katrina

I spent most of this past week in New Orleans on court business. Amanda was able to accompany me, and while we had a great time, it was with sadness that we observed the continuing impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city. In the next few posts, I’ll write about our trip. First up: the state of the Central Business District and the French Quarter.

Our courthouse is located near the intersection of Magazine and Poydras, and near Canal street and within easy walking distance of the French Quarter. The Central Business District was fortunate in that it didn’t suffer significant flooding. Nonetheless, the buildings there still suffered wind, water, and fire damage. Broken windows are still pretty common even in some of the high rises, as are piles of debris around the more damaged buildings. I even saw a few discarded refridgerators still laying on the sidewalk. A few buildings are damaged much more severely, essentially gutted. Despite the damage, many business are open, and there is active construction throughout the district, with dumpsters full of debris lining Poydras and Canal.

We stayed in the Windsor Court near the courthouse—which, incidentally, had some beautiful roses in the lobby–and the hotel was directly across the street from the burning building I wrote about in the aftermath of Katrina. It turns out that the building that burned was not in fact the Hotel de L’Eau Vive, but rather the building directly adjacent to the hotel, which housed a Subway restaurant and several condos.

On our last night in the city, we walked down into the French Quarter and by Jackson Square. The Cathedral looks like it’s in good shape, but a number of stores and restaurants in the Quarter are still closed. The most conspicuous difference around Jackson Square, however, was the absence of street performers. Normally home to mimes, musicians, palm readers, balloon artists, living statues, and other performers, the streets were mostly empty, with only a few tourists and residents about. As in the CBD, there is active construction and repair in the Quarter.

We learned after we arrived that we were staying in the same hotel as Denzel Washington, who is currently in New Orleans filming Deja Vu.  We heard a rumor that Denzel was in the hotel gym every morning at five o’clock, but my co-clerk reports that he never showed up.  We didn’t get to see Denzel, but they were filming near Jackson Square when we walked by.  Aside from some bright staging lights and a helicopter repeatedly buzzing the Cathedral, we didn’t see much.

We also didn’t drive into the harder hit areas of town, including the Ninth Ward.  As you’ve no doubt seen on the news, many of those areas, particularly north and east of the CBD, suffered tremendous damage.  Most of those areas have not been repopulated, and the latest estimates suggest that less than 100,000 people are sleeping in New Orleans each night, down from a population before the storm of over a half million.  The activity in the CBD gives me some hope, but there’s a long road ahead for New Orleans.

The major media outlets are starting to pick up on the environmental destruction left behind by Katrina and the flooding.

“New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07lake.html:

bq. While the human and economic toll of Hurricane Katrina continued to mount, New Orleans was beginning to pump back into Lake Pontchartrain the floodwaters that had inundated the city. But this is not the same water that flooded the city. What started flowing back into the lake on Monday and continued spilling into it Tuesday is laced with raw sewage, bacteria, heavy metals, pesticides and toxic chemicals, Louisiana officials said on Tuesday.

“Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/06/AR2005090600498.html:

bq. The dank and putrid floodwaters choking this once-gracious city are so poisoned with gasoline, industrial chemicals, feces and other contaminants that even casual contact is hazardous, and safe drinking water may not be available for the entire population for years to come, state and federal officials warned Tuesday. … Most sewage-treatment plants in New Orleans were destroyed. Two major spills sent 78,000 barrels of oil into Lake Pontchartrain, and fuel has coated the city from 2,200 fuel tanks and leaking gasoline from flooded cars and boats.

“Reuters”:http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2005-09-06T191700Z_01_N0624037_RTRIDST_0_KATRINA-ENVIRONMENT-PICTURE.XML:

bq. Preliminary figures indicate 140,000 to 160,000 homes were flooded and will not be recovered, he said. “Literally, they are unsalvageable,” [Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Mike McDaniel] said.

“Christian Science Monitor”:http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0908/p01s01-usgn.html:

bq. As engineers began pumping out the Big Easy this week, creating small but visible wakes of water behind street signs and tree trunks, the water they’re moving carries a volatile mix of everything imaginable - from household paints, deodorants, and old car batteries to railroad tank cars, sewage treatment plants, and landfills. While state officials stop short of calling it a toxic soup, at least so far, federal environmental officials call it catastrophic. … “The waters are horrible,” Mickey Gilliard, an employee of the Jefferson Parish Drainage Department, says, pointing to a half-submerged oil barrel lying in the 17th Street Canal, clearly leaking a dark fluid. “All we can do is to try to start pumping it into the lake and into the river.”

The breach in the 17th Street levee has now been repaired, and the pumps have been “turned back on”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aAXWfdM2pOEc&refer=top_world_news. However, it will take at least 75 days to pump all the water out of New Orleans, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. Where is the water going? Apparently the water is being pumped right back into the Pontchartrain. Given the amount of contaminants that may now be in that water—a “toxic soup” as the Mayor has called it—we may have an environmental disaster on our hands, spreading slowly into the Gulf of Mexico. For example, the Agriculture Street Landfill, a federal Superfund site on the National Priorities List of highly contaminated sites requiring cleanup and containment, takes up 95 acres in New Orleans, and is now under three feet or more of water. The flood waters, the same flood waters now being pumped back into the lake, could potentially cause the landfill’s toxic contents, the result of decades of municipal and industrial waste dumping, to leach out. Read more at “Solid Waste & Recycling Magazine”:http://www.solidwastemag.com/article.asp?id=47051&issue=09012005.

*Update:* Unbelievably, the EPA has been “*excluded*”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2005/09/06/white-house-excludes-epa-from-hurricane-response-task-force/ from the the federal Hurricane Response Task Force.

*Update 2:* More from “The Indepedant”:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310814.ece.

bq. Toxicologists and public health experts warned yesterday that pumping billions of gallons of contaminated water from the streets of New Orleans back into the Gulf of Mexico - the only viable option if the city is ever to return to even a semblance of its former self -would have a crippling effect on marine and animal life, compromise the wetlands that form the first line of resistance to future hurricanes, and carry deleterious consequences for human health throughout the region.

Thousands of evacuees from New Orleans and the surrounding area are streaming into cities across the country. The population of Baton Rouge has more than doubled, and here in Lafayette, officials expect as many as 40,000 residents of the affected areas to _permanently_ relocate here. Houston and other cities in Texas have stepped up to the plate, taking in a huge number of the evacuees. “Christine Hurt”:http://www.theconglomerate.org/2005/09/from_the_astrod.html and “Ted Barlow”:http://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/03/the-scene-at-the-houston-convention-center/ have both posted personal accounts of working at the Astrodome, and “Jenny Cu”:http://flickr.com/photos/jennycu/sets/889257/, “Zach Casper”:http://flickr.com/photos/zcasper/sets/882803/, “Kit Jarrell”:http://flickr.com/photos/euphoriadev/sets/872440/, and “Todd Porch”:http://flickr.com/photos/toddporch/sets/885483/ have each posted a set of photos from the Astrodome in flickr. “Tom Kirkendall”:http://blog.kir.com/archives/002366.asp writes about the big picture relief effort in Houston, especially the hundreds of churches involved.

Google Maps just added several satellite images of the flooding in the New Orleans area after Katrina rolled through. For example, “here is the Superdome”:http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=29.951430,-90.081099&spn=0.004107,0.007369&t=e&hl=en, and “here is Highway 610″:http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=29.995920,-90.119820&spn=0.004105,0.007369&t=e&hl=en disappearing into the water.

Nearly all of my traffic these days is coming from searches for Katrina pictures. Well, to satisfy your curiosity, here’s a roundup of sources for photos. I’ll be adding to this as I find more.

* My picture sets (I write the entry, so I get to be first): I’ve posted two sets of pictures to Flickr showing some of the damage from Katrina and its aftermath. The first shows “one of the fires”:http://flickr.com/photos/brainwidth/sets/871062/ which burned yesterday in New Orleans, and the second shows “damage around the Venice, Louisiana area.”:http://flickr.com/photos/brainwidth/sets/876453/ You can also see my photostream for some earlier pics and radar screencaps as Katrina was rolling in.
* Flickr has a number of Katrina pictures. Try the “Hurricane Katrina group”:http://www.flickr.com/groups/45871688@N00/ or the “Katrina tag”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/katrina/clusters/, to start. Sight Clutter has “a beautiful set of photos”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/slightclutter/sets/847243/, including pics of the first bus to arrive in Houston.
* Getty Images is one of the largest commercial providers of digital images, and galleries of photos in the “recent events” category are available “here”:http://editorial.gettyimages.com/source/search/product.aspx?p=1&e=0&pg=1&am=-1. This includes galleries of Katrina images, as well as other recent events in the news. Here are a few of the most recent galleries of Katrina photos: “[1]”:http://editorial.gettyimages.com/source/search/FrameSet.aspx?s=EventImagesSearchState%7c1%7c0%7c28%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c1%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c54208252%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0&p=1&tag=1 “[2]”:http://editorial.gettyimages.com/source/search/FrameSet.aspx?s=EventImagesSearchState%7c1%7c0%7c28%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c1%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c53536426%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0&p=1&tag=2 “[3]”:http://editorial.gettyimages.com/source/search/FrameSet.aspx?s=EventImagesSearchState%7c1%7c0%7c28%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c1%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c53914165%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0&p=1&tag=3 “[4]”:http://editorial.gettyimages.com/source/search/FrameSet.aspx?s=EventImagesSearchState%7c1%7c0%7c28%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c1%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c53914493%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0%7c0&p=1&tag=4.
* Yahoo News has a number of “Katrina photo galleries”:http://news.yahoo.com/photos, including: “[1]”:http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/ts/090105hurrickatrina “[2]”:http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/ts/083105katrinaaerial “[3]”:http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/ts/083105katrinadome.
* Vincent Laforet, a professional photojournalist, has a “gallery of Katrina pictures”:http://www.vincentlaforet.com/katrina/index.html.
* The New York Times has an “interactive slide show”:http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/09/03/national/20050903_STORM_FEATURE.html?HI with a number of pictures.
* The Washington Post also has several galleries, including “an interactive slide show”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2005/09/03/GA2005090300872_index_frames.htm?startat=1, “several panoramas”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/flash/photo/nation/2005-08-30_pano/index_frames.htm?startat=1&indexFile=test_2005-08-30_pano, and “a collection of galleries and videos”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/special/7/.
* The LA Times has several galleries: “[1]”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-0902katrina_wire-pg,0,6817280.photogallery?coll=la-home-headlines “[2]”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-090105katrina-pg,0,510796.photogallery?coll=la-home-headlines “[3]”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-0831katrina_rescue-pg,1,130336.photogallery?ctrack=1&cset=true “[4]”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-0831hurricane_outnola-pg,1,2674793.photogallery “[5]”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-0830katrina_aftermath-pg,1,5904431.photogallery “[6]”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-0829hurricane_katrina-pg,1,5956177.photogallery.
* The Houston Chronicle has “a gallery of photos of evacuees arriving in Houston.”:http://www.chron.com/content/news/photos/05/09/01/astrodome/photo1.html
* The folks at “DirecNIC”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/ have barricaded themselves into their building and have pledged to keep the servers up and running. In the process, they’ve taken a number of pictures and posted galleries online. All of these pictures are in and around DirecNIC’s building located at “650 Poydras”:http://maps.google.com/maps?q=650+Poydras+St,+New+Orleans,+LA+70130&spn=0.013477,0.020262&t=e&hl=en. Some of these may contain duplicate pictures: “[1]”:http://www.nola-intel.org/pictures2/ “[2]”:http://sigmund.biz.nyud.net:8090/kat200509012/index.html “[3]”:http://sigmund.biz/kat/ “[4]”:http://sigmund.biz/kat20050901/ “[5]”:http://www.nola-intel.org/pictures3/.
* From the cryptome eyeballing series: Eyeballing Katrina Damage “[1]”:http://eyeball-series.org/kat01/katrina-01.htm “[2]”:http://cryptome.org/kat02/katrina-02.htm “[3]”:http://cryptome.org/kat03/katrina-03.htm.

If you know of other good galleries or sources for pictures, please post them in the comments.

Rigzone, a portal for the offshore energy industry, has “a story on the damage to the rigs and platoforms”:http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=24992 in Katrina’s wake.

bq. When Hurricane Katrina blew through the Gulf, 62 rigs stood in its direct path, while another 55 rigs were within the reach of its tropical storm force winds. No damage has been reported on any of the rigs outside of its direct path, but many of the rigs in its path were damaged. According to rig manager reports as of Friday, Sept 2nd, a total of 12 rigs had endured notable damage; nearly 20% of the rigs in the path of the storm.

bq. …

bq. Based on information provided by operators owning platforms and leases in the Gulf of Mexico, there are at least 30 offshore platforms that have been damaged to varying degrees by Hurricane Katrina. Of those 30 platforms, reports show that 18 platforms appear to have been completely lost, while another 12 platforms have been damaged. The majority of damage has occurred on shallow water platforms, but there are a few notable exceptions.

The articles contains links to more detailed reports, for those interested. Also of note, RigLogix has “an interactive map showing damage”:http://gom.rigzone.com/ to particular rigs and platforms.