Ask anyone who's been to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina - real New Orleans, past the French Quarter and Bourbon Street - and the one thing that's brought up over and over is the people. How kind they were. How thankful. How - and this is the most surprising, after everything they've been through - happy. It's been over three and a half years since the waters that covered the city receded, and the rebuilding has hardly started, but residents and volunteers alike are working towards Louis Armstrong's wonderful world.
New Orleans is a city that should have been a lake and, when Katrina passed east of it on August 29, 2005 it became one. Built along the banks of the Mississippi River at an average of 1.9 metres below sea level, the city is kept dry by a series of levees, both natural (on which the city was originally built) and man-made, which have enabled expansion in areas that would otherwise be underwater. The levees were built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and their failure and the resultant flooding of 80 per cent of the city has been called, in the words of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history.
Vancouver volunteers reached first
The volunteer effort to relieve the devastation of Katrina began shortly after. RCMP from Vancouver were some of the first to arrive, something that New Orleanians have not forgotten.
"They thank you," says Megan Schieck, a University of Windsor science student who spent a week in New Orleans volunteering for Habitat for Humanity last February. "They told us, '[Canadians] were the first people to come to our rescue. Your helicopters from Vancouver were the first.' That blows my mind - that Vancouver, the opposite side of the continent, brought the first helicopters."
Schieck went to New Orleans as part of a group of 27 Windsor students and staff members for a Habitat for Humanity program. They travelled by bus and stayed in Habitat's Camp Hope, which is currently housed in a middle school. The week she was there, it housed roughly 600 volunteers on bunk beds in old classrooms.
"You just reach a certain point when you realize that this thing that happened was really terrible; I can never go near it again and avoid having to deal with it, or I can do something about it," says Schieck.
Arndell LeBlanc, a first year journalism student at Concordia who was taking time off from school when he went to New Orleans in December of 2007, was similarly inspired.
"I saw a photo of New Orleans that a Canadian took two years [after Katrina], and the photo was of a sign that said, 'Shame on you tourists, driving by without stopping.' And within two weeks … I found a way to get there."
LeBlanc went down with the intention of creating a documentary. His plan was to live on the street - something he's done before - and go home to Ottawa before Christmas, but he stayed longer. The first time he cancelled his flight, it was because he had been hired by Relief Spark, an organization that supplies a SWAT team of volunteers to other organizations that need help. The second time he cancelled his flight home, it was to run the organization. While most of the rebuilding effort's attention revolves around houses, Relief Spark helps with everything from building animal shelters to changing light bulbs.
"There's still people there who are not only trying to fix Katrina. People are trying to fix day-to-day life," says LeBlanc.
Simply rebuilding destroyed houses is complicated by the fact that many are in different stages of decay: some can be gutted and rebuilt, which is far cheaper than building from scratch; some are waiting to be torn down, and others are completely gone.
"We saw houses in St. Bernard [Parish], and at first I thought they were parking spots, because they were flat and cement. We realized later that they were foundations," says Schieck. In some areas, wooden houses were built within 40 feet of the levee, and weren't secured to their foundations - when they even had any. When the levee broke, the houses were washed away.
Two of the areas most affected by Katrina were St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward. Both areas are near levees that broke; both areas have a significant number of the population below the poverty line (in St. Bernard, 18.9 per cent live below the poverty line; in the Lower Ninth, the numbers are closer to 36.9 per cent) and both areas have yet to be rebuilt.
The problem with tourism
Many visitors to New Orleans don't see this devastation - walking through the French Quarter or along Bourbon Street, there's no reason to. The main tourist areas were built on higher ground and therefore saw less flood damage and were repaired, rebuilt, and reopened on September 26, less than a month after Katrina. In contrast, the first house in the Lower Ninth was gutted that December.
"This is a poor area," says LeBlanc. "All the rich people in New Orleans? They already have their houses back."
Schieck and the rest of her group were assigned to two lots in St. Bernard Parish. When they arrived, the houses were little more than foundations set several feet above the ground and a cinderblock levee break facing the direction of the levee, where any flooding would be coming from. By the end of the week, the volunteers - working with another group of mostly high school students from Ohio - had framed up the interior and exterior of both houses.
"There is nothing more awe - inspiring than putting up a house," Schieck says fondly.
But while their efforts were realized, LeBlanc, who worked with volunteers as part of Relief Spark, is skeptical about how much visitors can do.
"They think, 'Why don't we just rebuild this block of houses?' The fact is that when there are people displaced all across the United States, families that have been separated … just rebuilding the house is not that easy."
LeBlanc is also critical of how much many volunteers actually do, noting that many volunteered for a day or two and spent the rest of their trip visiting tourist areas - when they volunteered at all.
"They're just there to have a good time."
As for those who were actually helping?
"[New Orleanians] would come and shake your hand and say, 'Thank you, you're doing a good job,'" says LeBlanc. "But there's also the flip side: some people, usually the wealthy, don't like the volunteers coming because they think, 'Whatever, the poor people are gone.'"
Even in the short time he was there, LeBlanc saw change, but it was slow in coming.
"Brad Pitt put up his fake houses [made from tarps] right when I got there," says LeBlanc, not bothering to hide his distaste. "But the second I left, Holmes on Homes went down and really started something, so there was the positivity of that." Food banks, clothing distribution operating out of community centres, and even having a washing machine that can clean donated clothes are all steps in the right direction. But, "it's in slow, slow stages."
Scheick agrees.
"Nobody knows that New Orleans is still in ruins. … It's important to remember that just because we fixed up historically relevant parts of the city, there's a lot left to be done."
A new New Orleans
Schieck, a first-time visitor to the city, found the experience strange.
"It's like someone has taken a very average city and put weird things in it. You see the sky, you see the bridge, you see the grass, you see the ducks paddling by - and then there's half a car."
Even that's an improvement. Katrina killed everything: grass, ducks, ponds, and all. Restoring the city's gardens and vegetation has been the subject of more than a few lifestyle sections and is one more part of restoring the city itself.
Sandy Howe, a Residence Life Co-ordinator at Windsor and the organizer of both the most recent New Orleans volunteer group and a similar group two years ago, has seen the city in various states of development.
"When we went the first time, it was 18 months after Katrina, and it was completely devastated still. You could hardly tell that work had been done," Howe recalls. "But when we went back this time … some of the businesses were starting to recover - they were cleaning up or the store was open - and houses had been knocked down that were in ruins the last time."
But even after all the work that's been completed, and the additional work still in progress, New Orleans isn't the city it once was.
"Everybody has an opinion, but the fact is, you don't really know anything until you get there," says LeBlanc, "and even when you get there, there are so many sides to this coin that it's not even black or white, it's just an ugly, ugly shade of grey, like the waters that covered New Orleans."
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Brian Churchill
posted 6/14/09 @ 10:14 AM EST
New Orleans is a great place still.
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