By Richard Wall
It’s a year after Hurricane Katrina, and in the Arabi neighborhood east of New Orleans, there’s still a water heater lying on a house roof. It doesn’t look out of place.
There’s an air compressor on the roof of the house across the street. Odd household items are stuck in tree branches about 12 feet up—the high water mark. Thousands of brick homes that were flooded for three weeks stand close by each other. Yet virtually nobody’s home.
In New Orleans, failed levees and the resulting flood did the lion’s share of damage: a disaster for which the Army Corps of Engineers finally took responsibility in February. Blocks and blocks of homes are vacant. Most are still in post-flood limbo, their families’ personal belongings fused together in a soufflé of black mud and mold-ridden drywall.
And every house carries Katrina’s legacy odor: the nauseating smell of year-old food in hot refrigerators. You do not want to open that door.
On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Katrina’s 25-foot high storm surge knocked down everything that the 140-mph winds hadn’t already blown apart. As Katrina rampaged inland from the beaches, its force abated, and most housing appears to be habitable, but not all. Damage is extensive, and many roofs are plastic-tarp blue.
Along oceanfront Highway 90 from Biloxi to Waveland, Miss., where it is closed, the site of any house still standing is remarkable. The coast has been cleared of buildings to about a half-mile from shore. The beach itself has been cleaned up, but the water is littered with tree branches and sections of pipe that stick up from the water like obstacles against an amphibious landing.
For the most part, Mississippi’s coastal destruction has been cleared away, leaving resilient live oaks flanking houseless foundations along miles of beachfront property that seems wholly uninviting. Most coastal businesses are closed—if they weren’t wiped away entirely.
The Beau Rivage Casino in Biloxi is scheduled to open on the bay front August 29. About a mile inland, the highrise Imperial Palace has been open for a while. Many other businesses further back from the coast in Mississippi are up and limping along.
Too much damage to fix soon
The streetcars aren’t running yet in New Orleans’ Garden District, which saw some wind damage and minor flooding of its stately Southern homes. The Crescent City’s electricity is still sketchy. Mid City took a few feet of water, but its older homes, including modest shotgun houses and Creole cottages, were designed with the living floor elevated about 4 feet above street level.
The large, middle-class Lakeview section’s slab-on-grade homes were as soaked as those in the nearby now-infamous Lower Ninth Ward, where the surge from the ruptured levee pushed some houses off their foundations and sent them into their neighbors' parlors.
New Orleans East, as suburban an area as you’ll see in any U.S. city, presents a line of empty homes standing like dispirited sentinels along I-10 heading into town. Even mighty Wal-Marts sit vacant, waiting to see if enough customers will return home. All of these areas are mostly empty, save for a FEMA trailer here and there, and rarely an actual house repaired and occupied.
One year later, New Orleans is just now entering the gutting stage, where flooded houses are stripped down to the studs. Everywhere in New Orleans’ dead areas, you’re struck with the dilemma each homeowner faces: Do I want to be one of the few people on my block to rebuild?
It's just one of many questions left to be answered for tens of thousands of people. But one thing is excruciatingly clear: The damage resulting from Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding will leave scars for decades—and maybe forever.
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