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After eight weeks, we drove from Gulfport to New Orleans for a Sierra Club meeting. There are many deep ties between that incomparable city and coastal Mississippi, including prior hurricanes like Betsy and Camille. Our dog Nash is named after revered New Orleans weatherman Nash Roberts, who wielded a grease pencil instead of Pinpoint Power Doppler Radar.
Debris Pile, New Orleans
From our host's house in Metairie, we drove over to Bucktown, doubling and tripling back and forth in a rhumba familiar to all who navigate areas in recovery. At a traffic light, we looked down the middle of a boulevard at a wide soaring pile of demolition debris hundreds of yards long that nearly enveloped a sign that read "Lakeview New Basin Canal Park." Arrows marked high tide and standing water lines on nearby houses.
At the breach in the levee at the 17th Street Canal we saw the path of a high-velocity flood, the upended cars, the destroyed and shifted houses. Seepage from one part of the repaired levee streamed down the road towards me and drained into a culvert. Later we crossed the London Street Canal and saw the breach and repairs there. The flood stain that some call the 'Katrina Patina" spread across endless blocks of houses and small businesses. The autos and trucks are flooded and abandoned on the green stretch between boulevards known locally as the neutral ground. The stain imperceptibly lowered as we entered the Ninth Ward until it stopped altogether when we crossed above the French Quarter on Basin Street. Where have the people gone, I wondered as we went through these neighborhoods, and when can they return?
Katrina's ferocity was vividly displayed across the Mississippi coastline, with whole neighborhoods destroyed, and vehicles, ships and barges hurled inland. In New Orleans, Katrina's damage was more insidious, except near the breaches in the levees. Back home, the storm would destroy one house inland and leave the next one without a mark. In New Orleans, one mark spanned most of the city. Katrina tore through the old oaks and magnolia shielding my house, ripping tin off roofs, cracking pecan trees, and after twelve hours, we were begging for the storm to stop. And the storm did stop, and the tide did recede. In New Orleans, the worst was still ahead.
Some coastal Mississippians feel neglected by the national media's preoccupation with New Orleans, but many of us have made progress in planning and carrying out our recovery. My guess is that New Orleaneans would gladly trade this media attention for a faster return to their homes and jobs.
After the tour, the members of Sierra's Gulf Coast Restoration Group sat down to dinner and I silently weighed how much larger the human dislocation and neighborhood destruction was for New Orleans than for my own hometown, and how much more violent the physical devastation was for us than for New Orleans. Next to me sat an attorney from Texas. Upon learning she was born in Pakistan, these thoughts collapsed before the staggering deaths and destruction from her country's earthquakes a few days earlier. I felt humility over the enormous resources poured into the Gulf Coast area in contrast to America's measly response to Pakistan's tragedy. We spent the next day and a half strategizing and brainstorming over Katrina, then I returned home. The trip gave me a clearer sense of proportion about the Gulf Coast's prospects for recovery compared to disaster victims elsewhere on this little blue marble we call home.
Reilly Morse
Attorney, Gulfport Mississippi
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