/ Xeni Jardin / 5:39 am Tue Aug 30, 2011

After Hurricane Katrina, years of post-traumatic stress: a first-person account


Photo: Reuters

My friend Susannah Breslin, a periodic guest contributor to Boing Boing, has written a piece for the Atlantic about her experience as a survivor of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

When I did return to New Orleans, the city was ravaged, its great oak trees broken, its buildings crumbling, a refrigerator stranded on a dark sidewalk like a ghost. My neighborhood was deserted. A sign on the front of the house where I had lived indicated the roof shingles, which had come off during the storm, contained asbestos. I was in the 20 percent of the city that hadn't flooded, but portions of the roof had come off during the storm.

Inside, the rain had spawned black, green, and yellow mold that crawled the walls. I could see the sky from the living room through the exposed wooden slats of the structure's bones. The ceiling was in the bed. In the backyard, a towering pecan tree that had stood for probably 100 years had been uprooted from the ground and tossed aside like a toothpick by a bored giant.

I took the boxes and my papers from the mostly undisturbed kitchen. From the rest of the house, I picked and chose from the things that didn't appear to have mold or asbestos on them. The following day, I drove out of the city. There was a boat in the middle of the street. The houses gaped, slack-jawed and empty-faced. I drove across the eastbound span of the Twin Span Bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, and parts of the westbound span of the bridge were simply gone. I drove an hour through a destroyed forest, and when I looked up in the sky, I tried to imagine a thing so big that it could destroy so much.

After Hurricane Katrina, Years of Post-Traumatic Stress

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  1. I feel sorry for New Orleans. 

    While those of us who live on the Gulf Coast truly understand the long-term effects of Hurricane Katrina, I fear that coverage of storm’s anniversary will be cancelled out by the coverage of Hurricane Irene’s aftermath.  Please understand: I am not belittling the flooding, the power outages or any of the destruction caused by Irene.  It is just that, because there is such a concentration of news media in the Northeast, there will be an over-valuing of the coverage of Irene’s aftermath to the detriment of reporting on the still-extant economic, social, and psychological toll caused by Katrina.

    In other words (and to paraphrase Porfirio Diaz): poor New Orleans.  So far from God and so close to the rest of the United States.

    1. As a New Orleanian, I’m happy about that. Yes, there is still a lot to be done, but the constant barrage of photos on TV of flood waters is awful and frankly, we’d like to move on. Every year, whenever a football game is played around the anniversary (like the Saints/Raiders game this past weekend) they feel the need to show a video of the Superdome with its roof damaged and water on the streets of downtown. THE GAME WAS IN CALIFORNIA but they still did this.

      We appreciate support and reminders to people that we’re still not 100% and will forever be grateful of everything the entire world continues to do for us, but the sensationalism of showing Katrina photos/videos during unrelated TV events is sickening.
      I just want to forget the thing ever happened. It’s not something I want to see pictures of every year. We will never forget what happened and we’ll remember the best way us New Orleanians know how (9th Ward residents held a second line at the site of the breach in their levee). Constant covering it on the news isn’t how we want to remember it.

  2. A New Orleans native, my family and I rode through Hurricane Betsy in
    1965. I was 4 years old at the time and to this day, the sound of howling winds,
    debris clattering against and vertical rain pummeling the building still
    make me break out in a terror. If Hurricane Camile had followed Betsy’s
    path instead of turning east in 1969, I don’t know if my family and I
    would have survived. As it was, Betsy’s storm surge was more than strong
    enough to overwhelm the 17th St. and Industrial Canal levees (and on
    both sides, too) in 1965 just as what occurred later in 2005.

    1. There seems to be an unwritten rule in the USA, that things that don’t occur at least once in a decade or two, are not worth preparing for. Which is unfortunate, no matter how you look at it. Even from the much maligned economic point of view. What’s a billion dollars for levees? The estimated cost for them was well below that – and even a billion was just 2% or so of the damage that was done.

      There is no question, that this would have been an extremely profitable investment – but unfortunately you need a strong government to do those investments. and not one that is constantly busy try to get rid of itself.

      1. I know this sounds callous, but I would make the reverse argument. If something like this happens with any frequency at all- why live there? I don’t see the point of dumping billions of dollars into fortifying an area that periodically gets obliterated.

        1. The historical reason (still relevant today to some extent) is that ports are valuable. But, they tend to occur near the ocean and so are prone to flooding and other disasters.

  3. I moved back home to New Orleans three days before Katrina. Lost all my stuff but for the tiny percentage still in my mother’s home.

    Oddly enough I kinda feel like the loss of so many material possessions was helpful in getting through the next few years without falling to pieces. I didn’t have anything to be a constant reminder of it.

  4. I went through it in Mississippi, you know, the “other” place the hurricane hit. Do yourself a favor and look up what happened to the city of Waveland..

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