Her first touch on land weakened her, but just one hour after swirling off Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico, she was a hurricane once again. On August 28, Katrina became a Category 5 hurricane, ripping winds as fast as 175 miles per hour.
She struck the city of New Orleans in the wee hours of August 29 with winds of 125 miles per hour. Storm surges flowed over levees, and burst the walls protecting the city, most of which is below sea level. About 80 per cent of the city flooded.
Katrina then moved across Louisiana, over Breton Sound, and began cruising across Mississippi. She slowed to a tropical storm around Jackson, and limped as a tropical storm and then a tropical depression, all the way to the Great Lakes before dying somewhere over Lake Superior on August 31, but not without kick-starting tornadoes on her journey north, and leaving behind storms that caused heavy rainfall and flooding in Canada.
The name Katrina was retired on April 6, 2006 at the request of the United States government, and replaced by Katia on list three of the Atlantic hurricane naming lists. There will never be another Katrina.
She left also in her wake nearly 2,000 dead, that same number still missing one year later, and millions more forever changed.
And after she left, nothing would ever be the same.
They knew she was coming long before she arrived. For almost a week, they watched her approach; experts around the world debated where she would go and what she would do when she got there. The projections for a small but very famous city in Louisiana were sufficiently dreary that on August 28, the mayor of New Orleans issued the first mandatory evacuation in the city’s history. Katrina, he said, was the storm they had all feared for so long.
Thousands upon thousands of people packed into their cars to make the crawling journey down the I-10 to places somewhere else, to Houston and Dallas, to Atlanta and and Nashville.
Thousands more stayed. Some stayed because they had no where else to go, some because they had no way to get there. Some stayed because they knew the big one would never really hit their city. Others didn’t care if it did—they were staying home.
“News Orleans,” the T-shirts on Bourbon St. now read. “Established 1752. Re-established August 2005.”
“Katrina gave me a blow-job I’ll never forget.”
“FEMA evacuation plan: Run, motherfucker, run.”
It was more than a year ago that hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, engulfing 80 per cent of the city in floodwater, killing 1,300 people. More than a year, but she is not gone. She is everywhere.
In the newspapers and radio broadcasts, Katrina. In the T-shirts and souvenirs in the tacky shops that line the streets of the French Quarter, Katrina. In the halls under vaulted ceilings where they sign the amendments and municipal bylaws, Katrina. In the scratched poetry of bathroom doors (“Fuck you Katrina, you fucking bitch”), the photos and furniture still strewn across the streets, in the eyes and words of the thousands whose lives will never be the same, there is Katrina.
New Orleans has always been a city of ghosts. For decades, locals charmed the millions of tourists that visited every year with tales of whispery women on lamp-lit streets and shrieking from cellars where more than one hundred slaves were buried alive in 1806.
It is still a city of ghosts. But it is different now. There is a new ghost. Katrina.
Ghost tours that take visitors around the French Quarter to see the sites of macabre massacres and brutal injustices that left the dead unable to rest do not go to the Lower Ninth Ward or St. Bernard Parish. It is not because there are no ghosts there, no tales of good and evil, of injustice and heroism. It is because they are still too raw.“You know, I hope someday that I’ll take something from the storm, that I’ll learn something,” says a woman seated on a bar stool sipping a double Maker’s Mark on the rocks. She lost her home in the flood, spent six months in New York City before driving back to the South. There is a line in Mississippi, she says, where you can see exactly where the edges of the hurricane were. When she crossed it in her car, she began to cry. She pulled over on the side of the highway and wept for 20 minutes. She hadn’t even seen her home.
“Someday, I hope that I will be wiser because I lived through this,” she says, lighting a cigarette. She has a ring on every finger. “But not now. Now, it’s still too raw. It hurts too much, all of it. I’m still so angry.”
While the bodies that Katrina left in her wake were carted away by October 2005, much remains the same as it was the first days the water receded.
There are long, straight streets with no sidewalks, high grass growing on either side. Lining the streets are houses where people used to live. Now, they are boarded up with plywood, marked with spray paint on the front indicating the date the house was searched and whether any dead were found.
Many houses are not yet gutted—the process of removing everything that was in the house—the furniture, the clothes, the photos and the books, as well as the drywall, the insulating, the flooring, everything but the frame. Everything is destroyed and everything must go; it was under as much as 12 feet of water for as long as three weeks. Some of the houses are so rancid that the volunteers don biohazardous suits to enter, for fear of what moulds, what viruses, what bacteria, still lurk there.
Cars are still piled up underneath the overpass of the I-10, which runs for about a mile
through New Orleans. The cars are flood-damaged. The city plans to haul them away sometime, but no one knows when. For now, the homeless who used to sleep out under blankets beneath the overpass sleep instead in the cars.In front of some houses, belongings are strewn across the long-overgrown yards, out into the glass-littered streets. Some streets are not yet clear enough to drive down. On Royal Street beside the tracks, on the pavement in between deserted buildings, someone painted FOOD WATER ? for helicopters flying overhead to see. On the wall beside it: HOPE IS NOT A PLAN.
I am walking on one such street, vaguely lost, treading lightly and ashamed of the camera in my hand. A very old man, a saggy white shirt over his stooped back, frayed jeans held up by suspenders that hang from skinny shoulders, bowler atop his bald, black head, sits on the half-collapsed front stoop of a house. In front of him is junk: an old mattress, books, sheets of tin, a stove. His head hangs down, the back of his neck glistening wet in the 35 C heat; in his hand is a picture frame. Dozens more scatter the yard.
The old man looks up as I pass, and I hold up a hand. I cannot see his eyes, he is wearing sunglasses. But he, too, holds up his hand before setting his head back down on it.
There are no pick-ups with Mexican workers and lumber in the back cruising around these areas. There is no sound of saws, hammers, rebuilding, bringing life back from whence it was stolen. There is only the heat, hanging dank and heavy, the sour smell of mould, the plywood over the windows.
The city hasn’t even restored the water and electricity. There aren’t any people in these areas, save for those in cars, going through to somewhere else.
“I love travelling to developing countries,” says Kathryn, who has called New Orleans home for 10 years. She’s been all over: Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Africa. “But I’m not going this year.”
She can’t leave during hurricane season, she says—she works at a centre for homeless youth and needs to be there in case of an evacuation.
“But I don’t really want to anyway. The way it is here now, it’s like living in a developing country.”
It is May 15, 2006.
