tagged w/ Ninth Ward
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Today, the mayors and governors along the Gulf Coast issued dire warnings about Hurricane Isaac. Seven years ago, Katrina slammed into New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, as a strong Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 125 mph. More than 1,800 people were killed, most of them in Louisiana. On Tuesday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Isaac had become a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 75 mph, which could get stronger by the time it’s expected to reach the swampy coast of southeast Louisiana. The latest projections showed Isaac making landfall at or near New Orleans late Tuesday or early Wednesday.
This week marks the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s ravages of New Orleans, a city that not long ago appeared to be completely lost. Only seven years have passed since rotting corpses were floating through the city’s streets, since hundreds of thousands of survivors sat in hotel rooms and shelters and the homes of relatives, finding out from news coverage that they had been forced to join the ranks of the homeless. The unbelievable devastation of New Orleans is almost beyond human comprehension. The virtually complete destruction of the entire city by Hurricane Katrina, the loss of huge numbers of lives, the ruination of the property and lives of so many, especially the poor and disadvantaged, is a tragedy of historically monumental proportions.
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Aug. 29, 2005, pounding an area that included the fabled city of New Orleans and wreaking large-scale damages on neighboring Mississippi. In all, more than 1,700 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of others were displaced. Packing a terrifying punch of 145-mile-an-hour winds when it made landfall, the category-4 storm left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from its center. The hurricane’s storm surge pushed a 29-foot wall of water ashore when the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast, which was the highest level ever measured in the United States. Levees failed in New Orleans, resulting in political and social upheavals that continue a half decade later.
Damage, costing billions of dollars, has made Katrina one of the costliest storms on record. In New Orleans, floodwaters from the breached levee rose to rooftops in the poorest neighborhoods, and in many areas residents were rescued from roofs of homes that had become uninhabitable. The hurricane’s roaring winds stripped 15-foot sections off the roof of the Superdome, where as many as 10,000 city residents had been forced to take shelter. An exodus of hundreds of thousands left the city, many becoming refugees, finding shelter with nearby relatives or restarting their lives in states as far away as Massachusetts and Utah.
This piece includes a number of color photographs, a photo-gallery and two videos.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/remembering-hurricane-katrina-portraits-of-tragic-loss/Today, the mayors and governors along the Gulf Coast issued dire warnings about... more
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This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s ravages of New Orleans, a city that not long ago appeared to be completely lost. Only five years have passed since rotting corpses were floating through the city’s streets, since hundreds of thousands of survivors sat in hotel rooms and shelters and the homes of relatives, finding out from news coverage that they had been forced to join the ranks of the homeless.
The unbelievable devastation of New Orleans is almost beyond human comprehension. The virtually complete destruction of the entire city by Hurricane Katrina, the loss of huge numbers of lives, the ruination of the property and lives of so many, especially the poor and disadvantaged, is a tragedy of historically monumental proportions.
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Aug. 29, 2005, pounding an area that included the fabled city of New Orleans and wreaking large-scale damages on neighboring Mississippi. In all, more than 1,700 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of others were displaced as refugees. Packing a terrifying punch of 145-mile-an-hour winds when it made landfall, the category-4 storm's surge pushed a 29-foot wall of water ashore when the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast, the highest level ever measured in the United States. Levees failed in New Orleans, resulting in political and social upheavals that continue a half decade later.
This commemorative piece presents a number of historic high-resolution photographs, a memorable slide show and two emotionally moving documentary short films.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/a-remembrance-of-katrinas-wake-portraits-of-tragic-loss/This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s ravages of New... more
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Screening during the Republican National Convention, Tuesday, September 2nd at 11:00am at the Landmark Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
"Trouble the Water" is a documentary made by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, a pair of professional filmmakers who worked with Michael Moore on "Fahrenheit 9/11," and like other documentaries it's a movie about real people and their lives, designed to enlighten and entertain in roughly equal measure. You could say that all documentary films represent a collaboration between director and subject, but in "Trouble the Water" that collaboration is stretched nearly to the breaking point, since the heart of the film is footage Lessin and Deal didn't shoot.
As they would be the first to admit, "Trouble the Water" only exists because Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a charismatic, trash-talking "street hustler" (her words) and aspiring rapper from the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, turned on her new Sony camcorder -- she'd bought it on the street for $20, provenance unknown -- on Aug. 29, 2005, and began to shoot what was happening in her neighborhood. What was happening, in case you've forgotten, was that a big hurricane passed over New Orleans, the city's levees were breached in many places, and the water on Roberts' street rose past the stop signs and nearly to the housetops.
If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle; one neighbor, a man Roberts and her husband, Scott, hadn't even liked before the hurricane, risks his life to save them, swimming back and forth across the street using a punching bag as a flotation device. Roberts barely knew how to turn the camera on when the storm started, and her footage is highly uneven. But you can feel her taking ownership of the situation as the catastrophe worsens, doing her own TV-news-style voice- over and alternating between establishing shots and close-ups.
What Lessin and Deal provide is a considered structure that places Roberts' footage within a larger social and emotional context as part of a self-defined life, in which Hurricane Katrina was both tragedy and opportunity. As Roberts makes clear, she's a former drug dealer who lived by her wits in one of the poorest, blackest neighborhoods in the United States. But no person can be reduced to her pathologies, and she's also a married woman with a tremendously likable and loving husband and a supportive extended family, some of them much more affluent. All those resources helped her in her remarkable odyssey out of the flooded Ninth Ward to a Red Cross shelter, where she approached the two white filmmakers from New York (who had been turned away by the National Guard) with the words, "This needs to be worldwide. Ain't nobody got what I got."*continues*Screening during the Republican National Convention, Tuesday, September 2nd at 11:00am... more
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This podcast is an assemblage of randomly selected footage from my archive on post-Katrina New Orleans. A few things in it: Reverend Lucas (a community leader for the Lower Ninth Ward) speaks with the Army Corps of Engineers, the lower ninth ward levee, explorer Poppa Neutrino talks about his adventures and involvement with Common Ground Relief, and fishing boats on the side of a highway in New Orleans East.This podcast is an assemblage of randomly selected footage from my archive on... more
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A gumbo mix of local characters celebrate the survival of New Orleans' spirit through music, merry-making, costuming and community rebuilding - all thrown together with a little bit of healin' voodoo for the citys renewal.A gumbo mix of local characters celebrate the survival of New Orleans' spirit... more
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6 years ago
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In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, residents of the Ninth Ward slowly resume their lives in a part of the city that's come to represent the tenuous future of New Orleans.In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, residents of the Ninth Ward slowly resume their... more
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