Touching down in New Orleans

A hush came over the plane as we started our descent into New Orleans. Everyone was looking out the windows, taking in the devastation below.

"It makes a big difference when you actually see it, with your own eyes, doesn't it?" said the woman next to me.

Sue and her family are in Slidell, which -- being just up the road on I-10, right off Lake Pontchartrain, was hammered by Katrina. Everyone's house in her neighborhood was flooded out; her family could only move back in because they have a second floor. After living in a hotel for two months, they're back and living upstairs, but their neighbors haven't returned. "It's like a ghost town." She had left to see her daughter in North Carolina, and "didn't really want to come back."

I was greeted at the airport by New Orleans activist Darryl Malek-Wiley, who gave me an eye-opening tour of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, like the 9th Ward. "You have to see it to believe it," Darryl and others had told me. They were absolutely right. Nothing prepares you for seeing such devastation, as far as the eye can see.

Today marks 100 days since Katrina hit, and yet it's like the hurricane struck yesterday. You see endless blocks of emptied-out houses, belongings still piled on the street. There's no power and no water; vast stretches of the city don't have working street lights, every intersection is a 4-way stop. Every sign on every telephone pole is still for "debris removal" or "gutting houses, cheap!"

I started to get a taste for the ongoing scandals, small and large. One example: the largely immigrant workers, who are hired by sub-contractors to do rebuilding in the city (the contracts are sub-contracted several times, leaving little once it gets to the workers). They stay in a makeshift tent village in City Park. This is where they live -- no showers, a handful of port-a-johns. It's getting cold, into the 30s and 40s. And to top off this hard-scrabble existence, the city, being broke, is now planning to start charging them rent for their ramschackle lodging.

A common refrain: "nothing is improving." As Sue told me on the plane, "everyone's just waiting -- for the insurance company, for FEMA, for the city or state to do something. But nothing's happening. It's like everything has just stopped." When I told Sue and Darryl that part of Gulf Reconstruction Watch's aim -- and our current trip -- was to find out more about what's happening with the rebuilding process, they both said "tell us what you find out!"

Moving this city out of its stasis will take bold leadership, especially at the federal level. Not seeing that, residents like Sue and Darryl have concluded that leaders in Washington have forgotten about this city and its people.