a visit to new orleans

this is the mark placed by authorities on the sidewalk in front or facade of each house as they were checked for survivors or hazards...

I encountered this hieroglyph while I was in New Orleans yesterday...yes...in the city we are all forbidden to be in right now...it seems that if you are an architect and you work for a well connected architect who has considerable pull with one of his connections in the governor's office you can defy everything...looters, disease, nasty water, the federal government(FEMA, active duty military guys with big guns), the state government, flies, mosquitos, city government, and the media...the basic message is: If you have power or money or one of your friends does you can do whatever you want in the city that has become the biggest natural disaster to hit the US in a very long time. This is an interesting lesson.

What it says to me is this: Danger of disease, violence, and flooding does not apply to those who have money, power, or friends with money or power.

The more subtle message that this becomes is: There really is not much danger from disease, violence, crime, or flooding...unless your under water or an alligator got you.

I was able to verify this message with my own eyes. They're are many people still left in New Orleans to fend for themselves...they are the media and the press. And it was obvious they were not suffering--plenty of generators, fresh water tanks, and air conditioned trailers as far as the eye could see down Canal Street. And their well protected too by the new protectors of New Orleans. Do you know who protects New Orleans? Not the NOPD. Not the state police. 18-25 year olds all in the national guard and mostly from out of state all with big guns--usually two of them--protect New Orleans. And I am not even sure from whom...

so here's the brief summary of what I saw:

1. Uptown and the French Quarter seemed to fair pretty well. Picture the streets right after a parade only they threw massive tree limbs, lots of leaves, glass from broken windows, and roof tiles and there were no parade goers to pick them up. There was some flooding in certain areas--some of it bad, but, for the most part, there was very little flood damage and minimal looting damage. If you lived between the St. Charles and the river you're house is probably okay and if you had a shop on Magazine or Prytania its probably okay too unless you were selling $1200 cell phones or lots of non-perishable food and left them in big windows.

2. Downtown (Canal Street to about 2 blocks west of Poydras and from about Tchopitoulas north)got about 3-4 feet of flooding--we could see the water line on the buildings. All of this water is now gone. The looting on Canal, as well all know, was pretty bad. But there wan't much looting damage in the French Quarter just off of Canal as far as we could tell.

3. There is lots and lots of power line damage all over the place from trees and wind. They have made alot of progress clearing the streets of downed trees and other hazards, but the electrical work will take quite a while. There was major damage to bigger transmission lines downtown and in other parts of the city (which is where all the entergy trucks were since we saw maybe one in all of uptown). They are having to tear up streets to get to some of these major lines. So the basic message is that power outages will remain in New Orleans for some time.

4. The older front campus of Tulane did pretty well considering. There is some really sad tree damage, but the buildings did okay. The back campus is under about 2 feet of water, and the middle campus about 1 foot of water. I think most dorms did okay although we couldn't get to many of these areas...we just saw what we could from down the streets.


so that's all I've got for now...I'll wax philisophical later...