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Sunday, September 11, 2005
Surreal Landscape Alters Perspective
By Jeff Jones
Journal Staff Writer
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK:
Journal staff writer Jeff Jones and photographer Marla Brose returned late Saturday from New Orleans.
NEW ORLEANS— Spending a week in this vast and ruined city bends the perspective of rescuers and observers alike.
Destruction is seemingly everywhere— this street, the next street, the next neighborhood, the next suburb. Broken windows, crumpled power lines, trash and stench are the norm, not the exception.
From dusk to dawn, New Orleans is thick with the humid heat and the roar of low-flying helicopters; the night is filled with the whine of emergency generators.
For some who have remained here for days, the ruin begins to take on a surreal normalcy that others who haven't been steeped in it may have a hard time grasping.
"We see so much," said Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White, who has been in New Orleans for a week with a team of about 40 sheriff's and fire department members.
"I've seen so many dead bodies in the past five days. It's to the point (that) 'it's another body.' And that's sad."
After spending three days covering Hurricane Katrina two weeks ago, I returned to Albuquerque for three days before being sent back into New Orleans.
Back at home, I once caught myself wincing and looking up when I heard a loud noise that reminded me of a rescue chopper.
When I passed a busy Albuquerque restaurant where people were waiting outside for a seat, I initially wondered if they were waiting there for bottled water or emergency food supplies.
Working street lights and driving in the correct lanes of the freeway initially seemed foreign.
And that first hot shower was priceless.
Foul water
The putrid floodwaters that still cover much of New Orleans almost defy description.
In the first days after the levees broke, the water in some places had a foot or more of visibility— and fish sometimes could be seen.
But as of Friday, the water in one area off Canal Street looked more like oil than water. One Bernalillo County sheriff's deputy pegged the color as "metallic green."
The smell was nauseating. There was zero visibility in the murk. Chemical rainbows streaked the surface. Paint cans, oil cans and a thousand other toxins bobbed in the water.
Some dogs trapped in flooded areas are forced to drink the water, and rescuers believe many pets will die from it.
Stories circulated about rescue workers who may lose a leg or a hand due to water-caused infections. And rescuers who accidentally fell in were taken to a decontamination station to be cleaned. Among those were White and other members of his team; one returned to New Mexico as a precaution due to worries about infection of a leg injury.
Health workers at a makeshift medical station by Harrah's New Orleans casino off Canal Street stayed busy giving tetanus and hepatitis shots to rescue workers. Rescuers were also ordered to begin taking a regimen of Cipro, a strong antibiotic.
Signs and graffiti
In this evacuated city, surreal messages are etched everywhere.
Inside the abandoned Lindy Boggs Medical Center, which is surrounded by floodwater, doctors and nurses who were stranded there wrote their names on the wall near an exit before finally being evacuated.
"Escape from Lindy Boggs— Christy," read one message.
"Stuart Scott, RN— Survivor," read another hastily scrawled message.
A third person who apparently kept a sense of humor during the ordeal wrote, "New waterfront property for sale— call your Realtor."
Rescuers who went home-to-home searching for Katrina survivors used fluorescent orange spray paint to mark the doors of the houses they had searched.
Those cryptic messages denoted which agency did the searching, how many survivors were found inside— and how many dead, if any, were discovered there.
One sign on a flooded portion of Canal Street instructed searchers to "rescue the dog next door."
Handmade signs warning looters to stay away were everywhere.
"Don't try," one property owner had spray-painted on sheets of plywood covering the windows of a rug shop. "I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer."
A Bernalillo County Fire Department medical worker who accompanied county sheriff's deputies on their airboat search missions into flooded areas had a medical cross drawn in black marker on his hat.
The artist had also added these three words:
"Don't Shoot Me."
On Friday, one Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department supervisor said, searchers checking an office for survivors found a note from an elderly couple who had taken refuge there.
In the note, the couple told the proprietors they'd taken only some food and water they needed to survive. And they promised to repay the proprietors for what they'd taken.
Animal rescue
The massive Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, La.— about an hour's drive from New Orleans— is serving as a gathering point for pets that Hurricane Katrina has separated from their owners.
On Saturday morning, the open-air horse barns at the giant Expo Center were filled with hundreds of dog kennels. An endless cacophony of barks, whines and howls echoed inside the large steel structures.
Dogs of every breed, size and age were there— many of them sitting in their own waste as exhausted-looking animal rescue workers made sure the traumatized pets had food and water.
Fans were set up to blow fresh air into the kennels.
Some dogs slept. Others stood at the front of their kennels, panting. One friendly German shepherd wagged his tail and clawed at his door when someone walked by— the happy tail making a muffled "whump, whump, whump" inside the plastic kennel.
On a piece of duct tape on the door of one small dog kennel, someone had written, "Caution— bites."
Two big, black dogs snoozed in larger cages nearby. Another strip of duct tape draped across those cages said, "Dogs are together."
Captured moment
Walking or floating down the streets of New Orleans is sometimes like looking at a freeze-frame of life there— the frame that occurred just as the floodwaters rolled in.
Submerged or partly submerged cars and trucks remain in the middle of streets or jut out of alleys— apparently abandoned when they stalled out in the deluge.
Inside one flooded car-rental business, a handbag remained on the counter, as if a customer was just finishing a transaction.