The Battle of New Orleans

Parent Cafe
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<p>One thing that struck me as so poignant about Katrina’s impact on Mississippi is that unlike New Orleans, it was devasted by Camille just 36 years ago. In many towns, kids who remember their dads being the civic leaders who rebuilt the town are now in their dad’s roles, facing the same challenge all over again. It makes you realize how valuable the greatest generation was, how hard it is to fill their shoes, and how admirable the people are who are doing it.</p>

<p>Ryan, what numbers do you have for # of homes destroyed in Louisiana vs. Mississippi?</p>

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<p><a href=“http://www.cbs-homes.com/PR-Katrina.htm[/url]”>http://www.cbs-homes.com/PR-Katrina.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>This site combines Katrina and Rita statistics from the Red Cross, so it’s not reliable for Katrina alone, but it shows Louisiana having about 4 times as many homes destroyed as Mississippi. Mississippi about 69,000; Louisiana over 280,000. I’m not sure how good the Red Cross data is though, or how it would come out if you adjusted it per capita.</p>

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<p>The Tulane students I spoke with are happy there. They are anxious for the trolley line to reopen, but they can take a bus into town. They feel that the campus has been restored. The professor told me the stupid thing was that important documents had been stored in the basements of some of the buildings, and they were completely ruined/lost. He also said last year admissions made it VERY easy to apply (free) and they accepted almost anyone who would come. He said that has changed and admission is more competitive for this year.</p>

<p>I met the nicest boys, by the way, who were UNC grads. They had all come to New Orleans for a bachelor party for one of them (he works in DC). They were spending Saturday at the Habitat build- they all had done a lot of Habitat work in Chapel Hill. Then it was going to be partying on Bourbon Street! I was so impressed by how hard they worked and how nice they were. I wish my son would do something like that. I think he would skip right to the Bourbon Street part. I also was a little shocked at the level of crudeness on Bourbon Street. The restaurants were good, of course, but we were walking down the street late in the evening and there is a Larry Flynt club (one of several) with a pole dancer right in the window! I didn’t remember that from previous visits.</p>

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<p>Just wanted to add that I think it’s great that several of you have worked on Habitat projects or even just visited NO. Good job!</p>

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<p>Where to begin?</p>

<p>This thread has certainly hit a nerve with me. My husband and I were in NOLA for our son</p>

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<p>It is true that Lousiana has been shafted on the oil revenues for offshore drilling relative to other coastal states but it is incorrect to place all of the blame for coastal erosion on the oil companies. The canals they cut exasperated the erosion but without fresh feeds of silt the coast is still sinking and the marshes would disappear. After the major floods of the 1920’s the federal government and Corps of Engineers raised the levees higher and closed the gaps. This controled the flooding but the floods are what brought silt to the marshland. Since then the land has been sinking and at an accelerating rate.</p>

<p>The fact is there is no way to fix the danage the the canals have done without diverting the waters of the Missippi and the silt they contain. Blow the levees and the marshes would be restored in a hurry but what happens to everything behind them?</p>

<p>There are of course engineering solutions that would get the silt where it is needed and not wipe out everything behind the levees but it would cost a lot and have major impacts of shipping and the port i.e. lots of powerful interests are involved.</p>

<p>As for Tulane students - my son is a student there now, it is still a good school, the place is nowhere near as unsafe as the press would have you believe though like any large city there are places I would not venture, especially after dark. The students do venture off campus with regularity, after all there is a lot to see and do in NOLA especially if you are a music fan. The administration at Tulane unfortunately is permanently in full spin mode as one poster has already pointed out and their spin bears only a questionable verisimiltude to reality. This turns a lot of people off me included. They would do much better to just stick to the truth which is not that bad at all. The schools physical structure is fine. The students love the place, and the faculty is hanging in.</p>

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<p>Where to begin?</p>

<p>This thread has certainly hit a nerve with me. My husband and I were in NOLA for our son</p>

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<p>Sorry, having trouble with m y post…</p>

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<p>Where to begin?</p>

<p>This thread has certainly hit a nerve with me. My husband and I were in NOLA for our son</p>

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<h2>“The administration at Tulane unfortunately is permanently in full spin mode as one poster has already pointed out and their spin bears only a questionable verisimiltude to reality. This turns a lot of people off me included. They would do much better to just stick to the truth which is not that bad at all. The schools physical structure is fine. The students love the place, and the faculty is hanging in.”</h2>

<p>Exactly higher! ldgirl was excited at the prospect of being a part of the rebuilding process and was giving Tulane serious consideration. That they were offering a big scholarship certainly sweetened the pot. But we were very concerned about the spin that came directly from the administration. It’s a trust-breaking thing. Breaking trust is far worse than attending school on a campus and in a city that suffered tragedy and is in the process of rebuilding. I wish the admin folks at Tulane would get that.</p>

<p>Also, one thing people should also realize is it is true about the relatively empty coffers in Louisiana. Oil royalties are a huge issue. But so are property taxes, which are practically non-existent. What a shock when we left Lafayette where we paid about $800 a year in property taxes for Houston where we now pay almost $1000 a month. It’s hard to provide comparable services when revenues are so low.</p>

<p>Conyat - Sha! You gotta be in the oil patch! ;)</p>

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<p>Ryan - I have the most heartbreaking photos of Biloxi and Gulfport. On the way back from Chapel Hill in August, my husband and I stayed the night at the one decent hotel on I-10 in Biloxi. We ate dinner at the Chili’s next to the hotel that night. The waiter nearly fell asleep on us. He said he was spending his days rebuilding his home and waiting tables at night to make money. He was trying so hard to hang on to his place. He told us the entire Chili’s and the first floor of the hotel were completely under water due to storm surge.</p>

<p>The next morning we drove the 5 miles down to the beach and took photos. We stayed down there a couple of hours…I just felt the need to document it. People do not realize how bad it is. We used to drive that beach highway every year on the way to Destin to look at the grand old homes and stop for a meal. It was such a thriving community. It is just gone now. One photo I have is of signs, bent over to the ground, one after the other, in front of slabs where restaurants and stores used to be. I mean you know it was bad when there is no evidence other than a slab that a Denny’s or a McDonalds was ever there. The few buildings left standing, a funeral home here, a church there have the lower floors completely washed out. You can see straight through them. We drove as far east as we could on the beach and turned back for I-10 before the washed out bridge. </p>

<p>It was shocking to see this level of damage one year after the storm.</p>

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<p>Sure! Xiggi has a forked tongue or must be relying on political blogs! After all, the Senators Breaux and Landrieu have been so ineffective in bringing the bacon … home! Except for the requirement of cost sharing by the state and local authorties, there was little in the way for the Breaux Act to bring hundreds of millions more to the coasts of Louisiana, in addition to the federal funds that have been spent for more than a century! </p>

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</p>

<p>Source: Science 15 September 2000:
Vol. 289. no. 5486, pp. 1860 - 1863</p>

<p>PS For more partisan sources: <a href=“http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00060286-CB58-1315-8B5883414B7F0000&pageNumber=6&catID=2[/url]”>http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00060286-CB58-1315-8B5883414B7F0000&pageNumber=6&catID=2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Where to begin?</p>

<p>This thread has certainly hit a nerve with me. My husband and I were in NOLA for our son</p>

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<p>The point is, we don’t have the money because we got shafted on the oil revenues for decades (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year), and the Louisiana coastline is a national concern because the country needs our oil and gas and the work we do to process it. </p>

<p>There hasn’t been a refinery built in this country in 20 years. Why? No one wants them in their backyard. Shutdown the Murphy plant, the Chalmette refinery, Valero, etc, and what do you think will happen to the rest of the country? We can live without heating oil a heck of a lot longer you can, cher.</p>

<p>Congress has resisted doing anything substantial about restoring the coast in Louisiana for decades. Does the phrase “no net loss of wetlands” ring a bell? The policy was, it was OK for Louisiana to lose wetlands as long as it was gained somewhere else, like Alaska. So short-sighted. </p>

<p>Bottom line is, Louisiana provides the federal government a ton of tax revenue. A large chunk of what you pay at the pump for gas is tax. It’s not unfair to expect some of the money to come back to keep the wheels of your industries turning.</p>

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<p>Our middle D is in engineering school and for her freshman seminar research project (where each student could pick a topic of choice so long as it was a significant current engineering issue) she did the collapse of the floodwalls on the 17th Street canal, the Industrial Canal and the Orleans Avenue canal. Floodwalls people, not levees. The project involved using only technical industry sources found in the Engineering School library. One of the sources she read was the report by Robert Bea’s team at UC Berkeley. No newspapers or poplular magazines allowed. Just scientific and engineering journals.</p>

<p>Her conclusion? The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers screwed up and caused the largest engineering disaster in the history of the United States. She got a 100 A+ on the project.</p>

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<p>This thread has certainly hit a nerve with me. My husband and I were in NOLA for our son</p>

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<p>That must have been a wonderful experience MoWC, really doing some of the physical work to help NO get back up and running. Thanks for your report.</p>

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<p>My husband and I were in NOLA for our son’s orientation weekend at Loyola New Orleans when Katrina arrived. I have never seen such incompetence from government leaders, and I am not talking about FEMA.</p>

<p>Nagin and Blanco were a disgrace. Friday night wew were having a jolly old time in total oblivion while these two jokers were handwringing, sqabbling and holding a p—ing contest for power. Had it not been for the university declaring an emergency evacuation, we would probably be stuck there.</p>

<p>As it was, most of the airlines bailed even though the weather on Saturday was clear and dry. We ended up driving our rental car to Baton Rouge (60 miles, 6 hours) on Sunday and caught one of the last planes out (American Airlines).</p>

<p>For an excellent blow-by-blow account, I highly recommend Professor Douglas Brinkley’s (Tulane) book, “The Great Deluge.” Not a pretty picture of the mayor or the governor. There’s nothing to say about the reelection of Nagin except “pathetic.”</p>

<p>Our son was among many students who ended up as a visiting student for fall semester at schools around the country and he, along with over 92% of Loyola students, returned to NOLA in January 2006.</p>

<p>I had many questions about the state of the city and decided that I was not getting a fair picture from the news media. I boarded a plane from California 5 weeks after Katrina and spent three days there driving around and checking things out. The National Guard was housed at Loyola and the campus looked mostly unscathed. I was able to enter my son’s dorm room and retrieve some clothing (and drum cymbals!) to bring home, since he had left with only a backpack and his laptop.</p>

<p>I stayed at a B and B along with several workers from FEMA. The breakfast conversation was extremely informative. Many restaurants were open, the French Quarter was pretty normal and work had begun on the Superdome. It was all very eerie but the trip convinced me that my son would be safe returning to school second semester.</p>

<p>When I traveled there again in April 2006, I took a “Devastation Tour” and saw the rows of yellow school buses the mayor never used, the wiped out neighborhoods at Lakeview and the thousand of abandoned vehicles still parked under the interstate. </p>

<p>I believe there is plenty of money allocated for the rebuilding of New Orleans. The delay has everything to do with the local and state governments not having a plan and Nagin’s inability to make decision on anything. Check out:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1171178195230680.xml&coll=1[/url]”>http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1171178195230680.xml&coll=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>for an article entitled “Many New Orleanians say they are still waiting for Mayor Ray Nagin to do the job they elected him to do.”</p>

<p>Our son is very happy in New Orleans. I understand that both Tulane and Loyola had increases in the number of applicants last year but it was the PARENTS who didn’t want their kids to be in the city. IMHO, this is a result of the media harping on what’s NOT fixed instead of reporting the “life goes on” side of the picture.</p>

<p>Whew! There’s much more where this came from…</p>

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<p>I’ve heard that if a developer wants to build a subdivision of 500 homes, it usually takes about 5 years. Now imagine building 50,000 or 250,000. (What was lost in New Orleans and the entire Gulf South, respectively). And rebuilding bridges, roads, schools, fire stations, hospitals, all at the same time.</p>

<p>Habitat has managed to put up 50 homes in the past year in Southeast Louisiana, which is pretty amazing. And they’re gearing up to do more in Plaquemines and St. Bernard, as well as to have a base camp for people to live out of while they work on their homes. </p>

<p>You don’t actually have to come to New Orleans to work on a Habitat house for NO. There are “wall builds” all over the country, where people get together, nail together walls, and ship them down in containers. You even get a carpenter’s pencil to sign a stud and write a message on it to the homeowner. </p>

<p>BTW, recent studies have shown that the Katrina kids aren’t doing too well. Increases in behavior problems, rising numbers of parents and caregivers with PTSD, and a service delivery system that isn’t up to the challenges. Please keep them in your thoughts.</p>

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<p>JazzDrumMum -</p>

<p>I am so glad that you and yours got out of the city OK. On the Friday night that you speak of (before Katrina hit) our local TV weather reports were still saying that Katrina was going to hit Florida. My mother (who lives in nola) called me and said she was leaving first thing Saturday morning to drive to my house 'cause they were being told in nola that the storm was going to hit them and they needed to get out. It is my understanding that the governor called for an evacuation on Saturday morning and spent most of Saturday (when not trying to convince Nagin to do something) on the phone with the White House putting the National Emergency Response Plan into action. By Saturday afternoon, the White House had done the necessary with FEMA to have a national disaster declaration issued ahead of the storm so that FEMA could start getting response teams down there, and all of this happened before you decided to leave town on Sunday.</p>

<p>I am glad that with the contraflow evacuation plan implemented by Governor Blanco in conjunction with Governor Barber of Mississippi and coordinated by a joint effort of the State Police of both Louisiana and Mississippi that it only took you (and 1.8 million other people) six hours to get from New Orleans to Baton Rouge (which is actually 85 miles btw).</p>

<p>During the evacuation of Houston during Rita one of my mom’s friends who was by then staying with her son in Houston, it took the two of them six (6) hours just to get on the interstate and progress to the next exit. Since it took 6 hours to get from one exit to the next (what is that do you think, hmmm, 2 miles maybe?), they decided to get off, turn around and go home rather than get hit by Rita while sitting on the highway in their car.</p>

<p>Louisiana successfully evacuated almost 2 million people ahead of Katrina. That would be like evacuating the entire state of Mississippi. I am glad that you and your family were successfully evacuated. I am also glad that Loyola (my mom’s alma mater) is taking good care of your son.</p>