Gustav

(Ninth Ward New Orleans, February 2008)

In the winter of 2008 I was lucky to have the opportunity to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity in Slidell Louisiana. Slidell was one of the inland communities about 30 minutes north of the City of New Orleans. The town lost quite a lot of structures to Katrina. As the prospect of a hurricane Gustav impacting the gulf of New Mexico looms, I am forced to recall the vast regions of New Orleans and the surrounding areas which remained utterly destroyed when we visited. The devastation of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, which still remains unprotected, and largely uninhabited, was a particularly significant experience. The photo above is one I took while I was there. The central point of all this is the notion that the City and southern Louisiana have not recovered from Katrina ,and they are far from ready to weather, for lack of a better word, another. The population sat at roughly 60 percent of it's pre-Katrina level in a 2007 estimate and whilst I was there, this was quite evident. Certainly the Federal Government has spend quite a lot of money strengthening the stormwater infrastructure of the city since 2005. Popular Mechanics has channel on their site dedicated to Hurricane Katrina related lessons, rebuilding and redesign efforts. So the the City may be more resilient to hurricanes but one cannot make a place 'hurricane proof', it's simply not possible. This misses the point though, even if we've prepared the infrastructure to survive a category 5 hurricane, the heath of a city or a populace for that matter cannot be measured by it's infrastructure alone. The 'people' it's economy, it's culture, in all the connotations that that term has, have yet to heal.

There is some encouraging news though, the residents of the City are, at least in part, already mobilizing to leave or leaving the city currently. The Mayor has issued a voluntary evacuation order for the city and a mandatory one may come sometime this Sunday. The New York Times has a write up of the current efforts to date. So hopefully, if Gustav does make landfall around New Orleans, the people will not be there to greet him.