New Orleans, February 5, 2006

A house in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans
Note the flood line

At first the signs are subtle. The airport is a bit quiet, but it is a Sunday afternoon. Most of the food stands are dark, vacant. The shuttle ride to the hotel looked familiar. A few buildings showed signs of damage, boarded up windows, a smattering of blue tarp-covered roofs on our trip to the Warehouse and Arts District. This is the first time our "round table" of museum directors has been to New Orleans since Katrina. Our group meets quarterly as a professional network to advance and improve the work we do, usually in New Orleans since the majority of the group is from the South.

The force of the floodwaters in the Ninth Ward

Housekeeping service at the hotel comes only twice a week. The restaurant a couple of blocks away was serving a limited menu, and despite blaring TV's on Super Bowl Sunday, was virtually empty. The food comes on real plates, for the first time since the storm, but the forks are still plastic. The problem is there is no one to wash the dishes, the homes of the service workers washed away in a devastating hurricane that has taught a city with an economy based on tourism what happens when the working class leaves town.

Supermarkets are only open limited hours, most closing at 6 pm. It's tough to buy groceries if you work a full time job. Drug stores and gas stations open late and close early if they operate at all. There's no one to work there.

FEMA trailer in front of a home in a wealthy
neighborhood in Metairie

The people who are back think of Katrina constantly. They fear another hurricane. They struggle with paperwork to collect insurance, while paying mortgages on homes that are long gone. They are fragile. Nearly a half year since the traumatic event, the water that flooded the city has been pumped away, but tears are just a memory away. Suicide rates are expected to rise dramatically in the next two years. A prominent physician who lost his home and business just added his own life to the deadly toll.

Homes are gone. Friends have disappeared without the closure of a goodbye. Finances are strained. Services are slow and cumbersome. Life is a struggle. No one will be made financially whole, not one single person who experienced a loss.

Julia Bland runs the Louisiana Children's Museum and is in our museum directors' group. We met in her building, full of games, bright colors and kid-sized activities, eerily dark and silent. The staff of 40 is now four. They are desperate to re-open the museum but can't because of damage to the roof that lets water rain inside the building when the weather turns wet. The insurance company refuses to settle the claim: $150,000 for a new roof for a museum that every year pays a $100,000 premium to cover disasters just like this.

A house in Lakeview

So the children of New Orleans, the survivors of the worst hurricane ever, the children who've been displaced, lost homes and toys and everything familiar, have no place to play. The phone rings constantly at the museum. More than 50 times a day a parent or teacher calls wanting to bring children to the museum for a party, a field trip, a visit to normalcy. But the museum is closed.

Julia wants us to see New Orleans, a city that floodwaters returned to the footprint it occupied in the early 19th century. 80% of the city was flooded. The waters did not discriminate economically. No race or riches were untouched.

Julia drove us to Metairie, past the country club and down mansion-lined streets turned into trailer parks. Fine old family homes have FEMA trailers parked on the front lawn, at least those lucky enough to have negotiated the federal labyrinth that gets you a trailer.

The Ninth Ward: "still life of a lost life"

The water rose six feet in Julia's home. She had carefully positioned her antiques and heirlooms in the middle of each room as a safe haven from expected hurricane winds when she evacuated. She found them floating in smelly disgusting sludge when she was able to return home. Important papers are still stuck in desk drawers too swollen to open. Most of her soaked belongings wound up outside on the curb, a surreal stretch of street where homes turned inside out, each marked by a wretched pile of life's possessions, a still life of an old life.

Salt-laden brackish water destroyed Julia's magnolia trees and perennial gardens. Her husband has gutted the home's interior, as much therapy as progress, while they wait to find out if insurance will begin to cover the cost of restoration. A third of the $60,000 in insurance to cover the contents of the home will pay for restoring the precious pastel portraits of her children. Julia says a new sofa can wait. Meanwhile Julia padlocks the door to this gutted home, to protect it from another predator, thieves who clean the bones of empty houses, taking fixtures and tools, another insult to the injured.

Museum directors listening to Julia Bland in her home, where the first floor has been gutted

Julia and her family have lived everyday since the hurricane through the kindness of others who have shared house and home. She knows she has permission to rebuild. Thousands of others wait to find out if they even own a piece of buildable land, among them the people who live in Lakeview. This solid middle class neighborhood is block after block of homes crushed by water and wind, knocked off foundations. Each has the now-familiar stamp of the hurricane, like a prisoner's identification tattoo. Spray painted on the outside of each home is a code of letters and numbers indicating the house had been searched by the National Guard. This is a community in limbo. No word on whether rebuilding will be allowed. The pain of loss exacerbated by the anguish of uncertainty.

We thought we'd seen the worst. The block after block of damage, the holes cut in rooftops reminding us of the survivors rescued by helicopter while water lapped at the gutters. But then we drove over the industrial canal to the 9th Ward.

Working class homes in the Ninth Ward

Words cannot describe it. Photos cannot contain it. You must be there and you still can't comprehend it. Endless miles of homes and lives smashed, pulverized, flattened. The violence of the rushing water is unbelievable. A car is crushed like an accordion. But it's the little pieces of what's left that is so powerful now. The nightgown flapping in the wind from the branch of a tree like a flag of surrender. The nearly new shoe perched on the seat of a toilet, the most personal pieces of everyday life on public display.

We drove for hours through a silent sea of devastation. Silent. Still. Six months after the storm one might have expected to encounter the commotion of a cleanup and rebuilding effort, jackhammers, bulldozers, the beep beep beep of heavy equipment coming and going, the skyline filled with the cranes of construction. But there was nothing. Just a graveyard of cars and houses and people's possessions, the New Orleans ritual of burying the dead above ground.

A street in the Ninth Ward

Where is the recovery? Where is the national response to this natural disaster. It was embodied in the lone image of a couple of students from New York and Philadelphia, dressed in blue jump suits and face masks, living in tents on a vacant parking lot, volunteers with a group called Common Cause. They were preparing to spray down the inside of the only house still standing on a 9th Ward street, presumably a first step to making it habitable. But who would inhabit a house in the middle of such devastation? It seemed such a futile effort, but at least it was something.

It is hard to live in New Orleans. And it is hard to leave. Boarding planes and heading home to normalcy, there seemed to be nothing we could do but hug Julia extra tight at the airport. She asked us for just one thing. She asked us to tell people what we saw.



This article was written by Anita Walker, Director of the Department of Cultural Affairs for the State of Iowa. Anita is a member of the REX Museum Directors' Roundtable that is chaired by John Durel, and which meets regularly in New Orleans. The photographs were taken by Anita and other members of the roundtable.