claiborne are covered with maggots, and sometimes when the truck bringing the bodies out is parked nearby, the area smells of death. There is no electricity or running water. Occasionally, trucks roll down the road spraying water to keep down the dust. Military humvees patrol the empty streets. Street signs and debris lay where they fell, sometimes across the road. The neighborhood is a ruined record of past lives abruptly ended and abandoned. It is hard sometimes to tell the living ghosts from the dead; even the people who find their way to the tent in brand new replacement cars without license plates, get out and wander aimlessly as if they aren’t really there, searching for the faces of friends, searching for something recognizable from before, searching and searching and searching, with inwardly-looking eyes. And there is little they will find in the devastation.
I stand under the tent helplessly hiding from the relentless pulsing sun, with a bottle of Purell. Some big sturdy men, dust masks hanging around their necks, suddenly notice and grin at me, large enough of a smile to show their shiny gold teeth, not large enough that the smile reaches their eyes. They come, palms outstretched, for me to squirt purification into their hands. They rub their hands together, then grab some MREs and bottled water from the table and drift back into the desolation. We don’t speak; there is nothing that can be said, words are faint and fleeting in the vast and terrible destruction.
Crossing back over the bridge, if you look north along the no-man’s land beside the levee, and you look quickly, and you know what to look for, you might be able to see the red rusted hull of a barge lying crookedly on its side with a school bus underneath, where it came to rest after breaking through the levee and letting the flood waters pour in. As you cross over, your cell phone relocates its signal and comes back to life, and you leave behind the lingering echo of the screams of those stranded on roofs when the waters rose, crying into the starry sky for the strength to stay awake and not roll into the flood. You have escaped the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, October 2005.
posted by ixxidust at 11:27 AM
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