Day 58 – The Day Of Bad Roads And Hurricane Katrina.
I had a hair appointment outside of the City proper over by City Park so we decided to be brave and drive our own car. Schedule was going to be tight because we had reserved a seat on the 1 p.m. Katrina tour, but it was the only day during our stay that we could fit it in. Since time was going to be at a premium we figured we should have a decent breakfast because there wouldn’t be time to eat anything until late afternoon. I don’t usually eat anything in the morning, so finding something that I’d eat is always difficult. Rob will eat breakfast (and lunch and dinner, LOL) with no problems. We found a place online located a few blocks from the hair place and hooked up the GPS. It took us through a nice neighborhood and we enjoyed the different scenery until we suddenly found ourselves on the worst roads we’ve ever driven on. Not only huge potholes but the streets would rise and fall and dip and slant. Some slabs of concrete in the road were sticking up and painted red. At least those gave us an advanced warning of what was to come. We were in the Honda CRV and it was like riding a bucking bronco. Many of the small neighborhood roads were this way and we’re talking decent neighborhoods. We were curious why and we found out later. And we’d thought the road leading to Pontchartrain Landing was bad!
We bumped our way to the restaurant which was in a restored Victorian house. It was called “Another Broken Egg” and it was excellent. We’d definitely go back again if we could safely maneuver the small roads to get here. Rob had the Huevos Rancheros which he is picky about usually, but he loved their version. I had an omelette stuffed with a cream cheese and crab mixture; it came with grits which I used to have as a child. Very, very good. I had been nervous about my hair appointment but there was no need to be worried. The place I went was called The Gallery, my stylist was Elizabeth, and they were wonderful. While I was doing the hair-thing, Rob took the trusty camera and went to City Park. He had time to walk through the Sculpture Garden and the surrounding grounds. It’s really an amazing Park!
He picked me up and we hurried back to the RV, called Uber expecting their normal really fast service, and due to it taking longer than we expected for the driver to arrive and heavy traffic in the French Quarter, we arrived at the ticket booth for the Katrina Tour just after the bus was scheduled to leave. Rob ran ahead to pick up the tickets; I ran over to the bus to see if they’d left yet. Luckily they waited for Rob to come with the tickets, but we were the cause of the tour starting about 15 minutes late. The bus was full; the tour was excellent; and we’re very glad they waited!
The tour was 3 hours long and extremely informative. If you are at all interested in disaster relief and what a City needs to do to prepare for a disaster, what it’s like to be in a major flood and storm or if, like me, you are just fascinated with weather events, or if you are interested in the engineering or planning that takes place for dams and levees and what happens when they fail, take this tour. There was a driver and a separate tour guide. The tour guide was a woman who had lived in New Orleans her entire life & she gave us the step-by-step timeline of what happened and when, for herself and her family members. There was a film from NOAA which showed a minute by minute picture of the storm surge flooding as each levee failed. We drove through 3 areas (Lakeview/City Park, Gentilly, and the upper 9th Ward), each economically different, to see and hear about how each area was affected and how the recovery process was different in each. We went to see where 3 major levees failed (17th Street, London Avenue, and Lake Pontchartrain/Industrial Canal) and saw the repairs and new pumping stations which are still being built, 12 years later. The tour stopped at the Levee Memorial Gardens which document the devastation and the aftermath including the studies done to determine what went wrong and who was at fault. We stopped at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial which contained the remains of unidentified victims of the disaster. We had a restroom stop at City Park and a quick tour of the Park.
Hurricane Katrina Memorial containing the unclaimed victims, NOLA
Hurricane Katrina Memorial, NOLA
Hurricane Katrina Memorial, NOLA
The storm was scheduled to hit Florida as a Category 1 hurricane and people in NOLA thought they had nothing to worry about mostly because they’d been told to evacuate a couple of times in the recent past and the storms never even arrived at all. So they weren’t concerned about a Category 1 hurricane over Florida. That was a Thursday. Our tour guide continued with her plans to spend the weekend with friends at a reunion party. On Friday evening, her husband phoned to say that the storm had changed paths into the Gulf of Mexico, gaining strength from the warm waters. Saturday he called to say it was close to a Category 3 storm, had not reached landfall, and she might want to think about coming home or going to their evacuation location. (The family had previously chosen a place north of the City on high ground where they’d all planned to meet up should evacuation be necessary for any reason.) She said they were not about to end their weekend early for a storm that would probably never come. Saturday night the storm was a Category 3 hurricane, and he thought she should leave and go directly to the evacuation place, not bothering to come home first – he was a first responder for NOLA and he thought this was the real thing. At this time a forced evacuation had not been implemented; officials didn’t want to panic the public. Sunday morning early he called and said LEAVE NOW, evacuation is mandatory. They turned on the TV and found they were evacuating the City, it was then a category 4 and headed directly towards New Orleans. She called her son and daughter-in-law and encouraged them to join the family at the location they were evacuating to; they refused saying they wanted to wait it out and nothing would happen to them or their home which was recently purchased and an old fixer-upper which hadn’t been fixed up yet. Her husband had said he’d physically check on the grandparents and other relatives, they were not answering their phones, and then head up to the evacuation location. The TV was completely crazy with the news and everyone was in a panic – rightfully so. All entrances to the City had been closed and the major interstate highway had been turned into an exit-only route. Later that day as conditions worsened, the son and daughter-in-law decided to leave, and the drive that normally would have taken less than 2 hours took them more than 8 hours as throngs of people tried simultaneously to get out of the City. Traffic was at a standstill and as the weather worsened, vehicles overheated and people just left them on the highway and proceeded on foot which caused even more of a traffic jam. The grandparents were not located and did not evacuate with the rest of the family, but did find safety and rode out the storm elsewhere. The son’s home was damaged and pictures of the destruction were passed around to the passengers on the tour. This was the story of someone who made it out okay.
There were so many others who did not. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans early Monday morning, it was a Category 3 storm dropping from Category 4 as it raced across southern Louisiana towards the City. There were those who evacuated to the Superdome, only to find there was no room for them (the Superdome was set up for 14,000 people; more than double that number had arrived by Saturday evening). The Superdome itself received severe roof damage. There were the people who could not leave their homes, and the people who chose not to leave their homes. In many cases people had no transportation or they refused to leave their pets behind – designated shelters did not accept animals. (Since the storm, the federal government has mandated that all States have plans in place to provide care for the animals, or shelter for the animals, so people will not refuse to leave for that reason.)
Here are some statistics:
- 1,577 people died in all of Lousiana with over 1,100 in New Orleans alone (over 80 remain unidentified).
- A total of 1,833 died in 6 States.
- In NOLA, 40% drowned, 25% died due to injury and trauma, and 11% due to heart conditions.
- One half of the dead in NOLA were over 74 years old.
- 80% of New Orleans was flooded.
- More than 1 million people were displaced.
- More than 273,000 were sheltered.
- 114,000 were housed in FEMA trailers for the long term.
- 70% of NOLA-occupied housing was damaged by the storm (that’s 134,000 housing units).
- By July 2006, less than one year after the storm, New Orlean’s population was half of what it was before; in 2014 the population was still down by 20%.
It had been expected that when a large Hurricane hit NOLA, the major problem would be the high winds. No one was prepared for the storm surge which was caused by the Gulf waters racing backwards thru the canals which had been built to drain water OUT of the City. The biggest problem was caused by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR.GO) bypassing all of the protective wetlands and the winding Mississippi River, providing direct access for the storm surge from the Gulf into Lake Pontchartrain, causing 55 levees to fail, one-by-one, within a period of several hours. The surge was 12 feet in New Orleans (12 feet in Grand Isle and 8 feet in Port Fourchon, LA). New Orleans was first built around the French Quarter area which is on higher ground and had very little flooding. As the population and industry increased, the area of the City grew quickly, expanding into lower-lying areas. Most of NOLA is below sea level. All the surge had to do was break through a levee and then just fill the low-lying land of the City. To keep the city from flooding, water is regularly pumped out causing the land to subside at a rate of 3 feet every 100 years, worsening any potential flooding effects. As the tour guide said, “New Orleans is constantly sinking”. BACK TO THE ROUGH ROADS – the changing topography and sinking land is causing some roads to be unstable.
The storm surge broke thru 55 levees and water, mud, and debris poured into New Orleans, washing away most things in its path and causing the massive flooding. The water topped 15 feet and remained until it was finally pumped out because there was nowhere for it to go. On the tour we saw a line painted at a Starbuck’s at the high water line. We were shown how high water reached to where the sign was at a Walgreen’s, unbelievably high. A system was used to mark homes after they’d been searched, the upper number was the time & date searched and below that to the left was the I.D. of the searchers. To the right were the hazards present, and at the bottom the number of live and dead victims was annotated. We saw deserted homes in the 9th Ward which still had these numbers on the homes, and we saw that some homes were not searched until one month after the storm hit due to the inability of people to reach the homes in the area with the remaining flood waters. It should also be mentioned that when we were in Mississippi, people told us that their vicinity was hit harder than New Orleans but that NOLA got all the attention. As it turns out, coastal Mississippi got 30 feet of storm surge! But the water did not remain in the area the way it did in New Orleans. The storm hit the MS Gulf coast, destroying most of what was in its path, and then the water went back to the sea. The City of New Orleans had to deal with the flood damage, and is still dealing with it.
The tour took us through 3 different areas of the City which were affected by the storm. It was quite obvious that the more money you had, the better you recovered. If you could afford good insurance (and if the insurance paid out what you were owed), you were able to rebuild or at least fix the damage. The 9th Ward still needs so much work – a lot has been done but they, obviously, are the last to receive help. The tour guide pointed out that previous to Hurricane Katrina, there was not one plot of land available to buy, the City was fully occupied. If you wanted to build a new home, for example, you had to buy land which already had a house on it, tear it down, and start building again. Now post-Katrina, there are empty lots or pieces of land with abandoned houses throughout, especially in the 9th Ward. This appears to be an area which time forgot, and it was very sad to drive through and see the devastation, 12 years later. (We were allowed to tour the Upper 9th Ward; the Lower 9th Ward is in even worse shape and permission for the tour was not granted – imagine having lost everything and then watching as busloads of people drive down your streets taking pictures – not pretty.)
After much debate and study, we were told that it was determined that the levee failings were caused by the Corps of Engineers. For various reasons inadequate construction methods were used as a cost saving measure. This, coupled with record storm surge and many years of the destruction of the protective wetlands by canal construction for oil & gas exploration and shipping, caused the levees to fail way below their designed capacity. They were designed for a certain load and they just did not hold; it was inadequate and their designs were not right.
More statistics:
- The Corp of Engineers saved $100 million by using cheaper pilings.
- Thus far $13 billion has been spent on national flood insurance claims in Louisiana and $41 billion in private insurance claims.
- Huricane Katrina was the costliest disaster in the history of the global insurance industry.
- FEMA paid out $15 billion for roads, schools, and buildings and $6.7 billion in recovery aid to more than 1 million people.
- $120 billion has been paid out in federal aid.
The impact of what we saw will be with us for a very long time.
We got back to the waterfront and weren’t hungry so called Uber and got a ride back to the RV. Later we went to the Park restaurant and Carolyn brought us our much-awaited BBQ Shrimp, New Orleans-style. It was exactly what we needed. The chef, Darren, came out to meet us and I talked to him about the sauce and got the ingredients – not the ingredient measurements but I think I can re-create it. The high today was 85 degrees and it was very humid. We’re leaving tomorrow for less-populated locations. New Orleans was great but there’s still so much to do, and so much to eat and drink, LOL. We crammed a lot into our days; we’d stay longer next time.
Pontchartrain Landing, 6001 France Rd., Orleans Parish, New Orleans, LA 70126. (504) 286-8157. “http://www.pontchartrainlanding.com” We give the customer service here at 5-star-plus rating. Our site, SS-9, was great; the cheaper sites wouldn’t have been as nice; there were some better than ours, too. The shuttle service offered daily to and from the French Quarter was a big plus. The on-site restaurant was very convenient, too. Full hook-ups, entertainment, all the amenities. We would stay here again as the grounds are secure but still close enough to the tourist items to be reasonable.
I hope once you make your “own recipe” that you will share :-))))