11.12.05|
I am in the Houston Lufthansa lounge and I thought I would send an update about my weekend in NOLA.
New Orleans and the Northshore are worse than you probably realize. The Old Mandeville lakefront lost about 25% of the houses and after driving for about an hour, we still didn't get to see the worst of the wind damaged houses. The impact was extreme in Slidell where I saw apartments totally destroyed, houses with boats on roofs and abandoned cars stuffed with mud and grass. Elaine said she is ready to write some 'nasty letters' because the focus is so much on New Orleans when Slidell was hit so bad.
But the scope of the flood in NOLA is hard to imagine. CNN doesn't do it justice. I drove for two hours and did not reach the end of the empty, destroyed neighborhoods. Most of these neighborhoods were not much to begin with, but there are plenty of empty nice houses, too. We drove by house after house which had holes cut in their roofs to allow escape. My friend Mike's Lakeview house is a stinky mud pit three months after the hurricane - no work has been done in his neighborhood. There are plenty of crews working on the streets wearing white toxic protection suits and masks. Bobcats, bulldozers and huge trucks are hauling debris to dumps are all over town.
Mark says there are real estate speculators everywhere and his brother even suspected me of being one of them! The topic of all discussion is the hurricane and recovery. Mark said he has yet to find anyone who he thinks did the right things from the President on down. He was amazed that so many of elderly were left to fend for themselves. The restaurants serve on plastic plates and cups and are full of FEMA workers, animal rescuers, and real estate speculators. Uptown pretty untouched at least from Freret Street to the river. Mark complains that the uptown residents are oblivious to the rest of the city.
My flight to Frankfurt is delayed two hours - yuck. I'll keep in touch as I know more. I will have less than an hour to get to the Nigeria flight.