New Orleans, Three Years Later

Last Thursday I flew up from my home in New Orleans to what is, for most of us, our home away from home, New York, to begin the final year of my undergraduate education. Three years and two days prior to last Thursday, I flew up from New Orleans to New York for the first time in my life for my freshman orientation. Exactly three years prior to last Thursday, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

Last Thursday, funeral taps sounded and church bells rang in New Orleans to commemorate Katrina’s coming, as well as the three years that followed during which the city often seemed dangerously close to disintegration, despite the best and ardent efforts of locals and volunteers from around the nation. All New Orleanians have a Katrina story to tell—where’d you evacuate to? how high did the water get on your house?—and their own speculations about the city’s future.

I spent the majority of those three years here at Columbia. As the hurricane struck, I was in the middle of move-in and orientation activities. During its aftermath I lamentably was too busy with classes and the normal, painful adjustments—psychological, social, and intellectual—that typically go under the heading of “freshman year” to give the storm due attention. My family, thankfully, escaped the storm relatively unscathed—our house took damage that, in virtually any other hurricane, would have been considered fairly serious, but that by Katrina’s standards seemed minor. My father, very fortunately, retained his job.

The knowledge I have gained from Katrina and its aftermath has been shaped not so much by direct experience, then, as by the interaction of the national news event—with all its various perspectives voiced on news channels and in congress from “save New Orleans now” to “shut the city down” and the general disgust, entirely merited in this New Orleanian's opinion, with the Bush Administration's (mis-)handling of the disaster—with my own personal knowledge of the city in which I grew up. I watched from afar as this city, so quaint, so charming, and at times so deeply frustrating, underwent arguably the worst disaster of any kind that the United States has ever experienced.

Here’s one thing I learned: The vast majority of people in this country have no understanding at all of what the phrase “natural disaster” means. Most think of pictures of floodwaters on CNN and some reporter’s narration under the TV lights. I had no such understanding myself until I went home the first time for Thanksgiving of 2005 and saw firsthand the vast swaths of the city that had been destroyed. To get a mental image approaching the truth of what I saw that Thanksgiving, imagine that you are walking down Broadway, or through your neighborhood in your hometown, and that every building you encounter has been flooded 8 to 12 feet high, up to the second story. Debris and felled trees are strewn about the street and a grimy dried-up combination of mud and sewage coats everything. Cars lie askew, overturned, and piled on top of each other, all of them battered, and some of them literally ripped into pieces by the force of the floodwaters. In places entire houses have been picked up and moved down the street a block or two, or rammed into a tree. In others, nothing remains but mud-caked debris littering the lot where a house once stood that now lies in pieces dispersed throughout the neighborhood, shredded by the storm. Now imagine that the area so affected is approximately half that of New York City and four times that of Manhattan, parks included. Throw greater poverty and an at times astoundingly inept municipal government, and that’s New Orleans post-Katrina.

I wrote somewhat more vociferously on this page three years ago that I, like all New Orleanians I have met, am quite happy to talk about the storm, its effects, and the future of our city. That’s still true. Yet often people I meet up here are reticent to talk about it, as though if it went unmentioned it also might in some sense go un-happened. I imagine, though thankfully I never have found out firsthand, that those who have lost someone very close to them feel similarly. I say: Talk with us about Katrina. We are not ignorant of its trials.

As the remembrance ceremonies proceeded last Thursday, people’s thoughts in New Orleans were distracted by the knowledge that a new Caribbean tropical storm, Gustav, was predicted to strengthen to category four en route to rendezvous with southern Louisiana and New Orleans. On Katrina’s third anniversary, it looked as though Mother Nature might be coming for a reprise just a few days later. Gustav has since struck, and however much a nuisance the repairs may be, it seems safe to say that the damage it wrought did not reach the catastrophic levels of Katrina. But such a strong storm in the Gulf of Mexico so soon after the last disaster certainly is cause for worry. I don’t know what will happen to New Orleans, and I doubt anyone else does either. I suspect that another Katrina or two might sound the death knell of New Orleans as its residents today know it, however improved the federal government’s management of the disaster. What I, along with, I think, many others from my neck of the woods, hope and entreat to the nation at large is this: that the city as its residents today know it be not forgotten.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. He was the Online editor for the 131st Managing Board.