Stephanie Grace '87, a columnist of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, showed this and many other pictures of the desolation and human tragedy caused by Hurricane Katrina in a lecture she delivered along with Peter Kovacs '78, the paper's managing editor. The two spoke of their own struggles living through Katrina and the challenges faced by an impoverished and wrecked city.
The two alums returned to College Hill for a Saturday colloquium on rebuilding hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.
The New Orleans staff of the Times-Picayune spent the weekend Hurricane Katrina hit trapped in its office "disseminating the news in the only way we could - blogging it on the Internet," said Kovacs, a former Herald editor-in-chief.
The majority of the staff of the Times-Picayune evacuated its office in the newspaper's delivery trucks - the only vehicles capable of fording the flooded highways. Kovacs showed a video of their post-Katrina evacuation in a caravan of trucks on the multi-lane Route 10.
The staff of the Times-Picayune sought refuge at Louisiana State University's School of Journalism and returned to work in its new environs to put out the next issue of their paper online, Kovacs said.
During the week after Katrina, the Times-Picayune Web site had 20 million to 30 million page views a day, Kovacs said.
"In some ways the crisis forced us to reinvent how we worked," he added.
Grace was one of the newspaper's staff who evacuated to the Times-Picayune's office in Baton Rouge before the storm hit. However, those reporters who remained in New Orleans stopped by her house and turned it into their headquarters when they discovered her house had one of the last working phone lines, she said.
Before the lockdown in New Orleans was lifted following the chaos of the natural disaster, Grace returned to New Orleans to get back to her work and her home.
"On the trip I turned on my radio to try and hear my favorite radio station, and I hit scan, and it went around and around and around," Grace said.
Destruction hit her personally. In her neighborhood of the Garden District, one quarter of her block had burned down because all fire-fighting infrastructure had been destroyed, Grace said.
"They started using forest fire fighting techniques" like water-scooping propeller planes to douse otherwise inaccessible fires, she said.
The entire infrastructure of New Orleans has been destroyed by Katrina and by the flight of its citizens in a modern day diaspora across the country, Kovacs said.
Katrina left in its wake a city that is "working to rebuild but is hurting and needs help," Grace said.
Lakeview, what used to be a city park, is now an unplanned garbage dump piled stories high with the remains of hundreds of houses and apartments. On top of everything else, it is an environmental disaster, Grace said.
Refrigerators filled with spoiled food lined the streets of New Orleans for weeks and remain in some areas. Around 130,000 have already been collected, cleaned out and crushed, with an estimated total of 250,000 ruined refrigerators throughout the city, Grace said.
Grace saw blank refrigerators become a "public blackboard" for citizens' frustrations with President Bush, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson, she said.
The destruction of New Orleans' public infrastructure has complicated recovery efforts. A task considered unimaginable to postpone in a U.S. city - removing the bodies of Katrina's causalities - took weeks. An elderly man's body in Grace's neighborhood was left covered with a sheet for two weeks until the city picked up his remains, she said.
Even those fortunate enough to have a house to return to have much work ahead of them to make it once again inhabitable, Kovacs said.
"The houses that survived were not a pretty picture. There was a water line, and above it, mold, floating refrigerators and floating furniture," Grace said.
Kovacs said poverty remains evident in New Orleans. The poorest areas of the city are testaments to the damage Katrina has caused.
"It really is possible to go to New Orleans and see two different cities. Our editor who grew up in Germany likens it to post-war Germany," Kovacs said.
It was the poor of the city who were "left to wait for five sweaty days" and could not afford to flee the city before the storm hit. But now "the poor people ... cannot come home because there is not affordable housing," Kovacs said, explaining the current housing shortage in New Orleans and resulting inflation of housing costs.
Those who returned to New Orleans or never left have clung to any source of information they could get of their situation and the future of their city and their lives.
"You'd walk into a coffee shop and you'd see everybody reading the Times-Picayune gripping their copy without looking up," Grace said.
The mission of the Times-Picayune during and after Hurricane Katrina is to "tell our story to the evacuees and the decision makers," Grace said.
Grace said the driving force for renewal of New Orleans must come from the federal government.
"People need to understand that it was caused by a levee failure. An engineering failure. If not, New Orleans would have been OK," Grace told The Herald after her speech. She said the U.S. government has a responsibility to rebuild New Orleans.
"The government is the only force big and powerful enough to rebuild New Orleans, and it has been distressingly silent," Kovacs said, echoing Grace.
"The real truth about Katrina (is) not that it is FEMA disaster 1603, but that it is the greatest failing of civil engineering in American history," he added.
Though many outsiders question the logic of rebuilding a city below sea level like New Orleans, debate among the citizens of this flagship city is not about whether they will rebuild but what they should rebuild and what they should forgo redeveloping, Kovacs said.
"The areas that used to be swamp were flooded," Grace said, referring to a map of New Orleans in the 1800s when many areas of the modern city were still swampland. "This picture has fueled a debate - how should the city be rebuilt? But when you say that, you are talking about wiping out people's neighborhoods."
The issue of rebuilding has revived the accusations of widespread corruption in many levels of governance in New Orleans, Kovacs said.
"The city council meetings are debates on how the city ought to be rebuilt," he said. "There are debates about many reforms. Largely they are framed around the idea that we better do this or we're not going to get any federal money."
But there is a silver lining to this disaster. With the hurricane behind them, New Orleans' staunchest supporters are driving the city back to its colorful roots. Grace showed an image of the first jazz funeral since Katrina struck - a brass-band led parade held in honor of famous New Orleans chef Austin Leslie marching through the streets to an old-time New Orleans fazz cadence.
