Super Bowl planners: ‘Anticipate any features of [Lower 9] neighborhood that could be used by media to substantiate Katrina narrative’
1. Fat Domino’s home, 1208 Fats Domino Ave.
2. Site of Lionel Milton family home, 1429 Flood St
3. Bayou Bienvenue overlook, 2637 Fats Domino
4. MLK-Lawless High School, 5300 Law St.
5. Arthur Johnson’s grandma’s lot,1922 Forstall
6. Robert Green’s home, on Tennessee St
7. The oak tree that stopped Green’s floating house, 1617 Tennessee St
8. The Powell family block
9. Site of the Lower Ninth Ward Health Clinic, 5228 St. Claude Ave.
10. Block on Dauphine where 27 people including Alice Craft-Kerney
stayed during Katrina
11. The Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement
and Development, 5227 Chartres St.
(Map by Jeff Tolbert)
by NICK CHRASTIL
Last summer, in July, a group of influential New Orleanians gathered, with hopes of preparing the city for a national spotlight ahead of Super Bowl LIX.
Michael Hecht, the CEO Of Greater New Orleans Inc., who was tapped by Governor Jeff Landry to lead Super Bowl preparation efforts, informed the group that the GNO Inc. “internal Super Bowl team” had taken a drive around the Lower 9th Ward, checking out beautification and infrastructure needs in the neighborhood.
The visit was made to “anticipate any features of the neighborhood which could be used by media to substantiate Katrina narrative,” Hecht had reported, according to a slide presentation from the meeting.
The group, which dubbed itself the “Super Gras Subcommittee,” included Orleans city officials and representatives from the French Market Corporation, Downtown Development District, and the Audubon Institute.
The meeting had a broad focus, ranging from potholes to street flooding to dingy-looking surfaces.
Editor’s note: No New Orleanian asks, “Where were you when the faulty federal levees breached?” Instead, we use “Katrina shorthand” – referring to the 50 local levee breaches and subsequent 2005 devastation simply as “Katrina.”
These neighborhood accounts are entitled “Katrina narratives,” because they are a response to the Super Bowl committee’s concerns. But in some ways, they are incomplete. When we talk about levee waters rushing toward Robert Green’s house, we do describe the “faulty federal levee” that breached. But in other places, we had referred to the disaster simply as “Katrina.” That has now been corrected.
Beyond New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina and its massive storm surge devastated Gulf Coast communities in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. There, the name Katrina alone suffices. But, as our readers reminded us, it is dangerous territory for journalists to use “the Katrina shorthand” when referring to New Orleans, because it does not properly ascribe the cause of the city’s widespread 2005 devastation to badly constructed and maintained federal levees.
After 2005, the federal flood protection systems in New Orleans were scrutinized through six exhaustive analyses by engineers and other structural experts. All concluded that the primary cause in New Orleans for the disaster that left 80% of the city flooded was inadequate design and construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Nowhere is this point clearer than the Lower 9, which flooded catastrophically and early due to storm surge through the former MR GO canal and through grave Industrial Canal breaches. By the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane at 9:45 a.m. on August 29, 2005, Robert Green and his family — one of the families interviewed for The Lens’ Katrina narratives project — had been on their roof for about five hours. Katrina the storm was still on its way.
Culturally rich, but unable to rebuild
by MIZANI BALL
The night before Katrina made landfall, artist Lionel Milton, who grew up in the Lower 9, experienced an omen that convinced him to evacuate.
She saw ‘a public-health crisis’ and opened a clinic in the emptied Lower 9
by MARTA JEWSON
“Alice saved my life,” neighbors say. In 2007, Alice Craft-Kerney helped launch an invaluable post-Katrina clinic. But it closed after an inexplicably short time.
Thwarted from connecting the Lower 9 to its wetland roots
by DELANEY DRYFOOS
A new project along Florida Avenue cuts off access to the Bayou Bienvenue overlook, a key post-Katrina achievement, says environmentalist Arthur Johnson.
Though she was an infant when Katrina hit, she still feels its effects today
by LA’SHANCE PERRY
With its doorway, marked with penciled hash marks showing Cedrionne Powell’s changing height, the family house tracked her growth while she tracked its years of repairs.
Planting a flag in the Lower 9 ‘wilderness’
by KATY RECKDAHL
Every year on the day Katrina hit, Robert Green’s family, in Roof Riders shirts, gathers where his mom’s house stood and walk the path that it floated, to the oak tree where it stopped.