February 11, 2006 A fog has settled over New Orleans.
The Mississippi is a study in gray.
At the Gray Line New Orleans Lighthouse ticket office near the river's edge, a few people gather, mostly couples, mostly older. The first bus is full, so I sit on the curb and eat half a muffuletta while I'm waiting. It fills up fast, but I get a seat.
This is Gray Line's famous and popular "Hurricane Katrina Disaster Tour." The very idea makes a lot of people angry. I was appalled.
I was wrong.
Tour guide Joe Gendusa, whose family has lived in New Orleans for generations, starts with an explanation.
"This is not exploitation, this is education," he says. Though Gendusa's home in Metairie was unscathed, the house he grew up in was destroyed.
As the bus gets moving, Gendusa spews figures in that distinctive New Orleans accent that is half New York, half Deep South:
The city is 180 square miles. Of that, 145 square miles were destroyed.
More than 270,000 homes were destroyed.
Population, pre-Katrina: 475,000. Now: "barely 100,000."
For a lot of people, "there is no home," he says.
The bus starts down Canal, where water lines mark the buildings.
Gendusa says he "went vertical" instead of leaving the city and stayed in Dominion Tower with his family.
The bus moves past closed hospitals: Louisiana State University Medical School, Tulane Medical School. The Charity Hospital system will not open. Toxic mold and mildew have polluted buildings so that they can "never be hospitals again," Gendusa says.
Next: the Superdome, the place we all watched, horrified, as people suffered in heat and squalor, where violence gained the upper hand. The cost to repair the building is $180 million.
Harrah's casino remains closed until later this month, and the Carnival cruise ship Sensation isn't waiting for tourists -- displaced New Orleans police officers still live there. The convention center, where still more people found more torment than refuge, has a long, long way to go before it will open again.
Gendusa remembers that after Katrina came Rita on Sept. 29. "The flooding all came back."
The people on the bus are silent as we head into our first neighborhood, Lakeview. Gendusa say the city won't permit Gray Line in the Ninth Ward, on which the news has been focused for months. That's OK. There's plenty of sorrow right here.
Once a comfortable neighborhood of mostly older people -- Gendusa says grandkids used to play on the lawns -- Lakeview is washed almost colorless by the floodwaters, most homes gutted now, the ominous spray-painted X remaining on each one. (Police agencies put the X's on the homes to record the date, which agency investigated, how many people were found and how many of them were dead.)
Gendusa grew up here. His patter slows down a little as he points out holes cut in attics, where people were rescued. Many here were not, he says. A lot of older people didn't want to leave home and so they died together.
"We're not back," he says after everyone has had time to try to take in the devastation. "We have to have Mardi Gras; we can't just lay down and die."
We go on to see levee breaches on the 17th Street and London Street canals. Water is still leaking into neighborhoods, where white government mobile homes are parked in front of some houses.
The driver wrestles the bus toward Lake Pontchartrain. What was once a row of seafood restaurants is nothing but black mud. Boats are strewn in a park; traffic signals are still on the ground.
It's time for a break -- the tour includes the soft drink of your choice at a restaurant near Pontchartrain. Later, Gendusa will distribute paperwork so that riders can choose a charity to which Gray Line will donate $3 from each $35 ticket.
The riders stand in groups, talking quietly among themselves. Their motivations for coming on the tour vary.
Jo Welborn of Opelousas, La., came because she wanted to come to grips with what had happened. "I felt like since it's a part of history I wanted to see for myself, not to be nosy, but to really understand what these people are going through."
Most of us are shocked at the extent of the devastation -- news video clips of the Ninth Ward don't begin to tell the story. It's one thing to watch the news and shake your head at what nature has done, just one state away. It's another to see the remains of lives and families piled in rubble and ruin across a city.
Jay Methvin, of Pontchatoula, La., says, "I just wanted to see for myself up close and personal. It makes it real -- it's the only way to make it real. Representatives in Congress and all of Washington need to come on the tour."
That is what New Orleans wants. Every New Orleanian I spoke to is all for the disaster tour. They want the world to know they still need a lot of help.
Hurricane season begins June 1.
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