No doubt, the University of Maryland marching band will never play a venue quite like this again.
Against a ghost-town backdrop of rotting buildings and empty houses, band members played a lunchtime gig Wednesday for the students and faculty at Holy Cross School in St. Bernard?s Parish. It was their first real glimpse at the worst of the residential destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina.
“It?s crazy,” said Lou Tedesco, a senior trumpet player from Long Island, N.Y., looking at row after row of vacant houses across from the school?s campus. “These houses are mangled.”
Check out Chris Ammann’s photo blog of the entire trip.
Even though it?s been a little more than 16 months, the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward, Mid-City, New Orleans East, Gentilly and St. Bernard?s Parish look like neighborhoods that were abandoned decades ago.
Window panes have vanished. Roofs have collapsed and are strewn with debris. Weathered rowboats still lie on empty sidewalks.
The exterior walls of many buildings are rotted and have crumbled. Shingles and paint have peeled off many houses that, once the water receded, were left to bake in the summer sun.
“These were thriving blue-collar and middle-class neighborhoods prior to the storm,” said Tobey Pittman, executive director of Operation NOAH Rebuild. “These were places where family was important, where friendship was important, where church and community were important. And all of that has disappeared.”
In the aftermath of Katrina, 80 percent of New Orleans was under water. Forty-five square miles had flooded, and an estimated 220,000 Gulf Coast homes were totaled.
The city?s population, 480,000 before Katrina, is roughly 200,000 today ? about the same as in 1890.
In response to the devastation, the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention launched Operation NOAH (New Orleans Area Homes) Rebuild. It is a two-year project using volunteers to rehab 1,000 homes and 20 churches.
In July, Operation NOAH leased three floors in the New Orleans World Trade Center, virtually empty since Katrina, to house its volunteers and others coming to the city?s aid. This is where the University of Maryland marching band called home for the past week. There were bunk beds, cafeteria-style meals, hot showers and a lot of camaraderie.
“I came to New Orleans in 2004 to see the NCAA basketball championships at the Superdome, and it was exciting to come to this city for the first time,” said Maryland junior alto sax player Gabriel Meskel, who graduated from Catonsville High. “This time, I was just really glad to come down to help.”
Many of the Operation NOAH staff at the World Trade Center personally felt the wrath of Katrina. Pittman?s son and daughter-in-law watched the floods take their home.
“They had just graduated from college and made their first month?s mortgage payment,” Pittman said. “They had lake water, mud and fish filling the first floor. They lost it all.”
April Price, an Operation NOAH staffer, had to evacuate from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, which was destroyed by the wind and high water. “I eventually graduated in Alabama,” Price said. “I went to where my grandparents used to live, and I didn?t know what I was looking at.”
FEMA trailers dot some streets on the outskirts of New Orleans. But the overwhelming number of residential blocks ? especially in the late afternoon when people normally would be arriving home from work and children would be outside playing ? are horror-movie desolate.
“New Orleans now is the French Quarter and business district surrounded by a ghost town,” said a local guitarist after a gig at the Café du Monde in the French Quarter. “There is nothing else happening.”
