View From The End Of The World
‘One of the things we forgot is that Katrina is a terrorist’, Walter Maestri, Emergency Manager For Jefferson Parish was looking around at a deserted French Quarter in New Orleans. The French Quarter was one of the few lucky areas of the city to avoid the catastrophic floods that have turned New Orleans into a foul smelling ghost town. Walter has been a fixture on National Television over the last three weeks. For years he begged and badgered anyone who would listen about the flood risk from a Hurricane. No did, now they can’t get enough of his homespun wisdom. For Walter, the events of August 29th is Louisiana’s 911. A terrorist attack known about and ignored, but this time it was not Islamic radicals, but one of Nature’s terrorist, the Atlantic Hurricane. Unlike the Middle East version, this terrorist was no sleeper cell. In the days prior to Katrina’s attack, NASA, NOAA and an alphabet soup of organizations and experts had followed the whereabouts of the coming storm. Katrina’s every move, her every mood change was charted, measured analyzed. By August 28th, they all sensed the worst about to happen. New Orleans’s last hope was her coastal defenses, the hundreds of thousands of square acres of marshland.
Those marshlands quelled and diverted storms for 200 years. They were the ramparts holding out against the furies of elements. Over the previous 70 years, 2000 square miles of marsh grasses had vanished. For an array reasons from changes to the Mississippi River, that starved the bayous of silt and sedimentation, to oil drilling in the Gulf, the marshes and wetlands were in poor shape. On August 29, the ramparts fell. In a real sense those wetland were a sacred battleground, like Gettysburg, Verdun, Normandy, places where the course of history was changed.
The following morning I was invited by the Louisiana State Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to tour the bayous. Except for a few National Guard troops, no one had gone down to see the place where the Battle of New Orleans was lost. Our destination was Delacroix, a commercial fishing village. The town has one claim to fame, a mention in a Bob Dylan song, but for the most part it is off the beaten track to all but the most avid crabbers. Getting there was a challenge, traveling to and through New Orleans was difficult enough, what roads are not under water are manned by National Guard troops. For security reasons and some not stated reasons, these roadblocks move, so at any given time on any given day no-one can tell you how to get anywhere. I was lucky to be linked up with three of the Department’s most knowledgeable specialists, Noel who seemed to know the hide out of every alligator in the swamps, Harry, the department manager with a telepathic connection to the fish populations and to where illegal fishing nets were strung and Heather a specialist in rare Bayou birds. What they did not know about the wetlands wasn’t probably worth knowing. It certainly helped that they knew the roads. Once past New Orleans and through the small towns of Reggio and Violet the landscape changed. Road signs vanished. The open grasslands were brown and turning black, destroyed by the surging seawaters. In the air hung the smell of decay, not the reek of sewers like that in New Orleans; this decay had the pleasant smell of late fall. The further we drove into the bayous the roads narrowed, to thin ribbons now heavily eroded with dark pools of water, and the occasional sickly yellow pond. The trees were stripped of leaves, many had been blown down, and one brought us to a dead stop. On the other side of the tree the road had been destroyed, a bright yellow torrent of water with a sulphurous smell was cascading into a lagoon. By the side of the road was a dead horse, trapped by the storm waters just yards from its stall. Everywhere the signs of destruction, trees stripped of their leaves, the earth covered in sticky black goo. I knew that I was entering the battlefield.
A short detour brought us to Delacroix, there was not building standing, just the skeletons to mark the spot. There were clumps of dead marsh grasses everywhere, on the remnants of buildings, in the branches of trees, and dangling off telephone poles. The End of The World Marina was just a shell; festooned with so much marsh grass it gave the appearance of an ancient ruin just uncovered by archeologists. Making the view from the End of The World truly remarkable was the Battlefield debris, boats lodged in trees, sticking out of the fetid marsh water, and jammed at strange angles into the skeletons of buildings. Along the road were the carcasses of wildlife; an armadillo squashed on the pavement, dead crabs and snakes baking in the sun. Next to the End of The World was the rubble of a new home, utterly destroyed except for a wet bar standing unscathed with a full compliment of hard liquor! In the bayou, by what was once a boat landing there was an overturned partially submerged Chevy panel van that had been hurled into the water. Across the road was the Roser home. I knew that because the mailbox was still standing in front of the ruin of what was their home. In their neighbor’s yard between the shattered cedar trees, with plastic ducks hanging from their branches was a Hackberry tree in full bloom. That there are trees that like hurricane winds of 160 miles per hour was something of a revelation. Out on the water, what remained of the marsh grass was broken up, some turning from brown to black. I asked Noel if there was any chance it could recover, he thought for a while, it depends, he said slowly, whether the silts and sediments can be replenished. I asked if that was likely. He told me it would be expensive, the oil companies wouldn’t like it, as it would effect the waterways used to carry their cargoes and the shrimp fishermen would not like it because it would kill their farms, and it would mean reconfiguring the Mississippi River. So, I asked what if they don’t. Well, he said, there is not much point to rebuilding New Orleans. And the thought struck me, then the Battle of New Orleans would be truly lost
