Full recovery still decades to come

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, January 26, 2007

The volunteer group with whom I am working on the Gulf Coast took a bus ride, last Saturday, to New Orleans.

Although our weeks here have been steeped in the stories of people and communities recovering from Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ plight has attracted so much attention that we felt compelled to get a first-hand look.

It was not pretty.

Although the city’s French Quarter and many other tourist attractions are back in business, and the football Saints’ success has done much to revive civic pride, New Orleans is still clearly a disaster area, with outlying communities and neighborhoods — some nearly the size of Fergus Falls — still in ruins.

As we drove into the city from the east, we passed mile after mile of abandoned homes, devastated apartment buildings and empty strip malls. We were to see much more of the same during the next four hours.

House after house was spray-painted with a symbol showing which disaster team had checked it for bodies, the date, the number of living and the number of dead found there. Some also had sprayed notes about the pets found dead, "One cat DOA NW corner porch," or messages from homeowners, such as, "Living here, please deliver mail."

A few had spray paint on the roof from the days that survivors had awaited rescue; most just said, "Help."

Many houses remain untouched since the hurricane, the owners moved away and apparently never coming back.

But in some ways, the saddest places are where people are rebuilding in devastated neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward. They are tiny lights in the dark. Can you imagine what it must do to one's spirit to come home to a half-repaired house surrounded by flooded, molding, burned-out wreckage?

After one of those sturdy souls does finish rebuilding, what then? There are few businesses or stores in those neighborhoods because there are no customers. No neighbors. Minimal city services. And one of the worst views in America. It is easy to see why so many simply aren't coming back.

In other places, groups like Habitat for Humanity are building houses wholesale, and whole tiny neighborhoods are springing to life.

People were not the hurricane’s only victims. Katrina’s flooding washed New Orleans not only in salt water, but with a broth of all the chemicals released by storm-ruptured industries and ships.

For trees and other green stuff, it was a disaster even worse than the high winds. What were once lovely golf courses are now wastelands of dying trees — magnificent, spreading live oaks that could have lived hundreds of years —and ugly weeds that attract snakes and rats, marked here and there by a tilted and rusting ball washer or tee marker.

Elsewhere, inside and outside the city, many trees were carried away — hundreds of beautiful, blooming magnolias that once lined the city’s boulevards are gone.

New Orleans, of course, is only one place that suffered during the storm summer of 2005. And the Gulf Coast was only the latest of many places around the nation to suffer storms, floods and earthquakes.

It will take decades to put all of the mess aright, and one can’t help but wonder whether there is enough energy to ever finish the job — and whether the intense volunteer effort that has accomplished so much will persist when the next big disaster draws attention elsewhere.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.