From the outside, 2019 Igania Street looked like a slightly dirty brick house with an overgrown lawn in a rough section of town.
Inside, a walk through the house was an uncomfortably intimate survey of lives frozen in the midst of a frenzied evacuation. At the doorstep lay a pile of ruined family photos that didn’t make it out before the flood. In the master bedroom, the caved-in ceiling covered a stash of porn DVDs that had spilled onto the floor next to a series of wedding portraits. In the next room, a young girl’s toys and clothes lay scattered across a room whose sole inhabitants are now rats and roaches.
The flood froze the lives of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward residents under a layer of mud that covered everything the same way that lava stopped time in the Roman city of Pompeii so many years ago. In one house, the water had been running ever since municipal services were restored to the neighborhood, turning the ground floor into a moldy marsh. In many cases, triage rescue team members had been the only people to look in the houses since the flood, marking their presence with a spray-painted “x” and noting whether any corpses had been found.
The Lower Ninth was at the center of the media’s attention during the storm. It was the place where a section of the levee system failed completely. The result was a rush of water that engulfed block upon block of the neighborhood and left residents stranded on their roofs or drowned in their attics.
Last week, 18 months after the flood, I arrived expecting to see a relief effort of American-sized proportions, with shiny federal equipment and soldiers working furiously to rebuild the ravaged neighborhood. Instead, before me was a desolate block where the small number of residents who have returned are met daily with packs of rats grown fat off spoiled food, and a landscape that eerily resembles the post-war photographs of bombed-out German cities. National Guard vehicles drive by occasionally, but only to patrol for looters, not to help in the relief effort.
Many of the condemned buildings have been bulldozed, but other houses, their backs broken by the surge of waters, mock the very concept of home and sag on the verge of collapse. On a major thoroughfare, a white van lies tipped completely on its side, and many of the sign-less streets are still blocked by debris or impassable potholes.
Inside many houses, the situation is even worse. The group I was with, Common Ground Relief, had a mission to “gut” all the houses that could potentially be salvaged; that is, remove all the disgusting mud-covered furniture, toxic refrigerators, and debris from the house, and then tear out the dry wall and ceilings to allow the frame of the house to dry and be treated for mold.
The most ubiquitous sight in the neighborhood are tour buses filled with tourists, who reportedly pay $42 when they get on in the French Quarter to ride through the ravaged cityscape and gaze at its unlucky residents through tinted glass.
This is not a story about what happened 18 months ago. It is a story about what is not happening now.
