Butterfly Cauldron

Ah, the aftermath of Katrina in Mississippi. The state is recovering faster than New Orleans is (and good for them, there's no resentment about that on this end) and people are rebuilding. This is a Very Good Thing. Habitat for Humanity is building lots of houses for lower-income people. (And I adore that organization. I keep trying to get hired by them, but no luck so far.) Things are going well, until local residents find out what's planned.

WAVELAND, Miss. (AP) — Toni Thomas, a 24-year-old single mom of two, pulled her nose out of a science book Wednesday and smiled.
For a few minutes she wasn’t thinking about her night-class homework or her rigorous routine that begins each morning at sunrise. She wasn’t thinking about her job or her finances. Instead, she dreamed of returning to her Middle Town neighborhood to be near her mother, aunts and cousins.
Thomas’ grin grew when she thought about watching Larry, her 2-year-old with dimples, and her daughter, Shadara, play in a new house she owns.
But the chance of that dream becoming reality in Waveland seems to be getting slimmer by the minute.
Thomas qualified for an interest-free home loan through Habitat for Humanity, the Christian-based nonprofit group made popular by former President Carter, which is building “thousands and thousands” of homes along the storm-pummeled Gulf Coast, from Texas to Alabama.
Nearly 200 Waveland families applied for a home through the Hancock County chapter of Habitat. So far, 70 are planned.
Those plans hit a brick wall when some residents and city leaders said Habitat should not be given special permits to build homes on lots smaller than city code allows.
Wendy McDonald, who leads the Hancock chapter of Habitat, told a disgruntled crowd at a Board of Aldermen meeting Tuesday that larger lots are more expensive and drive mortgage payments out of reach for most Habitat homeowners. Many who qualify are senior citizens and single moms who would find it hard to care for a large lot.
Some of the most vocal critics of Habitat’s plan to build on smaller lots in the predominantly black neighborhood of Middle Town were residents from far different areas of the city.
After McDonald said hundreds of pre-storm Waveland families are unable to return home because of the soaring cost of real estate, Judy Roth, who lives near the beachfront, said it’s not a problem current residents should have to deal with.
But Habitat will build homes only for families who were living in Hancock County before Katrina, meaning the 200-plus families wanting a Habitat house consider themselves Waveland residents.
Russell Voorhies, who lives on Beach Boulevard, said he fears allowing smaller lots could start a trend that may spread in the city.
But since March, aldermen have approved several recommendations from city planners allowing special permits similar to the requests they denied from Habitat.
One property owner was allowed to divide his property into eight lots, each 7 feet smaller than the city’s code requires.
In April the city approved a request to allow a homeowner to divide one lot into two, one of which did not meet the city’s square-footage requirement.
A month later the city approved a permit to allow a property owner to build a new home 14 feet closer to the front property line and 17 feet closer to the backyard boundary than code permitted.
Planning Commissioner Kathy Pinn said the community hardly opposed those changes.
The most debated project from Habitat is a plan to build six houses near Herlihy Street on lots that do not meet the city’s 75-foot-wide requirement. Four of the lots are 70 feet wide and two are 62 feet wide.
Pinn said the commission, which sends recommendations to aldermen, supports Habitat and most of the resistance is coming from the community.
One of the Middle Town residents who opposes Habitat’s plan is Mary Leigh Hall, 62, who told the commission the Habitat homes would attract drugs and traffic to the neighborhood and the city should focus on other things, “instead of housing.”
Hall is one of the aunts Thomas wants to be closer to. Thomas grew up in Middle Town and she said drugs and traffic would be nothing new.
“There’s always been drugs in that neighborhood,” she said. “That’s not Habitat’s fault.”
Habitat has threatened to leave Waveland if the climate doesn’t change. Thomas said she already has been asked if she would consider living in a Habitat home in Bay St. Louis.
“The city of Waveland should step up and do something, because there’s a bunch of people who just want to come home,” she said.
Instead of deciding on Habitat proposals this week, aldermen scheduled a meeting for Oct. 14 at 10 a.m. between Habitat and Middle Town residents to discuss the plans.

So. The cost of property is rising, lots of families who lived in Waveland cannot afford to buy said property, so Habitat steps in to help them out. And then their fricking neighbors protest? "It's not my problem"? What? These aren't strangers. These are people who lived in Waveland and were displaced by Katrina. They want to come home, dammit, and they have ever right to. They're also willing to work, hard, for their own home. I don't know if you've ever been involved with a Habitat Build but those people WORK. If this isn't a huge helping of classism, I don't know what is. Those people aren't good enough to live here anymore. Now that we can get rid of them.

But, you know, people who can afford their land on their own? Well, we'll give them permits with little acceptions. Because they're not poor, see? No poor, not old, not single parents. No, they're our kind of people, see?

Gah. Isn't it bad enough that Katrina destroyed lives left and right? Now those victims have to hurt each other? What the fuck is wrong with the world?

Labels: Katrina, outrage, poverty

The lights were out this time last year. I was home, from an incredible long day of work, sitting on my bed, listening to my battery-powered radio. For us, the worst of the weather was passed. It was still raining, but we were out of danger of tornados. I didn't have to wait long for the power to come back on, an hour maybe. Then I could watch the television, watch the coverage coming out of New Orleans. And, this time last year, I was relieved. Because although the city had taken a hit, the damage seemed managable. Because the levees were intact.

I had driven to work at 6 a.m. I didn't have to report that early, but I'd been unable to sleep and then the power went out. And why would I stay at home in no power when work has it's own generator? So, I drove to work with the wind howling and the rain drizzling. It hadn't really started raining here yet, but it was coming. I got to work, before anyone else, and got started on updating our Web site. I was pulling photos and wire stories -- all the while thinking it was rather silly to be doing all that, when pretty much our entire service area was out of power and couldn't read it anyway. But, I did it. People started drifting in around 7 a.m. and the day got rolling. It was hard, stressful, but not all that bad, since this time last year, the levees were intact.

The next day, the nightmare began.

I went to work at my regular time, 8 a.m. And heard rumors that the levees had broken. So, I started looking around...and found out it was true. The levee broke. Other people, having witnessed what happened when the levee broke, understand what that means. But at the time, only the local newscasters seem to get the enormity of just what that meant. The levee broke. In Louisiana, all over, it was like every just stopped breathing. We knew, all of us, that it meant New Orleans was gone. Not just that parts of the city would flood, but that it was done. Over. And then the pictures started coming in and the rest of my day is a blur. Photo after photo showed the same thing. And the people. All those people trapped and dying and begging for help. It was horrible.

It got worse. We kept waiting, kept looking, for news of what was being done to get those people out of there. Of course, we thought, there will be a rescue. Of course, we thought, there are people in position to go in, now that the storm is gone. But no one went in.

A year later, it's better, but not by much. Over 40 percent of the city doesn't have power yet. Over 60 percent has no gas. Mounds of rotten debris line the streets in many neighborhoods. People are living in trailers, that are as good as gone if another hurricane hits the city. And no one is sure just yet where TS Ernesto is going to go, although it looks like it'll hit Florida and leave us alone. But who knows? There are months left in the storm season.

Today was a horrible day for me, and I couldn't figure out why at first. I've been ready to just cry for the last week, even though there nothing terrible loaming over us. I realized it wasn't loaming, it's covering us. The rest of the world thinks it's got Katrina fatigue? Try living in the middle of it.

You may get tired of reading about this, over and over again. You're lucky, you get to turn the channel, flip the page, click on over to another blog and it's gone for you. I wish I were so lucky.

Labels: Katrina

1.3 million -- Number of people who were evacuated because of Katrina

900,000--People who changed addresses by Oct. 5

$50-70 billion--Total economic loss

220,000--Initial jobs lost

50,000--Jobs regained

11.6 inches--Amount of rain generated by Katrina in Louisiana

30--Tornadoes generated

Third--Katrina's ranking in size and strength in U.S. hurricanes

24 percent--Estimated increase in New Orleans birth rate nine months after Katrina

118 square miles--Coastal land lost

2.1 million--Number of Louisiana households that lost electricity

THE DEAD

1,464--Total number of deaths in Louisiana attributable to Katrina

10,746--Number of citizens found alive

135--Total number of citizens still missing

892--Bodies autopsied at the state morgue at Carville and St. Gabriel

56 percent--Percentage of African-Americans identified at state morgue

40 percent--Percentage of Caucasians at the state morgue

2 percent--Percentage of Hispanics at the state morgue

POPULATION

455,000--New Orleans population before Katrina

230,000--Estimated New Orleans population as of July

266,000--Statewide population loss

DONATIONS AND VOLUNTEERS

100,000--Estimated number of out-of-state volunteers in Louisiana this past year

$3.3 billion--Estimated Katrina-related charitable donations worldwide

$2.1 billion--Amount of those donations that went to American Red Cross

$129 million--Amount of money raised by the Clinton-Bush Katrina Fund

INSURANCE LOSSES

727,414--Insurance claims

$14 billion--Insurance paid out as of June 30

$13.2 billion--Federal flood insurance paid out in Louisiana

$140,000--Average federal flood insurance claim

INDIVIDUAL ASSISTANCE

$5.1 billion--FEMA grants to individuals

1.6 million--Number of Louisiana individuals receiving FEMA assistance

$450 million--Amount of state's share of FEMA's grants to individuals

32--Number of families still living in FEMA-paid hotel rooms

$3.6 billion--FEMA housing assistance grants

$367.5 million--Disaster Food Stamp Benefits

$320 million--Disaster unemployment paid

173,000--Louisianans receiving disaster unemployment

252,072--Louisianans receiving unemployment benefits on Sept. 24

32,800--Average weekly statewide employment claims prior to Katrina

173,000--Average weekly statewide unemployment claims post-Katrina

619,000--Total statewide non-farm employment, June 2005

425,200--Total statewide non-farm employment, June 2006

$5 billion--U.S. Small Business Administration loans to renters and homeowners

$34,7 million--FEMA grants for crisis mental health counseling

PETS

17,000--Rescued pets by Louisiana SPCA and partners

Up to 10,000--Estimated number of drowned pets

HOUSING

204,500--Total of homes affected

63,500--Owner-occupied homes severely damaged

43,000--Rental units severely damaged

106,500--Housing units with severed damaged

169,000--Number of homes with major flooding

101,000--Number of homeowners who have applied for The Road Home rebuilding aid

95,441--Number of FEMA trailers in Louisiana

81,245--Number of occupied FEMA trailers in Louisiana as of August 16

90,388--Number of evacuees who went to Texas

18,966--Number of evacuees who went to Mississippi

18,229--Number of evacuees who went to Georgia

6,309--Number of evacuees who went to Arkansas

$9.3 billion--The Road Home housing grant program

60 percent--Percent of former customers in New Orleans with reconnected electricity

41 percent--Percent of former customers in New Orleans with reconnected natural gas

DEBRIS

22 million tons--Debris estimate

8.7 million tons--Estimated remaining debris

13--Number of times the debris could fill the Superdome

25--Number of times the debris of the World Trade Center

1.5 million--Units of refrigerators, dishwashers, washers and dryers discarded curbside

350,000--Flooded and abandoned cars

60,000-plus--Damaged vessels


Sources: Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, Ochsner Health System, Louisiana Recovery Authority, Louisiana Association of Non-profit Organizations, Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, Louisiana Department of Insurance, Council for a Better Louisiana, Louisiana Family Recovery Crops, New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Louisiana Division of Administration, Louisiana Society Prevention of the Cruelty to Animals, National Hurricane Center and U.S. Minerals Management Service.

Labels: Katrina

This doesn't surprise me, at all. It's still sad though. Women are getting the shaft again, this time in the Katrina recovery. In the best of times, a disproportionate number of women are living in poverty, particularly women raising children on their own. Throw in a little natural disaster and it's a recipe for economic disaster. Add a liberal dose of southern sexism and, well. . .

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Low-income women have been slow to return to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina and many who have returned are not benefiting from the recovering city’s construction labor market, a report released Friday said.

“Those who have managed to get back are clearly struggling,” Avis Jones-DeWeever, director of the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said at a news conference in front of City Hall.

She cited a quadruple increase in food stamp use in the metropolitan area as evidence of the hard times for many women in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

Gleaning its findings from recent U.S. Census and other government data, the report said the number of single mothers in the area has dropped from 10 percent before Katrina to about 6 percent now.

The report also said the number of low-income female-led households dropped from 35 percent before the storm to 18 percent after.

The report said women in Louisiana earned less than men and had fewer opportunities than men before Katrina, and that their plight will be worsened with the unequal playing field that was created after the storm.

One way of changing this would be for women to be hired in the construction fields, new City Council woman Shelley Midura said.

“Women can break Sheetrock, women can wire homes, and women can drive trucks,” Midura said. “These are good-paying jobs.”

Beth Willinger of Tulane University’s Center for Research on Women said the labor force needs to be “totally integrated” both in terms of gender and race.

“But first we need to bring our women home,” she said.

Jones-DeWeever was joined by several prominent women, including Midura and state Rep. Karen Carter, a Democrat and a contender in a Nov. 7 congressional race for the seat of U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, who is running for re-election.

It's absolutely true that women can do construction work, for the most part. I don't do construction myself, so I don't know about the entire realm of construction jobs, but women can certain drive trucks and swing hammers and do electrical work and...well, just about anything. But, they don't get the job training and, if they do, they don't get hired. Why? Well, because there are men wanting those jobs too. Men with wives and children they need to take care of, ya know. And well, men are just better at these sort of things. Why don't you go get yourself a nice secretarial job, huh? Sure. I'm sure she would, but you have to have businesses for those kinds of jobs and hey, aren't you building those businesses right now? So, if they don't exist yet, how does that 'women's work' exist yet? Right. It doesn't. But you won't let her have a hammer or the keys to the forklift, so what's she supposed to do?

Of course, this isn't anything new. It's pretty standard operating procedure. And it's a shitty practice when things are running smoothly, but now? Now when you've got insane unemployment, very little government assistance and -- I love this part -- a government that doesn't want to rebuild it's assistance programs...(Seriously, we had people debating on whether they should rebuild assisted housing in New Orleans. They just didn't want to do it. Because then those poor people would come back. And they've suspended most of the social welfare programs, or at least they had. Some of them may have been reinstated by now.)

I fear that New Orleans, when it's rebuilt, is going to be a white-washed, personality-less Generic City. More men than women, more white than black, more bland and boring than colorful and alive.

Labels: feminism, Katrina

A year later, you'd think something as basic as water would be back online. A year seems long enough to get water, sewage and electricity work, at a bare minimum. Obviously, the city won't be back to full power in a year. There was way too much damage. But the basics? Come on. I'm begining to notice the similiarities between New Orleans and Iraq. No water? No lights? No sewage? People dying at an increased pace? National Guard troops roaming the streets? Temperatures over 100 degrees? Yeah...substitute swamps for sands and it's an almost familiar picture. Well, aside from the fact that our government is willing to spend whatever it takes on Iraq and can't seem to find the funds for New Orleans. Maybe our people are too brown?

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The most-devastated section of the Lower Ninth Ward, a poor area that was torn apart by Hurricane Katrina and floodwaters, is still without drinking water nearly a year after the storm.

Following a meeting between residents and the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board on Thursday, community activists said there is no indication of when the problem will be solved.

“That was an utter waste of my time,” ACORN organizer Tanya Harris said moments after the meeting. “I wasn’t given any clear timeline, a damage assessment, a partial damage assessment, nothing concrete.”

Because of the extreme devastation in the area, crews have been unable to open major valves that would move water and reveal pipe leaks, said Tommie Vassel, the board’s president pro tempore.

Repairs also have been slow because it took weeks to pump the area dry after Katrina on Aug. 29 and again after Hurricane Rita on Sept. 24, Vassel said.

After the water was drained, much of the area was off-limits after lawsuits were filed to stop demolition of ruined houses. Now that homes are being razed, demolition crews have torn more pipes from the ground, contributing to the difficulty of pinpointing infrastructure problems, Vassel said.

Harris said the board told residents that crews have been working seven days a week in some sections to repair pipes, but she had never seen any workers while visiting her neighborhood daily.

Harris also was critical of the S&WB spending almost $200,000 to install underground leak-detection devices in the French Quarter, the Central Business District and the Warehouse District while work has lagged in the Lower Ninth Ward
“I understand that those areas are important to our city, but we are important to our city,” Harris said. “We are important people, and we count.”

Labels: Katrina, outrage

Admittedly, I'm biased. But I so hope this lawsuit goes all the way through. Even if he doesn't win, it'll expose more details of what went on in New Orleans.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The son of a 91-year-old woman who died in her wheelchair awaiting rescue from a shelter in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina sued the city and the state on Thursday.

Herbert Humphrey Jr. filed a lawsuit in state Civil District Court in New Orleans accusing numerous state agencies and the city of New Orleans of willful misconduct in the death of his mother, Ethel Freeman.

Freeman died sitting in her wheelchair outside the city’s Convention Center, which was overwhelmed with desperate evacuees. Her body, pushed to one side and covered with a poncho, became a widely noted icon of the botched hurricane response.
Humphrey’s lawyer, John Paul Massicot, said Freeman was instructed to go the fetid Convention Center — even though there was no aid available and no way out.

“Let’s not forget, she survived the storm. The storm didn’t get her. She didn’t survive the rescue,” Massicot said.

Labels: death, Katrina, outrage

Ah, those golden promises our Frat Boy in Chief made. Standing in Jackson Square, looking all regal and presidential. Whatever it takes, he said. We're standing with you until the end, he said.

Bullshit.

Nearly half of New Orleans was still under water when President Bush stood in the Crescent City’s historic Jackson Square and swore he would “do what it takes” to rebuild the communities and lives that had been laid to waste two weeks before by Hurricane Katrina.

“Our goal is to get the work done quickly,” the president said.

He promised to spend federal money wisely and accountably. And he vowed to address the poverty exposed by the government’s inadequate Katrina response “with bold action.”

A year after the storm, the federal government has proven slow and unreliable in keeping the president’s promises.
The job of clearing debris left by the storm remains unfinished, and has been plagued by accusations of fraud and price gouging. Tens of thousands of families still live in trailers or mobile homes, with no indication of when or how they will be able to obtain permanent housing. Important decisions about rebuilding and improving flood defenses have been delayed. And little if anything has been done to ensure the welfare of the poor in a rebuilt New Orleans.

How has the government performed in the most critical areas of the recovery and reconstruction effort?

EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE: A June report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that FEMA wasted between $600 million and $1.4 billion on “improper and potentially fraudulent individual assistance payments.”

Government auditors found that debit cards distributed to Katrina victims were used to pay for things like Dom Perignon champagne, New Orleans Saints season tickets and adult-oriented entertainment. The audit also found that people used fictional addresses, fake Social Security numbers and the identities of dead people to fraudulently register for assistance. FEMA also double-deposited funds in the accounts of 5,000 out of the nearly 11,000 debit card holders.

CLEANUP: The job still isn’t done. More than 100 million cubic yards of debris have been cleared from the region affected by Katrina. So far the government has spent $3.6 billion, a figure that might have been considerably smaller had the contracts for debris removal been subject to competitive bidding.

Working through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA gave each of four companies contracts worth up to $500 million to clear hurricane debris. This spring government inspectors reported that the companies — AshBritt Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., Phillips and Jordan Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn., Ceres Environmental Services Inc. of Brooklyn Park, Minn. and ECC Operating Services Inc. of Burlingame, Calif. — charged the government as much as four to six times what they paid their subcontractors who actually did the work.

HOUSING: In his Jackson Square speech, Bush said his goal was to “get people out of shelters by the middle of October.”
By and large that goal was met, with all but a few thousand of 270,000 Katrina evacuees out of shelters by mid-October.
But that didn’t solve the monumental housing problem created by Katrina. Most of the people who had been in shelters went to hotel rooms, with FEMA picking up the bill. About 50,000 families who had evacuated to other cities were promised a year of rent assistance, though in April FEMA began cutting off some who the agency said did not qualify for the program. More than 100,000 families moved into trailers or mobile homes parked either in the yards of their damaged houses or in makeshift compounds.

Meanwhile, FEMA flailed and flip-flopped on its contracting policies for trailers, mobile homes and other temporary shelter. The first big contracts were handed out non-competitively to four well-connected companies — Shaw Group, Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Inc. and Fluor Corp. Then in October FEMA director R. David Paulison promised to rebid the contracts after Congress complained that smaller companies, especially local and minority-owned firms, should have a chance to compete for the work.

A month after that, FEMA said the new contracts would not be awarded until February. That deadline came and went, and then in March a FEMA official announced that the contracts weren’t going to be rebid after all.

A week later FEMA reversed itself again, giving up to $3.6 billion in business to small and minority-owned firms.
“I promised Congress I was going to bid them out, and that’s what I’m doing,” Paulison said.

REBUILDING: Despite Bush’s Jackson Square promise to “undertake a close partnership with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, the city of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities,” state and local officials had a hard time reaching a deal for federal aid to help residents rebuild their ruined homes.

In January the administration rejected a $30 billion plan for Louisiana as too expensive. The White House also balked at subsidizing the reconstruction of homes in flood plains, a policy that would have excluded all but a small fraction of Louisiana homeowners whose houses were significantly damaged.

The state finally won funding in July for the $9 billion ’Road Home’ program, which pays homeowners up to $150,000 either to repair their damaged property or rebuild elsewhere in the state. People who leave the state are eligible for a 60 percent buyout. The money, which is being distributed through escrow accounts to prevent fraud, is just becoming available a year after the hurricane.

LEVEES: The federal government hasn’t broken any promises with regard to flood protection — mostly because it has assiduously avoided making any.

White House Katrina recovery czar Donald Powell has said that the administration intends to wait for the completion of a $20 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study, due in December 2007, before it decides whether to enhance the flood protection system in southern Louisiana enough to resist a Category 5 hurricane.

A preliminary draft of the study released in July was widely criticized because it omitted five projects that state officials say should be started right away. At the same time, it focused on a massive levee that would stretch hundreds of miles along the Louisiana coast while paying only lip service to the critical task of shoring up the state’s vanishing wetlands, which provide a natural barrier to hurricane flooding.

“We’re wasting our time and money and attention contemplating large-scale levees across the entire state,” said Tim Searchinger, an attorney with the advocacy group Environmental Defense.

The federal government has committed about $6 billion since Katrina to repair and improve the Big Easy’s existing levee system. The first goal was to bring the levee system back to “pre-Katrina” levels by the beginning of the 2006 hurricane season on June 1. That goal was largely achieved. The next step will be to make improvements that will bring the system up to what is variously called Category 3 or 100-year protection by 2010.

But planners and state and local officials say that the levees need to be brought up to Category 5 protection, a level that would cost up to $30 billion, if people are to have confidence moving back to areas destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

POVERTY: Bush offered three proposals in Jackson Square to help combat poverty around the Gulf Coast region. Two of them never went anywhere — the creation of “worker recovery accounts” that would help evacuees find work by paying for school, job training or child care while they looked for employment, and an Urban Homesteading Act that would give poor people building sites for new homes that they would either finance themselves or obtain through programs such as Habitat for Humanity.

A third proposal, the creation of a Gulf Opportunity zone, did come to pass. Signed by President Bush in December, the legislation gives $8.7 billion in tax breaks to developers of low-income housing projects, small businesses and individuals affected not just by Katrina but by hurricanes Rita and Wilma as well. The law also provides debt restructuring for financially troubled local governments in the area.

Let's see...waste, fraud, massive piles of shit still piled, lack of housing, lack of water or electricity or heat in most of the city. And $30 billion is too much to pay for New Orleans, but how much are we paying to level Middle Eastern countries? And they keep trying to downgrade Katrina, saying she wasn't really a Cat 5. She was only a Cat 4. Or no, wait, she was just a Cat 3. Why? So they can justify not building the levees up enough to withstand another one. Because we're not worth it. But I bet if New Orleans gets taken over by wealthy white people, those levees will be able to withstand higher than a Cat 5.

Labels: Katrina, lies, outrage

I'm going to have to keep the commentary on my New Orleans pieces to a minimum. Not because I don't have lots to say, but because if I start to talk, I don't know that I'll be able to stop. This was written by a couple of reporters on the ground immediately following Katrina, who did a follow-up recently. People give reporters a bad rap, but there are times when this job is incredibly hard. It's never hard to do the fun stuff -- covering festivals or big community events or doing profiles of interesting people. That's great. But for every story that leaves you smiling, there's a dozen more that leave you crying and unable to sleep. There's a lot of burnout in this profession, because you get so close to people in their darkest moments. I've sat with parents who lost their children in horrific accidents, or to suicide or to murder. I've talked to rape victims, some of them as young as seven. I've watched the families of drunk driving victims react when the person who killed their loved one gets given a five year sentence, which the judge is mandated to suspend for 18 months house arrest by our fucked up law. Because vehicular homicide is not a violent crime in Louisiana. I've been there when the officers came to tell parents their only son was killed in action in a country they can't even pronounce. This is a very intimate, heartbreaking job and there's a point where you've got to just step back and try to remember who you are. When you can't remember, it's time to get out of the business.

What some Katrina survivors taught us through their faith, resilience

They were strangers to us, just stories to be told.
They had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina — shelter and shoes, electricity and air conditioning, running water and working toilets. And there we were, asking for something more.
We had been dispatched — Allen to New Orleans, Vicki to Mississippi — to collect the stories of people as they waited in line for food and rooted through piles of cast-off clothing for something that would fit, trying not to feel ashamed.
Many of Katrina’s victims had been too poor or too stubborn to flee when the monster storm closed in. Most had no idea how they would start over. Some wanted to die, and some we feared might.
They’ve haunted us — because brief as our time together was, it was enough for a real exchange.
They gave us much more than quotes to fill a story. What did we give? Not much, it seemed. Pop-Tarts for children running barefoot in the Mississippi mud, the chance to make a cell phone call from the hell of the New Orleans convention center to tell a loved one they were still alive.
We wondered what became of them. Did they give up? Or, when tested, did they discover in themselves something they didn’t know they had?
We went back to find out.
———

Allen:
In 18 years as a journalist, I’d never felt so helpless.
“Tell someone to come get me, please,” the man begged over the crackling phone connection as the wind howled outside. “I want to live.”
And then he added: “Pray for me.”
From the darkened hallway of my French Quarter hotel, Katrina had seemed until then just another near-miss hurricane, like Ivan had the year before. Then I heard Chris Robinson’s panicked voice.
The water in the ranch-style house Robinson’s parents had built in the Lower Ninth Ward was almost to the ceiling. He grabbed some bottled water, canned sausage, an ax, hammer and crowbar, and climbed into the cramped attic.
I felt like a vulture, using up this man’s precious cell phone battery to get a few quotes. But as far as I knew, Robinson’s anguished pleas were the first confirmation that Katrina wasn’t just another glancing blow — that it might be “the big one” we’d all been fearing.
After Robinson hung up, I called 911. The dispatcher said there was nothing she could do.
He’d asked me to pray for him. But if the police and fire departments couldn’t help, I thought, what good were my prayers?
Recently, I dug out my wrinkled, water-stained notebook and called that same New Orleans cell phone number. I was a little surprised when Robinson answered.
“Alive and breathing!” he said in a voice that seemed too jolly for someone who’d been through what he’d suffered. No longer worried about using up his battery, I asked Robinson about his ordeal.
The 47-year-old father of two told how he’d watched through a louvered opening in the eaves as water pouring from a gap in the Industrial Canal levee snapped the spine of his neighbor’s house. He talked of fish swimming around the attic with him, and how he finally punched a hole in the roof and climbed out.
Sitting on his roof, Robinson talked on his cell phone until the circuits got overloaded and the battery ran out.
Then he talked to God.
On July 30, he moved his family back to New Orleans from Houston.
He has used the tools that were his salvation to gut his parents’ home, which was battered but intact, in preparation for rebuilding.
Answered prayers, he’s sure.
———

Vicki:
Margaret Pertuit could see the sunshine from her bare mattress in the flooded-out motel room in Bay St. Louis, Miss. The elderly widow could hear the National Guard offering food and water. But all she could smell was mud and mold.
All she wanted, she told me, was to die.
“My mind is OK, but my body won’t let me do anything,” she said. “I get so depressed.”
I recognized the deep purple bruises on her arms, the kind caused by blood-thinning drugs. I’d seen them before, on the arms of someone I’d loved and lost.
I asked her if she had her medicines, and she said she’d stopped taking them. She was hoping for a clot that would kill her quickly.
She had survived Katrina’s flood, thanks to younger, stronger people. But the days passed slowly after the water receded. She had grown weary of the desperate life she was barely living, trapped in a room with no running water, no working toilets, no air conditioning.
I told her she wouldn’t be stuck here much longer — hoping it was true.
“Keep taking your medicine,” I said. “You’ve got more living to do.”
I kept wondering about her. Worrying. But a week later, when I returned to the motel to check on her, she had vanished. People who’d noticed the ambulance thought maybe she’d had a heart attack, but no one knew for sure.
It turns out she ended up at a hospital in Pascagoula, where she slept in a chair until one of her daughters found her through a Red Cross registry. Her heart was fine. It was anxiety that had overcome her.
She rented a room in Gonzales, La., then used half her life’s savings to buy a three-bedroom house in an older subdivision.
She’s been back to Bay St. Louis twice but will never live there again. Her garden washed away, and her house broke apart. About all she could recover was her grandmother’s century-old crystal punch bowl.
Now 86, Pertuit tires easily. She thinks about going out to eat, then wonders if it’s worth it.
But to her, depression is weakness. She’d rather not remember that day at the motel, and she tries not to think about the things she’s lost.
She’s learning to start over.
———

Allen:
With New Orleans descending into chaos, we were hearing reports of carjackings — even boatjackings of rescue workers. In fear that we would lose our car, our food stores or the precious cans of gasoline we’d hoarded since before the storm, photographer Eric Gay and I zigzagged around refugees. We avoided some neighborhoods altogether.
But something in Evelyn Turner’s face made us stop.
She had been waiting hours for someone to take away the body of the man she loved, her companion of 15 years, who had died when his oxygen ran out. She needed a ride to the police station.
Gay and I watched as she pleaded in vain with the police. “Oh Lordy!” she cried when they told her they were too busy with the living to worry about the dead.
We offered her a ride back. When we arrived at the spot on St. Claude Avenue, we came upon a scene that stunned us.
There on the median was the body of 57-year-old truck driver Xavier Bowie — wrapped in bedsheets, lying on the improvised raft of two-by-fours and plywood that Turner had used to float him out of their flooded neighborhood.
It was the first time I’d seen a corpse outside of a funeral home.
Turner went to the raft, weeping into a dirty rag — and Gay’s photo of her captured the extent to which civilization had collapsed.
When we last saw Turner, she was sitting beside Bowie’s body in the back of a flatbed truck on her way to the morgue at Charity Hospital. But her ordeal was just beginning, I learned when I contacted her recently.
Turned away from the flooded hospital, she asked the driver to take her to city hall, where she lay Bowie’s body on a grassy median. She stayed with him another eight hours before National Guard troops loaded the Navy veteran’s body into a military dump truck.
It wasn’t until October that she learned his body had been claimed by his wife and children.
He was buried in Florida. The death notice said they were unable to track Turner down.
Turner, 55, welcomed me into the three-bedroom rental home she now shares with four relatives in Shreveport, La. In the living room sits the overstuffed chair in which Bowie died. She keeps it, not for sentimental reasons, but because she cannot afford a new one.
At the kitchen table, Turner pulls a piece of paper from her wallet and unfolds it. It’s a copy of Gay’s photo.
For months, it was the only picture she had of Bowie.
Hurricane Katrina was the first time I felt I had to make a choice between doing my job and being human. I can’t forget the people we passed by.
Evelyn Turner reminded me that you have to be human to do the job.
———

Vicki:
I could tell from looking at him that Gary Turner was the kind of man who had moved through the world without attracting much attention. Skinny and shy, with weathered skin and downcast eyes, the 52-year-old carpenter had sometimes silently wondered what good he could possibly be to anyone in a crisis.
After Hurricane Katrina, he found out.
In the storm’s aftermath, he was one of hundreds who sought refuge in an unofficial shelter at a high school in Bay St. Louis, Miss.
Like everyone else, Turner could smell the stench of human waste wafting from the school’s auditorium. He could hear the pitiful moans of elderly people lying alone and in misery, unable to walk.
Unlike almost everyone else, he decided to help.
He followed a woman’s sobs into the darkness, where an arthritic hand latched onto his with all the strength the swollen knuckles could muster. Darlene Casanova had been asking God to send her someone.
“I think you’re my guardian angel,” she told Turner.
He and several strangers formed a rescue team, helping the frail and forgotten onto potty chairs, then into fresh air. They gathered food and water. They talked and they listened.
By the time I found him, his work was done. Hours earlier, ambulances had carried Darlene and the others away — where, he never learned.
Turner was exhausted and angry, but he shared the story. The suffering was horrific, the scrap of cardboard bearing Darlene’s shakily scrawled name heartbreaking.
But what Turner and a handful of others had done gave me hope that someday, Mississippi would recover.
As I walked back to my car, I saw that debris on the road had punched a hole in a tire. I turned back to the school, where Turner was already on his feet.
He and another man removed the flat and mounted the spare. I offered money or food, something to feel I wasn’t just taking.
Turner said I’d already given him something. I’d made him feel useful again.
———

Allen:
In the steaming mass of humanity at the New Orleans convention center, she stood out. Sitting in the rain on a hard folding chair, her tiny face poking forlornly from the folds of an American flag blanket, Milvirtha Hendricks seemed to say it all without uttering a word.
I looked at the frail 85-year-old woman and saw my own mother-in-law. They were the same age.
I wondered what I would do to get her out of this hell hole. I wondered if she could have survived out here in the searing sun and the filth.
Seeing Hendricks, wrapped in that star-spangled coverlet, also made me wonder about my country. How could this be happening in one of America’s great cities? Angry young men raged around her that they were being treated like Third World citizens, but there sat Hendricks, wrapped in the flag, as if to say: This is happening right here.
Blessedly, the now 86-year-old widow remembers almost none of this.
“Everybody tells me it’s better that I couldn’t remember the water or nothing,” she said recently from the apartment she and her eldest daughter share in Houston.
Hendricks lived with her daughter on Tennessee Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward, just a few blocks from the Industrial Canal levee. As Katrina approached, she packed a suitcase and left the home she and her late husband bought in 1970 — the only one she had ever owned.
When water forced her to evacuate to her son’s home in New Orleans East, she boarded a rescue boat and lost the few belongings she’d managed to take with her.
The next days and weeks are a fog.
“They tell me I went to Arkansas and stayed there two or three days,” says the woman who bore 10 children and fed them on her laborer husband’s salary.
Hendricks is surprised to learn that director Spike Lee wanted to use the convention center photo in documentary. She had no idea it had been used in newspaper ad campaigns to raise money for storm victims.
A framed copy of the photograph sits on the dresser in her bedroom.
She often stares at it, trying to remember what many of us wish we could forget.
———

Vicki:
After a week on the Mississippi coast, the sheer number of stories around me came crashing down. Feeling overwhelmed, I called my best friend. How could I see this, day after day, and do nothing to help?
Just do what you’re doing, she told me. “You’re doing God’s work now.”
I’m not exactly the churchgoing type. So for me to believe that seemed arrogant.
Then, a week later, I got an e-mail from a woman in Georgia. She had read one of my stories and decided she would open her home to a family of strangers. She used almost the same words my friend had.
A week later, I heard the message again.
It came from the Rev. Thomas Ruffin Jr. in a church in Biloxi. During a eulogy for a family member, Ruffin asked God to bless and watch over me in my work.
But not just me or photographer Darron Cummings. It was a prayer for all the journalists who had converged on the Gulf. He thanked us for coming, for doing what we were paid to do, for sharing their stories with the world.
I’d covered many funerals. At some, I’d even wept. But never in 18 years had I been thanked.
Main Street Baptist Church, where Ruffin is assistant pastor, has changed since then. During a recent trip, I visited the new sanctuary, built by strangers from another city with more than $100,000 in donations.
Half the original congregation has left, their homes gutted or gone. But the pews are nearly full every week, mainly with volunteers who are helping rebuild. They come month after month.
“God is showing us through others this is the way it should be — everyone helping each other,” Ruffin says.
His godmother had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized over the summer. Ruffin himself listens to the public service announcements on the radio offering counseling and wonders if he should call.
Instead, he keeps busy.
As a contractor, he rebuilds. As comforter-in-chief to a congregation, he soothes frazzled nerves with a gold-toothed smile and the words of Scripture.
It’s hard to imagine Ruffin’s heart wasn’t always as big as the man around it. But he insists that by sending Katrina, God gave him more compassion.
I still don’t go to church. I don’t read a Bible. But my heart feels somehow bigger, too. And more than once, I have given thanks for being sent to Mississippi.
———

EDITOR’S NOTE — Allen G. Breed is a national writer, based in Raleigh, N.C.; Vicki Smith is the AP’s correspondent in Morgantown, W.Va.

Labels: Katrina

The closer we get to the anniversary, the more stories are coming across the wire about the "recovery" in New Orleans. And everytime I read them, I tear up a little more. Louisianians are strong people. We have to be, rarely do we have anyone to count on but ourselves. Face it, most people think of us as the inbreed cousin whose 'not quite right' and treat us as such. But, fine. We can take it. We know who we are. And yet, this? This is just too much. There's too much devastation, too much loss, too much abandonment. And yet we keep trying. Why? Because the alternative is unimaginable.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — They said she was too frail. That the mold growing on the warped walls of her flooded house would make her ill. That she shouldn’t bother since her mottled, mud-filled home would likely be bulldozed anyway.
But Willie Lee Barnes, who recently turned 94, didn’t listen.

Standing outside her flooded house in the Louisiana sun, she clasped her rosary in her frail hands and prayed. “Lord,” she said, “I’m not asking that you climb the mountain for me. I’m only asking that you give me the strength to do it myself.”

Strapping on a dust mask, she grabbed a shovel and with all her force, began pounding the deformed walls of her living room until they came off, falling to the floor like the rinds of a desiccated orange. She filled buckets with the broken drywall, which her son ferried outside. Bucket by bucket and week after passing week, she kept at it, resting occasionally on a stool, the only piece of furniture in her house to survive the flooding. Flanked by a worn statue of the Virgin Mary, hers is now one of the few houses that’s been gutted in the city’s most destroyed neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward.

Ask her to explain how a nonagenarian succeeded in doing what thousands of younger families have failed to do, Miss Barnes offers an analogy: “I’m like bad grass. Because it never dies. You gotta pull it up and even though you do, it still grows back. I don’t care how hard something looks, I’m still going to try.”

In a city that still lies largely in ruin, life is pushing through like ’bad grass,’ forcing its way through cracks in the pavement. One year after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, the city is fighting to come back.

In each instance, it’s the perseverance of one person, or family, that led to one house, one tiny patch of New Orleans becoming whole again.

Those who choose to return do so in spite of the city’s broken infrastructure, which a year later remains in tatters: Nearly 60 percent of homes and business are still not receiving electricity or heating gas. Only three out of nine New Orleans hospitals have reopened. Only 56 of 128 public schools will enroll students this fall.

The city itself still has no master plan.

Those attempting to rebuild their homes have yet to be told how high they will have to raise them. And it’s still unclear if the city’s patched levees will hold back future floods.

Still, even in the worst-hit neighborhoods, where homes were ripped from their foundations and spit into the street, and where mattresses still lie impaled in the branches of trees, the rebirth is taking place.

On one street, one house may be gutted, while scores of others are untouched. Some are adorned with wooden crosses, a crude memorial to the dead.

Like pioneers that have survived a winter in an unforgiving wilderness, those that have returned to live here proudly proclaim their existence.

“I’m back. R U?” asks a sign in the window of a flooded pickup truck at a house slowly being repaired.

Down the block, past the flooded Victorian shotguns, another sign stands outside a gutted home. “I’m Coming Home,” it says — except “Coming” has been struck out with a bold, red line.

“This house is my soul,” explains Carolyn Parker, who says she violated a “look and leave” policy to move back into her broken home last winter. It has neither electricity nor running water, so each morning, until a government-issued trailer arrived last month, she walked to a nearby fire hydrant and screwed it open with a wrench. The water gushed out and she filled two buckets. Then, she carried them back, using them to bathe.

In neighborhoods that took a lesser hit, like Broadmoor, the pockets of health are deeper. Houses were not ripped off their slabs and so will not need to be bulldozed.

On a street that one year ago lay 7 feet under water, a young woman crosses the grassy median, pushing her 2-year-old daughter in a red stroller. On the same median come dusk, couples go jogging, sweating in the setting Louisiana sun, passing the same finished and unfinished houses as life moves on.

But what is visible from the street in the Lower Ninth Ward is sometimes hidden here: Behind their freshly painted doors, many families are still living in wounded homes.

“There are two types of people: Those that came back, and those that came back, threw up their hands and gave up,” says one Broadmoor resident, a 68-year-old man named Del who lives by himself in a lofty, two-story house, which from the outside appears repaired.

He’d give only his first name because he’s embarrassed of his living arrangements. To survive the oven-like heat — electricity is still out — he moves around his house naked, carrying a battery-operated fan from room to room.

Adapting has taken numerous forms. With large swaths of the city still without heating gas, many families are able to bathe only in cold water. But with electricity it’s possible microwave bowls of water to scalding, then mix that with tap water in the bathtub.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, in multi-story houses have moved into their dry upstairs.

Julie Quinn is one such homeowner. The state senator’s colonnaded mansion is in one of the city’s posh suburbs that flooded, and although the second- and third-stories are intact, the kitchen has yet to be repaired.

“I’ve become the queen of the Crockpot and toaster oven,” Quinn jokes.

Throughout the city, institutions have learned to adapt, too.

For more than 150 years, those who attended Sunday Mass at the Church of the Annunciation heard the scripture read in Elizabethan English. Now, the traditional Anglican church’s priest reads the ancient scripture, still dotted with ’Thees’ and ’Thous,’ inside a doublewide trailer, parked in the flooded Broadmoor neighborhood. Because there is no air conditioning, the clergy shed their ornate wool cassocks.

Still, the Episcopal bishop came carrying a tall, hooked staff and wearing green-and-gold vestments to bless the trailer.
“We do the best we can. But there’s only so much pomp and circumstance you can have inside a doublewide,” said the Rev. Milton Gibson, the church’s deacon.

Even though life is pushing through, it’s come at a cost.

Dentists are reporting that an alarming number of patients are arriving for checkups with chipped or grooved teeth, a result of grinding at night.

Funeral home directors say they’re seeing a disproportionate number of suicides, a rate that health officials estimate could be as much as three times higher than pre-Katrina.

Even in the unharmed French Quarter, where jazz tumbles into the street from ornate, cast-iron balconies, residents speak of a lingering depression.

“I can’t even remember how many going-away parties I’ve been to in the last few weeks. Every night I lay in bed, thinking, ’Should I stay or should I go?’” says Maggie Beal, the manager of a store selling 19th century French antiques. All day, she says, she waits for tourists to walk in, but there are few. And the ones who are in town rarely are interested in the expensive armoires and Louis XV furnishings.

Yet even in the Quarter, the day-to-day struggle has created a society of intense, highly committed, pro-city New Orleanians. Many have proudly hoisted City of New Orleans flags outside their 19th century shotguns. Bumper stickers proclaim “Proud to swim home” and “I love New Orleans.”

Even in a restroom at The Spotted Cat, a hipster bar just outside the Quarter, hope shines through graffiti: “Stay strong New Orleans. You are beautiful,” someone wrote with a black-felt pen on the door.

Throughout the city, those who stayed, who didn’t throw up their hands, are trying the best they can to make meaning out of the destruction.

When Miss Barnes first returned to her flooded bedroom, she hoped to find a crucifix studded with diamonds that for years she’d worn around her neck. She couldn’t find it.

Yet she was able to salvage one item: A present given to her years ago, still inside its gift box. It’s a porcelain angel, holding a battery-operated lantern.

Although the waters rose to the house’s cypress beams, the box must have bobbed on the surface and not gone under, because when she unwrapped it and switched it on, the lantern lit up — a soft, fuzzy yellow.

Holding the angel in her hands and straining to make out its inscription, she reads aloud: “You are the Lord. Keep my light burning and turn the darkness into light.”

Really think about that for a moment. An elderly woman tearing her house down. An elderly man hiding himself, naked, too ashamed to admit he's been reduced so very much. Miles and miles and miles of city with no electricity or water. Women walking to a 'well' with buckets for water. Does that seem like America? In 2006? Would anyone stand for this if it had happened to Los Angeles? Or New York? Or Boston? Denver? Chicago? San Francisco? Seattle? Dallas? Houston? But New Orleans? Eh. It's just full of poor and black people. We can afford to lose them, can't we? No. We can't. We can't afford to lose a single soul.

How are we supposed to snatch the light from the dark? How are we supposed to cope when we've been cut off, again. Rising suicide rates, rising domestic violence rates, more murder, more darkness. Can moments of light combat all that?

And New Orleans, depressed? That's just...wrong. New Orleans is the most colorful, joyful place I've ever been. Depressed? It doesn't fit the city. I think, sometimes, that the city itself is crying.

Labels: Katrina, outrage

Naturally, the homo-bigots can't leave anyone alone. Not even a gathering of medical professionals. Because, you see, being gay is a disease. Not a natural orientation. No, no. It's an illness and dammit, it needs to be classified as one again. Fuckers.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — About two dozen protesters marched for an hour outside the American Psychological Association convention on Friday to protest the organization’s stand on homosexuality.

The group, which was sponsored by the conservative ministry Focus on the Family, was protesting what it sees as the APA’s views on the immutability of homosexuality.

“We disagree with the APA’s stand that people can’t change if they want to,” said Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a Los Angeles psychologist and president of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. “If someone wants to change, they say, ‘No, this is you, you must learn to accept it.’ We say people have self determination, they can make a choice.”

In 1974, the APA ceased listing homosexuality as a mental disorder. The protesters demanded that the APA change its current position.

Dr. Clinton Anderson, director of the lesbian, gay and bisexual office of the APA, said the group’s position is that homosexuality is not an illness and therefore not in need of a cure. The association is not opposed to people who decide to try to change their sexual orientation if it’s an autonomous decision, but would question the motives for such a desire, he said.

“If someone wants to change their sexual orientation, we feel that may be because of an atmosphere that is prejudice against homosexuality,” Anderson said. “We are concerned it is a coercive choice that has to do with pressure from their family, their community, or their church.”

Marchers, who stayed outside the convention for an hour carrying signs reading “Don’t tell me I can’t change,” and “Diversity includes me,” among others, were people who had changed from homosexuality, Nicolosi said.

Nicolosi, who works with people wanting to change their sexuality, said that he has found about a third of his patients experience no change, a third have what he called “significant improvement.” and a third adopt a heterosexual life style.
“They marry and are cured,” Nicolosi said. “They may have an occasional attraction, but not a major or constant one.”

The protesters also had a petition for the APA from a group of psychologists to accept both “gay affirming therapists and reorientation therapists.”

The APA does not believe the claim by Nicolosi and others that there is scientific evidence that people can change their sexuality, Anderson said.

“There has never been a well designed study to show that people can change,” Anderson said. “Our concern about the so-called conversation therapy is that it isn’t supported by science. There is simply no sufficiently scientifically sound evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.”

You know, I was going to say something reasonable and rational about this. How people can choose behaviour, but that doesn't change orientation and blahblahblah. But you know what? Fuck that. My sexuality is not an abhoration. Nor it is deviant. It's a blessing and I'm sick of fucknuts like this telling me otherwise.

I love men. I love women. And what does that say about me, other than I can love either gender? Nothing. Period. Well, it could tell you I'm less bound to rigid social roles. Or that I'm more willing to look at people for who they are instead of what they are. But you know...

So, fuck off, okay? All you people out there who think there's something wrong with me because I can love a person with a penis or with a vagina, can just Shut.The.Hell.Up. A mental illness? Please. I've been mentally ill. Being bisexual doesn't even come close. Being bisexual is a blessing, not a deviation. Sexuality is a blessing, period. It's not dirty, it's not shameful, it's not something to deny. It can be comforting or intoxicating or bonding or just plain fun. So why don't you go try it and leave the rest of us alone already?

Labels: fundies, homosexuality, Katrina, New Orleans, religion

This one hits a little too close to home. I worked through Hurricane Katrina. All day long, from before dawn until late afternoon, I manned our paper's Web site, posting constant updates. Photographs, stories, an ever increasing list of the damage. I remember the horror I felt when I started getting the photos of the extent of the damage. They started coming in around 9 a.m., I think. At first there were just a few of them, then the deluge started. Entire buildings reduced to rubble. Sky shots showing water up to the overpasses, over the tops of houses. Pictures of people wading through water up to their chest, some barely able to keep their noses above water. People sitting on the tops of houses, waving frantically for help. Holding up hastily made signs. Save Us. Help Us.

And that was the first day. The day before we realized the levees had broken and things were getting worse. The day before. And for the next two weeks, that's all I did. All I felt and saw and breathed and lived was that horror of people trapped and abandoned and dying. We sent reporters and photographers down into New Orleans in shifts, so they wouldn't get too worn out. And still...even though we had distance, it was crippling. Our town was overrun with evacuees, resources were stretched thin, they filled up coliseums and football stadiums and high schools and theatres. Anywhere we could put them, we did. And we didn't have enough room for them all, so we had to send them on further north.

If I had had to walk through New Orleans itself, if I had had to confront the destruction eye-to-eye? I think I'd have done what this poor guy did, but much, much sooner.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Like many other New Orleanians nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina, John McCusker was experiencing the overwhelming stress of rebuilding his life.

McCusker, a photographer who was part of The Times-Picayune’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning staff, was seen driving wildly through the city Tuesday, attracting the attention of police.

He eventually was arrested, but not before he was subdued with a Taser and an officer fired twice at his vehicle. During the melee, he begged police to kill him. One officer suffered minor injuries.

James Arey, commander of the police department’s SWAT negotiating team, said he can understand why McCusker seemingly snapped.

“There are all these things you’re trying to deal with in your own life — not enough insurance, family problems, your health problems,” said Arey, who already knew McCusker. “And then day in and day out, we get to see the wreckage of our city and people’s lives. It’s not easy to handle.”

Stress is keeping law enforcement officers in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish busy these days, as they answer many more calls than before the storm for domestic abuse, drunkenness and fights. Involuntary commitments to mental hospitals are up from last year, and suicides in Orleans Parish have tripled since Katrina.

What’s more, psychologists say the city’s mental health environment is likely to get worse as the anniversary of the Aug. 29 storm approaches, sparking post-traumatic trauma in those who suffered losses.

McCusker remained in the city during the storm and continued to document the unprecedented destruction — except for a leave of absence this summer — while dealing with the loss of his house and other personal problems.

On Tuesday, it seems, the pressure of post-Katrina life finally got to him.

McCusker, a Times-Picayune photographer for about 20 years, was being held for observation and had not been charged late Wednesday, police said.

“He’s a great guy, a great photographer and we’re all pulling for him,” said newspaper managing editor Peter Kovacs.

McCusker is mentioned in a feature on the city’s travails in the current issue of American Journalism Review, saying he went back to work June 20 after a monthlong leave.

During the leave, the article says, McCusker spent much of his time sleeping off exhaustion and attending therapy sessions three times a week. He told the magazine he’d essentially become nonfunctional.

“You have to understand the depth of the horror that the city was,” McCusker says in the article. “Tens of thousands of people on the freeways stranded. The children begging for food and water. The looting at the Wal-Mart. It was of biblical proportions.”

This marks an especially dangerous time for residents in areas still largely destroyed by Katrina, said Dr. Jessica Henderson Daniel, director of training and psychology at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

Daniel, in New Orleans for a convention of the American Psychological Association, said the storm’s anniversary will spark new feelings of loss and more emotional and physical stress.

“Sometimes the initial feelings of loss re-emerge, and sometimes they re-emerge with even greater strength than they had originally, Daniel said.

A key to survival, Daniel says, is to have a strategy to cope with the feelings.

“It’s important for people to anticipate a reaction and know that it’s normal and they’re not alone in their feelings,” she said.
Suicide rates in New Orleans have nearly tripled in the 11 months since the storm. Experts blame an epidemic of depression and post-traumatic stress that crosses all socio-economic lines.

Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, the deputy New Orleans coroner who handles psychiatric cases, estimates the annual suicide rate was less than nine per 100,000 residents before the storm. It’s since increased to more than 26 per 100,000, he said.

Along with the general stress, there are more people with chronic mental illness not getting medication in the area now, Arey said. There’s also far less professional help for them.

The city’s crisis intervention unit at Charity Hospital — the primary center for such emergency treatment before the storm — has been closed since Katrina. That limits the options for police after they pick up someone in need of psychological help.
“There’s almost no psychiatric services in Orleans Parish now,” Arey said.

Remember us, because this isn't even close to over. If you believe, pray for us or chant or light candles or whatever happens to be meaningful to you. It's easy to forget about us. We're not in the news anymore. There are new wars and new deaths and new tragedies. Goddess knows, I write about them enough. But we're still here and we're still hurting and we still need help.

Labels: Katrina, outrage