Uptown New Orleans is slowly recovering, but the rest of New Orleans looks bad

NOTE: this webpage will be destroyed soon.

The funeral for Katrina on its antiversary

Goodbye to the FEMA trailer (Cam will miss it – I will not)

From February 2006 and earlier:

NOLA after Katrina

comments, links, and images from L. Dyer

I have many opinions about how federal, state, and local governments failed to protect and rescue the city of New Orleans before and after Katrina, and I have many ideas about how we should proceed now, but this page is more focused on some of my own personal responses to the hurricane. It is really a way to communicate to all the friends and colleagues who have asked about how things are going. Thanks for all the support!

Thanks also to FEMA and TULANE for my new home:

I really hope to be an important part of rebuilding the city, and I hope my 5 New Orleans Earthwatch teams (www.earthwatch.org) will be a part of it too. Here is one of those teams:

New Orleans continues on with Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest this year. Here’s some of the chemical ecology lab:

Now for some opinions about New Orleans, including a little science. I provide some links, comments, pictures and politics:

LINKS

Links to stories, scientific papers, pictures I have taken, and newspaper or magazine articles.

A paper we recently published in PNAS about how extreme weather events (like the recent Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma) could affect forests:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0508839102v1

It is open access, so the PDF is free. Based on results reported there and our rearing efforts in the New Orleans area, I predict elevated levels of caterpillar damage, and maybe outbreaks in 06 or 07 (perhaps of Hemileuca maia – see Gentry’s webpage for this caterpillar: http://www.tulane.edu/~ggentry/LAleps05/species/saturniidae/sat001/SAT001.htm).

Here are links to a couple of stories about the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/science/15obox.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1116_051116_caterpillar.html

Here is a link to a (mostly humorous) story by Joe O’Brien on how we heard about Katrina and how we returned to New Orleans to protect the Chemical Ecology and Tropical Entomology Laboratories:

www.tulane.edu/~ldyer/obrienstory.pdf

Pictures from that trip with Joe, along with a few comments about Katrina and Rita are at this link:

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lad4028/katrina.htm

There are plenty of ways that people can help rebuild this city. Here are a few links:

http://www.globalcrossroad.com/volunteer-katrina/katrina_volunteer_oppourtunities.php

www.nola.com

www.earthwatch.org

COMMENTS

13 March 2006

I finally got a FEMA trailer (see above), and Camden loves it. It’s nice to not live on the ship or in the office (where I was for a few weeks). Not much to report except the fact that the levees look as bad as they did in October, and parts of New Orleans look worse than they did in October. Uptown looks ok, but it would be nice to have regular mail service, regular store hours, and a long list of other basic services. On the positive side, the post-Katrina biology is really fascinating, and I look forward to seeing what the leaf chemistry, caterpillars and parsitoids do this season.

Mardi gras was still fun this year, and I am really looking forward to Jazz Fest.

17 January 2006

First day of classes. Tulane is requiring all faculty to teach double/triple loads this semester, plus a summer semester, so things are looking to be pretty busy. I’m living on the cruise ship right now because I cannot afford anything in a place where Camden can stay too and my FEMA trailer has not arrived yet. The cruise ship is sort of like a prison, with very limited access to guests, no alcohol on board, no decent place to park a bike (or a car for that matter), no overnight guests of the opposite sex, etc. It’s not a cruise. I look forward to moving into the trailer. Here are a couple of shots of Camden on deck:

3 January, 2006

Happy New Year everyone. Just a couple of quick comments. Uptown is looking a lot better than it did in November/December. Camden is back at his house and things seem pretty normal to him. We were hanging out on his porch on New Year’s Eve and we watched a second line march by. It was a funeral for 2005: GOOD RIDDANCE!

While uptown looks good, East New Orleans looks terrible still as do other parts of the city and other places in Louisiana and Mississippi. Even uptown is not fully functional, and Tulane is in total disarray. I really worry about the future of this city and of Tulane.

I’ll be living on a cruise ship for a while with other Tulane staff and students.

18 November, 2005

Uptown New Orleans is slowly recovering, but the rest of New Orleans looks really bad, especially East New Orleans. When I am uptown, I spend time at the various bars that have wireless, and especially at CCs café on Magazine and Jefferson, which has wireless on all the time. I have enjoyed sitting outside on this café, watching the various cars go by, seeing joyful reunions between recently returned New Orleanians, seeing old friends, and drinking the free coffee provided by CC’s (but they recently started charging for coffee again). All of these scenes are difficult to describe, but they are all quite poignant, sad, and hopeful at the same time. Each day the scenes change and the dynamics of the city are different. There are some businesses that look like they will never open again and there are others that I keep looking towards wistfully, hoping they will return soon.

There are still refrigerators all over town still, but I have seen trucks driving by with special equipment to retrieve them. Trees are still down all over the place, and entrepreneurs are charging huge amounts to remove them.

I have been returning to do various jobs. I cut a tree off of Chris and Cam’s house, that was fun. Chris and Camden are doing well. They finally got electricity. Cam has been so happy to be back in New Orleans, but he’s also been hanging out with me in Houston and on various climbing/camping trips (a couple of pics of one of his visits to Houston are below).

My landlord threw out most of my stuff from my apartment, which had been flooded with that smelly black sewage water (the smell and mold are impressive), but he asked if I could go and finish the job, which I did, with the help of some Tulane folks. Here are a few images (around November 1, 2005) from my apartment, some snapped trees east of NOLA, and cleanup in the uptown area: