This article from The Washington Post was written by Kevin Ambrose last August, and it was eye-opening to see the effects and the way that the city has grown since the Hurricane Katrina sixteen years ago. After watching the first part to the HBO documentary on Tuesday, I was curious to see if anyone made any before or after photos, or anything along those lines. The main reason was because I always heard about Katrina growing up; whenever New Orleans was brought up, inevitably either Mardi Gras or the hurricane followed promptly, but because I was roughly four when it hit and because I never had television growing up, I never really knew the extent of it. I had seen a few photos of the streets flooded, but I had no idea about the situation in the Superdome, on the highway, or at the Convention Center.
The article went through the different neighborhoods affected by the Hurricane, the varying levels of damage inflicted on them, and showed photos taken in August of this year. I wondered why exactly the French Quarter hadn’t flooded as much compared to other sections of the city, but it made sense with the logic that sediments being deposited on that side of the river would elevate it in comparison to the rest of the city. Though as the article went on, it was a little surreal to see the photos of foundation slabs with the knowledge that they were destroyed or abandoned after the hurricane. There were another two photos in this article that had the pilings leftover from one of the homes and one that showed an abandoned Six Flags underwater. Those two in particular looked like they were right out of some dystopian novel with the deteriorating wood and how apparently there are even crocodiles living in the area with the former amusement park. Finally, learning that they were adding more barriers in an attempt to protect the city from another hurricane and/or flooding caught my attention because its construction has led to the wetlands around the city’s detriment. So, they erected this barrier and inadvertently hurt one of the natural ones that would have aided in protecting the city, but at least the article ended with reassurance there have been “An effort to protect and restore wetlands in the Mississippi Delta.”