An update from New Orleans

[Inigo_Montoya]

One of my best friends calls Slidell, LA his hometown. If you’re unfamiliar with the New Orleans area, there is a huge lake (Pontchartrain) that lies on the northern border of NO. This lake is held in by levees and is a few feet in elevation above the city. These levees broke during the storm and the lake essentially filled the town (NO is below sea level for a number of reasons, so the lake basically relocated). But you probably know about that already. I got an e-mail today from him. The conditions he describes are current as of about Christmas.

Hey, Hombre,

Wifey and I were in New Orleans a month ago. The place got absolutely wasted. In downtown N.O., many of the streetlights STILL weren’t working. Ma drove us around to show us some of the choicest parts of the damage, and there were workers all over the place wearing hazmat suits – I wondered if I needed one, but ma said we were’nt digging around in what they were.

The city seemed like a ghost town, but the people that were there were VERY positive that the Big Easy would be back, better than ever. J__, L__. and I went to Cafe du Monde for beignets, then left cuz it was pretty “dead.”

Remember the bridge across Lake Pontchartrain from Slidell to N.O.? It’s called the
“Twin Span.” That was wiped out. They put together half of it so far, but the commute from Slidell to N.O. takes almost 2 hours now instead of 30 minutes since the traffic across the bridge is cut to one lane both ways.

We approached N.O. from Baton Rouge cuz we were there for the Saints game at LSU. That means I entered my hometown from the south from N.O. when we went to Slidell – what I saw along the way was surreal. J__ could probably describe it better because I was driving, but there were cars on top of cars off the side of the road, cars on top of light posts, houses off of their foundations. That was in the neighborhoods that were still recognizable. When we got to Slidell, I noticed whole neighborhoods were just gone. There is junk everywhere. Lake Pontchartrain was basically pushed into Slidell, and half of the city was under water. Remember my favorite restaraunt, Salvagios? I couldn’t even figure out where it used to be.