Too much spam on this site so hard to moderate. We have been going regularly to New Orleans to cheer on the city (Go Saints) but recovery is slow and painful.
Lots of good music coming out of it though (check out Terrence Blanchard’s new CD, A tale of God’s will) at www.terrenceblanchard.com.
I have not been able to write or even copy out articles in this blog since I visited New Orleans the first time after Katrina in October. I have now been three times and it’s a mixed bag.
Our neighborhood has been doing fine…yes, there is still garbage and debris everywhere and Jim says that he has now seen rats in the neighborhood, but for the most part, people are living in their homes, mail is coming sporadically. Folks have electricity, gas and the like. But venture just outside the ‘hood a few blocks, and still, six months or more later, there are water lines on homes that are unoccupied that you can follow all the way downtown.
So, many months after my first visit, with now three visits behind me, I’ll try and capture what the changes are and where our city is going.
But venture east of the Quarter and you will find nothing left. Just last week they started to tear down homes (118 of them) in the 9th Ward.
Pascale Manales is finally open this week!!
check out the NY times website for more info about this, but I’ll report in over the weekend about what I see.
In New Orleans, the Trashman Will Have to Move Mountains
NEW ORLEANS - On one front lawn, a two-foot-high pile of debris stands where a hedge would normally be. A rusting mattress lies next to a bottle of cleaning fluid and a television set. The stench of paint combined with weeks-old food is choking. Flies hover over the whole thing, zeroing in on a handful of foil-wrapped chocolate eggs.
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Workers will remove Freon from refrigerators so they can be recycled.
This is just one pile. There are thousands upon thousands of others, totaling 22 million tons of waste, according to state officials. They have baked in the swampy heat for weeks now, making this city look and smell like a landfill.
It is more trash than any American city produces in a year. It is enough to fill the Empire State Building 40 times over. It will take at least 3.5 million truckloads to haul it away. “It is absolutely and completely revolting,” Kathleen McGoey said on a recent day as she stood in front of a mound of Sheetrock, wicker chairs and moldy clothes outside an apartment building she owns.
This is not even counting the cars that have been abandoned on sidewalks, or the boats stranded on the streets. It is not counting the more than 1 million refrigerators, stoves and washing machines on curbs all over the area. This is not counting any of the hundreds of homes that will inevitably be demolished.
It is the largest, and most complicated, cleanup in American history.
More than a month after Hurricane Katrina, the state and the Army Corps of Engineers, which has been assigned to coordinate the effort, have just begun trying to figure out how to sort the blanket of debris. There are probably thousands of tons of household chemicals like bleach and pesticides. There are toxic substances like Freon and mercury.
“What we have looking at us in the face isn’t like anything we’ve seen before,” said Jim Pogue, a spokesman for the corps. “We’ve got to get this out of here as soon as possible.” But officials acknowledge that could mean months, if not years.
The corps has already awarded $2 billion in contracts to get rid of the waste in the region - more than three times the annual operating budget of the city of New Orleans. State officials predict that the cost could grow substantially.
There are nearly 3,000 dump trucks that have started to make daily rounds in neighborhoods where residents have moved back in. Much of work is being done now by three major contractors and their subcontractors. The corps is still looking for more trucks to arrive every day.
It will take months to get rid of the muck already clogging streets, and only a fraction of former city residents have returned home so far and have yet to empty out their homes. The Army Corps of Engineers says it is likely to take seven months, while Chuck Carr Brown, the assistant secretary of the Louisiana Environmental Services Office, said the process could take as long as two years.
In some neighborhoods, the rancid piles permeate the air with a smell that seems a mix of sour milk, foul river water and rotting meat. Residents who have returned are complaining about the odor and the accompanying maggots. They wear rubber gloves and face masks to guard their senses and protect their health from bacteria and mold.
As Ms. McGoey spent one recent day cleaning out an apartment in the building she owns, the tenant who lived there spent the afternoon hunched over the balcony, vomiting at least half a dozen times because of the stench. The night before the storm, Ms. McGoey bought several pounds of peppers, now transformed into a pulpy mess at the top of one trash can. “Even if my house is fine, there’s no way you could stand to be around this,” she said.
There are still five other apartments in the building that must be emptied, but Ms. McGoey says she cannot do that until the garbage she has now is taken away.
“What in the world happens when my neighbors come back?” she asked, looking down the road at other heaps like hers. “I don’t have any idea when somebody is going to move this.”
Regular trash collection still has not resumed in several parts of the city. In the French Quarter, the odor assaults diners even as they walk out of recently reopened upscale restaurants.
Moving the debris from the streets is just one step. Although officials are urging residents to separate and label their trash, few people have the time or desire to pile their aluminum cans away from their microwaves. Instead, most simply just drag the trash to the curb and leave it to the contractors to sort out the paint thinner from broken telephone poles.
Contractors must then sort the debris at a collection site before the mounds of rubbish will be taken to burn sites, recycling areas or existing landfills within the New Orleans metropolitan area.
The corps is only beginning to make plans for the six categories of waste: green, household, construction, chemical, appliances and vehicles. They have no accurate estimate of how much of the debris fits into each category.
“We’ll get rid of the most dangerous stuff first,” said Darin Mann, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. “The most difficult part is going to be when people start to realize you have entire homes that are going to be classified as debris.”
Much of the natural debris, such as tree trunks, branches and leaves knocked around by the storm, will be turned into wood chips and compost, but some will be burned to prevent termites from spreading. The metal scraps and the tires are expected to be recycled. Most of the remaining debris - including couches, insulation and roof shingles - will be placed in landfills in the area.
“There is a desire to recycle as much as possible, but there is also a strong drive to do this as soon as possible,” Mr. Pogue said.
There is no immediate threat of disease, and preliminary tests have shown less soil contamination than many feared. But the soppy, sticky mess has festered for weeks, and local officials worry that residents will be exposed to bacteria, chemical fumes or other toxic substances.
The plans to move forward quickly have drawn some concern from environmental advocates, who say that the pressure to simply get the stuff out could set a dangerous precedent with dumping in local processing sites and landfills.
“We’re looking at a place that doesn’t have the luxury of segregation that a normal, functioning infrastructure would have,” said Allen Hershkowitz, the director of the solid waste research program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There may be no alternative now, because there is such an urgent need to make sure that you get this waste away from people, but you’ve got all this stuff that is never mixed together normally.”
If the debris remains mixed in the long term, Dr. Hershkowitz said, there will be public health risks from combustible material, rodent infestation or chemical leaks into the ground. Because so much of the debris was soaked in floodwater for days, there is an even greater concern for the spread of bacteria and mold, he said.
Even in places that suffered little damage from the storm, homeowners have returned to five-week-old food in refrigerators that stopped working the day of the storm. Now, those refrigerators sit curbside, wrapped tightly with tape. In Jefferson Parish, local officials have set up what some call a refrigerator graveyard, where residents can drop off their discarded appliances.
The freezers contain what were once pounds of fresh meat, crab and shrimp - all of it now liquefied and putrid. Many have messages that warn “gross” or “don’t touch - stinky food.”
But somebody must touch them. The corps has hired contractors to remove the Freon from the appliances so that they can be recycled. Those same contractors are also expected to clean out whatever is inside.
“Right now, our job is just to get this stuff off the streets,” said Marnie Winter, the director of the Jefferson Parish Department of Environmental Affairs. “People have so much to worry about, the last thing they want to do is empty their refrigerators.”
If the magnitude of it all is too difficult to understand, consider Carneal Knapper’s dump deposit slips from one day of hauling debris. There were 10 tons at 9 a.m., and a 9-ton delivery two hours later. By the early afternoon, there were 23 tons and, during his final drop-off at 5 p.m., another 10 tons.
At the end of the day, Mr. Knapper, who works for a subcontractor hauling garbage, returned to his own destroyed home in the Lake Terrace neighborhood. He retrieved a wallet and a box of coins, about the only things he thought were salvageable.
“They’re going to have to tear down all this and put it in a dump truck,” he said, pointing to his brick home, where floodwater had destroyed everything inside but a wooden dining room table.
He thought about the rolls of sodden carpet he had put in his truck earlier and said: “I’m driving the stuff like this every day, all day. All day, every day.”
The link is posted to the right in Links but here is the message from Frank regarding our favorite neighborhood restaurant:
Hello all - I just wanted to let you know that Marna and I intend to re-open Brigtsen’s Restaurant in New Orleans as soon as the city recovers enough infrastructure to support a somewhat normal life. How long that will be is hard to say - probably a couple of months. We evacuated to Shreveport and will remain here with family members until the city recovers sufficiently for us to return. Our main priority after the storm was to stabilize our family and staff. Everyone is OK, and our nieces and nephew are enrolled in high school here in Shreveport. The reports of us opening a restaurant here are false, a product of misunderstandings being published in major newspapers. In the days after the storm, we did not know what the future held. Over time, Marna and I decided that we simply must re-open Brigtsen’s - for our wonderful staff, our community, and our city. The restaurant (and our homes) made it through with no flooding and no structural damage. We are very blessed and lucky. We wish everyone well in this difficult time and look forward to seeing you soon.
Best wishes,
Frank Brigtsen
We are getting ready to come to New Orleans in two weeks and the biggest concern seems to be hot water, although we can always make a bath by boiling water, it doesn’t occur to anyone that is an option.
We are monitoring sites that indicate what is open, including restaurants, whose biggest problem is getting their “infrastructure” back, including employees, who are scattered here and there.
I am posting some more links to restaurants today.
NPR is worried how we might find the house, but I have assured them that their work is more important right now and it’s only for the weekend.
I just want to see everything right now…experience the tail end of the devastation and try to help clean it up. I need to be there. I wonder how the parrots are.
Well, the electricity is on in our neighborhood, reports Jim, but everything is brown and awful from the flooding sludge. There is no gas yet so no hot water at our house…hopefully that will be repaired before I go out to visit on the 21st of October.
Jim also reported that most of Metarie is back to normal, with gasoline, grocery stores and the Home Depot. New Orleans is happening much slower, although he did report that Walter “Wolfman” Washington did a gig at a crowded Maple Leaf (curfew be damned) and rocked the house. Good to hear that he’s well and good to see the Maple Leaf back in action.
Cooter Brown’s (see article below) is serving food and beer and likely feeding much of the neighborhood, especially before the power came back on.
Stay tuned. a
Jim was able to leave a message on her cell phone and she’s in Tuscon Arizona…more later.
The saddest news to come from New Orleanians in exile is the passing of Austin Leslie, one of the best chefs to ever good a meal in New Orleans. He had stayed two days into Katrina, hiding out in his house, and then evacuated to the Convention Center and then to Atlanta…he had a high fever and went into the hospital on September 28 and died the next day. He apparently suffered a heart attack.
My first encounter with chef Leslie was in 1993 at his place called Chez Helene. Jess and I met him eating crawfish etouffe that was incredible…Jim had taken us and he came out and sat at the table with us, a big, gentle man who was all about the food.
Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times obit:
Mr. Leslie grew up in the city’s kitchens. He started delivering fried chicken and eventually cooked with his aunt Helen DeJean Pollock, who owned Chez Helene in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans. He took over her restaurant in 1975.
At Chez Helene, Mr. Leslie fused Creole cuisine and the casual food of the local African-American cooks. He made gumbo thickened with filé, served oysters Rockefeller on tin plates and stamped every plate of fried chicken with a smear of chopped parsley and garlic and slices of dill pickle.
(Photo out of the times from 1988, during the time they were making his TV show…)
***
…he worked at Jacques-Imo’s Café in our uptown neighborhood and most recently at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen. He was only 71. He will be greatly missed.
Tom Fitzmorris posted this (it’s an excerpt) on his site (see link at right re: new orleans restaurants):
I met Austin near the beginning of my career, when I wrote about Chez Helene for a review in the old Courier newspaper in 1973. He was already laughing, even when you asked why it was that from the time you placed your order till the time any food arrived was something like a half hour. His answer: “I guess you never fried chicken before!” It was a good answer, and opened my eyes for the first time to the truth that fried chicken prepared to order takes awhile, and is incomparably better than chicken that was fried before you arrived and has been under a heat lamp ever since.
Austin’s famous dish was three pieces of chicken (never four–always three) with a stuffed bell pepper and jambalaya. I learned quickly that the red beans and three pieces of chicken was even better. And that he put out great fried fish, delicious oysters Rockefeller and Bienville (colored with, respectively, green and yellow food coloring, enough to color the shell), and a textbook example of that unique property of the soul food restaurant, Creole gumbo (somewhere between a seafood gumbo and chicken and sausage gumbo).
What was the recipe for the chicken? I asked him. “I learned it from Miss Portia,” he said. (Portia’s was a fine old kitchen on South Rampart Street, a remnant of the historic black jazz club district that was torn down to widen the street in the 1950s. Portia’s was lucky enough to be on the right side of the street, and continued to serve until the late 1970s.)
“Miss Portia said that you had to use the small chickens, season it up right with salt and pepper, and keep the grease clean and hot,” is what Austin told me. Did he marinate it? He laughed at that and shook his head. “Good fried chicken is simple,” he said. “You just have to pay attention.”
It looked as if Austin was riding high again at the very popular Pampy’s. And then this. It’s the worst food-related news I’ve heard since the storm.
My partner, Joe Reece (who lives in Anchorage Alaska) also has a house in New Orleans…and it survived!
