The truth about New Orleans storm damage

For several months the media has presented the New Orleans storm damage. It seems to center around the city center and the trials and travails of getting people to move back in and getting tourists to return. I have family there and their take on the situation has been a bit different. My sister and her husband have basically told me the city is dead and is unlikely to be revived. I thought that they were overstating things. Today, I saw it. The damage is unbelievable. What we saw of the tsunami damage in Indonesia is more like what the lower 9th ward and the eastern suburbs are like. The city is dead. Downtown was only under 2 or 3 feet of water and parts of the French Quarter were spared completely. However, the downtown area is still pretty much deserted. A few businesses are trying to operate. Flooded cars are piled under the interstate. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. Storefronts are boarded up. The National Guard and the State Police are crawling all ove rthe city. For all intents and purposes the city is under martial law. The French Market is open, barely. There is damage to roofs, windows are boarded up. One the way down Tulane Avenue to downtown, most of the traffic lights are still nonfunctional. Most of the businesses along Tulane are destroyed. Now, lets leave the Quarter and travel toward the 9th ward. The levees broke and the water pushed houses into piles. Forget the crap about the levees overtopping and water slowly filling up the town. The levees failed catastophically and the surge smashed everything in its path. The flood took less thaan thirty minutes to fill the entire area. The houses floated, the cars floated, everything is piles of debris. The houses that still stand have the casualty counts painted on the fronts of them. That is, the houses that have been searched. Many have not. There is not enough manpower to seach them all. Some are too badly damaged to safely enter. Many aren't there anymore. Lets travel to the lakefront. There is nothing left. Fires raged in the flood waters due to broken gas lines. Large areas are gone. There are large boats scattered all over. There are parts of boats sticking out of the water in the yachtclub harbor. There are boats on top of houses. There are cars on houses. there are houses that are on top of boats. As we drove toward Chalmette and Arabi, the damage went on for miles. Miles of total devastation and miles of ruined homes with casualty counts on the fronts. Areas where houses once stood that are barren. Houses, occupants, all gone. The factories and refineries in that part of town are destroyed. There is little to rebuild. And why rebuild? There are no utilities. No power, no water, no sewer and no gas. Murphy Oil refinery had some of its large oil tanks float and rupture. Oil is everywhere. We continued to the south and eat down toward Delecroix. The entire area is swept. Here the water came in from the gulf and from the marsh and met the water flowing through the levies. Houses and housetrailers are in pieces everywhere. Entire portions of communities are noticable only by the slabs and a little debris. The bayous are full of cars, trucks, buildings and sunken boats. There is heavy tree damage, in places all the trees are gone. In some areas the flood waters stood long enough that the standing trees are dead. It is beyond belief. Now the real horror: My sister told me of the shootings, of thousands of people dead and not counted, of the corpses being eaten by gators and rats. I thought she exagerated. She did not. The casualty counts are bogus. I spoke to a police officer that had the first boat in the water in his part of town while the storm was still blowing. I told me they were pulling bodies out of the water and dragging them up on rooftops so they could be picked up later. They were saaving the boats for live people they might be able to save. He told me the gators would swim up and get on the roofs and dragethe corpses back into the water. I believe him. He also told me the guard and police got into several fire fights with the local hoodlums. Many were killed. You know what? I believe him. The damage reported is not in any way representative of what actually happened. The New Orleans metropolitan area was for all intents and purposes destroyed. No one has any idea of the number of people killed. Putting a number on the dollar damage is impossible. The place hasn't even been totally examined to see what the damages are. And, the levies are still leaking.