HumidCity

A new Katrina Refrigerator post here. Its title is Walking to New Orleans.

This is Walking to New Orleans II.

Last night, while my grandson and I were playing a game, my husband and daughter were sitting in the front room watching TV and talking. The rest of the story comes from my husband as I didn’t know about it until today.

They heard a knock on the door. My husband opened it to find a 60-ish, emaciated, black woman standing there. She asked him if he could ask his wife to make her a sandwich. She had walked and walked to get to our neighborhood because she was so hungry, but found the church (probably the one up on the corner of Rampart and St. Anthony) closed. She was clearly unaccustomed to knocking on random doors in search of food, and according to my husband, clearly in need of the food. She didn’t look like a substance abuser, just a desperate, very poor, very hungry woman. My husband packed her a sack lunch with a sandwich, some chips, some peanut butter crackers, whatever he could find in our kitchen and gave it to her. When he gave it to her he said she was crying and then she disappeared into the night.

There are so few services here that we couldn’t think this morning of where we could have sent her and we’re going to look into putting a list together of shelters, etc. so that we will have that information for someone who needs it.

As unaccustomed as she was to knocking on random doors in order to eat, we are also unaccustomed to having our door knocked on for that reason. It is shocking to us. I wish we knew who she was, where she was. Maybe we could help her in some other way than just a sandwich and some chips if we knew that, but the whole thing transpired fast and my husband, in his shock, didn’t get any information from her. How many others like her are there out there?

For sure they’re “out there”—-not in an apartment.

There was help for the very poor right after Katrina, but now so many services are just not up and running, and there are grants for homeowners coming through, but this city has been a city of renters for a long, long time. There has been no help at all for renters (Section 8 aside, but that’s another story). We regular Joe’s in the middle are at the mercy of “the market.” There is no chance for a woman like her to find an affordable apartment as rents have doubled in many cases, and the number of apartments available has declined.

Yesterday’s Times Picayune had an article on rising rents. While I understand that some landlords have extraordinary refurbishment expenses, there are others out there who clearly raised the rent to a number that would be close to what the Section 8 voucher amount is, even though the apartment would have rented for half that much last year, or certainly the year before Katrina.

Businesses can’t get workers, workers can’t find affordable housing. Without the workers there is no business—-who’s not GETTING this? It seems so obvious.

No one is saying that landlords should give away their rentals free, (there is a story in the article of one landlord who waived the deposit—that’s fabulous! What a novel idea!) but as one woman in the article said, who was now making $500 more a month than she was pre-K, she thought she could do better and fears she “missed the market.” C’mon! You’re already making more than you were before so what are you griping about? The rest of us are paying you all the money we have to keep a roof over our heads. And Entergy is raping us for the rest of our paycheck. Throw in paid utilities and maybe your apartment would be worth it.

I fear that if something isn’t done to cap rents in this city, that our labor issues will only get worse, and more people will leave, especially those who work in the service industry. The tourism and convention people need to get involved in this or they’re gonna tout our culture and music and party town only to have the conventioneers find that they hafta make their own hurricane at Pat O’s and bring their own pots to make red beans. There won’t be anyone here to make it for them. The bartenders and cooks won’t be able to find an apartment.

The woman who knocked on our door last night might be a harbinger of things to come if we don’t get services together, figure out what HANO is thinking, and get some rent controls in here.

None of that makes you think? Okay, how about this: What if that woman was YOUR mother?

-NOLA Slate

We are too much a rabble, leaderless and increasingly dispirited. I heard nothing in the mayor’s 100-day remarks Wednesday to remedy that. We lack the charismatic leadership we need to see us through this dark hour, our Henry V to rally the tired few to the great battle that will remake the world. Instead, we get Mayor Hamlet, Prince of Denmark or somewhere, anywhere else but New Orleans, wandering the ramparts of Perdido Street and wondering how to proceed.

I see more and more on-line commentators, and some in the newspaper, remark that they are starting to have thoughts of moving on, of leaving the city, of giving up. No one I know personally is ready to leave, and people I thought lost to Texas continue to trickle in despite all the challenges. Still, the conventional wisdom of the street points to the sprouting forests of For Sale signs as indication that many who haven’t yet returned, and more than a few who are back, are making other plans.

I wasn’t surprised to hear this sort of chatter in August. The first serious month of hurricane season was filled with an endless tide of contrary news, the threat of a storm in the Gulf, and the looming anniversary. Even for the most heavily medicated population in the developed world, it was a depressing prospect. Can we make it, people asked each other with the breathlessness of exhausted swimmers struggling to make their way to the shore.

The mayor and his circle give us no confidence. Leadership is the rescue we need now every bit as much as the people on the roofs of last year, watching the helicopters circle then leave; the 100-day promise was another lifeline tantalizing dangled before our eyes and then withdrawn. Perhaps we should drape our houses in bedsheets roughly lettered: Mayor Nagin, Please Help Us.

I remain convinced the city will survive. We the 200,000 who have come home can be enough if we do not surrender, if we insist that our leaders step up to the difficult challenges we face as a city, as a collective. We only ask they they work as hard and as ingenously as those who labor all day to save their businesses, and still go home at night to work on ruined homes, that the mayor and his cohorts navigate the paths of Entergy and RTA and recovery finances in the same way the majority of us hack our way through the jungle of insurance, SBA and LRA.

The rousing speech Shakespeare puts into the mouth of his Henry V is something I have carried with me through the years, the product of most of a degree in English Literature from the University of New Orleans, and a number of years spent working alongside a Shakespeare enthusiast. Henry’s position was bleak. He was at the end of a long land campaign, surrounded by the French who had cut off his line of supply and retreat, facing a choice between victory and defeat, with no place for retreat. It is a marvel of motivational speech, a statement that rings true to the American ear across the centuries with its martial setting and its celebration of exceptionalism.

It is the speech I would hear from Perdido Street, but have no reason to expect; the sort of speech we must demand of our own leaders, if they wish to be counted among the 200,000 who saved the city. It is the speech we must all give to ourselves, should post on our shaving mirrors or on the doors of our new refrigetarors, to remind ourselves we are here because we have chosen this place to fight.

Its opening words are the best response I could offer to Mayor Hamlet’s vacuous remarks, and the truest antidote to them. If you read this blog, you are among the 200,000, the happy few. I do not mean to indict those who have not returned, by choice or happenstance. It is mostly beyond their control. Instead, I mean to remind the 200,000 that they are living through a special place and time in history, one that will be long remembered. When people look back on this time, they will read of the president and the governor and the mayor and laugh, or perhaps cry in catharsis at the tragedy of hubris strutting to its doom. There’s nothing we can do now to remedy the leaders who hobble us, except to prove them wrong, to write for ourselves the scene that ends not in tragedy but in triumph.

…proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
and say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
-Mark Folse, Wet Bank Guide 

It was a year ago today that the real disaster happened. The largest engineering failure in American History: Levee Failure.

Here are the posts made from the hotel in W. Memphis as we watched in horror. We were some of the few people not from the 9th Ward, and as we watched the city drown the fear and pain were palpable.

Here are the voices of two residents of the Lower 9 that afternoon while we watched the devatation unfold:

http://humidcity.com/2005/08/30/woo-woo-from-the-9th-ward-shouts-out-podcast/

http://humidcity.com/2005/08/30/112542287999615332/

Then news of looting, which really angered me. New Orleanians take care of each other after hurricanes. It was just wrong.

http://humidcity.com/2005/08/30/to-the-looters-anger-warning-podcast/

We were in a beat up hotel room with condensation on every surface, crammed in with the cats and fellow evacuees. Every window in the place had some kind of animal or child visible in it as the entire population of the site was made up of refugees. (Yes, refugees. When you are forcibly displaced that is what you are and no amount of PC verbal dancing changes that). It was at this point that we realized we were not going home for awhile if ever.

The fear and uncertainty of that day hangs heavy in my heart still. There is nothing, thank god, that can equal that first blast of images across my screaming retinas images heretofore relegated to news feeds of natural disasters or wars overseas. Little did I know that the true horror would be the lack of response.

Yesterday I realized that I was constantly going back, in my mind, to the events of a year ago. I would think, “Just now we were waking up to the news after finally getting some sleep,” or, “Oh god, right about now was when I ran into that guy hauling ass to the lobby yelling “the levees broke!” Since I cannot get the running taly out of my mind I will be flashing back to it here on the site. Each days pot will have a link at the bottom to the one I made exactly one year prior.

This is why we CANNOT forget!

Leave me a comment. Where were you the day the levees failed?

I’ve been thinking about one of the greatest losses that we have experienced since the storm. Grandma and Grandpa. Big Momma and Big Poppa. Grand-père de Grand-mère. Many elderly people and especially those with illnesses have not returned to New Orleans. A lot of them died during the flood or from overall stress after.
In New Orleans entire families often live with or next door to each other. Here, there are a strong familial bonds that tend to exist only outside of this country. Those bonds are a main reason why this place has so many enduring traditions. Those bonds are the well-source of culture. Here it is customary to leave the children with the grandparents when the parent must work or make groceries, etc. That is the time when Grandpa and Grandma teach the kids to play the trumpet, sew and bead costumes, and enjoy taking the day to cook a good dinner. Lots of kids are missing out.
Lots of kids are here and running around in the streets. Most of them are bored. I used to hear kids playing instruments and tapping out drumbeats on the trash cans. I used to see families gathered on porches having a barbecue while the kids rode bikes and played ball.

Everyone is so busy now. We miss the wisdom, the love and the reassurance. I’ve been thinking about this loss because I miss my grandmother. She moved away. I should write her today.

Reuters AlertNet - Army leader who admitted New Orleans errors quits

WASHINGTON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - The head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who in June admitted that design flaws in the levees his agency built to protect New Orleans caused most of the flooding during Hurricane Katrina, has asked to retire, the Army said on Thursday.

Why is it that no one oputside of Louisiana seems to know about the admissions of failure made by these people? They did a “heckuva job!” on my city…

I wonder who the new idiot will be?

Once again the New Orleans LJ community generates a discussion all should read. the following post touches upon thoughts we all have had, whether we will admit it or not.

neworleans: Stay or Go or Return?

Almost a year after hurricane Katrina, I think my family and I have finally decided to move on from New Orleans. Life here isn’t easy and it seems to get harder by the day. We’ve been back since the day we were allowed back in the city and have given it our best shot. Sadly, we have children to think about and we don’t have any family ties to the city so we think the best move would be to leave. This isn’t the city I fell in love with when I was younger, to me it’s not even a recognizable shell of it’s old self.

I was curious how everyone else was feeling on the state of New Orleans and it’s future. If you are here, do you plan on staying? Are you ready to move elsewhere? If you haven’t yet moved back, do you think you might? This is the hardest decision we’ve ever faced and hearing other’s prospectives always helps make things a little clearer.

Discussion- neworleans: Stay or Go or Return? Read the comments and opinions.

Since when do we need to have a government representative along for a press interview? This has just got to be illegal, or at least would have been in Pre-Bush America. I don’t know which angers me more, this Orwellian supervision or the Harrah’s sponsored KAtrina Anniversary plans recently unveiled.

FEMA a Disaster for Freedom of the Press

The Federal Emergency Management Agency prohibits journalists from having unsupervised interviews with Hurricane Katrina victims who have been relocated to FEMA trailer parks, according to a report in the Baton Rouge Advocate (7/15/06).

“If a resident invites the media to the trailer, they have to be escorted by a FEMA representative who sits in on the interview,” FEMA spokesperson Rachel Rodi is quoted in the article. “That’s just a policy.”

The Advocate report, by reporter Sandy Davis, describes two separate attempts to talk to people displaced by Katrina that were halted by the intervention of a FEMA security guard. In the first incident, in a Morgan City, Louisiana camp, an interview was interrupted by a guard who claimed that residents of the camp are “not allowed” to talk to the media.

Any followup info would be appreciated. All we have right now is hope that the truth will make an impact. Denying people the right to speak frankly about the circumstances they have been thrust into is about as anti-American as it gets. Hardly shocking during an administration which seems terrified of the idea of free speech.

Here’s toast tot he ghost of McCarthy…..

When the attacks in Lebanon started I had the TV on with the sound off. As I saw the first images of the destruction I was puzzled. I could not place which New Orleans neighbohood it was that I was looking at. That, in and of itself, is a barometer of how things are close to a year after the Storm. How surprising that American citizens should have to wait through danger for the slow and plodding footsteps of governmental action…

Hotline On Call

Shuster: “The image of Americans, terrified and having to wait for days to be rescued, is an image that has burned the Bush administration before, namely a year ago following Hurricane Katrina. This time around, amidst the violence in Lebanon, no Americans have died waiting for help. And with U.S. Navy ships streaming towards Beirut and Israel pledging safe passage for all evacuees, Bush administration officials are convinced the greatest political danger they are facing in all of this here at home will be over within days” (”Hardball,” 7/18).

New Orleans #1 For Cell Phone Usage- Ne Orleans City Business

“Mobile communications became a lifeline for many of the residents who were forced to evacuate their homes, and it clearly played a critical role in the coordination of family and friends immediately following Hurricane Katrina,” said Tamara Gaffney, product director for Telephia, a San Francisco company that tracks cell phone usage. “Interestingly, this heightened mobile usage continued long after landline telephone communications services were restored.”

And not only that, we all know to trust text messaging more than voice communication when then entire Gulf Coast is decimated…..