Part 4: Katrina Journal

Rebecca Harrison's Report from October 19, 2005 in St. Bernard Parish

On Hamburg Street: A Day in New Orleans

Text by Rebecca Harrison
Photos by Tobin Russell Brogunier


On Hamburg Street in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, cars lie stranded, their innerds eaten away by saltwater in streets where the drains never worked, even before Hurricane Katrina. A rusted tool kit lies on the sidewalk by one salt-encrusted car, open as if abandoned in mid-use. Perhaps the owner tried to repair the car in a panicked attempt to flee the city. Like the lava in Pompeii, there are instances all over the city where the water stopped time, flooding the interstices between humans and their now useless machines.




A rusted tool kit and salt-encrusted car on Hamburg Street in New Orleans.

After the hurricane, the Seventh Ward was left in a strange purgatory: Unlike the now infamous Ninth Ward, it wasn't completely destroyed, and unlike the affluent Uptown area, it wasn't untouched either. Depending on their foundations, houses in this area were flooded with somewhere between a few inches and six feet of water. Although the homes are still standing, water damage has caused a rapid mold growth that makes them dangerous to live in. Despite this, several hundred residents have stayed on in this ghost town that once had a population of 50,000, living in homes without electricity as they fight contamination, bureaucracy, and despair.




Mold is the only living inhabitant of an apartment in a housing project (top); a line
on the St. John's Church shows how high the floodwater reached (bottom).

One of these residents is Coma Lewis, who is in her late sixties. In addition to the home she is still living in, Lewis also owns two rental properties in the area. Because her husband paid off all three of their properties before he died two years ago, Lewis has no mortgage payments. But she has lost all of her renters and she cannot simply collect insurance and leave town. "On the house, we had wind and fire," Lewis says. "The flood insurance was cancelled in the 1970s when my husband bought the house, and they said this is not a flood zone." Lewis says she received a letter from her insurance company that said she did not need the flood coverage. I asked her if she still has a copy of the letter, as she may be able to sue. She doesn't know where it is, but she said it wouldn't help anyway. "The problem with my insurance on this house, we've been living here thirty-two years and it went from company to company," Lewis says. "We took this insurance out with Geddes agency, they sold out to somebody then that somebody sold out to somebody. Nobody knows what nobody said."



Coma Lewis outside her damaged home (top) and sitting on her back stairs (right).

While waiting for an agent to come out and determine what exactly will be covered, Lewis has applied for a loan from the Small Business Administration to repair her floors. In the interim, she spends her time tirelessly cleaning the mold from the baseboards and clearing up the debris surrounding her house. "The SBA told me they don't know if they're going to give us the loan or not. Me being 67 almost 68, the way he talked would be my ability to pay since I'm retired." Lewis did tell the SBA representative that she collects
retirement from working for the state of Louisiana for thirty years as a teacher and a social worker, and that she also collects a pension from her husband, who was a service-connected disabled veteran. "But [the representative] wanted to know, how much money for this and that. I told him, I'm a heavy diabetic.
Every one of my prescriptions costs $50. That is my co-payment, because the State of Louisiana regulates my medicine. So I told him, it doesn't take long when you're on ten of those. My medicine is three hundred and some dollars a month."



One of Lewis's rental properties (top); Lewis rests outside her home, which faces the St. Bernard
Parish housing project (bottom).

As insurance adjustors and loan officers decide her fate, Lewis and her son Melvin are living on the undamaged upper floor of her home. Lewis sleeps on the floor, insisting that her son take the bed. And she refuses to feel sorry for herself. "Long as I got my life, I can recover. When my first husband left, I lost everything. I been through this before, I know what it means. But I trusted God. He gave me this. This is his stuff. It's not my stuff, it's God's stuff. And you don't know when he'll come back for it."

It is also not clear when then government will come back for the people. There is still no electricity in the Seventh Ward, and all the businesses are closed in the area. There is running water, but when Melvin brushed his teeth with it, he immediately became ill. And there is no relief in sight. "The mayor was crying and everything, but we wait on word and we just don't hear anything. So we don't know what is what,"
Lewis says. "They don't know. Nobody's ever been faced with this before. Everybody's feeling their way, including the mayor, the governor."


A few residents still live on the upper floors of the St. Bernard housing project,
despite repeated attempts by authorities to remove them.

Pastor Bruce, who runs the church next to Lewis's home as well as several community centers for educating and housing troubled youth, is in an even worse dilemna. He had no insurance at all, which is very common in the South. In the Pastor's GED training center, twenty-six new Dell computers are destroyed. A shelter for pregnant teens who had been kicked out by their parents is how inhabited by mold. As the weeks pass, the mold keeps growing, and termites are moving into the ceiling of the church. Time is running out. "FEMA won't come in here," says Pastor Bruce. "And Mayor Nagin is only interested in casinos, the appearance of rebuilding. Nobody from the city comes to visit."



Pastor Bruce outside his church (top); the interior of the church is contaminated
by mold and termites are eating away at the ceiling (bottom).

But former residents are coming back to visit, and to survey the damage. While we were walking down the deserted street with Pastor Bruce, a couple driving by pulled over to greet him. They had lived in the area, and they were driving around looking for a truck they left behind. They are currently staying with family in Texas. Pastor Bruce asked if they were planning on coming back. They said they were not sure. "C'mon, there's no place like home," Pastor Bruce said. "It's gonna be alright-we still havin' church every Sunday!" The couple brightened at this, and said they are thinking about returning home some day. The woman told me she grew up on the projects across the street. "We sure do miss it," she said sadly.

As we drove out of town, from the overpass we could smell rotting food from a supermarket over a quarter of a mile away-with the car windows closed. Everywhere we looked, car dealer lots were filled with thousands of new cars, now completely useless. And yet the very poor had no way to leave the city in the days before the hurricane. One of the greatest mythologies spun in the aftermath of Katrina by some politicians was that the poor didn't want to leave. This is simply not true. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, when you have no car, when you have no family to go to, it is not a matter of desire.



Pastor Bruce's mold-infested office in the church (top); the hard drives of all the
computers in the GED training center are destroyed (bottom).

I lived in New York during the cleanup of Ground Zero, an ungodly mess. Progress was hindered by underground fires, dangerous chemicals, flooding, and sensitivity to human remains—not to mention infighting among city agencies, survivor families, and residents of the area. But it was finished in just one year. Two months after Hurricane Katrina, neither the local nor federal government have sent real relief into the greater part of New Orleans. Lewis was amazed that people could come to New Orleans all the way from Minnesota when their own city officials are completely ignoring them. As we leave, I tell Lewis we won't forget her, that we will tell SOS Katrina—the organization we are working for—that she needs their volunteer carpenters. "I'm not goin' nowhere," she says. "We stayin' right here. I sure can't come up to Minnesota—it's too cold!"

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Desks in the GED training center sit empty next to a water-damaged bookshelf.