Gutting New Orleans: Katrina, 10 Months Later

Katrina, 10 Months Later\r\nGutting New Orleans \r\n\r\nBy BILL QUIGLEY\r\n\r\nJune 28, 2006\r\n\r\nSaturday I joined some volunteers and helped gut the home of one of my best friends. Two months after she finished paying off her mortgage, her one-story brick home was engulfed in 7 feet of water. Because she was under-insured and remains worried about a repeat of the floods, my friend, a grandmother, has not yet decided if she is going to rebuild.\r\n\r\nThough it is Saturday morning, on my friend\'s block no children play and no one is cutting the grass. Most of her neighbors\' homes are still abandoned. Three older women neighbors have died since Katrina.\r\n\r\nWe are still finding dead bodies. Ten days ago, workers cleaning a house in New Orleans found a body of a man who died in the flood. He is the twenty-third person found dead from the storm since March.\r\n\r\nOver two hundred thousand people have not yet made it back to New Orleans. Vacant houses stretch mile after mile, neighborhood after neighborhood. Thousands of buildings remain marked with brown ribbons where floodwaters settled. Of the thousands of homes and businesses in eastern New Orleans, thirteen percent have been re-connected to electricity.\r\n

Citation

“Gutting New Orleans: Katrina, 10 Months Later,” Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, accessed March 28, 2024, https://hurricanearchive.org/items/show/33675.