Lost in the Flood

Nine years ago this weekend, one of the most devastating hurricanes to ever strike the U.S. mainland ravaged the city of New Orleans.

It was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history (over $80 billion in damages), and it incredibly claimed more than 1,800 lives.

The category 5 hurricane also destroyed thousands of homes in New Orleans.  Many, like this one pictured here, were abandoned and never restored.

Happily, there are organizations such as Habitat for Humanity that have spent the ensuing years trying to rebuild some of the homes.  I chronicled the efforts of Middlesex Community College students to lend a hand in a post earlier this year, that can be read here:  Habitat Forming

This spring, some of my colleagues from MCC and I travelled to the bayou to attend a marketing conference on behalf of the college, the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations (NCMPR)

But at the tail end of it, we were fortunate enough to meet up with another MCC colleague who suffered a personal loss with the hurricane and returns to the Big Easy quite often to check in on her extended circle of family and friends.

Lura Smith, the assistant to President Carole Cowan at MCC, lost her family home to the hurricane.  She is NOLA through and through, and never forgets her heritage, so it was a special treat to see the backroads and main streets via Lura's eyes.
At one point, Lura took us to her what was once her old homestead, where she was warmly greeted by some of the neighbors who were able to salvage their homes and stay in place.

The family has had to elevate their home on stilts (seen in the background here), but remarkably, still have only received partial federal financial funding to help rebuild their home, nine years later!

Lura stands in the middle of a field, where her house once stood.  The home was so badly damaged by the flooding of Katrina, it was razed several years later.

Lura takes our colleagues Donna Corbin and Mary-Jo Griffin through the plot, recounting some of her childhood memories. 

Lura explains to me about her memories of attending school, and how tightly wound the neighborhood was, with families always helping one another out. 

And finally, Lura, and our MCC team members, in a picture taken by a very young but adorable neighbor

While the NCMPR conference was valuable for its content, and certainly for its networking opportunities with other community colleges from across the country, the last day's visit to the storm-ravaged areas of New Orleans really put things into perspective.

Donna, Mary-Jo and I spent each early morning as part of our Boston Marathon training by taking a run through the downtown or the nearby environs.  But it was getting way out into the all-residential neighborhoods, where we saw the thousands of abandoned homes that reminded us how catastrophic the hurricane was and how much work still needs to be done.

If you're interested in helping to rebuild, here's a website you can visit to lend a hand:

Habitat for Humanity - New Orleans

It was the author Thomas Wolfe who made famous the idiom "You can't go home again."

From his novel of the same name, said Wolfe: "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood....back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

Never had that phrase seemed more appropriate than that afternoon spent in New Orleans.