Day 1091: The Night Before Rising Tide
August 22, 2008 - Filed Under We Are Not Ok, blogistas, federal flood, katrina, new orleans, rising tide conference
Although I want to shut it off and fall asleep on my keyboard, Rebirth Brass Band’s upbeat ”Four Leaf Clover” is playing in the background. I am exhausted from this week, but it’s time to gear up for this weekend’s Rising Tide conference. Go over to VirgoTex’s and read why what happened here three years ago still is a “Now! Now! Now!” wake-up call for America. Virgo is an American outside of New Orleans who gets it. That it’s never too late to turn our faces back towards the problems of this nation and face them head on, do the needful and become a superpower again, in the truest sense of the word. That it’s never too late to save ourselves. That it’s never too late to be real Americans.
… To most people going about their lives, sitting in front of their televisions, worrying about their own stuff, the disaster was over after a few weeks, when the water finally went down, when the news cameras left. In New Orleans, Katrina is still right now. Even after the changes that three years have brought, right now is a disaster. Entire communities disappeared. Families torn apart, spread all over the country. Schools, housing, crime, corruption, failure of government. The levees. The f-ing levees, inadequate before, being rebuilt at great cost, still inadequate.
There is much to do now, and when tomorrow and next month, and next year are now, in New Orleans there will still be much to do, and there will still be people in New Orleans doing it. Mostly all by themselves.
Day 1011: Does Cake Float?
June 4, 2008 - Filed Under federal flood, government, katrina, new orleans, photographs
McCain’s speech in Kenner last night (which Fanboy Stybbie got autographed). By the way, Kenner is not New Orleans.
“When Americans confront a catastrophe they have a right to expect basic competence from their government.”
Yes, basic competence in serving photo op with fake presidential birthday cake.
Day 947: 31 Months After, A Drive Through New Orleans
April 1, 2008 - Filed Under We Are Not Ok, family & friends, federal flood, katrina, new orleans, photographs, recovery
Ms. Maisnon just departed after a very long weekend in New Orleans. Visiting from San Francisco, our sister city in character and characters, she spent a lot of Saturday with D and me. Like any good American, she was determined not to stay in the Quarter and wanted to see some parts of the city that flooded and how they have changed over the years.
Everywhere we went were people bent over working on their homes, brick by brick, wall by wall, leaf by leaf. Hear me correctly, I said people. No cranes, no government-led earthmovers and pavers. Just regular folks and miles of broken-down infrastructure around them.
Our drive took us first to the Lower Ninth and Arabi, where, for an hour, we maneuvered the potholes, questioned the stability of the new Industrial Canal wall and marveled sadly at houses untouched and that had fallen onto themselves. Somewhere at the corner of Deslonde and Missing Street Sign, Maisnon suddenly got a better feel for the place - the empty, overgrown lots that once bore houses - and just how barren it is now compared to almost three years ago. There were folks on almost every block working on their property, each of these individual people or small groups working on the only house on an entire block of devastation. This is a big part of why I didn’t take many pictures on this drive (the other reason was I didn’t know what of the million possible choices to take pictures of). If some woman were to pull up to my house, yank out her little digital camera and take pictures of me putting in my new front path, I’d put one of those red bricks right in her windshield. There’s a fine line between seeing what you’ve got to see and turning it into a tourist attraction. Let me note here that I stopped on Florida Avenue to give Maisnon an idea of what the deepest portion of a drained-swamp-turned-into-residential area looks like and that there was indeed an elderly gentleman putting in a red-brick front path that worked its way towards a house that wasn’t there. Nope, not even a solitary concrete block with which to raise it. One’s got to start somewhere at property reclamation, though, and my hat is off to this old man.
Next, we drove towards downtown and into Central City. This neighborhood has to be the most underrated in New Orleans mostly due to its crime rate, but is not in the American vernacular to the same extent as Lakeview or Lower Ninth Ward. It’s older, more historic and possesses an architectural beauty that shines brighter than most of the other flooded New Orleans neighborhoods, yet gets short shrift. Maisnon and I saw old New Orleans shotgun-style architecture that is waiting to be bought, renovated and loved by someone, but not many are so motivated by the prospect of living in the Triangle Of Death. Kudos to Poppy Brite who has made a home there and tries so hard to give her area a voice. It’s way past time the Times Picayune hosted a column entitled The View from Central City.
Then up Claiborne into the Broadmoor neighborhood which I pointed out as part of the bowl within the bowl, but where the neighborhood association bravely works in the name of people, place and all a neighborhood association should be. We stopped at the Arts Market at Palmer Park where Maisnon bought some prints and I window-shopped for a while. By then, it was lunchtime, so down St. Charles we went to pick up Senor D. Following a short wait outside and a short downpour during that wait, lunch was delicious po-boys at Liuzza’s By The Track in MidCity.
Day 943: How Can You Afford Your FEMA Trailer Lifestyle?
March 28, 2008 - Filed Under We Are Not Ok, federal flood, government, katrina, new orleans, recovery
If you read nothing else, this is my point: Immediately on hearing of this city ordinance, I knew it came with an appeals process. This, to me, is more egregious than the arbitrary June 1st deadline. If squatters are the problem, address them separately using law enforcement and immediate trailer confiscation. As for those legally in trailers, don’t saddle them with the onus of standing in more lines to prove they are worthy of a tin can on their front lawn. This is slow death by paperwork. Stacey Head’s choice of words is simply insult to injury.
NOLA.com: N.O. may set June 1 trailer deadline
New Orleanians in trailers, rich and poor, had pre-flood lives that have since irreversibly changed, but they make do. A cramped metal box sitting on your front lawn that is poisoned with formaldehyde is not a lifestyle choice. It’s something you get used to and make into a home in the absence of a “normal” one. Imagine if, after almost three years of waiting on FEMA, contractors, the Road Home, unreasonably-high rents, contaminated land and the slow pace of every single repair and amenity in this town, you and your family are evicted from the only semblance of shelter available.
Therefore, when Ed Blakely states that “we do not want to be trailer city” and the councilwoman I elected, Stacy Head, blows kisses at protesting citizens and then follows up, in the most patronizing manner, with “at what point are we going to say New Orleans is not a place where you can live in a trailer as a lifestyle choice,” I respond:
Do you think any New Orleanian purposely lives in unsafe and poisonous sardine cans on their front lawns because the alternative is finished or available? Are people putting their lives and the lives of their children and parents at risk of formaldehyde poisoning, invasion and the elements because it’s the cool new thing to do?
What have you two done to expedite the process by which trailer dwellers get the Road Home funds and trustworthy contractors necessary to get back into their homes? What provisions have you made for renters in trailers to lease affordable places now that rents have skyrocketed? Do you have a program in place that evicts “squatters” and removes existing abandoned FEMA trailers? Nothing, none and no. Given the absence of such forward-moving action by yourselves, the elected and decidedly more powerful, you have the nerve to blame citizens for conditions that you helped fester. Then, you dictate that they evict themselves from yet another home.
A part of me believes that you are weak and powerless, too, and that this is the projection of your helplessness onto the people you were elected to serve. How crude, how immature, how provincial. Another suspicion is that by evicting citizens out of trailers, their homes remain unfinished and are consequently condemned, demolished and redeveloped or sold back to Road Home, transferred to the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and then redeveloped.
My ninety-one-year-old grandmother’s cancer is back, but she lives in Ohio in a warm home with transportation and access to good healthcare. What if she were currently in an Orleans Parish trailer, waiting endlessly on her home to be rebuilt, while she lacks the health and youth to “get on with it” and deal with the attendant bureaucracy? Would you kick her out of the trailer come June? That’s how a woman wants to end her long life, you know, with a FEMA-trailer lifestyle and eviction notices on her wooden and metal homes.
For the taxes such a woman has paid over the course of her life, give her three FEMA trailers she can put anywhere on her property that she damned well pleases and shut your mouth.
Day 943: FEMA Trailer Wishes And MRE Dreams
March 28, 2008 - Filed Under We Are Not Ok, federal flood, katrina, new orleans, recovery
Unbelievable. You’re floating a June 1st deadline so that we don’t become known as “trailer city” but you admit that most residents are economically incapable of finding new housing or rebuilding their own home enough so that it is livable by summer. Your plan to help them with lending programs will not be available by the time you the deadline you’re setting.
It’s obvious that the architects of New New Orleans want folks to move elsewhere so they’re someone else’s problem. This recovery is turning into the current Iraq War; they just don’t know how to tackle the non-trivial problems of making things right, contradict themselves at every turn and refuse to take in community needs and ideas.
You know, ever since moving to this nation, I’ve wanted to produce a TV show called The Lifestyles Of The Poor And Unknown and get Robin Leach to host.
Day 895: No Such Thing As A Hundred-Year Flood
February 8, 2008 - Filed Under We Are Not Ok, education, federal flood, government, katrina, louisiana, new orleans, recovery, science & technology
At least not in any land adjacent to a sea which is prone to hurricane/storm activity.
Right after the hurricane and flood of 2005, I heard a number of people, scientists, bloggers and Mayor Nagin included, proclaim that now that New Orleans had experienced its hundred-year storm, we are safe for a long while. Even our local newspaper describes this phenomenon as a “1-in-100-year event” or a “100-year hurricane.” These are misnomers that have sprung up nationwide from the incorrect understanding of flood protection levels provided by levees, floodwalls, seawalls and the like. What the term really refers to is a certain level of flood protection, in this case one based on 1-in-100 odds that such a hurricane/storm will occur in any given year. As a reminder, New Orleans still does not enjoy this measliest level of insurance.
Presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, was here on Thursday and delivered a stirring speech (chock full of specific campaign promises) at Tulane University [VIDEO]. All was good, he got it, except for this paragraph:
We can’t gamble every hurricane season. When I am President, we will finish building a system of levees that can withstand a 100-year storm by 2011, with the goal of expanding that protection to defend against a Category 5 storm. We also have to restore nature’s barriers - the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.
Obama is not an engineer and understands the issues here better than some scientists, but the phrase “100-year storm” made me cringe. America still doesn’t get it and we cannot afford for the misconception to propagate through nationally-broadcasted speeches. Over the last 29 months, we have had “flooding caused by the federal levees breaking” enter the national vocabulary. Now, it’s time to get “100-year storm/flood protection” out and replace it with “1 in 100 per year flood protection.” I nominated Tim Ruppert, resident engineer well-versed in all things Flood Protection, to write Team Obama on this. Tim delivered.
… Senator, I must tell you there is no such thing as a “100-year storm.”
The terminology “100-year flood” or “100-year storm” may be popular in the common vernacular, but it is patently misleading. What we are really talking about is the flood or storm that has a 1 percent chance of occurring or being exceeded in any given year. It is a theoretical weather event that is used to benchmark the risk of flooding.
Such careless terminology encourages the belief that such storms are rare and only occur once in a lifetime or less. Unfortunately this is not the case.
That 1 percent chance only applies to one year. Once we experience a “bad” year, there is no assurance whatsoever that we will have 99 “good” years. We could, in fact, see two consecutive “100-year” hurricanes occur in back-to-back years.
Read the whole letter; it’s quite polite and well-crafted. Thank you, Tim, and I hope you hear back from the Obama camp soon that they have altered that particular aspect of their message. We have to continue in our obligation to educate and learn in return. It’s coastal Louisiana’s only hope for survival in the midst of fallacies and apathy.
Day 804: Packer Pilgrimage
November 9, 2007 - Filed Under football, katrina, recovery, wisconsin
No, not mine to Lambeau Field; I’ll have to forego a visit this year, the first time in eight. *sulk*
Scout Prime sent me a video of members of the Door County Gulf Coast Relief fund on their way to do reconstruction work in Kiln, MS, home of the greatest quarterback in the world (and imaginary boyfriend), Brett Favre. “Sister Bay resident Pete D’Amico and others [lead] local volunteers to Hancock County, Miss., to spend a week nearly every month rebuilding hurricane-ravaged homes.”
These are D’s and my people coming down here to help our new home. More power to the Packer nation!
I remarked to Scout that these volunteers ought not to be alarmed when they enter the Broke Spoke and see “Keep Mississippi White” stickers and portraits of ancestors by their klan robes, but then remembered all of that was blown away by Hurricane Katrina along with the bar. God must hate bigots, too. Before you consider that statement heartless in the face of horrific destruction, it was merely a sarcastic one pointing out the hypocrisy of those who think Katrina was God’s punishment for the Sodom & Gomorrah that is New Orleans. Another thing it states is this is America, we’re all in it together and the volunteers who continue to give their time here two years after the events of August 2005 embody the best in human nature. They are whom I thank, consider truly Christian and try to emulate.
Go Pack Go!
Day 783: A Unified Front
October 19, 2007 - Filed Under We Are Not Ok, federal flood, government, katrina, louisiana, new orleans, recovery
When discussing the bomb blasts that rocked Karachi during Benazir Bhutto’s return from exile, a friend wrote me what has to be the most depressing thing I’ve read in the last 2+ years:
“Katrina was a natural disaster — albeit one likely forced by climate change — and the bombing in Pakistan was a human act. The two are incomparable. Yes, there was human apathy, and f***-ups, and inadequacy, and so much more with Katrina, but the explosion in Pakistan was a complete and utter act of human hate.”
Through my astonishment, I replied with the usual litany of facts and news items we ourselves have been inundated with over the past two years, but none of it felt effective against the certitude with which someone I know has wrongly absorbed what happened in this city. The non-readiness of our levees for a Category 3 hurricane’s surge was completely a human act and an avoidable disaster waiting to happen. Yet America continues to talk of recognizing “that the aftereffects of Katrina were man-made” while allegedly educated on the topic.
Where did we go wrong? And why do I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut?
Of course, it doesn’t help when the local media says it – all the way from Lucy Bustamante to Diane Mack and Travers Mackel to Norm Robinson — and reinforces the notion of the New Orleanian natural disaster of 2005. Mack spoke the other morning of the Southern University of New Orleans (SUNO), the doors of which haven’t opened “since ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.” Ray wrote a great post on the re-opening rally there last week, along with pictures. A hurricane doesn’t do this, a levee-bursting flood does.
My first reaction to the aforementioned comment was utter revulsion, then disappointment, followed by a promise to never again engage this person in discussions that are remotely serious in nature. Unfortunately, it is the severance of such relationships and the subsequent building of walls that further rear ignorance and erode goodwill. I just have to find a different way to speak with him about this, preferably not over the internet, where often the tenor and intent of communication may be grossly misinterpreted. It’s also going to be tougher talking with someone who thinks he has all the facts. No one said there was only one battle or that it was going to be easy.
Going into tomorrow’s election, instead of reiterating my ticket, I ask you to vote for New Orleans and not your turf or peeps within it. What’s good for this city and its relationship with the state and nation, now and tomorrow? Your answer to that is most likely different from mine, but all I ask is to keep that question firmly in mind when hitting each choice. We cannot afford to lose this place again.
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