Carper's Corner (Part 2 of 2)

Carper's Corner (Part 2 of 2)

April 11, 2006 - New Orleans, LA:

For the next two hours on Monday afternoon, we drove through miles of neighborhoods with homes, large and small, where no one lived anymore. You could still see the water lines on the outside of homes which sat for days in flood waters that engulfed entire first floors, leaving thousand of homes uninhabitable today. We surveyed mile after mile of homes missing doors, windows and roofs. Spray painted on the front of many houses were the coded messages left by the teams of first responders who personally inspected virtually every home for survivors and victims when the floods waters began to recede. Everywhere we looked, you would see abandoned cars and debris piled up waiting to be taken somewhere. Anywhere.

But we also saw glimmers of hope amid the devastation. As we drove away from one of the levees that had been breached in the storm, we caught a glimpse of activity around a nearby house in an upper-middle class neighborhood of abandoned homes. Getting out of our vehicle alongside the home, we walked past the backhoe that was tearing out large pieces of a badly-damaged driveway. Standing in the front yard, we met the home's new owner. Along with his visiting father and a small crew of men, they had just finished gutting the entire first floor of what once had been a lovely two-story home. In the back yard sat the remains of another home from a block away that the storm and flood waters had deposited there.

The new owner, who used to visit Delaware with his family, was a man on a mission. He hoped to move into the home in roughly two weeks. Undaunted by the challenge awaiting him, he told us of how most of the homes on his side of that block would soon undergo reconstruction to allow families old and new to move in, hopefully by year's end. He still wasn't sure, though, what to do with the second home that was sitting in his backyard.

As we wished him well and drove away, I was reminded of the spirit of an earlier generation of urban homesteaders in Wilmington's Trinity Vicinity. In fact, 20 years ago, I married one of them. That spirit turned around Trinity Vicinity for keeps. As we headed for a damaged nearby National Guard base, I was encouraged that a similar spirit a generation later might work small wonders in some parts of the Crescent City, too.

But for many other neighborhoods, there is little hope or none at all. If anything, recovery, should it come at all, is years away. In some of the lower-income areas - like the Lower 9th Ward, an historic African American community with above-average homeownership rates - residents will have great difficulty paying to rebuild their homes. In many other low-lying neighbors, no one will ever live there again unless they live in new homes built on foundations rising in some places as much of a dozen feet above the ground.

Katrina is not the last hurricane that will visit our Gulf Coast. Other subsequent storms may bring even stronger winds and serve to dissipate the investments in strengthening a suspect levee system. Unless the people of New Orleans and other communities along the Gulf cost are smart about it, along with our government, more devastation will inevitably follow.

For the better part of two centuries, New Orleans and its surrounding parishes, or counties, were protected from hurricanes, not just by levees, but by the miles of wetlands that stretched 50 miles south from the city to the Gulf of Mexico. The wetlands' grasses, vegetation and trees act as a buffer by absorbing the shock of storms like Katrina, draining some of their force before the hurricane reached populated areas like the city and its surrounding communities.

For more than an hour that Monday afternoon, we flew all over much of what had been a vibrant wetlands to the south of New Orleans. Over time, much of it has eroded away. Marsh grasses, whose root systems held the land together during the various onslaughts by Mother Nature, have succumbed over time to salt water infiltration, gradually killing the roots, the grasses and other vegetation. Much of the land is being swept into the Gulf. Every 35 minutes, an area roughly the size of a football field is lost to the sea. If nothing is done to restore these wetlands, the Gulf Coast will continue its relentless march on the Crescent City, and the outcome of this "Battle of New Orleans" is not one we will ever celebrate.

We had about an hour of down time after our flight and, after checking into our hotel, I went for a run on the same riverwalk that I had run on a number of times over the years. The view along the Mississippi as the sun was setting was as spectacular as ever. After my run and a quick shower, we drove into the University District of Uptown New Orleans, not knowing quite what we'd see when we got there. To my surprise, it looked just as it had all those years ago when I first saw it. We passed block after block of stately homes with their immaculate gardens and lawns before stopping at a lovely home just off St. Charles Street to have dinner as guests of a citizens group called "The Women of the Storm." Along with Senator Landrieu, for the next several hours, we heard from them and from the leaders of business, academia, and the environment who were assembled around Nancy and King Milling's big dining room table.

They shared with us the plan that was taking shape to reverse the loss of wetlands that we had witnessed just hours ago. How? By diverting some of the enormous amounts of sedimentation that the Mississippi carries every day and dumps into the Gulf of Mexico. "Every 2.7 miles of coastal wetlands reduces storm surges by about 1 foot," one of them said. "We have no choice but to get started." I did the math in my head, reflected on the value of our own under-appreciated wetlands in the First State, and concluded that they were on to something. As long as the same folks at the Army Corps of Engineers who've been in charge of contracting for debris removal aren't put in charge of wetlands restoration, I believe that the project should go forward, paid for in large part by revenues from off-shore drilling for oil and gas in the Gulf.

A few minutes after 7am the next morning, the airliner that I was on began its takeoff roll at New Orleans International Airport. The sun was just coming up on a new day in the Crescent City. As we began to climb up to altitude, I looked out my window and saw some of the abandoned neighborhoods that we had driven through the previous afternoon. I saw the work being done to reinforce the levees that had failed. I saw the Superdome which will reopen later this year after $100 million in repairs. I caught a glimpse of the Garden District and the Mississippi's riverwalk. Off to the south stretched the wetlands whose value was taken for granted for so long.

I wouldn't take for granted that New Orleans will fully recover from Katrina; however, this week and next, its citizens both there and in communities scattered across America, will vote to elect a mayor to lead their city into the future. If they choose wisely, and the rest of us continue to lend a hand, their city just might pull it off. On September 25, 2006, the New Orleans Saints will return to the Superdome to play their first home game in over a year there. With the Saints back in the game, the right leadership at the helm, a lot of hard work and a break from Mother Nature, the rest of the city just might be back in the game before long, too.

http://carper.senate.gov/acarpercorner.htm