Cleaning Up After Katrina
Residents return to their fermenting homes in New Orleans.
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Sylvie Campbell fights back tears after seeing her mother-in-law's piano in her New Orleans home. Photo courtesy of Times Photo / Shane Bevel |
You smell it before you see it. A yeasty, reeking mixture of spoiled food, sewage residue and rotting drywall.
Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, some residents returned to New Orleans for the first time. Their tightly shuttered homes had incubated the fetid brew of post-Hurricane filth in the wicked southern Louisiana heat and humidity — a veritable steam pressure cooker for the bacteria and mold growing rampant in badly flooded neighborhoods.
What they encountered when they reopened their doors for the first time since Hurricane Katrina was a surreal, sensory experience that photographs and words can only capture a portion of.
But let me try.
Sylvie Campbell pulled up to her mother-in-law’s home one Saturday afternoon in a van loaded with jugs of bleach, rubber gloves and scrub brushes.
The scene she found inside made her gasp and weep. The cleaning supplies suddenly seemed like a bad joke in the face of the dank, mold-encrusted nightmare that bore little resemblance to the carefully tended home her mother had left.
The living room looked as if it had been ransacked by Godzilla — furniture, a piano, couches strewn at odd angles; wood rotting; fabric an unrecognizable science-fiction patchwork of multi-colored fungus and mold.
In Donna Neumann’s home, floodwaters had floated the refrigerator across the kitchen, depositing it sideways on top of a table. The doors, open, hung heavily from hinges pointed toward the floor, food strewn across the kitchen in fermenting heaps of stinking mush.
Soon the fridge will join thousands of others duct-taped shut at curbs (there has been no trash collection to date) with warnings like “Toxic gumbo, do not open.” Toxic is not an understatement, and the warning is not a joke.
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Donna Neumann cleans up the remains of a kitchen in her friend's rent house after a refrigerator was overturned by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters. Photo courtesy of Times Photo / Shane Bevel |
Walls are coated with quarter-inch thick swirls of mold that spread upwards across ceilings, circular designs so colorful, intricate and geometrically perfect they are horrifyingly beautiful.
Floors are coated with a slippery-as-sheet-ice film of black slime that smells like septic.
The smell permeates everything — clothes, hair, shoes, nostrils. No amount of scrubbing hands with antibacterial wipes erases the suspicion that ones’ hands are never cleansed, seemingly absorbing noxious residue from the air.
You want to wash with the tap water in the few taverns now open on Bourbon Street, but signs urge you not to dare. So does Gannett photographer Shane Bevel, who’s been in the broken city for weeks: “I saw the sewage treatment plant under water,” he says. “I ain’t touching that stuff.”
To be fair, many parts of town did not endure such devastation. But for thousands of homes, the term “rebuilding” is a cruel joke.
As newspaper reporters, we’re constantly exhorted to go beyond simply pointing out problems and urged to offer solutions.
But how on God’s Earth we give these people back their broken lives is inconceivable. Solutions? I have none.
But I do know the people who let us into what’s left of their homes don’t give a rip about the esoteric debates over who’s to blame for what, which agencies dropped the ball or whether Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco should be recalled.
Let the historians sort that out, said Shetonia Williams, the owner of an uninhabitable home currently living with her husband and four children in a shelter. “All I want now is something other than a busy signal from my insurance company.”
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