It's been seven years since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 people and leaving molding shambles in its wake. New Orleans is still recovering, in some places more than others. This past May, more
than a dozen employees from the New York City Parks Department used a week of
their vacation time to help the city rebuild. —Friday, May 11, 2012, Lower Ninth Ward
“THIS IS WHERE YOU are,” Tom Pepper said to a roomful of
roughly 20 volunteers.
Pepper is the director of , a non-profit
perched near the levee’s edge of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. He held up a book titled ,
and pointed at a two-story white house on the cover. The yards around it were flooded with water. A deep olive sea reflected second-story
windows and the crowns of trees. A burgundy barge floated amidst the ruins. A
few hundred feet away, where the wall of the Industrial Canal should have been, whitewater rushed into
the city.
The volunteers stood around Pepper in the living room of
the house, which is now purple. Common Ground Relief gutted, rebuilt, and painted
the house after the storm. The color helped it fit in, at least a little, with
the surrounding 70-plus funky, pastel, acutely-angled homes built by Brad Pitt’s .
Pepper continued. On August 29, Hurricane Katrina’s
eye hovered 25 to 30 miles east of here and sent a 25-foot high tidal surge up
the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, whose fixed banks funneled the water toward
the city and into the Industrial Canal. Tulane University geographer Richard
Campanella . The water in the canal rose 14 feet above normal levels.
Pressure built, and shortly after 7 a.m., two giant sections of the wall
collapsed. All that saltwater, and then that barge, poured into a neighborhood
that is four feet below sea level in some places.
Cameras focused on the barge, but the water knocked down
walls, splintered homes, and drowned people. Some people climbed onto roofs. The water sat, turning into a toxic soup, held still in the bowl of a city. More than a week later, over . Many of the people who climbed onto roofs were saved, albeit with memories
of .
Still, people wanted to come back. Even though the Lower
Ninth Ward , was below sea level, and was surrounded on three sides
by water, it also had than the city as a whole. An estimated 20,000 people lived in
the neighborhood before the storm. The area has been slow to recover. Pepper said the deluge destroyed more than
4,000 homes. A published this past spring described
sections of the neighborhood as a jungle, returning to nature. Roughly 5,500
people live here now.
Common Ground Relief is trying to create a welcoming environment
for the people who want to return. Pepper said they have gutted more than 3,000
homes in the city and rebuilt more than 130 in the Lower Ninth Ward. The
organization also teaches families to build raised gardens so they can grow
vegetables in toxin-free soil, runs a legal clinic that offers free advice to
lower income residents, and replants marsh grasses to help build a natural
buffer around the city. They've done all this by relying on a rag tag army of roughly
40,000 volunteers. Today’s volunteers include 14 people from the New York City
Parks Department, who plan to wade through waist-deep water in a bayou filled
with bugs, snakes, and, they’ve heard, alligators—all to plant a few blades
of grass.
THE NEW YORKERS CAME because of Brian Aucoin, a 39-year-old
New Orleans metro native. He moved to New York City 13 years ago to
work for the Parks Department. Three months after Katrina, he traveled home
for Thanksgiving and could not believe what he saw in his old neighborhood: no working traffic lights,
no running water, no electricity, no garbage collectors. “Debris and trash were
scattered everywhere the eye could see,” he said. “Abandoned and wasted cars,
entire contents of houses piled higher than the first floor of homes, rotted
and mildewed furniture, carpet, drywall, appliances.”
His first day back, he and his wife
left their six-month-old son with
his parents and helped clean up Mid-City. After six hours of work, he vowed to return
in the spring. “I simply could not not do anything,” he said.
He came back that May with a crew of 30
people, and has come back every May since. He recruits by sending a broadcast
email to co-workers and then gathering people for an informal slideshow. He is
polite and mellow, with thinning black hair and kind eyes. As I would find out
later that morning, he works relentlessly hard and leads quietly by example.
He works as the director
of environmental service and training programs, recruiting, training, and overseeing volunteers in a wide variety of ecological restoration projects. On vacation in New
Orleans, he helped with the same type of work. His crews have rebuilt houses and
replanted parks, volunteering over the last six years with Habitat for
Humanity, The Phoenix of New Orleans, the St. Bernard Project, Bayou Rebirth,
and Common Ground Relief.
Earlier in the week, they spent two days in City Park
planting native trees and removing exotic Chinese tallows. Later in the
week, they helped restore an 85-year-old double shotgun home in the Gentilly
neighborhood that belonged to a retired city pump operator. Like Pepper, Aucoin
hopes today's planting at the city’s edge will help protect what's been rebuilt.
NEW ORLEANS AND THE land around it are sinking.
are easy to recite, but hard to fathom. Louisiana loses a football field-sized
patch of land every 50 minutes.
The state accounts for of the coastal land loss in the country,
more than 1,800 miles of land since 1932. That’s an area the size of
Delaware—or an area the size of Manhattan every year.
Campanella
that the sinking has a lot to do with humans building sharp, hard lines across
a soft environment, the Mississippi Delta. Canals made by oil and gas companies for ships allow storm
surges to flow further inland. Saltwater invades brackish habitat, killing
native plants and animals. The vegetation dies and floats away. The land
follows it into the Gulf. The canals grow in size, which leads to more
saltwater intrusion, more plant die off, and more erosion. The land subsides
further courtesy of the oil and gas sucked out from the ground beneath the
wetlands.
The Mississippi River is now one really big fixed line, but that its delta once moved like the hand of a piano player along the coast,
depositing sediment as it tracked east to west and back in a fluid motion. It has
since been set in place with locks and dams. The government constricted the
river to facilitate shipping and to prevent flooding. That mostly worked, but the sediment
it once gently laid down along the coast in a meandering tickle it now spits deep
into the Gulf of Mexico.
A lot of that sediment passes by . In 1990, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service took
control of the 23,000-acre park, which is one of the last remaining marsh areas
next to Lake Pontchartrain and the largest urban national wildlife refuge in
the country. It’s an important habitat for wildlife. Up to 340 bird species can
be found in the refuge, with a peak population during migration season of 30,000.
It’s also an important buffer against storm surge. But Bayou Sauvage is
sinking—the refuge has lost 10 inches in elevation since 1950—and suffering.
On August 29, 2005, when the eye of Katrina passed roughly 15
miles East of Bayou Sauvage, it sent a storm surge of six to eight feet through
the refuge. Winds blew up to 132 miles per hour. Saltwater mixed with the more
brackish water and stayed in the bayou long after Katrina. The increased
salinity helped kill up to 90 percent of the trees in the bottomland forest and
destroyed more than 1,700 acres of marsh grasses, which is why Common Ground brings volunteers here.
“FIRST THINGS FIRST,” A U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist
named Drew Wirwa said.
The volunteers should sign the liability waiver. They passed
it around. Wirwa pointed at a silver horse trailer with 6,000 bulrush plants—single
reeds to be dug firmly into the mud under a couple feet of water. Someone asked
if there were alligators in the bayou. “The biggest danger is trees and
debris,” Wirwa said.
A few hundred feet out from shore a makeshift wall of dessicate evergreens poked out of the water, interrupting a reflection of clouds that looked
like stretched cotton filler. National Guard helicopters had in a line in the middle of the water, stacking the evergreens up to build
a barricade against storm surge and collect sediment. Wirwa said the volunteers should plant the bulrush in the
space between the shore and that tree wall, in bunches of 10 to 30, with each
plug pushed elbow deep into the mud. “You're
going to be able to come here in years and see this area filled in,” said
Wirwa. “Barring another hurricane.”
The volunteers formed a line next to the trailer and passed the
plants down into a bunch near a path. Everyone grabbed a bundle and trudged to
the water over land as firm as a wet sponge. Before they moved too far away,
Wirwa yelled out one last piece of advice. “And if you haven't signed that
paper, go ahead and do it,” he said. “Just in case an alligator does get
you.”
The volunteers waded off the edge of the sponge and into knee-deep
drink the color of sweet tea. The mud beneath the water encouraged, rather than
stopped, their sinking. The bottom had the consistency of hot fudge. Those that
didn’t move quickly got stuck. Chuckles turned into guffaws and then grimaces.
The more people struggled, the more they got stuck. Shoes and sandals were lost, retrieved,
and lost again.
Someone yelled—the first introduction to a Christmas tree that
didn’t quite make the helicopter drop at the breakwall. The pine’s branches, which
had been marinating in swamp water for months, had lost none of their brittle,
sharp qualities.
Aucoin dragged two bundles at a time a couple of hundred
feet out on each trip. He moved at a faster pace than the others, both through
the bayou and as he planted. He was quiet, quick, and somehow avoided getting
stuck. As he worked, he thought about improvements. “I quickly realized that with a few canoes or small aluminum
boats we could maximize our efforts,”
he said.
Those logistical improvements would have to wait. A Common Ground Relief employee named Elisha took to
swimming the reeds out before digging them into the mud. Others followed suit. The
bulrush started popping up in patches, strips, and then, sheets of green. By
11:00 a.m. there were roughly a dozen green swaths breaking up the reflection
of the clouds.
Terese Flores, a woman in a blue hat, a yellow shirt, and
Carhartt waders, planted bulrush into the mud roughly 100 feet from shore. Carrie
Grassi, a volunteer fifteen feet away, plugged nearby as though she was getting
paid by the plant. “I was just thinking about this,” Flores said to Grassi.
She paused to pull up a mud-dipped arm. “My dad would say, 'You went on vacation
to do what?'”
MOST PEOPLE WHO VISIT New Orleans come for a vacation of a different sort. Often, they head to the French
Quarter, where they stumble over cobblestone and pot-holed streets and whiff an olfactory spectrum that ranges from the subtle accents of five-star kitchens to the not-so-subtle smells wafting up from between the cobblestones. They gawk at colors ranging from gold to iridescent purple to
any tone of flesh. They barter for beads, gorge on seafood, and gulp down a
sugary palette of pastel drinks: pink Hurricanes from Pat O’Brien's, lime Hand
Grenades from Tropical Isle, blue daiquiris or purple jelly shots from so many
stops on so many streets.
The number of people visiting since Katrina has increased. The New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau announced that the city hosted
4.9 million visitors in the first half of 2012. For the first time since the hurricane, the city is approaching
2004 numbers—10.1 million tourists. Tourism spending has also increased, trumping pre-Katrina numbers with $5.5 billion spent in 2011.
Tourism jobs are not at pre-Katrina levels. Jobs in the tourism industry rose to 70,000, about 14,000 jobs
below 2004 numbers, according to the bureau. The bureau says the discrepancy is a result of not enough
people looking for work. Others have different numbers that show an even bigger gap. They say the discrepancy has to do with a situation familiar
to people all over the country. “Although
tourism in terms of visitors has rebounded, they have come to some new level of
efficiency,” said Allison Plyer of the . “That’s how you might put it in economic terms, of doing more with fewer
employees.”
The city is rebuilding in some
places better than others. About half of New Orleans' 72 neighborhoods now have
90 percent of the population they had prior to the storm, but the Lower Ninth Ward is
one of four communities where less than 50 percent of the residents have
returned. “Overall, the recovery is underfunded. We have about $150 billion
worth in damages because of those 2005 hurricanes and only about $45 billion
dollars from public and private sources,” said Plyer. “So every neighborhood
has struggled with recovery, and, of course, the poorer neighborhoods have
struggled because they don’t have the private resources to bring to things.”
Charity giving and volunteering, like the work done by Common Ground Relief, helps.
Katrina led to the greatest outpouring of aid in U.S. history—$6 billion—but
compared to government funding, the total given has been like, well, a few thousand
blades of grass planted in a sinking marsh on the edge of a rising ocean.
IT HAS BEEN SEVEN months since the team from New York
City volunteered in Bayou Sauvage. Since then, Hurricane Isaac hit the city. Campanella that one of the main
lessons of Hurricane Katrina was the failure to engineer protection of New Orleans. He the big lesson of
Hurricane Isaac was something more natural. The city’s new levees and walls
held Isaac back, but its wetlands continued to disappear. Engineers should
figure out how to allow the land to fill back in, and fast.
When I called Pepper in October, he said the marsh grasses
planted by the volunteers in Bayou Sauvage held. Other plants didn't. In his
last day as the outdoors editor of the New Orleans Times Picayune, Bob Marshall at the city’s floodwalls after
Isaac—workers removing piles of marsh grasses with their mud plugs attached.
“The nearest marsh from their final resting places was
probably five miles away. So Isaac had ripped them from the skeletal remains of
our once vibrant, growing delta, and dropped them when the Mississippi River
levees blocked further transport,” Marshall wrote. “The line of death reached
halfway up the tall mud walls along the river and were stacked four to six feet
deep on the highway before the mechanical undertakers arrived to sanitize the
scene.”
A city
that built walls around its waterways to protect against flooding from a river
is increasingly facing the threat of flooding from the Gulf of Mexico in the form of rising sea levels. Volunteers
alone can’t undo that coming damage.
Not that such a message would stop
Aucoin. I emailed him late in the summer and asked if he would return. He
responded quickly. “We’ll be back for our eighth annual
trip. It will likely be another combination of City Park, Common Ground, and
either the St. Bernard Project or the Phoenix of New Orleans,” he said. “You
should join us.”
A few months later, on October 29, Hurricane
Sandy barreled into New Jersey and shellacked New York City with violent winds and
a sustained and powerful storm surge. Houses were knocked off their foundations, homes burned down, trees fell
into buildings, and .
In the aftermath, Aucoin knew what to
do. This time, though, he was not volunteering. As part of his job, he helped organize the clearing of
downed trees from city streets, responded to 311 calls, supervised contractors
in park restoration, and helped staff park centers so that storm victims had a
safe place to stay.
When I contacted him in November to see
how he was doing and whether he would return to New Orleans in May, he had an
understandable response. “I would love to keep the tradition
going, but seeing the destruction here recently from super Frankenstorm Sandy,
not sure I can or would want to try to pull people away from New York City to New Orleans when
there will ultimately be plenty to do right here in Queens and Staten Island,”
he said. “This may be a swap from the swamp year—we’ll see how things
progress.”
If you’d like to join Aucoin and the New York City Parks
Department, you can sign up for a project led by Aucoin, or sign up for one of the city’s other .
—Joe Spring