Having viewed many post-Katrina photos of my town on the web, and having talked to people there, I was still not prepared for the reality. You can look at a still photograph and say "yeah, that looks bad", but it doesn't compare to actually standing in the street in front of your house or driving in the neighborhoods -- surrounded by piles of debris and the ruined stuff of people's lives, smelling the mold and must, hearing the sounds of people working to gut their homes and attempting to begin repairs, seeing the tent villages set up in parking lots and the Red Cross vehicles driving up and down the streets, handing out lunch and dinner.
Not to mention the very interesting feeling of doing the salvage of your own home, wearing respirator and rubber gloves, while sightseers with out-of-state license plates drive past your house.
There was a police officer directing traffic at an intersection just south of the railroad in Waveland, where there is now nothing but foundation slabs, dying trees, and rubble for miles, where neighborhoods of all socioeconomic groups used to be. She stood next to a sign which read, "Sightseers: this rubble represents our lives and our dreams."
As bad as things look now, people who have been there the entire time tell me that two weeks ago, it looked a whole lot worse. The town is into the second round of building-gutting and trash-hauling. There are four-foot high piles of rubbish where two weeks ago they were 15 feet high. Right after the storm, the roads were impassable; you couldn't even distinguish between the roadways and residential lots, because there was debris everywhere and the landmarks had all been demolished.
Despite the inadequacy of photos to convey the reality, I still can't resist attempting to document it. Here are some pictures I took this week of my house and my immediate neighborhood. I am having to do the salvage of my house and photographing of the town in stages. Because it is both a health risk and emotionally overwhelming, there is only so much you can do at any one time. I think the entire relief effort is taking place the same way. Efforts at recovery are underway, but in many ways the Gulf Coast (personally as well as on the community level) is still very much in survival mode. You take it day-to-day and do what you can do or need to do on that day.
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