I’m writing from the McKendrick-Breaux House, the B&B the 2010 NOLA trip is staying at in the beautiful Garden District. It’s been an amazing trip (i’ll be sure you all get to see some of the 100′s of photos we’ve taken along the way) but I wanted to highlight one event we had yesterday, that changed my context for this trip, and the events of Katrina and the Levees Breaking.
Yesterday we met with author and playwright John Biguenet. I know him from working on one of his plays two years ago, Rising Water. He, and his family, live in New Orleans, and although they left just before the storm, he came back about four weeks later when the NY Times invited him to be their first ever guest columnist and asked him to document the state of the city. He did so in a series of blogs and videos you can find HERE
Among the many great and informative things he had to say, he really put in context what actually happened. He diagrams where the storm actually hit, and how New Orleans was completely passed over and left with little damage until hours later when the levees broke. He explained how the levee’s should have been 60′ deep but instead they were anywhere between 4′ and 20′ deep, and that while the Army Core of Engineers admitted fault (hidden in a 6,000 page document several years later) they still have not done anything tangible to rectify the situation.
One of the most eye-opening things he had to say was how, as a writer, it was his job to help the american people find a context to understand what had happened. Paraphrasing what he said: America has no ability to really understand the almost-full destruction of a city, as it’s something we’ve never had to deal with. The area affected by the levees breaking is (5?) times the size of Manhattan, making this man-made disaster much larger than anything we’ve ever seen on our land before. Europeans understood because they’ve seen their cities destroyed many times in history. We’ve never rebuilt an entire major metropolitan city before, both culturally, and physically, so how can we understand what that takes?
It was a really inspiring two-hour discussion we had with him, and definitely a moment that changed the trip for me, and my context for what really happened.
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Because of the amount of flooding and the time that it took for the water to begin to recede, the spiders took to the trees. To add to the mystery, the people in the area report that there appeared to be fewer mosquitoes than they expected, especially given the amount of standing water that there had been. Their thinking was that the webs caught the mosquitoes, thereby reducing the risk of malaria. Amazing.
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