Day 2: The City Tour

New Orleans is a bowl between a river and a lake . Sitting below sea level, the city is fortified by pumping stations that keep the city dry – most of the time. As we drove around the city, water lines were everywhere, like painful reminders of what the sea level would be, if nature were left to her own ways. New Orleans continues to be a struggle for survival.

One by one, we revisited the levies that had caved. Beaurocrats, ever influential, had overruled the engineers in determining how far into the ground the steel skeleton would go and which fingers of the lake would be closed off. After Katrina, new levies have replaced the fallen ones with steel that goes five times deeper. Yet the portions of the old levy remain. One cannot help but think that the levy is only as strong as its weakest wall.

As we drove into the Lakeview neighbourhood, I wondered “where is the damage?”. The irony of the scattered houses did not strike me until I realized that the vacant lots were in fact tombstones of lives that had been displaced. Few people dared to rebuild. Others stubbornly refused to give up. Cracked roads and bare bone houses told a story I have heard several times, but only in the third world. This was the United Sates, vulnerable to the brutality of a force it had not fully fathomed.

The Upper 9th Ward is a ghost town. Houses stand still, like a deathly still frame from an unfinished movie. All restaurants and gas stations are abandoned. I pick out a dozen cars in the area, reassuring myself that people still live around here but nothing moved apart from the wind.

The Lower 9th Ward may have never existed if I were not told that it was once a fully packed neighbourhood. The stumps were still there. The houses had floated away or had to be removed with the debris. Each house, with the land that it stood on, might have been worth $45,000 before Katrina. The cost of building a house now would easily be $120,000. For the people living on the edge, a government grant covering only 2/3rd the cost of reconstruction was simply not enough. Instead, FEMA trailers – each worth $75,000 – had found their way into New Orleans’ new way of life.

As the beautiful sunset flushed the New Orleans sky, Erik spoke about the painful chapter that his folks had lived through post-Katrina. When they returned to their flood-ravaged home in white suits and masks, he recalled his farther frustration over being looted. As if the flood had not been enough, the city residents had violated them too. Some felt that it might even be easy to put a face to the thieves, and racial tensions still lurked among the offended. Erik’s home had been repeatedly violated. His parents’ suffering, anger and pain were not hard to imagine.

Yet new life springs from hope afresh. Our guide, Steve, showed us the residential solar panels and the green eco-friendly homes that “no storm can tear down”. Overlooking the racetrack, each unit is marked at $290,000 a-piece. A Brad Pitt-funded experimental construction project has resulted in a two-storey house built from the best that green technology can offer. The project was clearly not for the masses. At least not yet. What is not clear is where this is leading New Orleans. Steve is certain that the 9th Ward would flood again, green housing or not.

However, New Orleans and the 9th Ward in particular, felt like the crucible of humble beginnings and optimism. Man has had an important role to play in climate change. But perhaps he has an even bigger role in reacting constructively to this change. New Orleans promises to be an interesting case study.

- Anupama Sharma