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Coping with Katrina

It was a Thursday night and a lively crowd was crammed into the dark back room of Le Bon Temps Roule in New Orleans. A brass band was playing its heart out to an appreciative audience but the lyrics were largely lost on me. I had to shout into our friend Morgan’s ear to get the translation. “Who dat? Who dat?” I didn’t understand. 

“Who dat sayin dey gonna beat dem Saints?” is the battle cry of supporters of New Orleans American Football Team, the Saints, who unexpectedly won the Super Bowl in February of this year. It was a moment of great catharsis for the city, allowing the re-appropriation of the Superdome stadium as a place of regeneration rather than one of painful memories. Banners still flutter across the city today bearing words of gratitude: “God bless you boys”. 

As a tourist passing between the bawdy bars of Bourbon Street and the jazz joints of Frenchman Street it’s possible to think that Hurricane Katrina never happened. The streets bustle with buskers and lindyhop dancers, hot dog stands and expensive-looking art galleries. But New Orleans is no longer the city that care forgot. 

Five years after Katrina there are legal cases outstanding against doctors and nurses of the Memorial Hospital accused of euthanizing patients faced with the prospect of painful deaths in a hospital stranded in floodwater with no electricity. There is a continued lack of access to housing and healthcare and a complete lack of development of specific communities like the Lower Ninth Ward, where there are nearly 6,500 unoccupied residential addresses. 

While many people have made the decision to return to support the rebuilding of the city, some locals told us that it would not recover to its former glory for a hundred years. And the US corps of Engineers is still building to complete citywide defences against a hundred year storm by the start of next year’s hurricane season. 

On our last day we took a guided tour of the city, peppering our guide, Bill, with questions. He had alluded to his time in the Superdome during Katrina and as a parting question I asked him if he would tell us about it. 

He normally answers the question by reading a poem he has written but on this day he had forgotten it. And so he answered at length describing his four days of hell, the fear and delirium, while others around the table contributed their experiences of the storm. For a brief moment it felt as if we were a part of a healing process. The sharing of stories and the slow catharsis of reliving the experience. 

Bill has never returned to the Superdome but said he had summoned up the reserve to pay it a visit in the next couple of weeks. 

The hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico runs until the end of November and New Orleans is hoping that it will ride it out without event.

See more photos from New Orleans here.