[Original post: August 31, 2005]
Sorry to have taken so long to thank everyone for their good wishes and let you all know how things are.
We left New Orleans on Sunday morning. I just returned from Denver the previous evening, having to scramble to get back at all and catching the last flight to Baton Rouge. I-10 was already jammed with cars heading west, and we had to leave the highway halfway back into city because of the contraflow.
We live on the upper floor of our house: the ground floor is a basement (as we can't have below-ground basements in New Orleans, for reasons that are now perfectly obvious to everyone). Sunday morning we moved as much as we could from the ground floor upstairs. All the roads west were gridlocked, so we drove north into Mississippi, planning to veer west via Natchez, headed for central Louisiana, and following our friends, Sarah and Joe. Just across the state line, their car broke down, so we crammed them (and all their stuff) into our Ford Escort. Every car on I-55 had a Louisiana license plate. We dropped them off in Alexandria, and ended our journey in Marksville. Normally, this is a three or four
hour drive from New Orleans. It took us 14 hours.
Since then, we've been driving ourselves crazy listening to the radio, going to people's houses to watch TV and obsessively reading updates on www.nola.com. We're waiting to hear if we can get back into the city next week, albeit briefly, to survey damage, fix things and get some more of our belongings. At the moment, we're hoping that we don't have worse damage than flooding on the ground floor, but the water is still rising. We live in the Audubon section of the city, for those of you who know New Orleans, and our street is just below sea level. The most recent thing we heard is that there's less flooding Uptown than
elsewhere, but we don't want to get too hopeful. Many streets are impassable because of fallen trees. It seems that we won't be able to move home for more than a month, possibly two or three months, so we'd like to secure the house, presuming we still have one. Also, when we left, we thought we'd just be away for a few days, like the last time we evacuated, so we have very little with us.
Then we may head up to St Louis and Iowa City, and then come back down here when it's closer to the time we can return home. If we really have to be out for three months, as the mayor suggested today, then I may go back to NZ to stay with my family. There's only so long you can stay with friends without driving everyone crazy. Thanks to everyone who's offered us a temporary home: we really appreciate it. There are so many people from our adopted home town who have to depend on the kindness of
strangers right now.
The city is just a mess - rising water, fires burning, trees down, roads gone, looters breaking into Wal-Mart and stealing guns. There's no electricity, gas or drinking water. Cell phones aren't working. Nothing is working. Tulane's whole semester may be cancelled: this is looking increasingly certain. (I'm waiting to see if I get paid tomorrow.) It's very surreal to be so displaced, from home and work, and to be uncertain about what our city will look like and feel like when we eventually return. New Orleans is almost third-world at the best of times; now, at the worst of times, it's a chaotic, lawless shambles. Many people have lost everything. Today, as you probably know, they're evacuating the people in the Superdome to Houston, and the governor wants everyone to leave the city.
Maybe we'll see those of you who live in Iowa soon. We'll stay put here in Marksville until there's more news. Thanks again for all the e-mails and good wishes.
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