9th Ward

I know you have heard lots of talk about the 9th Ward and how badly it was impacted. It was. It is a relatively small area of New Orleans below the levee that was essentially destroyed. You have to really stand there and look all around you to marvel at the power that water has. It is very much like the tsunami last year, except the tsunami pulled all the debris back into the ocean when the water receded. The houses in the 9th Ward were pushed back, and the area where the levee broke was pushed clean. They are filling the levee break with a huge dam of rock. It is wide enough to drive a car on. It is eerily quiet in the area. There are no people there, just destroyed homes and cars. All you hear is the crunch of the gravel under your feet or the wheels of the car as you drive along. I went with another woman, and we found ourselves whispering to each other. We kept saying things like, "can you believe this?", "this is unbelievable". She had also gone over for tsunami relief. We couldn't help but compare what we were seeing here with what we had seen in the tsunami areas. However, people impacted by the tsunami continued to live in the devastated areas, they had no where to go. Tents were set up on the foundations of their homes or in long rows in open areas. Here in Louisiana they have apparently found other places to live, because no one is in the area. It does not appear that any clean-up has started, everything looks like it was pushed by the water and just left where it landed. The roads through the area have been plowed clear, but other than that it looks untouched. There were children's' big wheels and other items pushed into wire fences and they were still hanging on the fences. When you stand there and see the power of the water and the height it went to, it is truly amazing that there weren't more people killed by the rush of water.