If Katrina doesn't actually necessitate abandoning New Orleans permanently, if its citizens (who are, at this point, becoming ghosts) decide to return after many long months in other states and try to rebuild their impoverished, paradisical city without economic or climatic justification, then the greatest losses we've suffered will perhaps not be the buildings or the neighborhood, fragile though demography and culture are.

To me, the greatest loss will be that of our self-image, for New Orleanians thrive on the sense that we, perhaps we alone in the speed-obsessed, brutally efficient, commerical and antiseptic United States, have a secret cameraderie, a laissez faire-inspired bonhomie that differentiates us.

We are proud to be more racially integrated than other cities; proud to have such deep cultural interconnectedness between whites and blacks, Italians and Irish, Yats and debutantes; proud to celebrate so many things, music and food and life, together with our fellow New Orleanians, free from the tensions omnipresent elsewhere whenever socioeconomically disparate groups intermingle; we are proud to take life slowly, easily, with joy.

It has often been said that that source of this serene indifference to modernity, post-modernity, materialism, and capital growth is the knowledge that our city lives on borrowed time. Like men dying, we congregate without letting bullshit get in the way of a good time. Knowing that water waits to overwhelm our homes at the first chance makes us fatalistic, and fatalists throw great parties.

Now, however, all that is gone. The happy fatalism of New Orleans existed only so long as death was an abstraction, only while we all thought the secret dispensation of New Orleans was perpetual; more than that, it was only possible in a city that believed in itself, that related well to itself, that trusted and cared for itself.

Ask us where those sentiments are today. New Orleanians watch as New Orleanians shoot at rescue helicopters evacuating the wounded, burn the businesses of struggling entrepeneurs, try to murder paramedics, rape and kill each other while stealing schwag that won't save them from cholera or yellow fever or post-apocalyptic poverty.

Ask me how I feel about New Orleans, and I will tell you: I feel it is gone, lost, destroyed, and part of me feels like it never existed, like this brutality and insanity was always there, like a pedophilic priest in a trusted church; none of the memories are the same, recontextualized by this revelation: in our midst lived thousands of hate-filled savages. Underneath, we were savages.

Yes: the government could have bought more cots and hot dogs; yes: the levees could have been stronger; yes: more troops were needed more quickly. All that is minutiae; a natural disaster is characterized by the fact that it exceeds the capacity of governments to deal with it; otherwise, it wouldn't be a disaster. Could it have been better handled? One is sure that it could have been. Does that matter? No.

What matters is that New Orleans, as we knew it, and as it was when it informed the culture of this country and the world through its authors and musicians and even its mere existence, an island of European and Carribean culture in a sea of increasingly homogenous Southern Americana, is gone. It is gone physically, in large measure, and many of us are in fact dead in the literal sense; many more will never return, it must also be noted. But most imporantly, it is gone because of what Katrina has shown us.

We did not rise to the occasion. We slid into atavistic barbarism. We failed to meet the needs of our city, and we failed to live up to what it deserved. Amid the grieving and the praying and the hoping and the raging, there is another emotion, utterly alien to New Orleanians.

It is shame. That shame has changed my home, I think, as much as the water and the fire.


I hope that New Orleans will rebuild, and I fully intend to help it. I am hosting rescue workers in my home, even though I am a selfish prick. I will return to my city, even though I had rather gotten accustomed to the fact that living there isn't healthy for me.

I know many citizens feel the same. But it has been noted often that New Orleanians took their greatest fear, a hurricane, and turned in into a classic drink, the Hurricane of Pat O'Brien's (even the New York Times is onto that). Who will enjoy a Hurricane now? Will the funerals of the babies floating in the waters of the Ninth Ward be jazz second-line affairs? Will we still pride ourselves on fatalism and harmony, when death and anarchy reigned in New Orleans?

I hope so. Maybe it will only take a generation to forget. I don't know, though; and not knowing, doubting, is like poison for me, for us all. We will watch like hawks in the coming months, hoping to see les bon temps return. We will do our best.

Come give us a hand. Visit the Quarter. Get drunk. Get a hooker. Toss some money into someone's cup. Flash your tits. Be a tourist. Or come seriously. Hear the music, savor the atmosphere, the mysterious and lovely malaise, immerse yourself in our culture, whatever is left.

We'll need you very much.

Hurricane Katrina. Where shall I begin?

Well, I guess I should start on Sunday, August 28, 2005. That day, I was mostly asleep, as is normal for me because I work the night shift. Thus, I missed New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin issue his mandatory evacuation order. I didn't really realize that anything was wrong until I inexplicably woke up a few hours before I was due into work. I'd been up for a couple of hours when the power in my apartment complex in Metairie went out. At first I thought it was just my apartment's power that had gone out until I went outside, trusty Mag-Lite in hand, and noticed that there wasn't a single light on in any of the other apartments. "So this is it, then; this is the proverbial 'it.'" Even though it was only about 9:30 that night, I decided to drive downtown to the office building in which I work. There were no visible power outages on the way there, which was a bit reassuring, although there were also no cars going in either direction along the way, not even police cars.

Water was running; children were running
You were running out of time
Under the mountain, a golden fountain
Were you praying at the Lares shrine?

I got to work and parked where I usually do, on South Maestri Street, a one-way block-long affair which runs along the back of the building, between a public park and then North Maestri Street (also consisting of a single block), on which was a federal building and a post office. When I got to the revolving doors of my building, the overnight security staff was busying themselves bracing the doors with 2x4 boards, so I had to walk around to the front of the building to enter through the one non-revolving door to gain entry. The security guys paid me no mind, so I took the elevator up to the tenth floor, where my office and our company's massive datacenter lies.

Work progressed in a mostly normal fashion; the only indication that something was amiss were the very occasional hiccups in the building's power, which the UPSes took care of without an awkward glance. I'd reached the end of my full eight-hour shift when the power finally went out for good. Jim, the other night guy who doesn't normally work on Sundays, was there in preparation for the incoming storm, due to his distrust in the 250-year-old building in which he lived. He spent most of the night trying to catch some sleep on the floor of his office while I went about my nightly work duties. At approximately 5:30am, the power quit. Our diesel generator kicked itself on, keeping us in business.

But oh your city lies in dust, my friend

As Monday morning dawned, it became apparent that this was to be no normal blink-and-you-miss-it hurricane. As the sun shown through the thick, cyclonic clouds, we witnessed windows breaking. The same was happening to all the other buildings we could see from our office windows (some of these buildings had holes punched through their outer walls), which were gradually but brutally beginning to shatter. These windows were of the double-layer variety; the outer layer was UV-treated plastic, and they were the first to go. When an inch-and-a-half thick window breaks, it wants you to notice it, I thought. The breakages sounded like major ordnance going off very close to where our desks lay. As it turned out, the company's CEO, Sig, the CTO, Donny, and our security specialist Mike (and his girlfriend Crystal) were on the eleventh floor preparing for the day's recovery work.

Sooner than any of us could say "Wha--?" our team was moving all the office's computers as far away from the windows as possible, and running thick, industrial-strength extension cables from the generator (which was situated on the ninth floor of the build's parking garage) to our office, the colocation room, and the build room which was situated within the datacenter. We lent some of this generator-borne electricity to others who had decided to weather the storm in their places of employment, so they could run their TVs and watch the news, microwave ovens for the preparation of food, and water coolers. Many of these people, who on a normal day wouldn't have been allowed to even glimpse inside the datacenter or colo room, were invited in by Sig to help out with the storm-damaged walls, which were leaking rainwater. Lawyers, accountants, secretaries, security guards, and janitors were all running to and fro to help staunch the flow of water that was quickly making its way into the datacenter with mops, a Shop-Vac, and a cache of promotional t-shirts we still had lying around from when the company was trying to get a since-failed project off the ground. The problem was that the north-facing wall of the datacenter was drywall, but behind the drywall, the windows that covered the rest of the building were still in place so as to maintain visual conformity from the ground. Most of these windows were the first to break, and hurricane force winds and increasing puddles of yellowish water were rapidly spreading from beneath the drywall and towards the 100-some racks and their countless, mission-critical servers in the datacenter and colo. Where the walls met the floor were quickly covered by the aforementioned t-shirts and the rest was rapidly mopped up (thanks to the maintenance guys, Jim, and myself) and the larger puddles were fed to the Shop-Vac. As the wind shifted direction, the water gradually receded. "I survived Hurricane Katrina and all I got was the smell of a wet mop on my hands," I remarked to Jim.

Looking down at the street was like looking down at news footage of various war-torn areas in any given part of the world where things explode and people die; roofing shingles, sheet metal twisted into unrecognizable forms, roof-mounted air conditioning units and their protective covers, thousands and thousands of bricks, boards, and doors, and most obviously, millions of glass shards, some just slivers, others the size of cars, all in varying degrees of destruction. It was one of the worst things I'd seen in my life. Looking out the window later that night and seeing only black looking back at me was indescribably chilling; normally, the downtown area is brightly lit all night long, but now, it was a bottomless pit. That old saying, "you do not look into the abyss, for the abyss looks into you" seemed utterly true then.

We found you hiding we found you lying
Choking on the dirt and sand
Your former glories and all the stories
Dragged and washed with eager hands

While the rainwater was being beaten back, the windows in the build room started cracking and so we pushed/pulled as many storage cabinets and file boxes we could find in there and strapped to them to the window frames with CAT5 and coaxial cable by the spool to desks, shelves, and whatever else we could find, hoping to minimize the damage that could've conceivably been caused had the inner window panes broken. While the putty holding the two separate panes of glass together started failing, all we could do was wait. We spent a large portion of the three lockdown days in the general area just generally milling about on the internet, taking pictures of the carnage beneath the room's now half-thick windows, and engaging in interviews with CNN, the BBC, and a few local news stations, as we were the only place at ground zero with not only power but also with net access. The interviews were conducted wholly via ICQ and AIM, since cell phone reception was either non-existent or so spotty as to be unusable, as most of the cell towers in the city had blown over at the first hint of hurricane-force winds.

We were able to force open the electric (unpowered) access gate to the building's garage, to allow for more barrels of diesel fuel to be brought to the generator. The National Guard and some U.S. Army detachments also used the garage as a staging area for the general downtown district. Martial law was declared the day after the hurricane departed for parts north.

By Tuesday morning, I was starting to get sick from SSRI withdrawal. Since I'm a vegan, Crystal (the team's designated cook, with what little food was available to us) did a good job by offering me bread, peanut butter sandwiches, and whatever else we could find to fit a vegan's diet. All the rest of the team were omnivores, so they managed to maintain a greater degree of health than I, despite subsisting on little more than store-brand lunch meat, Kraft singles, and store-brand sandwich bread, all warmed on a generator-powered George Foreman grill. In any situation where I might be forced to break my vegan diet, I will hold out against it for as long as possible. Another day in the office and I'd have probably done it.

Tuesday morning I decided to go check on my car, which, as you may recall, I had parked on the street on Sunday evening. I was shocked to find that it hadn't had the slightest ding on it—indeed, it was filthy from all the shit falling all around it (mostly roofing insulation and tar paper), but it seemed as though most of the debris had fallen around, but not on my car. I think the biggest piece I had to remove was a 3"x3" piece of roofing insulation that was stuck to the windshield. Given the relatively pristine condition the car was in, I went for a drive, just to take a look at other areas of the city. I drove uptown, to the Garden District. I was able to get to around Napoleon Avenue and St. Charles Avenue before the fallen trees became completely impassible; there were so many fallen trees in the uptown area that you couldn't drive on one street for more than a block or two before having to find a different street to avoid a tree. There were no open stores or gas stations. Every store I passed which might've sold the tiniest morsel of food was in the process of being looted. The Walgreens on St. Charles was probably the biggest target that I was able to see (though the Wal*Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street was reportedly hit very hard by the looters). At the Walgreens, a crowd was gathered outside and making orders to those who would venture in to retrieve what they needed, mostly food and prescription drugs, as the looters had managed, after blowing out the main entrance with shotguns, to destroy the steel gates that protected the pharmacy by repeated firing of a wide range of large-caliber weapons, which I could hear as I drove past. Police cars drove past as if it was just another day, although I can sympathize with with their non-violent law non-enforcement in the face of gangs of hungry and frightened people armed with shotguns.

On Tuesday afternoon, when I was really starting to feel sick from SSRI withdrawal, I heard on the news (we were fortunate enough to have a TV in our little build room enclave) that there was a way out of the city, across the Crescent City Connection bridge to the West Bank, the outlying suburbs of New Orleans, across the Mississippi River. I took advantage of this, having had the unknowing foresight to have filled my car's gas tank the Saturday before the shit hit the fan. The way to the bridge, and the bridge itself was clear, although I had to drive the wrong way down a few one-way streets due to various debris, and so off I went. There wasn't much traffic heading west, and I didn't encounter a town that had power until I reached Bayou Vista, some ninety miles west of New Orleans. Given that I'd been wearing the same jeans, socks, shirt and undies since the previous Sunday, I was beyond relieved when I found a Wal*Mart in Bayou Vista, where I picked up some comfortable driving clothes and promptly changed into them in my car's back seat.

After a stop at a neighboring Burger King for a BK Veggie Burger™ (sans mayo and cheese), I was off again. I got to Lafayette before finding a northbound route, in this case I-10 east, which could've taken me back to the city I'd just left, instead deposited me onto I-12 and then I-55, which I followed north to Jackson, where I picked up I-20 east to Meridian. There, I spent one hour in line for gas ($2.59/gallon; cheap by the standards of only five days later), and searched in vain for a hotel room for the night, but the whole city was occupied by other refugees. I pressed on. Brandon had power, but no hotel rooms. Ditto for Tuscaloosa. Finally I was able to find a room at a Days Inn on the outskirts of Birmingham at about 1:30am Wednesday; the last room they had available. Showering for the first time in three days was nothing short of heavenly, as was sleeping on an actual bed as opposed to non-shag office carpet with no pillows or blankets.

I checked out of the Days Inn around 11:00am the following morning and arrived at my parents' house in Spring Hill, Tennessee, around 1:00pm, where I ended up staying for the next three months before returning home.

Then, I didn't know if my home still existed, or if the storm razed it to the ground, flooded it, or sent it off to the merry old land of Oz. I left my two beloved cats, Pepper and Jena, in the apartment because I stupidly thought I'd be returning the following day. I feared the worst for their safety. Based on my stupid, misguided foresight, I've deemed myself unworthy to ever adopt another cat.

I didn't know that I would return to New Orleans if it did survive; the fear of natural disasters such as this has made me want to distance myself as far as possible from the chance that a similar storm might happen again in a place I'm living. All of my belongings are insured, but some of them carry with them extremely high sentimental value that simply cannot be replaced. Once I found out what became of my home, I made a decision to return. It's still home, after all.

But oh your city lies in dust, my friend

I didn't know what to do. I was very scared and very apprehensive.


  • Sig's Katrina pictures site, mostly taken from our tenth floor refuge:
    http://sigmund.biz/kat/

  • Mike's LiveJournal, which documents all he sees as it happens:
    http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

  • Also, the indefatigable company I work for that just keeps on chugging in the face of cataclysm:
    http://www.directnic.com/

Epilogue

October 2, 2005: I just returned from New Orleans; there was no damage to my apartment at all, and both cats were still alive! They're here in Tennessee with me now, seemingly well, and getting used to having people around again. They've both turned into voracious eaters. I'm taking them to the vet this week sometime to check for sepsis (they'd been drinking from the toilet) and other afflictions, but from all appearances, they're hale and hearty now. Joy!

I ended up staying at my parents' place until the first week of December. I drove back to New Orleans on December 3, 2005, and I've been here since. And though there is still a lot of cleaning up to be done, I'm not going anywhere.

 

Lyrical interludes by Siouxsie and the Banshees.©1986

CST Approved

in times of trouble
everyone joins a team
no one waves a flag
for all human beings
no one is excited
unless they are divided

In our litigation prone society, in which blame is the game, we aren't uniting in the face of a disaster, we are crumbling apart.

Remember 9/11? Remember people flying flags all over the place, the copious amounts of praise for the bravery of New York City's police and fire departments and the cry of "let's roll!" from Flight 93 becoming a sign of hope in overcoming a tragedy? Within weeks, if not days, plans were being brainstormed how to rebuild, how to repair, how to honor those who perished and how to make sure something like this never happened again. Well, shit, I don't see any of that in this time of crisis.

Sure, I see people giving money and food, I see volunteers trying to help, I see people trying their hardest to make people feel at home...but beyond these great deeds, I feel that we are once again horribly divided. I see people with certain political agendas using tragedy as a scapegoat for possible political gain. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to be hearing "Let me give hope to those who have little to be hopeful for" but I wish I could hear "Let us rebuild," "Let us find ways in which this will never happen again" and "Let us honor those who have perished."

Instead, I hear the following: "Impeach Bush that slow reacting bastard!" "Fire Michael Brown...the under qualified fool that Bush instated! And that Michael Chertoff guy too!" And such statements are about that diplomatically stated as well.

Okay, now you won't get any arguments from me that the greatest test of character in a leader is how they handle extreme situations. And you won't find any argument from me that both Bush and Brown failed as leaders under this situation, but it's not worth making such arguments over and over as people have right now (“Category 5 BUSH SHIT STORM BABY!”).

I wish I could wake up tomorrow and America would act like a good parent would in the following situation: A man with two sons comes downstairs to find that of his sons has a badly injured knee because the other son was beating up on him. At first, he would tell the abusive son that what he's done is wrong. Yet after the initial reprimand, he'd put all discipline aside for the time being and devote every last one of his thoughts and all his efforts would go to how to ease the pain of his victimized son and make him better again as soon as possible. That's what we need to be doing right now. Alright now, we’ve given the initial reprimand, now let’s start thinking elsewhere. To overcome this we need to be ONE in the effort to move forward. To rebuild the cities and towns along the Gulf Coast, to honor those who perished and begin to think of ways that we can stop this from ever happening again.

And hopefully, things will begin moving in that effort, the victimized son will be out of the hospital, and we'll finally begin to put the past behind us and move forward. Yet the same unit that came together as one to help heal the situation should then grab the attention of the abusive son and really let him know that his worth as a leader failed when millions of people needed a great leader. Here’s to hoping that once the gray skies have past the abusive son will see the pain that his brother had to go through and he will decide to play nice.


Lyrics from ”Seems Uncertain” by 311

Hurricain Katrina devestated a city I was immensely fond of in 2005- this was the poem that I wrote afterwards.

 

Long She lay upon the Delta, warm and lazy in the sun

Long before the busy White Ones came with whisky, beads, and guns

She was home to fox and ‘gator, secret mole and cunning snake

And the Tchoupitoulas Indians built their wickiaps by the lake

Life was good there for the Indian, close to nature, wild and free

Then the White Ones came to settle from their lands across the sea

Built they houses, did the White Ones, built of stone and plastered brick

And there upon the high ground came the rest and clustered thick

Came the trader, came the trapper, one to sell and one to buy

Came the thieves and whores and gamblers quick to steal it. Then the sky

Growled over them with thunder, wind and lightning followed fast,

And the waters rose upon them till Her mood was safely past

 

Then the Whites called in their wise men, called in workers by the score

Built the levees and the barricades along the water’s shore

Tamed the river (as they boasted) made the lakeshore safe (they thought)

And they built and built more houses on the new dry land they’d bought

Then She yawned and gently mocked them, with a mother’s tender smile,

When her children build sandcastles where the tide has gone awhile.

They were clever, were the White Ones, smart as foxes, then and now

Brought the Black Men there for servants when the Indian would not bow

Chained and beaten were the Black Men, sold like cattle, sold for gain

Yet within their hearts was music born of loneliness and pain

Oh yes at first was hatred, and the races kept apart,

Till one by one She touched them, made Her magic in each heart

Made the Whites a little browner, made the Blacks bit more white,

As they found each others’ beauty in the warm and secret night.

 

Then faraway in Washington, a government awoke

To the bit of Southern Territory owned by foreign folk

They were dry men, dry and hollow, counted acres, counted beans

And they bought Louisiana and the city New Orleans

Did She care who owned Her? Who was faithless? Who had sinned?

It was all just so much chatter, bits of paper in the wind

What were governments and treaties? What were wars and rude alarums?

She knew well who were Her people, kept them safely in Her arms

She awoke each heart to music, if the soul was there to sing,

Gave them art and love and laughter, and old gods for honouring

Turned the cold and fogs of winter to the blaze of Carnival

And death’s grief became rejoicing if the grief was there at all

 

But like a woman She had sisters, though They walked in different form,

And the greatest One was mistress all of tempest rain and storm

With a sibling’s bitter envy, this One said, ‘O sister fair,’

‘I gone brew a little breeze up, blow the nits from out you hair’

The air was churned, the clouds grew black, the waves to rags were torn

And out upon the great Gulf Sea, an awful wind was born

Then word was passed from the hollow men, from those who counted beans

That the mother of all storms was headed straight for New Orleans

Oh, some packed up and tried to leave, and some fell on their knees

And prayed both high and lowly. But what prayers could appease

A Power like the Hurricane or swerve it from its path?

Yet still, She heard, and tried Her best, to calm her sister’s wrath

 

Who knows what sort of deal was struck between those awful kin?

For the storm’s worst fury passed Her by, then let the waters in.

And some were drowned and buried and their houses washed away

But those within Her heart were saved to face the bitter day

Leaderless and scared they clung to shelter if they could

And lost among the wreckage searched for water and for food

The strong preyed on the weak ones, fearful deeds were daily done

And the dead piled up unburied in the equatorial sun

 

In Washington the hollow men sent troops from near and far

While the Chief of them played Country tunes upon his gilt guitar

They brought guns instead of water, body bags in place of bread

And told them all they had to leave, the living and the dead

For those who loved New Orleans there was pain and bitter tears

For it seemed that the rebuilding, if at all, might last for years

But gradually the levees rose, the filth was pumped away,

As helicopters dipped and rose like dragonflies at play

The State Police in boredom ceased to knock on shattered doors

The troops yawned in their tanks and jeeps and dreamed of other wars

The lights came on by ones and twos, and sparkled in the night

While News Crews packed their bags and left like vultures taking flight

And those who fled to exile or survived the Super Dome

Await the day She calls at last Her chastened children home.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.