Katrina: Six Months Later
HAPPY MUDDY GRAS? FOR MANY IN KATRINA'S PATH, THE WORST IS NOT OVER YET
In the yard of a ruined house not far from where workers had plugged the hole in the levee on the 17th Street Canal in New Orleans, a giant sheet of plywood painted with a message stood guard over a familiar scene: strings of shimmering beads, bags of chips, liquor bottles—everything you would need for a particular kind of party.
“Happy Muddy Gras,” read the acid-green letters on the sign. The slop gushing through the breach in the levee had slimed everything, party fixings included. The folks on Filmore had gutted their blue clapboard house, set up the ghostly party scene, and fled.
Would they be back for the real thing?
“If we ever needed a Mardis Gras to get together, to celebrate, to dance, to hand out coconuts, to hand out beads—this is the time we need to do it,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told the Associated Press in late January, “to get all the negativity away from us.”
You can imagine what it will look like on TV. Thousands of miles away, viewers will switch on their sets. They’ll note the glitter, the gaiety, the illusion that all is well—and click, they’ll forget about New Orleans, reassured that for Louisianans the worst is over.
But it’s not—far from it.
About a 40-minute drive southeast of New Orleans, in St. Bernard Parish, Cindy Garcia Flores hovered over a washing machine propped on a concrete slab under the open sky. It thumped with its heavy load, a rigging of wires and pipes feeding it electricity and water not fit for drinking. Mud—sticky, thick, and black—lay in a sea around the encampment of four trailers and a tent. Gnats swarmed the air, hardly discouraged by the smoke from the pile of burning garbage off to the side.
“I don’t care to live primitive any more,” said Flores, whose house and everything in it vanished in the maelstrom of Hurricane Katrina. “People don’t realize how good they have it being able to take a shower every night or put on makeup.”
Up the road apiece, Ladonna and Roy Vanderhoff stood in the mud of a driveway strewn with oyster shells and marked at the entrance by a smashed van pitched into a ditch filled with murky water. Some of their six kids pattered about the edge of puddles, lobbing wads of mud at each other. Behind the gang, on a slight rise, sat a tiny trailer—a battered Katrina survivor—that now served as home for the entire family. Their own house had disappeared. Inside those overcrowded quarters, said Ladonna, her husband, an oyster fisherman, had fashioned her a comfortable bed so she could rest: She was pregnant and having complications, but no doctor would see her.
“They say I’m high-risk,” she said, her face nearly expressionless. “I’m getting no care.”
Further along Florissant Highway, Henry Morgan stalked between two tents pitched where a house once stood. Only the elevated foundation was left. One of the tents belonged to his wife. Morgan himself was living in an old school bus toward the back of the lot. On a scavenging mission through the wreckage in the neighborhood, someone had found the innards of a prefabricated fireplace and hauled it back, dropping it between the tents on the foundation to serve as a campfire. It was here Morgan and others gathered for warmth on gray, cold days.
“I have no place to go,” said Morgan. “If you can get something done for the people living in tents, at least give them lights, because when the moon’s not full, it’s so dark.”
Nearly five months after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, some of the rural reaches of Louisiana looked—and felt—like the storm had just hit. There was no electricity at Morgan’s place. Flores was driving about 20 miles round trip to get drinking water. And on the road to Delacroix, the obliteration remained nearly complete. Driveway after driveway ended in emptiness. Only boards propped next to the roadside and hastily painted with surnames—Nunez, Calvin, Juneau, Morales—lay claim to the mud.
They may party in New Orleans on Fat Tuesday. And they should, if they’re in the mood for it. But for the family on Filmore—and countless others across Louisiana’s gray swamplands—the merrymaking won’t blunt for long the hardships masked by Muddy Gras. And we shouldn’t let the fun fool the rest of us either: Fixing Louisiana is going to be a long, hard, and very expensive job.
Let’s party—and then get down to business.
-- Coco McCabe
