Christmas 2005

Dear Friends,

As much as I have enjoyed the Christmas letters of others, I have never been tempted to write one myself. Generally our events of the year are somewhat unremarkable. We may have taken a trip or visited with friends, but these events can be summed up in a few handwritten lines. Last year I couldn’t bring myself to send out Christmas cards because the sorrow we were feeling for the loss of our Rosie was not something I wanted to share in a Christmas card.

Well, for those of us in south Louisiana, these are definitely extraordinary times. Our year pre-K (before Katrina in the local vernacular) was comprised of continued success with our miracle dog Sydney. She was diagnosed with bone cancer with metastases to the lungs on February 9, 2004 and was given an estimated three months to live. This was after repeated trips to the vet starting in early November 2003. We had her in an off-protocol vaccine trial out of the Colorado State University Vet School. It was being administered at the LSU Vet School in Baton Rouge. In May, 2004 I also took her up to the University of Missouri Vet School for a samarium treatment. She responded favorably. Her lung metastases shrank and she started to grow new bone. I took her up to Missouri for another treatment this past August after her cancer returned.

Meanwhile, in March we adopted a yellow lab puppy, Josie. The spring and summer were spent landscaping most of our yard.

On Saturday, August 27^th it looked like Katrina would pay us a visit, so we boarded up our home and did the "normal" hurricane preparations. We evacuated to Homewood, AL (Ken’s parents) at one am on August 28^th. We packed enough clothes and dog food for three days. I was expecting to be home on Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. I bought one of the last four generators at Lowes in Homewood and 10 gas cans. I filled up the gas cans and was ready to go home, expecting to be without power for two months, but ready to be home nonetheless. On Tuesday morning the levees broke and life as we know it changed.

The story you have seen (over and over and over again) is not our story. We live in the Garden District and were high and dry. Our 140-year-old home was built to withstand such storms, as was the new roof we put on two years ago. So, with minor damage, we escaped the personal devastation that so many others have endured. But even so, our lives are radically changed.

We left Homewood on Thursday post-K and went to Zachary, LA, a small community just north of Baton Rouge. A friend of mine was renting a place there, affectionately called "the barn," while he built his new home. He and his wife took us in. From there I resumed work on Friday at the Bayou Choctaw SPR site, southwest of Baton Rouge. In the midst of all this chaos, the SPR was being called on to deliver oil. With all of the gulf oil production down and shipping interrupted, we were planning for oil deliveries first as exchange oil and then as actual sales. We started delivering oil out of Bayou Choctaw that Saturday.

On the first Sunday post-K, Sydney took a turn for the worse. She collapsed, panting heavily, on the way to the front door. We called the LSU Vet School. They were overwhelmed with all the animals rescued from the New Orleans area. We took Sydney in on Monday morning (Labor Day). They diagnosed her with a pulmonary embolism (blood clot to the lung). She was put in an oxygen room

in the ICU with the hope that the clot would dissolve. On Wednesday night she had a heart attack and couldn’t be revived. Our miracle dog had run out of miracles.

On the second Friday post-K we managed to get home, for a day, with the benefit of a letter borrowed from work giving the "bearer" free access through the road blocks. We cleaned out the refrigerator and freezer and packed a few things to make our stay at the barn more comfortable.

That weekend we helped our benefactors move into their new home and "the barn" was ours for the remainder of September. Our furnishings consisted of one air mattress, two plastic chairs and three plastic tables, all acquired to give us something to sit, eat, sleep and work on. Our life was a series of ups and downs as the news that we could return home was given and then retracted.

A week later we returned to start cleaning up our yard. The National Guard was enforcing a strict 8 am to 6 pm curfew, but was lenient about letting those who they identified as "business people" access to start preparing their businesses for opening. We planned on spending the night this trip and brought enough food to cook for the firemen and National Guard who were camped in and around the fire station two blocks from us. (We now have some NOFD t-shirts.) Afterwards we had to be escorted home by a National Guardsman since it was after curfew. Sitting on our front porch that evening watching "the dark" that had descended on our city under a bright moon and contemplating what we had been through and what was to follow was an experience that I don’t have the vocabulary to explain.

Just prior to the first time we were told we could return home, we took a "day" trip to Homewood to borrow one of Ken’s parents’ cars. We have been a one-car family for many years and there were no rentals to be had, and probably none in all of southeast Louisiana. Since my job was working out of Bayou Choctaw and Ken was going home, we both needed our own set of wheels. Then Rita entered the gulf and Ken’s return home for good was delayed until September 27^th, a month to the day of when we boarded up our home. Since my job was still in Bayou Choctaw, I went home on the 29^th preparing to leave on a pre-K-planned, week long trip to Nashville. I severely overestimated the time our power would be out. It was restored on the 30^th. This was due to our neighborhood being largely unaffected by the storm, so that was where the power restoration crews could restore power the quickest. I was able to return to work in my office on October 10^th.

In recent years the Garden District Association has sponsored a Halloween trick-or-treat route and party. We felt strongly that we should still have at least the party (few children had returned at that time) as part of bringing our neighborhood back and restoring some of the camaraderie that existed pre-K even though most people had not returned. Unfortunately, despite our best lobbying efforts, the GDA board vetoed that idea. (Lawyers can always find a reason not to do something and most members were still evacuated and had no clue as to what was really happening here.) So, with another couple, we had one at our house. We were ecstatic that it turned into a much more successful event than even our most optimistic hopes. We think there were about 80 people, but because of the unusual nature of the party, we aren’t really sure. The party was to end at 9pm, but the last guests left a little before midnight.

There are many more details of our experiences I can tell, but this letter is already too long.

What Katrina didn’t do to our beautiful trees, the power company did. A great many of our oaks and magnolias now have a distinctive "V" shape or had their tops cut off. While our neighborhood fared well, relatively speaking, much of the rest of the city is a different story. Eighty percent of it suffered at least some flooding. Despite the seemingly endless pictures of flooded houses, downed trees and inundated cars you may have seen, the reality is much worse than you can imagine.

We have friends that lived in the flooded areas and seeing their previously immaculate homes with inches of muck on the floors, their furniture floated around and dropped in ruins in other places in their house, is something that must be seen to fully understand. The mental image of standing on a street where literally everywhere one looks is brown, dead brown, including tall trees, cannot be conveyed through pictures. I am writing this because that is precisely what we went through.

The vast majority of us are experiencing short term memory loss. We call it the Katrina Syndrome. To function, not only do I need to make a "to-do" list, I have to remember to look at it.

With all "normal" methods of communication down, "yard signs" spring up everywhere. They are mostly put in the neutral ground and advertise "we’re open," "help wanted," and "we’ve moved," for the entire gamut of goods and services. If Ken and I had had the foresight to own a sign printing business, we would be able to retire now.

In many ways life in New Orleans now, for those of us with intact homes, is like a step back in time. Fifty years ago, stores were open from 9 to 5, even the grocery stores. You only received a few pieces of mail a week, frequently going to the post office to pick them up. There were four-way stops instead of traffic lights at intersections and streetlights were minimal. You felt safe walking the streets at night.

It will be February or March before the city expects to have all the traffic lights operational. While many are restored, I have not heard any projection on the recovery of the streetlights, but it is nice to see the stars. While we now have occasional home delivery of mail (1^st class only), the "junk" mail is all gone, and it takes quite a while to get to us. Trying to buy groceries, or anything else you might need, requires shopping at lunch or leaving work early. Everything that is open is crowded, especially on Saturdays. There is no such thing as a "quick" errand anymore. The crime rate is almost non-existent. Some of the bad guys were evacuated elsewhere, and others, well let’s just say that their mothers will never know what happened to them.

One spends a lot of what would have been "free" time doing the modern equivalent of "barn raising;" helping clean out, sheetrock or paint a friend’s home. We have had a number of friends staying with us for days or months. And that will continue for the foreseeable future. While there is a general feeling that things will be better among those of us who are home in our intact houses, others are still having "Katrina moments" - those times when emotion overcomes logic and rash decisions are made. All in all it feels like we have entered the "twilight zone," an alternate reality existence that may look somewhat like the real thing, but is somehow twisted, so that it isn’t quite "right."

While Katrina may have faded from the headlines, there is much that needs to be done in the New Orleans area. This is not a "typical" hurricane story, where blue roofs are everywhere, some people have interior damage due to water entering because of roof damage, sometimes due to trees invading their home, but most structures are to some degree habitable. Most structures in New Orleans are not habitable and will not be for quite some time. Many will have to be bulldozed. Large portions of the city were not even included in the "blue roof" program (where FEMA pays to have a tarp put on your roof) because the buildings were so flooded that the lack of a blue roof wouldn’t damage the structure any further.

Basic services such as power, water or sewer have not been restored in the severely flooded areas so FEMA will not install trailers there, even if one could get one. Bureaucratic logjams have kept decisions about base flood elevations, requirements for rebuilding, permitting and insurance from being made.

We are still living through the worst disaster (natural or otherwise) in this nation. What adds to the tragedy is that it could have been avoided. If the levees had been built properly, the flooding and resultant devastation would not have happened and our story would be similar to that of other hurricanes. Everything we read about the construction of the levees makes things look worse and makes one wonder why there has not been a catastrophic levee failure prior to Katrina. Not only were the levees not designed to protect residential property (the safety factor used was for farm land and the sheet pile design depth was in a peat or sand layer that had no structural stability), but the annual levee "inspections" consisted of levee board members driving by some of the levees and then going to lunch. Time will tell where the blame lies, but there will undoubtedly be enough to go around - from the Corps of Engineers who designed and supervised the installation of the levees, to the contractors who built them, to the various levee boards who are supposed to be responsible for levee maintenance.

Despite what I have written so far, all is not dismal. We are getting our levees rebuilt to a true "category 3" status – lots of people will make sure of that. And there are definite moves afoot in D.C. to make them even stronger. (Members of Congress that have paid us a visit quickly come to understand the situation we face.) The unflooded areas; mainly the French Quarter, Garden District and Uptown; are coming back quickly. About 90% of what tourists come to see in New Orleans was not flooded and is relatively undamaged (although we can see a lot more of the sky than pre-K). Quite a few restaurants have already reopened to packed houses (and we are doing our best to support them). Many more plan to reopen by the end of January, including our favorite, Brigtsen’s, on December 29. Jazz can again be heard in the French Quarter. And we are looking forward to what promises to be a most unusual Mardi Gras. And now we even get garbage picked up every Friday! (And they leave the trash cans now, too)

We don’t know what the future brings for our city, but one thing we do know is best expressed in the words of favorite son, Louis Armstrong:

I know what it means to miss New Orleans
To miss it each night and day.
I know I’m not wrong
The feeling’s getting stronger each moment I stay away….
I know what it means to miss New Orleans
when that’s where I’ve left my heart ….

One thing I am very thankful for this Christmas is just being home. Ken joins me in wishing you the best for 2006.

Lisa Eldredge