More Of The News From The Renewing New Orleans

After returning to the city, one of my tasks is going through the newspapers to see what I’ve missed. I mean, other than a men’s magazine naming Jennifer Aniston (is that her name? I’m so culturally hip) its “man of the year.”

ABOUT OUR SCHOOL SYSTEMS

To my amazement, the St. Bernard Parish public schools has reopened. The people who live in this parish are now virtually all residing in FEMA trailers, I understand, but to re-establish some kind of normalcy and to send a signal for others to come on back and get to work rebuilding the neighborhoods, the school board opened the St. Bernard Unified School. It meets in trailers and runs on generators and had 330 students the first day.

Meanwhile, New Orleans became the only public school system in the region that has not opened any of its schools since Katrina, even though several of their campuses in Uptown and across the river in Algiers had no damage. Out west in Jefferson Parish, the attendance is about 80 percent of what it was pre-Katrina. The Christian schools are all in crisis, if I’m any judge. Our First Baptist (Kenner) Christian School is running half the 300 students they had at their peak a couple of years ago. The church met Wednesday night to discuss what to do, and yes, considered the nuclear option of closing it down after 20 years, but decided to stay the course for a while longer. A church in South Carolina has sent some money to help, plus they have some insurance money coming that should buy temporary relief.

REBUILDING THE CITY AND WHAT WE ARE DISCOVERING

The contractor assigned to bring the Superdome back to speed says he’s finding materials and labor pricier than he had thought and the cost is going to be in the neighborhood of $200 million. That’s some neighborhood. The dome cost about $75 million to erect, as I recall. This being Louisiana, the original estimate was about half that. Those were 1970 dollars which were larger and stronger than the ones in our billfolds today, although we did not know it at the time.


Teams that have gone into the St. Bernard neighborhoods and tested damaged homes are revising their estimate downward of the percentage that will need to be destroyed. Early forecasts had said 80% of St. Bernard would have to come down. Now the figure is 20%, based on what they have found. The homes will still have to be gutted, but they are structurally sound. Good news for homeowners, I guess. Problem is, the parish wants everything built higher in order to withstand future storms. By leaving homes at their present level, they’re still exposed to great risk.

People who want to re-do all our levees–and that’s all of us–are pointing to Holland and their system of dikes as role models. That went on long enough for someone to actually go to The Netherlands and see what they had. A subtitle for an article on that country’s system reads: “The Dutch found out the hard way: Flood control can create as many problems as it solves.” There may not be any easy answers.

The population of our area is shifting. Pre-K, Jefferson Parish (Metairie, Kenner, Marrero, Gretna, etc.) had 453,000 citizens. Today, we’re down to 408,000. Orleans Parish–which includes the city of New Orleans–had 460,000, but is down to about 100,000 now. Plaquemines–which includes the city of Belle Chasse and our Naval Air Station there, but was so devastated south of there–had 28,000 before and 16,000 now. Two of our neighboring parishes have grown. St. Charles (just west of the airport; includes Destrehan, Luling, Boutte) counts 65,000 citizens now, up from 50,000 pre-K. And on the Northshore, St. Tammany Parish (Slidell, Covington) went from 216,000 to 300,000 almost overnight. Ask anyone who lives there; growth is a mixed blessing, unless you love traffic problems and inflated housing prices and long lines at stores.

COUPLE OF BIG PROBLEMS ARE PESTERING US

Those little flies are everywhere. Slightly larger than gnats, they’re called “coffin flies” because decaying organic matter is its favorite breeding place. This town has lots of incubators. The first time I drove onto the campus of the seminary in late September, my friends got out of the car and left the doors open. Big mistake. When we drove away, those tiny flies were everywhere. Now, they’re all over the city. The authorities are finding different kinds of insects–I won’t bore you with that here–and prescribing various remedies. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said one expert. We can hardly wait.

Mold is in the air. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has been in the area recently taking air samples. What they found is not good news. We knew that areas like Lakeview where homes’ contents are now lying in huge piles in front of their gutted homes were rife with mold and mildew. You can smell it from the interstate. The CDC went inside a Lakeview home and found 638,000 spores per cubic meter of air. They walked outside and found 40,000 spores per c.m. Across town, a long way from the flooding, they found 26,000 spores/c.m. in yards of homes that had only slight damage from the storm.

“As people demolish the inside of their homes, it’ll release a lot of mold spore into the air,” said a scientist. “Once the work is done, it may go down. But it’s likely to go on for many months to come.”

They’re urging the old and the very young as well as those with respiratory problems to stay out of areas with high mold content. But that’s like asking them to stay away from New Orleans and its suburbs, to not go home.

For the most part, we’re told, all that will happen is congestion, sneezing, runny nose, and throat irritation. Nothing life-threatening. We think. We hope.

SO, WHAT’S THE GOOD NEWS FROM DOWN HERE?

Re-reading the above, I realize I’ve given a long list of the problems we’re facing. The good news is the Lord and the people. God still loves us, He’s here with us, and leading us. People are coming in to help us, sending money, praying for us. The local people are trying their best to re-think how things can be done differently and better.

Your prayers are making a difference. But please don’t stop.

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