More walking of the streets of the French Quarter. I catch a tour in the afternoon. The tour includes two hours of bussing around some interesting parts of town. The driver provides a rapid fire description of everything that flashes past our windows. He takes us into the areas worse effected by Hurricane Katrina. Six years have now past and there are areas that are still to be prepared. The most devastated part, Ward 9 lower, was also the poorest and the levee breech that caused the flooding here was caused by a run-away barge. The levees were quite flimsy, twelve foot high and about 8 inches thick cement panels from memory. And basically just stuck into the ground. The replacement levee is far more serious. Some of the houses are still in their original damaged form complete with holes in the roof where people had to bust their way out from the inside. Interestingly houses in this sector are being rebuilt from Brad Pitts pocket. He has taken it upon himself to side with an engineer to come up with a highest house design that is very energy efficient and capable of withstanding a repeat event. The authorities had not planned on rebuilding this part of town, leaving it go back to it’s natural state – swamp. This whole area is reclaimed swamp for the city to expand. It is below sea level and well below the height of the levee walls. But the residents wanted to return to their homes and about 40 percent of them have. But very few government services have returned to support them.
Other parts of town flooded as well. In all 85 percent went under including middle and upper-class areas. These areas were flooded by two other breeches in the levee walls and there is a conspiracy theory as to why these breeches happened. It is thought they were deliberate, blown open with explosives to sacrifice certain areas to save others. Nothing is admitted of course and nothing can be proved. Anyway the town is rebuilding but there are still houses waiting fir repair. A bizarre twist, the huge pumping stations in place to keep the water out ran only on electricity! When the power went out, they were useless. New pumps are now connected to huge diesel generators.
New Orleanians seem to be sensitive about what people think of them living or rebuilding in such a risky place because without prompting the driver broke his tour marathon with an explanation of all the other dangerous places in America that residents persist to live. The whole west coast live on an earthquake belt and the mid west keep rebuilding in the tornado belt.
Graves are above ground here because of the flooding.
Another stop was at a cemetery. These are no ordinary cemeteries here. The dead are buried in crypts above the ground because the flooding causes the coffins to pop out of the ground. They tried everything to prevent this happening but the only solution was to encapsulated the dead above ground. But these tombs don’t just house a few members – they are designed to house entire families. How? Bodies deteriorate to nothing and then they can throw in another. It is law to wait one whole year and one day after the last burial before you can bury the next. One year gives the deterioration process enough time to neutralise any chance of disease transmission. Then you wait one day because you can’t disturb the corpse on it’s anniversary! What if a family member dies within that waiting timespan? You put them in another section of the crypt. Amazing process. These plots can be expensive to buy. Sorry,
The there is the story about the ‘shot gun’ houses. They are a unique house design, popular in parts of New Orleans. I will leave it to Wikipedia to explain – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house
angusmccoll 