My friend's trip into NOLA today (photo heavy)

Autumn Colors

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Sat Sep-17-05 10:46 PM
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My friend's trip into NOLA today (photo heavy)

Edited on Sat Sep-17-05 11:14 PM by Autumn Colors

He's from Mississippi and I know him from another forum. He gave me permission to re-post his journal entry from that site over here. He talks about a slimy film that he's never seen before growing on everything (not just "regular mold" - even on the second floor where water never reached. The first 3 photos show that film. In the first one, look at the very bottom of the dresser -- like it's growing from the floor up to the wood. Who knows what kind of stuff is growing down there. No one's ever thrown all of these chemicals, fuels, drugs, body parts all together in one mix. We may end up with something no one's seen before.

I should also tell you that he's 20 years old and before the hurricane, seemed (to me anyway) to take very little interest in politics. He likes making and editing videos for entertainment. Now, he says he wants to use his camera to spread information about what happened down there. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think I may have just witnessed the birth of a new Democratic voter in MS.

He writes:

"I just got back home from New Orleans.

Leaving my town was a little rough. I got to see some of the towns close to mine and the damage done there. It was basically the same amount. Power lines down, roofs blown away, that sort of thing. Although I wasn't prepared to see what I was about to see.

Before I go on, here's a small background of my childhood. I actually grew up in New Orleans. I lived there for about eight years before I moved to Mississippi after my parents split up. My real childhood home is New Orleans. My mother's entire family lives there. My father's family lives there. As I said yesterday, I was going back with my Aunt and Uncle to try to salvage anything in the house that we could.

Going farther and farther down the interstate we could see nothing but broken trees. Almost every tree on the way to LA was snapped in half. Going across the bridge into New Orleans was horrible. Parts of other bridges were visible, buckled up and fallen into the water. Power lines going across the lake were broken. It was pretty bad.

Once we actually got into the city, things were starting to look a lot worse. Everything is dead. It was a real ghost town. There wasn't a green plant in site. Trees, bushes, grass, everything. Dead. The entire city is under Martial Law. The National Guard was everywhere. Every time you turned around, there was a guy with an M-16 or Shotgun standing right there.

Just today, the city had started a new order. For anyone to be able to get back into the city, they had to have a special business owner or contractors pass to get back in. Although my uncle owns a car parts and repair shop, we didn't have the pass. After about an hour though, we found some back roads to get back into the part of the city where the shop is, and also his house close by.

I saw cars that had floated away, houses that left the foundations and floated into the middle of the street. I had never seen anything like this before. Inside the shop, there was mud everywhere. Everything was so wet and dirty. We couldn't really get much out of there, so we just left it.

Then came what I wasn't ready for. The last time I had seen the inside of my Aunt and Uncle's house was when I came back from Toronto, since I flew out of the New Orleans airport. When we opened the front door of the house, a smell hit my face that I had never smelled before. This was the most horrible smell ever. There was at least 3 to 5 inches of mud caked in the floor. Objects in the house were moved because they floated in the water. Chairs, desks, the fridge, the piano, couches, everything. There was mold everywhere. The air was so thick and moldy. In some rooms, my eyes even began to burn and water. Anything that was lower than 5 feet in the house was completely unsalvageable. Anything higher than that was already starting to ruin because of the mold. There was a thick slimy film in some places that I had never seen before. The house was completely ruined. It was like a bad dream. I remember so many things from my childhood from that house, and everything was completely destroyed. We got what we could, TV's and VCR's and such that were over the water level and we tried to clean up the best that we could. We left the city without thought of ever coming back.

I have a few hundred pictures of the city that I took today, which I'll be uploading to a directory on the webserver in a little bit. There's just too many to upload individually, so it will be in a directory listing. Also, I have a lot of pictures of the inside of the house, and I do believe that these are some of the VERY few that are out right now, as I am sure I'm one of the very few people that were allowed (sort of) to go back into the city and actually take pictures of things.

Bottom line: New Orleans is completely destroyed. No satellite pictures can begin to describe what I've seen today. And in just a little while, you'll be able to witness these images yourselves."