The cicadas are singing. That's a good thing. Immediately after Katrina and Rita, there were no sounds in New Orleans other than the constant thrum of military helicopters.
Katrina bloomed in the Gulf of Mexico and, despite all weather systems touted by local and national meteorologists, set its sites on Louisiana. I had returned to New Orleans for two weeks before having lived outside the city for 20 years, renting an apartment uptown near Napoleon and Magazine. I hadn't spent much time in the apartment and had unpacked little or nothing since my time was taken up running hospital duty for my elderly mother. She was a patient in LifeCare, which occupied the seventh floor of the now infamous Memorial Baptist Hospital.
As the storm approached on Friday, I believed it would turn. As the storm grew on Saturday, I prayed for Alabama and Florida, for surely it would turn. When I awoke at 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, August 28, on my sofa, a local meteorologist was jumping from foot to foot on camera proclaiming Katrina as a Cat 5. And I knew. I knew we couldn't stay in the city and that a mandatory evacuation would be called. At 6 a.m., my brother and sister-in-law called to say we had to leave. We cried together on the phone because we all felt as though we were abandoning my mother, but there was no way to evacuate her.
We went to the hospital with a laundry basket of supplies for the sitter, Jill, staying with my mother who had unknowingly consigned herself to three days of hell. We brought water, flashlights, batteries, a battery operated radio, snack food, towels, and cash. The hospital was abuzz, taking in patients from an affiliated institution in Chalmette which had already received its mandatory evacuation order.
We consoled ourselves as we drove out of town that Memorial Baptist, which in other days had been called Southern Baptist Hospital and was where my brother and I were born, was a sturdy brick structure which had withstood countless storms and hurricanes. My mother and the sitter were on the seventh floor, well above any flood level. We had been assured that the hospital had food, water, medications and staff to weather even Katrina.
We evacuated to Ferriday, Louisiana, to my sister-in-law's sister's home. We invaded it. We brought my dog, two cats, ourselves, and our anxiety. We threw mattresses on their living room floor, turned on the television thanking whoever for this family's addiction to satellite, and stared at the news reports as the storm closed in on the state. We took turns with the remote and yelled updates to whoever had to use the bathroom.
By mid-morning on Monday, August 29, it became apparent that New Orleans would never again be the city we had left. Scenes of foolhardy news reporters blown by the winds had been bad enough to impart Katrina's wrath. When reports began to come in first of topping of levees, then of levees just separating and laying down to the force of the waters, we cried. No, we didn't cry. We keened.
By Monday night, my sister-in-law, a former EMT and director of the EMT training program at Nunez Community College in St. Bernard Parish, was beside herself with guilt. She felt that with her training she could help and by promising to get to my mother, convinced my brother to reenter the city the next morning. I was to stay in Ferriday, a home base.
By 6 a.m. Tuesday morning, my brother's truck was loaded with a generator, gasoline cans, tarps, food, ice chests, some clothes, and orange traffic cones. They made a stop at the local Wal-Mart and bought ice, solid boots, as much bottled water as they could find, and rain suits.
They got to the Causeway and I-10 bridge we figure about the same time I got the first frantic call from Jill. From what I could pull from the sitter's panicked ramblings, there was no electricity, it was stifling, they were rationing water, medications were running low, the staff had not been relieved, and people were dying. She said there were military outside but they were doing nothing and the water was rising. The only comfort was when Jill said my mother was bearing up well, although she seemed to be dehydrating. I begged her to stay with my mother, pour water on her, fan her, strip her naked, break the window. My mind was flying.
I tried to reach my brother but Jill's fleeting cell phone signal must have been one of the few in the city. I just kept getting a recording that due to the weather circuits were down. I was now the one in a panic. I was with relative strangers, over three hours from New Orleans, with no vehicle, and my mother was alone with a floor of dying patients and panic-stricken caregivers.
I lived in this state until early Wednesday evening. Until that time, the intensity of my panic ebbed and flowed with each news report, and with comforting phone calls from the Disaster Recovery Unit at my employer who had located me when I tried to email everyone I could think of to send help to the city. I watched, sobbing, as fires flared in the midst of the flood waters from broken gas lines. I watched parents separated from children being hoisted above blade-driven flood waters. I watched people beg for water and shade. I watched people die. And I felt guilty that I wasn't among them.
When my cell phone rang and the caller ID indicated my brother's cell number I almost crushed the phone opening the flip top. I heard my sister-in-law's voice say "We've got Mom" and I literally fell to my knees in her sister's kitchen yelling the news to the household.
They brought my mother to a string of ambulances atop the I-10 bridge and patrolled them until they located one manned by two of my sister-in-law's former students. They pledged to deliver my mother to Baton Rouge, and my brother and sister-in-law returned to the city to rescue more patients and families of patients. By Thursday my brother couldn't take it any longer and they returned to Ferriday. By then, by phone, we had located my mother at the Pete Maravich Center on the LSU campus where they were bringing the elderly and disabled. I had her slotted for a place in an unknown nursing home in Baton Rouge, so we gathered everything and on Friday headed for Baton Rouge.
Over time, I've gotten the story of what went on in the city. They had spent the first day doing triage on the Causeway Bridge and in the wee hours of Tuesday morning had overheard plans by members of the Wildlife and Fisheries department to try to get to the hospitals at daybreak. My sister-in-law pulled her truck into line with theirs and they were soon on an airboat headed through eight foot deep water to Memorial Baptist Hospital.
They rode the airboat into the Emergency Room of the hospital. It was sweltering, but my brother said there seemed to be some order to things. There was no electricity: the generators had been in the basement of the hospital and flooded. On the seventh floor, my mother was a limp puddle of eighty-three year old skin and Jill was a basket case. My brother and his wife hauled my mother on a cot down the unlit stairwell to the second level and then helped staff kick out the massive plate glass windows to bring in some air. Unfortunately, it brought in humidity and a stench more than fresh air.
Rumors told of helicopters which were to evacuate patients and my brother helped bring many to the roof of the parking garage to meet them. The helicopters never showed up. When my brother realized they were triaging patients for evacuation based on those who could or could not survive the trip, and my mother, a DNR, was on the "will not survive" list, he took matters into his own hands and declared that they were leaving. He grabbed my mother's chart, fought off the staff who said that he couldn't take her records much less her, loaded Jill on one airboat and my mother still on her cot on another, and took off.
When I asked them about the reports of gunfire they said that yes, they had heard gunshots but seen no evidence of bullets landing. The consensus had been that they were stranded residents shooting to get the attention of the military and those they saw with boats. They said neither they nor those they were with had felt threatened.
Despite our efforts, my mother passed away peacefully in her sleep at 5 a.m. on September 8th. Unfortunately, our memories of Katrina won't pass that easily.
We stayed in Baton Rouge for a month, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with an EMT friend of my sister-in-law. She was exhausted from long, chaotic shifts working with the influx of people to Baton Rouge. We were raw, not knowing what our future would be.
My brother had returned briefly to his house in the Garden District after sending my mother off to Baton Rouge. He thankfully had only a few broken windows from flying roof slates. That part of the city had no flooding. A massive oak tree across the street had toppled and taken out the second floor porch and part of the first floor porch of a house. He described a church steeple lying in the middle of the streetcar tracks. There were cars strewn helter-skelter that had either been stolen then abandoned, or that people had tried to use to leave the city.
He had gone by my house and seen that the roof had taken a little damage, but was otherwise okay. During Rita, however, the roof damage allowed water to get in and a bedroom ceiling collapsed strewing fiberglass insulation throughout.
When we returned to the city to stay, it was obvious we would feel like pioneers for a while. We stopped people on the street who carried water or ice to find out where shipments had been delivered and tried to get there before stocks ran out. Electricity and gas had been restored to the Garden District so we were able to cook. The military drove past regularly handing out water and meals. Stores were only open a few hours a day and gasoline stations were few and far between so we alternated vehicles and rationed trips.
News was all that was available on radio or TV, and it was all we wanted to hear. It was unimaginable that the city, operating on a war zone mentality, would recover. The mayor, despite his crazy statements and often unthinking actions, held a post that no one would have wanted. He was now dealing with a city with broken water mains, no medical facilities, few gasoline stations, no phone service, collapsed cell towers, deserting police, broken levees, demolished neighborhoods, dead bodies, rampant stray animals, no jail or court system, a broken sewerage system, inoperable pumps, no water pressure and little potable water in areas, and acres of homes with refrigerators that held rotting, maggot infested, foul smelling food.
Today, the majority of the refrigerators are gone, although organizing the removal, drainage of Freon, and disposition of the rotting food has seemed endless.
Today, we have a hospital up and running in the Garden District, although there are no emergency services. There is a Level One Trauma Unit near the heart of downtown in a converted department store. A full-service hospital is just over the parish line in Jefferson Parish.
Today, the crime rate is escalating as new drug factions come into the city and war over turf. An ineffectual police chief with a reduced police force has been unable to stem it and now the National Guard again rumbles through the city patrolling less populated areas seeking out squatters and looters so the police themselves can tackle violent crime.
The election ousted some incumbents and opened the eyes of others. Those like me and my brother who have chosen to see the city rebuilt will no longer accept the "good ole boy" form of government that has been handed down by generations. Grassroot efforts at rebuilding have sprung up in almost every neighborhood and they are making themselves heard either directly or through the news media.
The number of missing people has diminished, and the dead are slowly being identified.
There is potable water and electricity in every part of the city except the Ninth Ward, where few houses are habitable as they stand. Demolition of those homes throughout the city which are a hazard is ongoing. Those in Lakeview directly against the 17th Avenue Canal breech are gone and have been replaced by machinery and dirt bolstering the levee.
The downtown area has free wireless Internet. Libraries are either opening, or as in the case of one neighborhood, Bookmobiles are being set up for summer reading programs for the children who have returned. The Library Convention was held this weekend in the city, the first major convention since the storm, and thousands of librarians from across the country spent time reshelving books and cleaning public libraries.
The levees are being repaired, but the repairs aren't as solid as we would like. Trust in the Corps of Engineers is non-existent. We mumble and are afraid to ask about potential weak spots that didn't fail in the last storm. We know we are vulnerable. We always have been. We just know more about the extent of our vulnerability.
The pumps are being rewired and repaired one at a time so that all of the pumps are not offline at once during this hurricane season. Their capacity is diminished until the repairs are complete but we are told they will handle an inch of rain an hour.
Debris removal is progressing. The estimate is that it will total over 22 million tons, which is 200 football fields piled 50 feet high, including over 1 million tons of "white goods" (appliances). There are over 500,000 wrecked cars stretching across the city, although the signing of a recent contract has started their removal.
The Universities are open. Some elementary and high schools opened in January, and others continued to open until the official closing day several weeks ago. Plans and operations are underway to ensure many more will be open in the fall.
Mardi Gras was muted, but necessary. Those in the city had to step back from the devastation for a brief period and regroup and Mardi Gras allowed that. Families who had seen each other only once a year during parades, always viewing from the same spot generation after generation, hugged and cried as they met up again. Catharsis lined the parade routes as story upon story unfolded of the horrors of Katrina.
There will not be a normal in the city for a long while. In fact, normal is going to have to be redefined. Residents live a constant battle between comfort and just letting go, and continuing to fight for the best for the city. We're tired and we're still a long way from even looking like a city. We hear about the rest of the nation having Katrina fatigue, being tired of hearing about Katrina. We hear that we are looked down upon because we haven't been able to recover yet. We hear that we are laughed at for returning C. Ray Nagin to office.
And many of us still feel guilty because we didn't experience the full ravages of Katrina.
Katrina fatigue isn't allowed here, but we reserve the right to be tired; stand in line. If you think we should have recovered, have someone drop a bomb every mile within your city limits and start marking your calendars. See how long recovery takes. C. Ray Nagin isn't the brightest star in the sky, is abrasive, and often acts before he thinks. But he isn't part of the good ole boy politics that has had a grip on this region for generations. We expect his antics and are learning how to react to them to get corrective action.
We are still The City That Care Forgot, nestled in the crescent of the Mississippi River and earning the title Crescent City. We are still the Big Easy, but now with more vision and less clay feet.
And we still need America to care about us.
