Coroner says that there are still bodies to be found in New Orleans, because "there's houses that have not been touched":
We have found 25 or 26 I believe remains since a year, in the past year, since last April. And so we know that this is going to keep happening because there are more people out there.
Last fall I went to New Orleans with a photojournalist friend, and we spent a day in the lower 9th. A day. A measly day, a year after Katrina. We weren't personally touched by the tragedy, came too late and for too short a stay to help much beyond donating to the Tipitina's Foundation.
I've lived and traveled and worked in some of the most destitute parts of the developing world, and I've never seen anything like what we saw that day. The places that others warn about may be dangerous, or polluted, or risky for various reasons, but they are also teeming with life. Walking through the favela, or some of the more scattered outlying less quickly urbanizing areas that could be pre-favela or pre-bairro not quite sure yet, it's easy to see that people live there, those people care for their homes however modest they may be. Yes, I've also seen dead bodies dumped by drug dealers, and the cases of those caught by the trafficantes' vigilante justice, cut into pieces and hung from a high tension tower. The communities were at least full of life.
What we saw in the 9th Ward, so long after the storm, long enough for the wealthier neighborhoods to have moved on to the phase of planting ornamental grasses in neat rows to spruce things us, was desolation. Maybe a stray (?) dog, but not much else. Very occasionally we saw a house that stood defiantly tidy, freshly painted and fiercely occupied. We saw piles of debris that the occupants had dragged to the edge of their property, off onto the road, exorcising, but that had faded on the street. Those piles had sprouted with weeds, and no one had come to drag them off, to remove the homes for vermin.
And we saw many, many houses that had clearly not been touched since the storm. Twisted, flattened, with the telltale spraypaint markings, tattered drapes flapping out of shattered windows. Some of the foundations had been scraped clean, and you could see steps to nowhere. Those reminded me of old pictures of Atlanta.
And then there were the houses that were not shattered, not ripped open, that to the eye looked intact, but that obviously been under water. You could tell by the stains. And you could tell by the tangle of furniture sucked up against the open front as the water had receded. Those barricades of couches, chairs, rugs, could only have been placed just so by effects of the receding floodwaters. And those houses bore the spraypainted "all clear" markings as well. As we walked, and drove, and ached for the people whose homes these had been. We smelled the lingering stench of the toxic soup that had covered the area, and was refreshed with each rainfall. Of all the things we saw, what stuck with me most was the way the tangles blocked the doorways. There was no way anyone had been in those houses to check if anyone was trapped, was ill, was dead. I remember saying to my friend, "There are still people in there."
And now, "plans show walking malls and parks in a rebuilt Lower 9th Ward."
Posted by binky at April 26, 2007 04:03 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Natural Disasters