Today it’s two years since Hurricane Katrina hit. Two years ago, we were sitting in Rodney’s law office in Marksville, in front of the television – watching the city blow in the wind and fill with water. We’d arrived in central Louisiana some time after two that morning, fourteen hours or so after leaving our house in New Orleans. When we left home on Sunday morning, we passed McMain High School. A city bus had pulled up outside, and a family was getting in, all clutching plastic bags with their stuff – clothes, pillows, food, drinks. They were being taken to the Superdome, the “refuge of last resort,” as the mayor described it, expecting to spend a night there, two at most. Over the next long, hot week, I felt sick every time I thought of them.
The first breach of the Industrial Canal happened at dawn, according to the latest report from the US Army Corps of Engineers (not very popular engineers these days) – ie before the eye of the hurricane made landfall in Plaquemines Parish.
Two years on, we have the same mayor and governor and President, all making nice these days – in public, at least. Crime is up (go, crime!): apparently, New Orleans is on track to lead the nation in homicides per capita for the second straight year. And the city has between sixty and seventy per cent of its pre-storm population, though I suspect many of these people are new residents rather than returnees.
Most of the homes damaged by Katrina and Rita were in Louisiana – 77 per cent, compared with 23 per cent in Mississippi. But federal aid has not been distributed based on relative damage. Mississippi has received 50 per cent of funds from the Community Development Block Grant Program. It received $95 million for higher education relief, exactly the same amount as Louisiana, although Louisiana had more than three times the number of displaced students. Mississippi has received $280 million to build alternative housing to replace FEMA trailers: Louisiana, with two-and-a-half times the number of families living in FEMA trailers, got only a third of the money. For Louisiana’s 163 buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places, we received $6 million LESS than Mississippi, which had 130. These figures are from the Times-Picayune. Click here for today’s editorial.
In happier and stranger news, Oprah has invited Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose onto her show. Chris is the author of a best-selling book of Katrina-related columns: it’s called One Dead in Attic. However, he’s been forbidden to mention anything about his book on air – not even the title. Apparently, you can’t mention a book on Oprah because that makes it A Book On Oprah and therefore anointed in a must-buy, sacred-text kind of way.
Chris writes: “It turns out that Oprah's show today is a one-hour special on the mental health crisis in New Orleans. And, it turns out, they wanted my expertise, not as a book writer or even a newspaper columnist, but as the city's most famously depressed resident, by virtue of my 5,000-word account about battling the disease which I published in the newspaper last fall -- and which you can read in my book (am I allowed to say that?).
And, by the end of today, I will probably be one of America's most famously depressed citizens -- right up there with Terry Bradshaw and Brooke Shields -- rather than one of its new, hot, young (well, young-ish) writers.
This is what my life has come to; representing New Orleans on national TV as the city's most obviously disturbed public figure.”
You can read his whole column here.
Happy Anniversary.