Surviving New Orleans
An unidentified man sits in the flood water underneath the Interstate-10 in New Orleans, La., earlier this week.
News: Residents still stranded in the city -- many of them poor, many of them minorities -- find ways to scrape by.
September 7, 2005
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NEW ORLEANS — Schools of minnows scatter as Dave Williams, a member of a search and rescue crew that came from San Diego last week, launches a boat into the flooded parking lot of a church on the city's easternmost side.
"At this point in the operation we're checking each house, marking each house for contact, hazards, whatever we find, and when we find someone willing to stay we're letting them know that this is our last time through the area as far as search and rescue and that they need to be prepared for the long haul," Williams said.
Despite warnings like those, thousands of residents have decided to remain for a variety of reasons.
"We didn't have the money to escape," says Becky Shertz, who decided to remain because the hurricane hit near the end of the month and most of her boyfriend's—a disabled veteran—disability check had already been spent.
Shertz lives in the Bayou Trailer Park on Chef Manteure Highway. The water that flooded Shertz's trailer has receded, but she said she spent a frightening evening after a nearby levee broke and her trailer filled with water. A shed was floating against her door, preventing her from getting out until neighbor saved her by breaking one of her windows. "I was on the phone calling 9-1-1, screaming that I was going to die, and they told me there was nothing they could do."
Shertz also said she doesn't want to leave behind her dogs (evacuees are not allowed to take pets with them) and says she and her boyfriend have been relying on a local man who has regularly been driving by with sandwiches and water. She says she might be forced to leave, however, because her boyfriend, a diabetic, is on his last vial of insulin.
U.S. military helicopters continue to ferry a trickle of evacuees from the Convention Center in downtown New Orleans to the airport and then elsewhere. In front of the Convention Center, ankle-deep trash attests to the chaos and crowding last week that kept some residents from going to the center, as well as to the Superdome, another evacuation site that has since been cleared.
As he pushed a shopping cart full of supplies through nearly deserted French Quarter, Gregory Tavia, whose house was flooded, said he spent three days at the Convention Center before deciding to return to his girlfriend's house, which is on drier ground.
"For a couple of days it was deplorable conditions. It smelled like feces and urine."
As he walked, another man rode by on a bike an introduced himself as Wilfred.
"Do you know anyone who wants some work? I'm looking for people to help clean out a cooler."
Wilfred considers asking another man as he rides by on a bike, clearly mentally disturbed—apparently, another reason people decided to remain in the city.
"Ain't gonna have enough people around to clean up," he said.
As Army and National Guard units continue to arrive in New Orleans, order seems to have been restored. People in places such as the city's west bank—which still has water and gas service—are wondering why people are being sent out of the state rather than across the river.
Malik Rahim is a community organizer and member of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans who lives in the Algiers neighborhood. He says that when he offered to cook for those people still left in the city, he was told by local authorities that it would "start riots."
At times it is hard to ignore the comparisons between Baghdad (where I was less than a month ago and have spent most of the last two years) and New Orleans: The anarchy, the looting, some of it purely for survival, some of it purely opportunistic. We watched a flatbed truck drive by, a man on the back with an M-16 looking up on the roofs for snipers, as is common in Iraq. Trailing the flatbed was a van marked "Blackwater USA"—the private security firm that gained notoriety in Fallujah in the spring of 2004. Private security contractors were stationed outside the Royal St. Charles Hotel; when asked if things were getting pretty wild around the area, one of them replied, "Nope. It's pretty Green Zone here."
The first journalists we met in the city, as my colleague and I were stopped and talking to a police officer, asked a disconcerting question: "What's going on here? I smell dead bodies."
The second question was no more reassuring: "Are you guys carrying guns?"
A body lies near Rahim's house, and the police or the military won't do anything about it. It's been there for more than a week, now bloated and covered by maggots, in the parking lot of the community center, the doors of which are chained.
Chaos is everywhere. The destruction of houses, roofs and walls displaced by inhuman forces. Horses grazing on a median strip. The constant flyovers of helicopters, Humvees rolling down the streets. An armed populace. On the way into New Orleans, the mayor of Harahan, a mostly white suburb, comes on the radio. He has a dare for the looters: "don't come in here. All of us are armed."
"It's the only time I've ever seen money worthless," one of Rahim's neighbors says, sitting at Rahim's kitchen table. "People have been punching holes in gas tanks of abandoned cars," Rahim adds.
Even the police officers participated in the looting. "One of the policemen told me 'this is survival time,'" Tavia said.
Though virtually all of the city's businesses remain closed, a couple of bars have opened on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. In the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, between the French Quarter and the Ninth Ward, where the flooding begins, people sat outside Kajun's Pub, drinking beers and barbequing. Neighborhoods across the street were still flooded and virtually every business on the street had been looted except for the pub. Joann Guidos, the owner, said the bar had been open since the hurricane hit and sustained only minor damage during the storm.
"One of the levees gave way and we got about a foot of water in the bar. About two days after that the water finally subsided and went down. Then the looting started, and that was really scary. You had gangs with vans, trucks, guns going into every damn business and prying into every business. After they left then the regular people went in and got food and necessities. The only reason we weren't broken into is because we were here. We're probably one of the only businesses open in the city, and everybody loves it because you come in and you're getting away from all the disaster in the city. People are bringing food to us that hasn't spoiled yet and we're cooking. We're just trying to do is survive, that's it."
The scene at the bar is also telling—customers said that the police initially told everyone to leave before realizing the bar had been opened by the owner. Most of the patrons are white.
Rahim sees the mandatory evacuation—called for by Mayor Ray Negin—as nothing more than a way to clear the city of an unwanted population in the first place. But Rahim, and others, say they won't leave. He's been coordinating with people outside New Orleans to have bleach and other supplies sent in to begin decontamination efforts in the neighborhood, and tomorrow, he says, they're going to go bury the body.
"If we leave, who will make sure there's something here for people to come back to?" he asks.
David Enders is a regular contributor to motherjones.com. His first book, Baghdad Bulletin, is available from University of Michigan Press.
