Ninth of 9 emails describing the Christmann family's Katrina story

christmannemail9, nola.txt

A lot has happened since I last dropped a note. This has the potential to be a pretty long and poorly organized note (aren't they all), as I've got a bunch of thoughts juggling around in my mind. So read at your own peril. We've now moved twice since I last sent a note. At last report, I was fearing the move to a new house in Baton Rouge. That was far less problematic than I thought - moving about a mile is actually pretty easy, since you can just keep driving back and forth. This weekend, we moved back to New Orleans - for this, we had to rent a truck. So no back and forth trips - load it all and go. After we unloaded all that we had accumulated in Baton Rouge, we returned to our New Orleans house and retrieved almost all of the remaining furniture and moved it to the apartment. So for the first time in 3 months, I have drawers in which to store my socks and (can you see it coming?) my drawers..... Yes, I know, bad jokes abound. We're pretty well settled into our cozy little apartment. We're just off of St. Charles Avenue, the main Mardi Gras parade route. There has been a lot of rumbling in the last 2 weeks about just how big Mardi Gras will be this year - initial press conferences from mayor and/or police chief were suggesting 6 days of parades - down from 11 in a normal year. They are very rightfully concerned about the load on an already stressed and stretched police force. But apparently 30 of the 34 "krewes" have expressed their intent to parade, and there's no way they can get that many parades into such a short time. Hard to say what will happen, but we've already assured the kids: whatever parades there are, they are free to stay as long as they want to watch them. No bed time, I'll let 'em skip their homework, whatever they want for those 6 (or 11) days. This is probably their one chance as kids to live on the parade routes, and its not like they'll really be able to sleep when we're only about 100 feet from the bands and crowds (if there are any crowds). Today was a day of firsts for all of us: Carrie and Robert were back at their schools, Noel went to her Entergy office, now located in the suburbs since their downtown office is still uninhabitable, and I went to my office downtown. Both Noel and I noticed that it was unexpectedly hard to work back in a regular work environment. After 3 months of working while surrounded by in-laws, kids, spouses and a myriad of distractions, it was very hard to work when there was nothing to do *but* work. The kids were both suffering from some serious mixed emotions - I think they were thrilled to be back in a familiar environment, but I think they also had grown to like their school in Baton Rouge. Robert, in particular, was crying as we left Baton Rouge. I'd been back to my neighborhood several times, but this was my first time downtown, so I went out for a walk for a while. I work across the street from the superdome; normally, I park in the Superdome garage. I can't now, though - the garages are still underwater. I read something about that - and if I recall, the superdome commission could drain the garages but is choosing not to right now. I think they have enough other problems so that parking is not high on the list. But not to worry - there are so few people downtown that parking is not a problem. Parking enforcement is lax, if not non-existant (thought the local news last night said that today was the day parking tickets would start being issued). Cars were parked up and down the neutral ground (fancy souther term meaning "median" or "boulevard") of some of the big streets downtown. I guess you just park wherever you feel like - as long as there's another car there, it looks like its fair game. The Superdome plaza itself - where you saw the massive crowds lingering outside the dome while they waited and waited and waited - I don't know what I expected when I went to see it, but I was surprised: Everything was dirty. Not covered in trash - unlike most areas of town, the trash was all cleaned up. Very little paper and lose debris lying around. But the ground was filthy - just mud and dirt ground into the concrete and stones. Nothing a good power washing wouldn't clean up, but it was everywhere. But no people. It was a little eerie looking at all of the remnants of this disaster and remembering the pictures of all the people crammed up there surrounded by water - and looking around and seeing no one. On a normal day, there are people walking around the dome. It connects to a mall with a food court, its across the street from City Hall and some courtrooms. There's enough stuff around that there are always people walking - but not today. Just some construction workers on their lunch break looking at me looking at them - like they couldn't quite figure out why I was there. I walked down to Canal Street - the edge of the French Quarter. Here the streets had flooded, but some of the buildings hadn't. Again, there was trash everywhere. I digress.... I can't say this enough - everywhere we go in this town is trash. Loose trash like garbage bags ripped open and spilled, piles of trash in front of houses that have been gutted, trees that have fallen down, even houses that have collapsed. Trash, trash, trash. Some areas of town have their normal weekly garbage collection operating, but most don't. FEMA is collecting trash from neighborhoods and depositing it in a "staging" area in Lakeview - last time I drove by it looked to be a half mile long 40 foot high pile of trash. Then there was a matching half-mile by 40 foot pile of trees and branches. In between was a field of a hundred flooded cars. It was obvious that the cars had been put onto the field since it was the highest ground in the area - people must get used to putting their cars there to avoid street flooding in heavy rains. But that didn't help in the flood - all of the cars had been entirely underwater, and now they sat waiting to get towed to wherever. But back to Canal Street - the trash piles were smaller (I think they had less flood waters, so fewer buildings needed to be gutted), and the smell was no where near as bad as I feared. It almost smelled like a normal town - and for Canal Street on a hot day, that's saying something (good). But no people. I've talked to some friends who are working downtown and one common gripe right now is the lack of food - very few restaurants are open. There aren't enough workers to staff them, and I'm not sure there are enough people working downtown to warrant opening them. Normally, Canal Street at noon is bustling and crowded. But not today. Most of our friends are planning on coming back in the next two months, but right now it looks strangely like a ghost town. I still can't put forth a reasonable guess for what New Orleans is going to be like in 6 months. We took the kids to our house when we got here Saturday. We've continued working on demolition - it seems that this is a never ending project. After we ripped up some flooring, we found more flooring under it. After ripping up that floor, we found - yep, another floor. After that, we found concrete. After that we found another floor. Then finally we hit the subfloor - which is rotten and probably needs to be replaced. Same story with some walls - rip out the wall and find another wall hiding behind it. We've really learned a lot about our house and the various additions that have been done over the last 50 years. We've got some plans from an architect now, and we're moving forward with the first steps of rebuilding. But anyway - on Saturday, the kids got to see the house for the first time. We had been cautious in how much we had told them, as we were trying to avoid unnerving them. But during 3 months, they had picked up enough tidbits so they had some idea what to expect. Fortunately, about an hour before we got there, the FEMA guys had finished picking up the latest pile of trash in front of our house (they've been buy 3 times, and each time we produce more trash for the next go round). But at least when the kids got to the house, the outside was reasonably tidy. At least all of the bags of their toys were safely disposed of. We'd tried to prepare them by making a game of it - telling them how much fun it would be to get to walk through the walls. Carrie wanted to play hide and seek, but I assured her there would be no place to hide. When they walked in - they were both very quiet. Robert asked to see his room - he needed to know that it was ok. Carrie was quiet for a bit, and when we looked at her she was just staring at the wall where the closet of their toys used to be. I think she knew that the toys were gone, but I don't think she really got it until she saw that the toys, the closet, the *wall* were all gone. But she went upstairs to her room and collected a few of her treasures (things like bandaids and an empty bottle of toothpaste that she's saved since she was 3), and seemed happy. And somehow in the flood, a pumpkin vine has taken root in our backyard. Over the last couple of years, we had tried in vain to grow pumpkins. Somehow (and don't ask me how, cause it makes no sense), the flood pulled some seeds out from over there and deposited them over here and instead of drowning them, the combination of sludge and salt water served to fertilize the seeds. When they first appeared, I thought it was a weed but it was green and everything else was grey, so I let it grow. Later, I meant to pull it but forgot. Then lo and behold, flowers appeared and I realized what we had. So we took the kids to see it, and they were thrilled by it. Still no pumpkins on the vine, but we've got 2 10 foot vines covered in flowers. Our neighborhood is really moving quickly in rebuilding. About a third of the houses had no flooding damage, and another third had fairly minor damage. Many of those families are already back in their houses. Of the badly damaged houses (us included), many are moving quickly to fix up. But I find the most depressing sight is the total lack of greenery. The flood waters killed just about everything - grasses, shrubberies (anyone know where I can find a shrubbery salesman?). Big trees survived, except Magnolias. I'd be interested if anyone knows a horticulturist - or anyone who may offer an explanation for the demise of the Magnolias. Everywhere in the city, huge magnolia trees are turning brown and dying. I don't think its just the leaves, as the branches seem to be dead too. But oaks and others have done well. But - in the flooded neighborhoods there's nothing green. I think this weekend I may go and buy flowers to put in the yard. They'll probably die soon, but at least for a little while they'll offer some color besides brown and grey. And I'll end with two more water stories - my parents rode out Wilma in Naples. I tried to gently encourage my parents to evacuate (thanks T!), but they were a wee bit stubborn. After all, they know so much more about hurricanes from their vast experience in Wisconsin. My Mom said that about 5 pm the night before it arrived, she started to think they made a mistake. At 4 am while it was arriving, she *new* they had made a mistake. I asked her what my Dad said at 4 while the winds were howling and her response (expressed in anger at the shear audacity of him): "He had taken out his hearing aids and he slept through the whole thing!". But they and their friends and their houses all survived, though I think they were all a bit shaken by the whole experience. Not a good year for Christmann's and hurricanes. And finally - we moved into our apartment on Saturday. Sunday, we went to a picnic at my son's school. When we came home after a brief downpour, we discovered that our apartment roof leaked. Water all over the floor, on our suitcases (fortunately they had been unpacked), and the puddle stopped about an inch away from one of the rugs that we had salvaged from our house and had just retrieved from the cleaners. Oh well, each day is a new day - when we got to our house on Sunday, we had some plans from our architect. Tomorrow we're meeting with one contractor with those plans - hopefully our first step towards actually rebuilding!

Citation Information:

Paul Christmann, "Ninth of 9 emails describing the Christmann family's Katrina story." Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, Object #40 (November 16 2005, 10:38 am)<http://www.hurricanearchive.org/object/40>