1 more time.it's a long article but take note of what the residents say...the Lower 9th looks just as it did right after the water went down.....the city and Ray are working hard in the white sections of town to clear the streets and restore power and such .....it's a trip...
"'A WAR ZONE'
Lower 9th Ward residents finally get the official OK to see their homes, but all that's left is a shattered mess
Friday, December 02, 2005
By Gwen Filosa
Staff writer
New Orleans formally reopened the last piece of the ravaged Lower 9th Ward to residents Thursday, three months after Hurricane Katrina left ruin and decay in every corner of the neighborhood.
Nathan Washington returned to 2128 Lizardi St., his former home. Despite the city's restrictions on access to these streets, closest to the levee breach off Florida Avenue, he had gotten in twice before to see his ruined house, which was uninsured.
"The first couple of times it was kind of rough," Washington said. "I can deal with it now. I built this house from the ground up. Finished it in 1991, when me and my wife were barely making minimum wage."
The floodwaters spun his house around, and plopped it back down. Part of it crushed his daughter's car in the driveway. On Thursday, Washington and his brother tried to retrieve some tools from the back of the mangled house.
They were among the Lower 9th Ward residents Thursday who weren't in tears, but in awe that three months after the hurricane, the hardest-hit part of New Orleans appeared frozen in time. There was the same plastic tricycle stuck in the chain-link fence on North Roman Street. There was the same overturned grocery cart, coated in brown muck, on Caffin Avenue's neutral ground.
The Washington family has lived in the Lower 9th Ward since 1947, the brothers said, so they know their hurricanes. The damage to the Lower 9, so vast and awful, isn't what shocks them, they said -- it's the lax response by government to enact any plan to rebuild or repopulate the city.
Couldn't they at least come take away the snapped power lines that hung across the streets and the frayed light poles?
"I think I'm in a war zone, really," said Washington's brother Wilmot, who lost his house in eastern New Orleans. "I'm supposed to walk in this? What needs to be done hasn't been done. There is no reason they couldn't be doing something."
While Thursday marked the opening of the entire Lower 9th Ward, the city still had some rules and limits in place. This was still "look and leave," Mayor Ray Nagin's office said, and "enter at your own risk." The area is open only from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and no residents are allowed to remain after dark. Identification is required to enter.
Residents must sign in at the disaster recovery center at the intersection of Caffin and North Claiborne avenues and display a paper "pass" on their car windshields. Police barricades remain on most of the streets, as the city Thursday tried to usher all traffic through Caffin.
The city, along with activist groups, urge residents to wear protective gear, from masks to boots, and to wash their hands often. Activists were handing out respirators, gloves and foot coverings Thursday at Claiborne and Caffin.
Uncertain future
Wilmot Washington, 65, kicked at the soft muck that was everywhere in the neighborhood and shook his head at the downed power lines still hanging in front of his brother's house. He and some relatives, including his 97-year-old aunt, rode out the storm in eastern New Orleans and were rescued by boat. He wants to come back to his hometown, but the obstacles are like that thick dark muck that covers the Lower 9th Ward -- the sediment that environmental activists say poses health risks.
It is the same muck that Prince Charles freely roamed through during his visit to the area last month, while homeowners and residents were still barred from the streets near the Industrial Canal because the city deemed it too dangerous to reopen.
The Washingtons, and other Lower 9th Ward originals, are frustrated at the neighborhood's grim reality and bleak future. It's a time when the Lower 9 is caught in the sights of developers seeking mass property buyouts. Activists have papered the streets off Caffin with red and white "No Bulldozing" signs, even on Fats Domino's compound.
"I stayed away for two months because I had nowhere to stay," said Wilmot Washington, who retired after working 35 years at the Folgers coffee plant. "The system didn't bring me back. I brought myself back. I've moved five times since the storm. My sister moved to Atlanta and I moved back into her house" in New Orleans.
'This is home'
Without insurance, Nathan Washington isn't sure what he will do about rebuilding, but he has yet to give up on the Lizardi Street property he bought 32 years ago. He believed he had full coverage on the home and had mailed the check for payment on a homeowners, flood and fire policy before the storm, he said. But the company had mailed it back, inexplicably, he said.
When he called his company after the storm, he was told that his homeowners, flood and fire policies didn't exist.
"Which means we don't have insurance," Washington said. "I don't want to dwell on it."
The Washingtons said they want to continue living and working in New Orleans, for basically one reason: "This is home," Wilmot Washington said.
But a few blocks over, at North Dorgenois Street and Caffin, another Lower 9th Ward family said it wasn't coming back.
'I'm blessed'
Keisha Thornabar, 27, peered into the home she had rented for $754 a month, trying to figure out a way to retrieve her children's photographs that hung on the wall. A mine field of rubble was between her and the portraits, though, and she wore only sneakers.
"I can't take nothing out," she said, on her first walking tour of her former home. She had viewed the neighborhood about a month ago from one of the Gray Line tour buses provided by the city.
"I don't know. I really don't even want to stay in New Orleans," said the mother of three who drove a school bus for Holy Cross before the storm.
Days ago, she landed an apartment in Algiers, but it's more expensive and nothing like having her own house for her children. She wondered aloud Thursday if she could get a Habitat for Humanity home.
"I'm blessed," Thornabar said of having survived the storm. "But I need help. I just want my children to have a wonderful Christmas."
She looked at her flooded car, which she had bought so recently before evacuating that she had not yet purchased insurance. Next door was St. Luke Baptist Church -- or what's left of it. Only the facade, including the front doors, remain standing. "
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... please make yourself at home ... 