Signs of Life Start to Appear in N.O.

[Brightmore]

Signs of Life Start to Appear in N.O.
Associated Press
DON BABWIN and MARY FOSTER
September 10, 2005

A woman waters her mint plants outside her house. A man rides his bicycle on a levee. A newspaper truck lumbers down the road, the passenger handing out papers.

In this battered, flooded city, a few signs of normalcy have flickered defiantly in recent days. While the bodies of their fellow citizens are being removed and counted, while the monumental task of draining, cleaning and rebuilding looms, some residents are starting to reclaim a sliver of their pre-hurricane lives.

Their homes may be damaged, but they're dry — spared by quirks of geography from the flooding that devastated huge chunks of the city. So, as soldiers and police have tried to convince people living on flooded streets to comply with an evacuation order, the luckier residents have quietly been allowed to go about their lives.

And they have.

Full story

[stray cat]

1. The french quarter, garden and part of business district is intact

These were the highest ground in NO and were not flooded. There is a bar there still serving beer that never closed.

[Historic NY]

2. Makes me happy to see NO spirit isn't crushed..........

carry on people.

[bigbrother05]

3. My question is Why do they get to stay?

Don't get me wrong, they could not force me to leave, they would have to arrest me. But the media is telling us with no food or utilities and the threat of desease it is not safe, so are the selecting who leaves and who stays? One more question= since they are so worried about the clean-up and they are going house to house, are they the contracted workers going to clean up the inside of houses?

[CdnObserver]

4. Seriously! I can't believe they are being so blatant!

Seems to me that a Kinder, Gentler Ethnic Cleansing in New Orleans is in full effect.

There is no doubt it my mind that the poorest areas of New Orleans will be completely demolished in order to make way for new development.

There is no way that they are going to rebuild a bunch of low income housing and just hand it back to those who lived there before.

I mean, it's not like this is Florida! Even people who had insurance are being told, "Sorry, you had HURRICANE insurance, not FLOOD insurance".

Plus, they won't even have to compensate them as they would in an "Eminent Domain" situation. I'm sure the banks will be foreclosing on whatever land those homes were built on to cover their "losses" on the mortgages that won't be paid.

edit: accidentally put in those houses those homes.

[Psephos]

5. Two salient points

I don't know if you've ever strolled one of the poor hoods of NOLA, but most of the houses were a POS. (I'm talking about the physical structures only here - the people are wonderful.) To rebuild them as they were would violate building codes, and that ain't gonna happen. So those areas will never again be as they were...and that may be for the best. I hardly think erecting modern conceptions of low-income housing (which ranges from ant farm multi-tenant structures to swaths of cookie cutter tract houses) will restore either the culture or the cohesion of the old neighborhoods.

Second, the flooded areas are below sea level, and sinking deeper every year. To my thinking, there's something not right about putting the poorest people back on the most dangerous land. The delta lands south of NOLA are disappearing, NOLA itself is sinking into the sea, and sea level is going to rise two to three feet this century. The hubris of building "impenetrable" levees to protect rebuilt neighborhoods sitting at the bottom of a flood basin seems like flipping off God with your middle finger and daring him to try it again.

I am not offering an answer here, just pointing out that demolition of the poorest areas is not an automatic bad thing.

As the Chinese say, in great chaos lies great opportunity. If the ablest and most creative minds are put to labor, NOLA may emerge changed for the better. A chance like this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Peace.