David Kronke: I'll be gone 500 miles when the day is done

Wednesday’s Daily News will contain a review of the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Here’s a review of the city itself:

Sad.

That pretty much sums it up. On Thursday and Monday, I drove around the city and was fairly staggered by the city’s condition and how much seems to have gone undone in the intervening seven months. Traffic lights remain tilted at inopportune angles; street signs remain unreplaced, both of which can make things pretty challenging for an out-of-town driver. Piles of debris – the wrecked lives and memories emptied from homes throughout the area – of an enormity unseen since New York City’s garbage strike are ubiquitous. Trashed cars huddle together under freeway overpasses or in medians – or, in at least one case I saw, remain crushed at the spot it was battered by the storms (in a popular area where parking is at a premium). The Superdome looks just as beleaguered as it did last September.

Like a lot of roads in the area, the I-10 is undergoing repairs, the nature of which create traffic jams that bely the notion that more than half of the city’s population has not yet returned. Highway repairs collapsing the I-10 to a single lane resulted in it taking me two hours to get from the airport to my hotel, a distance of 16 miles. (As for the hotel itself, well, you could fairly see the Legionaire’s Disease crusting on the air-conditioning vents.)

Stories abound, about how it took two months to restore phone use to a degree best described as almost reliable, how the Postal Service is just now capable of delivering mail to most of the city, and the phrase third-world country leaps to mind anew.

But the drive out to the ninth ward, on the other side of the levee from Lake Ponchatrain, is the most chilling. (And not because President Bush was out there the same day I was – I drove around for a couple of hours and saw no sign of his vast retinue of aides, drivers, Secret Service guys and reporters scurrying behind, which should give you some idea of how large the area is.)

We’ve all seen the images on TV, but, as usual, TV doesn’t provide a broader context, and that broader context is what’s tough to wrap your head around. Blocks upon blocks upon blocks upon excrutiating blocks of tattered, empty homes with scant signs of life; few people have returned out this way. You can drive for miles upon miles, up and down the neighborhood’s streets – many if not most of which are in terrible shape, with gaping chasms and adjacent slabs of concrete at regrettable angles to one another – past thousands of houses and see no signs of life emanating from any of them, and few if any cars that seem anything close to operable. It’s difficult to process it, to accept it as real; “This has to be a movie set� is what a lot of people describe as their response.

One thinks about how FEMA had L.A. up and running six months after the Northridge earthquake, when several freeway overpasses had collapsed. New Orleans is in exponentially worse shape, and so the challenges are obviously much greater to the point of overwhelming, and yet the problem seems to have been attacked at a most leisurely pace.

Those who have returned fight the odds with a spirited resolve and a sense of humor about the whole thing. They don’t seem to mind telling you their stories, even if they’ve told them a hundred times before, and they, graciously and earnestly, thank you for simply coming to visit. (How many residents of tourist towns can you imagine doing that?) But talk to them at length, and an exasperation, a frustration, an exhaustion comes seeping through. It’s a weariness borne of hours spent on the phone trying to machete their ways through paperwork and bureaucracy. For New Orleans, Katrina was a perfect storm of, well, a perfect storm and governments more interested in making the tragedy a political issue than effecting meaningful solutions.

After a few hours, though, I was pretty much inured to it all, so that’s what accounts for the lack of empathy or outrage in this account.

Seriously, though, one would hope we could do better for our own; we always have in the past. But the words of more than one reporter covering the catastrophe linger today: “This is not the America I know.� Perhaps the Jazz Festival will return our attention to the area and more of us will see how much needs to be done and demand it be attended to in a more urgent manner.