The Challenge Ahead

Enlarge Andrea Hsu, NPR

Homes in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

Andrea Hsu, NPR

Homes in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

It doesn't matter how much you think you know about what happened in New Orleans, seeing the devastation firsthand is shocking -- just plain shocking. Driving through New Orleans East last weekend, visiting Honeysuckle Lane -- the street All Things Considered has been following for the past few months -- the landscape is post-apocalyptic.

Six months later, there are empty houses for mile after mile, many barely damaged at first glance, uninhabitable on closer inspection. Some have white FEMA trailers in the yard. Every so often you see someone working on a home, methodically dragging rotting materials to the curb, stripping the house to the studs or hammering away on a blue tarpaulin covered roof. Few cars are on the road. Traffic lights aren't working. Shopping malls are empty and desolate. A crisp new gas station sits idle, just a block from a busy interstate.

"It's so much worse than I expected," I say to our senior producer Art Silverman, as we pass yet another deserted supermarket. Art feels differently. On his fourth trip here since the storm, he sees progress being made. Dead animals have been cleared from the curb, he says, tons of garbage has been hauled away, and the stench of rotting meat and produce no longer hangs in the air.

Eastern New Orleans -- far from the worst damaged part of the city -- reminds me of Bosnia, which I first visited not long after the war, driving through deserted village after village, where the roofs had been blown off almost every house.

It isn't just the panorama that provides an inexact parallel with the Balkans. It's also that in New Orleans today, as in Bosnia years ago, there is only one topic of conversation. For Bosnians it was the war, the war and the war. All conversational roads in New Orleans end at the levees.

A simple "How are you?" is heavily freighted. Sometimes it's, "How's your house?" or "Any news about your FEMA trailer?" Mention the wait for your food in a restaurant and you'll end up discussing the service industry's post-Katrina labor shortage.

There is one other distant place that comes to mind here: Gyumri in Armenia. That city was almost completely destroyed by a massive earthquake in 1988. Forty-five thousand people died, another half million were left homeless. When I toured that city a decade later, it looked as if reconstruction had barely started. People were still living in shipping containers.

No one thinks New Orleanians still will be living in their FEMA trailers in a decade's time. But no one should underestimate the challenge ahead.