Katrina is a Rotten Bitch

The end of Mardi Gras has reminded me to write the blog that I’ve been meaning to post for two months…

In December I traveled to New Orleans for business. In my job, part of my responsibility is medical disaster management for a large five hospital system in LA and Orange Counties, California. Of course, our biggest regional threat is earthquakes. Since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, we morbidly joke about our own impending date with Earthquake Katrina. While hurricanes are obviously much different from earthquakes, there are still valuable lessons to be learned from the hospitals that experienced Katrina. So last December, I joined a group of hospital executives from around the country in New Orleans for a conference on hospital disaster management. The tales from those who experienced the hurricane in a hospital setting were captivating, and worth a blog on their own (that I will probably never write).

After the conclusion of the conference, my wife and I stuck around in New Orleans for a few days as tourists. On our last day, we rented a car and toured some of the areas devastated by the hurricane. What totally astounded me was how vast the devastation was, and still is. I recall after the hurricane how so many reporters explained that photos and videos just don’t adequately show how bad it all was. Now I get it. There is devastation still all around the city, but nothing compares to the Lower 9th Ward. We drove for blocks – for miles – and never saw a living soul. It looked like an entire town after war. All around us were collapsed houses, missing houses, overturned cars, boats stranded on land, even a boat on the roof of a house. And all this more than a year after the hurricane. At one point I just stood in the middle of a street, and for as far as I could see in every direction, not a single house was restored. And all I could hear was the breeze. In front of several houses were crosses, and markings on the walls of how many dead were recovered from the house.

Here are a few pics from my trip. None of these are exceptional – these are typical of more than a hundred pictures I took. Keep in mind that these were taken only two months ago, and probably don’t look any different today…