“I drove my Chevy to the levee and the levee was gone…”
These are the powerful words inscribed on a t-shirt in a gift shop in the French Quarter of New Orleans on Bourbon Street. The breach of the levees (yes, plural) in New Orleans led to mounds of destruction and death. Water rushed in from multiple canals and the Miss. River through the streets and into houses taking the lives of many who did not expect such a surge, literally moving houses down the streets on top of other houses (and you can still see that image here , I stood right in front of such a scenario today). I walked through the Lower 9th Ward and it is a veritable ghost town. There are some houses standing, but most are nowhere near liveable. They all have spray-painting on them relaying if a certain structure is toxic, how many people died in it, and how many pets died in it.
Walking down the street I tried to envision how this neighborhood was before Katrina. How many brothers, mothers, uncles, cousins, nieces lived in a close-knit community blocks away from one another? How many senior citizens lived in these houses and sat out on the front stoop telling younger people stories of the past? How many kids rode their bikes through the area and played basketball in the streets? These are of New Orleans may have been poor before the storm, but one thing I am sure was there before the storm was life. A life that was lived day by day unaware of the weak levee system “protecting” their neighborhood. Water rushed in from 3 angles into this community and one thing that is barely present 2 years later is life.