There’s an amazing narrative description on New Orleans posted over at Salon. It’s by a freelance writer, who went to see what had happened to his French Quarter home that he had sold 3 weeks before the hurricane. There’s some incredible descriptions:
I drive across the French Quarter, which looks fine and smells better than usual, then out St. Claude Avenue. Past Desire Street the disaster begins. Buildings on both sides of the street are flooded out, bombed out, burned down. A ski boat sits on the neutral ground in the middle of St. Claude. There’s a flooded bus abandoned in midturn, cars with their doors open, dead dogs decomposing on the sidewalk.
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more from that Salon article: The flooded neighborhoods look bad, but not as bad as they’ll look in a couple of months, when all the condemned houses start coming down. Right now they seem to be frozen in place by their waterlines. Many of the houses look OK, but the waterline is high on the wall and they have pink stickers that mean they’ve been declared uninhabitable. A strange whitish dust coats everything, like a stage set in an apocalypse movie. The cars appear to have been bathed in a caustic solution that has sandblasted their glass. They sit at odd angles here and there on the ground and in the streets, where they came to rest when the floodwaters receded. The poor blown-open houses with their guts spewed out onto the sidewalk! Creole cottages, shotguns, camelbacks, doubles — block after block, on and on for miles. Some houses are missing their fronts or their sides, some are completely caved in. There’s one that looks fine, but then I see the number 5 five spray-painted in the lower-left-hand quadrant, meaning five dead people got pulled out of there. There’s a new New Orleans smell: vomity and moldy and dead, a reek of rotting garbage, occasional notes of putrefying flesh. It’s impossible for me to imagine what the residents there are experiencing.
#134682 | Author: kate | Date: Oct 14 2005
