A tale of two Katrina-ravaged cities (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Thursday, 4 January 2007

A tale of two Katrina-ravaged cities

Since I only had a two-hour drive today from Mobile to New Orleans, I decided to take a detour via what used to be known as the scenic route along the coast. Not that today was likely to be good for sightseeing in any event—it was foggy all day.

Driving along US 90 from Gulfport to Pass Christian was probably the most surreal experience of my life, an experience heightened by the fog on all sides that kept the merely damaged buildings out of sight. Every half-mile or so you could see some effort at rebuilding along the highway, with living quarters usually (but not always) elevated above ground-level garages, but the gaps in between were completely desolate save for “for sale” signs, as if the Hand of God came down and just scooped everything within sight off the planet, leaving a few scrawny trees and eerily empty streets behind. Here are the two photos I took, which if anything understate the devastation.

Driving through eastern New Orleans on I-10 was an altogether different experience, like what one imagines Beirut or Mogadishu would currently look like if either city had previously been American suburbia. On my previous visit, I’d left and arrived via the closer-to-normal western suburbs; the contrast is quite stark.

3 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.

1. Alfie Sumrall wrote @ Sat, 6 Jan 2007, 8:15 am CST:

The fog may not have done it justice, but the drive from Biloxi on 90 is equally surreal. I assume you took 49 down to where it ends at 90, so you missed a lot of the really old ($$$) Civil War-era houses that are nothing but slabs now. I figure if 25% of the condo developments and casino developments that are tossed around ever see the light of day, 10–15 years from now, the Coast will be 100% back. You can’t rewrite or rebuild history, but you can write a script for the future. Man, that’s awfully philosophical of me on a Saturday morning.

2. Chris Lawrence wrote @ Sat, 6 Jan 2007, 4:16 pm CST:

Yeah, I went down 49 to 90 to just past Menge Avenue in Pass Christian.

In some ways I think the MS coast is better off than New Orleans: replacing from what is essentially a blank slate has got to be easier than bulldozing and cleaning up whole neighborhoods to begin with.

The political scientist (or maybe my inner Marvin Overby—“never have an unpublishable thought”) in me wonders if your MA thesis might be relevant to this discussion.

3. Alfie Sumrall wrote @ Sun, 7 Jan 2007, 7:42 am CST:

1. To a person, everyone on the Coast thinks, in the long run, they will be much better off than NOLA. Like you said, they have a blank slate. And, speaking politically, the Coast’s cities have competent mayors (even Bay St. Louis mayor Eddie Favre who will only wear shorts until the city is rebuilt) and the state has a competent governor. Louisiana cannot say the same about Nagin and Blanco. Blanco might be the only governor in history to hand the phone to her spouse when the feds were on the phone b/c she was too “overcome with emotion.”

2. Ha ha, you know I’ve thought of my thesis a few times since then. There is plenty in there that is relevant; though, the disasters in my database only took place in congressional election years. If you ever need anything, I’ve got a couple copies here and there is one, obviously, in the library.

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