There's one annecdotal piece of information I talk about a lot when he comes to New Orleans, and it has to do with a dog grooming place in New Orleans East. I honestly don't know what this particular place hit me so strongly. When I first went to post-storm New Orleans in October 2005, there was misery and horror all around. The place fairly stunk of death and destruction. And when I went back this past April, things were only some measure less horrible, but still fairly awful when you consider that this is a major American city in which we expect people to make their lives once again.

Anyho, Sheralane Dog Grooming just happened to stand on a road I just happened to drive drive in 2005, and I stopped to take a photograph of it. Here's how that looked then:

Boarded up, with some horrying marks on the door indicating that not only had a dog died there, but that it had been left in a crate for more than a month. Okay, so that was taken in October of 2005. When I went back to New Orleans in April of 2007, I made a beeline for Sherlane. Again, I don't know what it is exactly about this obscure dog grooming outfit that so capture my imagination, but I figured it was at least worth heading back to and capturing another picture.

So here we are, one more, at Sheralane, some 20 months after the storm, some 19 months after the picture above was taken:

Ain't much has changed, kids, not much at all. Still boarded up. Still grown over with weeds. Still vacant. It doesn't look to me like anyone has been in or out of the place in the intervening 20 months, so who knows what has become of the dog in the crate. (Though I can't imagine that the city would allow it to sit and rot for that long. Health services does seem to have made a strong effort at addressing the most serious health risks post-storm.)

Yeah, I know that this is just one dog grooming shop, but in my mind it stands as a proxy for what has become for much of New Orleans. Things stand still the way they were just after the storm hit. In the grand scheme of things, two years isn't an overly long time. But it's a ridiculously long time when it doesn't seem like much progress is being made at all.

Anyway, when I began to forget what it's like down in New Orleans today, I think of Sheralane. Maybe you will too now.

The good folks at the Huffington Post requested another piece on Hurricane Katrina, and who am I to say no to Arianna when she calls? Seriously, called me on the phone. Asked me herself. Didn't want to break her heart. Love that accent too much.

This post attempts to answer why hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians can't, or won't, return home again. I gently suggest it's because going back is so difficult as to be a bit crazy. Hope you'll give it a read. And with that, I'm off to eat my birthday dinner, somewhere in the East Village. It's a surprise...

I have a post by that title up on Huffington Post on this, the two year anniversary of the day that Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast. I'm lucky enough to have it featured on the home page of the site -- thanks HuffPo! I went to New Orleans in October of 2005 and again in April of this year, and while some homes have been gutted and some neighborhoods rebuilt and some lending programs established in the intervening 20 months, so much of that city stands frozen like it was just after the storm came through.

The post doesn't get into policy or politics, really, though those are the root reasons why New Orleans is still stuck on August 29th, 2005. Jane called it an "emotional" piece. I'm okay with that. It's meant only as a reminder. Poetry is about the grief, politics is about the grievance, right? I'm not saying that piece is poetry, but it's more or less about the unending grief of the Gulf Coast.

(The photo is from a house I helped to gut on Caffin Street in the Lower Ninth, working with ACORN. More photos from that trip here.)

I'd like you to take a look at something:

That's the long, lonely road that takes you out to a FEMA-run trailer camp in Baker, Louisiana. When I visited the Baker camp back on October 3, 2005, a contractor called the Shaw Group was just putting the finishing touches on the installation of 573 trailers, and a thousand or so Hurricane Katrina evacuees living in shelters or bunking with friends or relatives were preparing to move in.

The Baker camp is some 10 miles outside of Baton Rouge and about 95 miles northwest of New Orleans. When I visited in late 2005, no bus or other mode of public transportation served the Baker trailer camp, and area commerce consisted of a convenience store attached to a gas station. The camp's immediate surroundings were the sort of remote, open space where you might think to build a prison. In fact, the nearest building of any real size was a juvenile detention center.

Perhaps not the best of settings for housing evacuees from New Orleans, a densely-packed urban environment teeming with life. But these were emergency measures. This was short-term solution. It was temporary.

Today, some 442 days later, I open up the New York Times and read this*:

BAKER, La. -- There are hundreds of children in the trailer camp that is run by FEMA and known as Renaissance Village, but they won’t be having much of a Christmas. They’re trapped here in a demoralizing, overcrowded environment with adults who are mostly broke, jobless and at the end of their emotional tethers. Many of the kids aren’t even going to school.

...

The enormity of the continuing tragedy is breathtaking. Thousands upon thousands of people are still suffering. And yet the way the poorest and most vulnerable victims have been treated so far by government officials at every level has been disgraceful.

More than a third of the 1,200 people in this sprawling camp are children. Only about half of the school-age youngsters are even registered for school; of those, roughly half actually go to school on any given day. The authorities can’t account for the rest.

A number of officials who asked not to be identified told me they are concerned that large numbers of children are remaining isolated at Renaissance Village, holed up in the trailers day in and day out, falling further and further behind educationally, and deteriorating emotionally.

As seen from a Blackhawk helicopter.

A downed street sign in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. I'll admit that I didn't know much about much of the specifics of the ancient city of Babylon and so I got a little bit of a kick out of the Webster's reference: "a city devoted to materialism and sensual pleasure."

Next Tuesday is, as you probably know, the one-year anniversary of when Hurricane Katrina touched down in Louisiana. I had the fantastic opportunity to travel down to Baton Rouge and New Orleans just a few weeks after as a guest of the Louisiana NAACP and I took a whole bunch of photos of the incredible devastation I found there. They're not overly good -- it was during what I like to call the "point-and-click" phase of my photographic development -- but I still never get tired of looking at them. They still capture, for me, what it was like to be there -- just a whole lot of emptiness and destruction. So I'm planning on pulling out and posting some of them in this space over the next couple of days. Notice the water level across the windows and doors of these two cars -- that's how high the flooding got in this neighborhood and it stayed that way for quite a while.

About 8 miles outside the center of Baton Rouge, in a town called Baker, a trailer camp has been built to house a few thousand of those hurricane evacuees still staying in area shelters and hotels. When I was down in Louisiana, I drove out to see the Baker trailer camp. A few days after visiting Baker, I toured New Orleans and the very neighborhoods the evacuees had evacuated from.

New Orleans was, of course, was a city environment and a densely-populated one at that. The area in which the Baker trailer camp has been built has no commerce beyond a convience store attached to a gas station. There was, at the time of my visit, no public transportation. It's the sort of remote open space where one might think to build a prison of some kind. In fact, the nearest establish of any real size is a juvenile detention center.

I cut together a video (.wmv), just over a minute long, showing part of the drive from Baton Rouge out to Baker and some of the 573 trailers in the camp.

(As the video itself has no real audio beyond just the sound of the wind whistling past the windows as we drove, I added in a song called Everything's Just Fine, Thanks by Flatwound that I found through ccMixter.)

Also, I am now officially a radio personality, having made my debut on 94.9 WQTQ LP FM Baton Rouge, interviewed about what I observed in New Orleans and Slidell. I was witty and urbane.

The good news is that I did in fact do a fly-over of New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish, and Slidell today with the Louisiana Air National Guard. The bad news is that it caused me to miss my flight to Baltimore and I’ll be sleeping over in Dallas tonight. But the somewhat comforting news is that the flight I was scheduled to be on this afternoon was delayed enough so that even if I had made that flight I’d be staying in Dallas tonight anyway.

As for the Blackhawk flyover. In some areas, particularly on the east side of New Orleans, it looked like as if you built a small Lego city, put it down on the ground, and stomped the crap out of it. Buildings that were just piles of sticks, cars overturned in the canals, boats standing up on end. Homes ripped off of their foundations and butted up against other houses. Tree after tree just snapped like matchsticks.

Before we took off from Baton Rouge, our National Guardsman pilot said to keep an eye out for holes in the roofs of the houses, where people cut their way out of their way out as the flood waters rose. But it didn’t really hit me until I saw it myself -- holes maybe six feet or so across in the roofs of large family houses, house after house. Some looked as if they had somehow been burnt out. Others looked as if they had cut with an axe. House after house, people clawing their way out to survival. And then there was the stuff that people had written on the roofs of their houses, things like “Need water,” or a list of the names of the families still inside. The handwriting on a few I saw was almost perfect block letters. It made me wonder how someone in a situation like that could manage to spray paint those words - cries for help - so neatly.

I’d post some pictures but I wisely separated all my electronics -- in my carry-on bag --from all of my plugs and cables -- in my checked pack. So I have a camera and I have a laptop, but, alas, nothing to connect the two.

(Just posted this now but wrote it up yesterday. One of the plugs I packed was the one for my laptop and it died after I wrote it but before I posted it. I'm back in DC now, after a lovely night in Grapevine, Texas.)

Bike outside of Superdome, New Orleans


Boat on street outside of Superdome, New Orleans


"Stuck on Stupid -- Thanks, Gen. H.," French Quarter


Business complex, Route 90, New Orleans


"You loot, we shoot," Route 90, New Orleans


"Proud to call it home," 9th Ward


Street sign, 9th Ward


Boat on a hill, 9th Ward


Stuffed bunny in the street, 9th Ward


Bushes, 9th Ward (The red leaves start where the water stopped.)


Scene from a parking lot, 9th Ward (It's nice when a car and a couch can find love like this.)


Upside-down car, 9th Ward


Car showing waterline, 9th Ward


Dogwasher, 9th Ward


Business, 9th Ward


Street sign, 9th Ward


Fence with waterline, 9th Ward


Fridge on the street, French Quarter


House with goat markings, 9th Ward


"Katrina Cafe," New Orleans


Me, just to break things up


House showing water level, 9th Ward


Pet food left under an overpass, 9th Ward


Plane at the harbor


Car showing water line, 9th Ward


Purse and dried mud, 9th Ward


House with roof off, 9th Ward


Shoe collection, 9th Ward


Pair of shoes, 9th Ward


Pair of shoes II, 9th Ward


Toy truck in yard, 9th Ward


Upsidedown truck, 9th Ward


Tweety and stuffed dog, 9th Ward


Two cars, 9th Ward


Damaged house, Slidell


House still standing, Slidell


Canned drinking water, Slidell


"T's will be back," Slidell

I'm writing up some notes from the last several days but want to share the exciting news that tomorrow I am scheduled to do a flyover of the New Orleans and the Louisiana coast in a Blackhawk helicopter.

UPDATE: Alas, the flyover was not to be today. There was some confusion this morning about whether the Air Force had to do some sort of official mission instead. I decided to use the day to drive down to New Orleans and I am hoping that it'll happen tomorrow.

Louisiana NCAAP President Ernest Johnson and sidekick Bob Brigham are doing what from many miles away looks to be remarakble work. The plan is to get evacuees to self-organize in the shelters in which they are staying. They can pick leaders who would then make decisions for the group on living conditions, what to do with the children, that sort of thing. Also, and very importantly, they want to make sure that those who were taken far away from New Orleans (as far away as Montana, Johnson says) can move back if they want to. The thinking is to make sure that they have a black voting base back there because some important decisions on the future of that city are gonna need to be made down there -- and elections to choose the area's leaders begin as early as February of next year. That right there is a smart humanitarian and political response to a horrible situation.

LOUISIANA NAACP PRESIDENT CALLS FOR EVACUEES TO TAKE CONTROL OF THEIR OWN DESTINY AND FORM "SHELTER COMMITTEES"

Ernest L. Johnson, President of the Louisiana NAACP called today for Katrina evacuees in shelters to take control of their own destinies by forming SHELTER COMMITTEES.

"Each SHELTER COMMITTEE should elect a Chairperson and a Secretary and begin holding meetings, organizing, and working as a team for better treatment," Johnson said. "In unity there is strength."

Johnson called for each committee to begin writing down the name, telephone number, and next of kin of every shelter resident.

This contact information must be put into the FEMA database for evacuees to receive financial assistance.

Johnson urged each SHELTER COMMITTEE to send this information to 1755 Nicholson Drive, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70802, or to fax it to (225) 334-7491.

The Louisiana NAACP is airing public service announcements on radio stations that explain the process for bringing participatory democracy to the shelter system.

"The Louisiana NAACP is with you in solidarity," Johnson said. "The NAACP will stand with all displaced people until each and every one return to a brand-new New Orleans."

Ernest Johnson is available for media interviews.

Andrew Sullivan:

Below is a passage from the Houston Chronicle in 2001, which quoted the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the three likeliest potential disasters to threaten America. They were: an earthquake in San Francisco, a terrorist attack in New York City (predicted before 9/11), and a hurricane hitting New Orleans.

Read this prophetic passage and weep: “The New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all. In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20ft of water.

“Thousands of refugees could land in Houston. Economically, the toll would be shattering . . . If an Allison-type storm were to strike New Orleans, or a category three storm or greater with at least 111mph winds, the results would be cataclysmic, New Orleans planners said.”

Katrina, of course, was category four.

D.C. Armory to Shelter 400:

A convoy of 10 buses provisioned with food, water and officers to keep the peace left the District yesterday evening bound for the troubled city of New Orleans, hoping to return by Monday with as many as 400 evacuees who will be sheltered at the D.C. Armory.

Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), a leader of the effort, said he hoped it would be only the beginning. He called on other communities in the Washington region to take in those in need.

Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) echoed Catania's challenge by calling on mayors across the country to open armories, stadiums and gyms to those displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

...

D.C. police officers will accompany the buses for security, and each bus will have two drivers so the caravan can drive through the night on its 2,200-mile, round-trip journey.

In addition, a fuel tanker will be in the convoy, ensuring enough fuel without lengthy stops.

...

City officials are preparing the armory to accommodate an extended stay by its guests. D.C. public school officials said they will enroll any children who arrive in the bus convoy.

...

The Washington Nationals, Mystics and D.C. United have offered to organize recreational events and make available some tickets to their games.

D.C. officials also will try to help those who come to the District locate missing relatives and get their affairs in order.

A leader calls for sacrifice:

With 15,000 people filling the floor of the Astrodome and thousands more evacuees from New Orleans streaming into the city, Houston Mayor Bill White asked residents today to open their garages and homes to hurricane refugees.

“Houston is rising to the call of an unprecedented refugee situation,” White said at a press conference this morning. “People should be asking themselves in this region where they know of a garage or apartment.”

Thousands of children displaced from their homes by Hurricane Katrina have been enrolled in schools throughout the Houston area, and government officials were kicking conventioneers out of several centers so the buildings could be turned into shelters.

“If it takes someone suing us, then sue — and then explain to the American public,” White said.

Via Atrios:

MSNBC: Tim, there are people in New Orleans shooting at helicopters trying to deliver supplies and evacuate patients, people shooting at rescue boats. The mayor of New Orleans says the federal government doesn’t have a clue about what is going on in his town. There seems to be no one in charge in New Orleans. What’s the problem?

Tim Russert: It’s a question that our country is going to have to look inside its soul and answer. The fact is, those who were well off were able to evacuate the city and those who were poor stayed behind. And those who are suffering and those who are dying are those very same poor people.

It’s just unbelievable. The world is watching the United States of America this week. And we’re watching ourselves.

I think the response across the country has been universal and uniform. After Sept. 11, I think people realized we’d been attacked by an outside enemy and we were not in a position to be criticizing our own government.

That’s not the case with this crisis. The Washington Times — a conservative paper — and the Manchester Union Leader up in New Hampshire both just absolutely denouncing the response of the federal government, state government, local government. They are basically saying the government has one function and that’s’ to protect the citizens and it hasn’t happened this week in New Orleans.

I think liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, are just absolutely outraged and confused at the scenes we’re watching on TV. And the world is watching.

Why are we apparently incapable of rescuing people and in the process of witnessing an American city being lost?

MSNBC: This seems especially troubling to some, when America was able to offer aid to victims of the tsunami, a half a world away, but seemingly can’t do it in one of its own cities.

Russert: And it’s not as if we didn’t know this was coming. There were studies after studies. There were tests after tests. As recently as a year ago there was a tabletop disaster scenario played out as to what would happen to New Orleans in a major hurricane. And the results of those studies have now been proven to be true.

So the questions that have to be asked are:

Why weren’t the poor people evacuated? They don’t have SUVs. They travel by public bus. Could they have been evacuated?

Secondly, in terms of pre-positioning, where were the troops, where were the National Guard? If people were to be sent to the Superdome, why weren’t there cots and water and food there?

Second-guessing is easy, but it is also, I think, a requirement of those in a free society to challenge their government, when the primary function of the government is to protect its citizens and they haven’t been protected.

New Orleans

September 1, 2005
"Desperate SOS"

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin:

"This is a desperate SOS. Right now we are out of resources at the Convention Center and don't anticipate enough buses. Currently the Convention Center is unsanitary and unsafe and we are running out of supplies for 15,000 to 25,000 people," he said in the statement read by CNN.

New Orleans

September 1, 2005
Jack Cafferty

I normally think that CNN's Jack Cafferty comes off as something pretty close to a loony jerk, but I saw him say this (transcribed by lesliet on kos) today and it was brilliant:

I'm 62. I remember the riots in Watts, I remember the earthquake in San Francisco, I remember a lot of things. I have never, ever, seen anything as bungled and as poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can't sandwiches be dropped to those people in the Superdome. What is going on? This is Thursday! This storm happened 5 days ago. This is a disgrace. And don't think the world isn't watching. This is the government that the taxpayers are paying for, and it's fallen right flat on its face as far as I can see, in the way it's handled this thing.
...
We're going to talk about something else before the show's over, too. And that's the big elephant in the room. The race and economic class of most of the victims, which the media hasn't discussed much at all, but we will a bit later.

A newsman reacting with all the passion and outrage that a normal person would and should exhibit in such a situation. Bravo.
Update: video now available.

New Orleans

September 1, 2005
Ellen DeGeneres

A shaken and emotional Ellen DeGeneres said her 82-year-old aunt had to quickly evacuate her home in Pass Christian, Mississippi, as Hurricane Katrina headed toward the Gulf Coast.

"My aunt has lost everything, she has nothing," DeGeneres told AP Radio Wednesday. "She grabbed four pictures out of her house. She's lost her entire life."

DeGeneres, who was born in Metairie, Louisiana, said her childhood was filled with weekends at her aunt Helen Currie's home, just over the state line from New Orleans.

"It's where I grew up every weekend. I spent all my childhood there," she said. "Pass Christian ... is just gone. There's not one building left -- no church, no nothing."

New Orleans

August 31, 2005
Wakeup Call for DC
Finally, for once, Hotline says something truly useful:

Anyone else get the feeling that we here in official Washington haven't quite grasped the seriousness of what's happening in LA and MS? -- This is not a criticism of any one person or one agency. It's meant as a wakeup call to all of us. This could very well be the biggest natural disaster in this country's history; an entire city in ruins. -- If this happened in Washington, you wouldn't be reading this. There would be no electricity; there would be no light; there would be no phones (even cell service would be nearly non-existent); your Blackberries would get no email; there'd be no subway; there'd be no newspaper delivered or available; you couldn't reach your friends; your office wouldn't exist or you couldn't get to it; your home would be gone; there'd be no schools to send your kids to; the graves of your family would be washed away; electrocuted family pets; snakes and other scary creatures everywere; and you'd have to move somewhere for at least 3 months. -- And this is what life is like for those with means in New Orleans. MS is the 3rd poorest state in the union, according to a Census report released yesterday.
, Miscellaneous, New Orleans

August 30, 2005
Times-Picayune Neighborhood Forums
In a nifty use of tech, the Times-Picayune, the newspaper of New Orleans, is hosting online neighborhood forums that residents are using to contact each other to check on the state of their houses and how friends and family have made out. (No direct link, just go to the home page and scroll down to "WHAT'S HAPPENED TO MY NEIGHBORHOOD?")
New Orleans

August 30, 2005
New Orleans
My mom's family is from Louisiana -- Avoyelles Parish, actually, smack in the middle of the state -- and this Katrina is getting me down. New Orleans has of course long known that it's built to low (see this Chris Mooney article for more) but its strange architecture is part of the reason that the city is so ridiculously fabulous. For example, because of the high water table under the city, they 'bury' bodies there above ground in crypts. (They tried burying them below ground for a while but then a big rainstorm would come and the coffins would pop right up out of the ground.) The result is 'cities of the dead' scattered around the city. The last time that I was down there, I wandered through St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and got lost in the twists and turns of the cemetery. I'd find myself in some dead end, alone with a crypt tagged with voodoo markings and offerings like chicken bones scattered on the ground. That's part of what makes New Orleans so unique -- what feels to me about as far as you can get from Washington DC and still be in a major American city. It breaks my heart to think that we likely will have lost some of that.

Update: It looks like things are actually far, far worse down there than we I first wrote this. The point stands, though, that -- in addtion to the lost lives, the huge cost of rebuilding, and the suffering that those down there are going to be going through for a long time to come -- if we lose the unique blend of history, culture, architecture, and people that made NO such a spectacularly original city, that will be a damn damn shame.

Update: Oh, jeez. I don't say this lightly, but it seems as if some of the above ground crypts may have opened.
, Miscellaneous, New Orleans

Though I'm now working on focusing this blog on technology, social organizing, networks -- with a dose of food politics and Top Chef -- I want to take a minute to touch back on something I've spent some time on in the past: New Orleans, and specifically the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Just about a month after Katrina came through the Gulf Coast region, I was lucky enough to spend time in New Orleans as a guest of the Louisiana NAACP. One of the days I spent down there an NAACP staffer and I headed up to Baton Rouge to have a look at what was somewhat grandly being called Renaissance Village -- a FEMA-run collection of small trailers collected in a gravel pit of sorts several miles outside town. This was just before the camp was set to open, and so we watched as contractors hurried to hook-up the trailers to what there was of a infrastructure grid.

Poking around Renaissance Village that day, it amazed me to realize that the best federal plan we'd come up with for responding to the crisis was to have entire families live in trailers that were literally not big enough to swing a cat in. The trailers were cramped, the setting desolate, and the location remote. How, I wondered, were kids and old people especially be expected to survive here for more than a few weeks?

That was my thinking in October of 2005. It's now the summer of 2008, and FEMA is right now in the process of moving the last residents out of Renaissance Village. I'm not here to rail against FEMA or pretend that there are easy answers on how to handle thousands of people being displaced from an already dysfunctional city. It's hard, complicated, tiring work. But man we're in serious trouble if we don't get it through our thick skulls that we have to start asking better questions now if we ever want to arrive at acceptable answers.

Oh, wow, I almost forgot the point of this little rant. The New York Times has a great photo collection up on Renaissance Village's close.

I have always thought New Orleans is a useful dramatic counterpoint to the rest of the country. It has a different value system. It's not a money culture. It's a family--it's almost more European. It's, "who's your mama? Who's your granddaddy?" I had a moment--this is a very New Orleans moment. Liar's Poker came out. I was whoring for publicity and was sent out to be on every TV show. I was on the Letterman show. And after I was on the Letterman show, people stopped me on the street routinely because they recognized me from TV. And the tour, a week after that, took me through New Orleans. And I went there and I was staying with my parents, doing local media. I went over to the grocery store to pick up something for my mother. And I was walking down the aisle with a grocery cart and a little old lady was coming the other way. And she starts to point her crooked finger at me.

...

And I'm thinking, "I know you, you were on the Letterman show." But she gets closer and she says, "I know you, you're Malcolm Monroe's grandson." I said, "How'd you know that?" "I can tell by your face." And everybody is a celebrity in New Orleans because everybody knows you.

While filming a movie in New Orleans, Brad Pitt noticed a pink fabric house that was being used as part of the set. He perceived the visual potency of pink houses as a metaphor. Working together with [the architectural firm] GRAFT, the idea was born to merge film and architecture into an installation that would bring immediate global attention to a pervasive local issue. The scenes within the assembly create emotive storyboards containing perspectives rich with history and memories. Like a tangram puzzle, the components of each house lay haphazard at the installation's commencement. It is only through monetary donations that these pink placeholders will become reassembled, registering the effects of a collective consciousness, ultimately enabling the construction of 150 real homes. Pink, a symbol rich with the promise of homes that will be constructed for the community of the Lower 9th, resonates with an immediate and cogent message: "They have not been forgotten."

James Carville, John "Night Court" Larroquette, and others have launched Friends of New Orleans, a non-partisan non-profit in support of the forgotten city.