Preface

I observed the ferocity and intensity of the chaos that gripped the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina had made her indelible mark.  The flooding, the death, the politicians, all graced our house through the screen of our television in the days and weeks that followed the storm.  The companies we worked for sent hundreds and thousands of dollars in aid and supplies to help the beleaguered rescue efforts.

As the people in the affected areas struggled to makes sense of the event, the fingers started pointing.  Blame had to be given.  The government, FEMA, Ray Nagin, George Bush, Mike Brown, Michael Chertoff, and Kathleen Blanco all deservedly or not, suffered accusations of incompetence, neglect and ignorance.

People struggling to re-build their lives muttered conspiracy theories that it was the Army Corps of Engineers that actually blew up the Industrial Canal levee to save Bourbon Street from the potential of flooding.  Many explosions were rumored to have been heard.

Reports of anarchy, looting, raping and shooting along with many other crimes pervaded the news.  The republicans were pretty certain it was the democrats that had failed the people.  The democrats were pretty sure it was the republicans who were to blame.  The poor folks implicitly new it was the rich folks in cahoots with the government that caused delayed and postponed rescue efforts.  It was somebody’s fault.  The human fingers had to point.  Somebody had to be blamed.  The media misreported, the politicians changed their stories.  The local governments were celebrating the loss of their poor class majority.   

As time past, the media’s attention slowly shifted to those events more worthy of news than the face of New Orleans.  Five months after Hurricane Katrina hit, an occasional report would trickle through the media speaking of how Bourbon Street is back.  How tourists are drinking, dancing, and partying along the length of the street.  “New Orleans is back!”

Five months after the storm, I walked along a cleared road in the Lower Ninth Ward.  I observed the swath of nothingness in the area bordering where the Industrial Canal levee had failed.  The new construction occurring on the levee could be easily viewed.  There was a scent in the air of petroleum, garbage, and mildew.  Where the Canal had failed, a semicircular path could be observed indicating the fan of the wall of water.  For two to three blocks in a semi-circular swath away from the canal breach was utter destruction.  The houses had been splintered into oblivion.  Remnants of concrete foundations, wood splinters, electrical wires, and pipes protruded from the ground amidst refrigerators, small tricycles, and picture frames.  Two to three blocks further into the Lower Ninth, more houses were observed to still be on their foundations.  The roofs were crushed, porches collapsed, cars leaning on their roofs in the front yards.

As I walked through the Lower Ninth, the smells, the silence and the visage of destruction was all that my senses recorded.  I walked and drove for miles and miles through the neighborhood.  There was no power, there was no running water, and there was no habitation as far as you could see.

Destroyed houses, destroyed lives, the markings on the house fronts or vehicles or whatever was available left by the search and rescue squads as they went house to house looking for the living and the dead.

On most structures still standing, spray painted graffiti recorded the number of bodies, the conditions of the structures, the search date, and the search team’s identification markers.  The markers being placed as a check off to indicate a completed search and to help the body removal squads as they followed the searchers removing the grisly contents reported by the graffiti.

St Bernard’s Parish hadn’t fared much better than the Lower Ninth.  More houses stood on their foundations then in the Lower Ninth, yet the same silence and emptiness still reigned. The neighborhood I walked through was clearly a white collar, higher income area.  The once beautiful brick homes were gutted or in the process of being gutted.  “For Sale by Owner” signs were posted on lot after lot like a bad joke.   Graffiti on the garage doors, saying things like, “We are OK and are in Georgia”, “Have you seen my Irish Terrier?  Call me!”, “If you loot, I will shoot!”, “Hungry? serving dog gumbo!”, or “Katrina…you Bitch!!”

I observed the tell tale blackish-yellowish colors on the sides of the houses indicating the level of the water, reaching 10 feet in height, drawing a thin line crowning the make-shift billboards people left on their former homes as they hurriedly left the area.

Guess what?  At the time of this writing, it is six months after Katrina struck and New Orleans is not back.  New Orleans has been irrevocably altered.  Bourbon Street appears unscathed, but 10 minutes away, the traffic lights still do not work.  The empty homes of some 900,000 people lay vacant and destroyed.

Noted as well is the observation that something in the human collective spirit requires a scapegoat.  It has to be somebody’s fault.  This book is about a hurricane and the mass of destruction she breathed into being.  This book is an attempt to communicate the magnitude of her fury and destructive reach.  This book has been written to tell the story of the people of Katrina.  The tales as told through the voices and eyes of the people who lived it.  The stories of the people who were on the ground, saving lives, taking lives, saving animals, and providing all manner of support or chaos.

This is not a political book.  This is not a book being written to pass blame or to jump on any number of bandwagons or political agendas.

This book is in every way an attempt to speak to the truth of Hurricane Katrina.  This book is an attempt to put the magnitude of the event into perspective.  Unlike other books which have come out since the hurricane, this book does not have an agenda.  Many folks will likely be disappointed that this book doesn’t cast blame to the government and that it probably will be useless as a slinger of political ideology.  Katrina was a hurricane.  She did what hurricanes do; she weaved destruction.
Could New Orleans have been better prepared?  Probably!  Will people learn from the past to try and be better prepared?  Some will and some won’t.  There were no surprises those weeks in August and September of 2005.  If anything, the toll that Hurricane Katrina took on New Orleans was significantly less then what had been predicted.  Never before in the history of the United States had so many people been rescued so quickly through the efforts of the largest state and federal governmental rescue effort in history.  Not embellishment, not spin…just a fact.  Could all concerned have done better?  Probably!  Will all concerned deal with it better in the future?  Hopefully!

This book is about the people, their thoughts, their feelings, their experiences, and future concerns.  This book is written for the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and those special souls who spent many months away from home trying to help strangers.  It is written for those special men and women in the New Orleans and local Gulf Coast Fire and Police Departments who were there at ground zero and who began doing rescues before the winds had abated.

This book is about the pendulum of human behavior from the most heroic to the most deplorable, and everything in between.  This book is about American people living through the greatest natural disaster this country has ever seen.

This book is about our humanity, our society and our culture.  This book is about a freight train screamin’.

(Go back)

Cary Black
February, 2006