
Hurricane flooded I-10/I-610 interchange, New Orleans, LA
Reposted from my guest blog on Rooflines: In the halcyon days of my youth, way back in 2006, I went to New Orleans. I traveled there at the behest of the corporation that I worked for at the time, as we had made a $2 million disaster recovery commitment to the city, and we were trying to figure out how to spend it.
Now, there’s two things you need to know about spending $2 million: (1) that’s a lot of money, and (2) it’s really not very much money at all. When you get right down to it, in dealing with a post-crisis situation of the scale of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the troubled city of New Orleans, spending that kind of money in a way that was both responsible and impactful was a damned hard thing to do.
So there I am, the well-meaning Yankee, fresh off the plane in my shiny city slicker best, traipsing through the Lower 9th Ward. I was there several months after the floods had receded, but it was still a silent, mud-stained, wracked and ruined wasteland. I remember picking up a dirty and detached doll’s head (Woody, from Toy Story – a memento I’ve kept with me always. He’s staring at me as I write this now), and thinking, well, I’ve got to start somewhere.
Continue reading →
Like this:
Like Loading...