Katrina - Two Years Later And...?

I was sitting at a café here in Dallas last night next to a good friend formerly from New Orleans. I looked up at one of the ubiquitous TVs that always seem to be present in eating establishments today and saw a replay of the Katrina radar image. She looked up around the same time and muttered under her breath, “seen enough of that bitch.” I asked here what Katrina was like, since she and her partner lived through the hurricane.

“Well we were in the East Jefferson Parish General Hospital. They had ordered all the public service employees to evacuate, except us and a couple of other hospitals. We rode it out.” She is a nurse and I could see the pain in her eyes as she spoke.

“Had water right up to the steps, but our place had the generators and records on the second floor, so the flooding didn’t hurt us too much.” She took another bite of her dinner.

After a few minutes she mustered up enough courage to speak again and she told me know they were left to fend for themselves. They were lucky at her job, but her house was another story. Later the pain of living there was too much and they left for Dallas. Her relatives are slowly being squeezed out of the Crescent City by a combination of slow relief and high property reevaluations. Friends who lived on St. Charles in the Garden District had their places grandfathered in for property taxes before, but now their properties are reevaluated at astronomically high rates. They will have to sell to eager developers to avoid the taxes. In the poorer neighborhoods, the property values are slashed to nothing, making it impossible for residents to get loans sufficient to rebuild. The city has become a massive field day for developers wanting to make a quick buck.

As we talked, I could hear the Randy Newman song “Louisiana 1927” playing in my head.

President Coolidge come down, in a railroad train
With his little fat man with a note pad in his hand
President say "little fat man, oh ain't a shame,
What the river has done to this poor farmer’s land"

Oh Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re trying to wash us away, you’re trying to wash us away
Oh Louisiana, oh Louisiana
They’re trying to wash us away, oh lord, they’re trying to wash us away
They’re trying to wash us away, they’re trying to wash us away

Recording Copyright 2003 Nonesuch Records