Merry Katrina Christmas

Disclaimer: Don't get the impression that New Orleans is doing alright because people are decorating their houses for Christmas. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It's true that life goes on almost normally along a narrow sliver of the city that follows the curve of the Mississippi River. I'm not interested in the Christmas decorations there -- those homes have no markings on them because they had no flooding. What you're seeing here, for the most part, are homes that were in areas that flooded, but that were at least marginally habitable (often because they were sufficiently raised or had second floors), or that had already been gutted and restored. If you traveled in a straight line from the river to Lake Pontchartrain, the condition of neighborhoods and homes would generally diminish as the natural land elevation dips deeper into the shape of a bowl, with the exception of a few natural ridges (see the elevation and flood maps listed in the sidebar for a visual). The homes pictured below lie in that periphery on the very edge of habitable New Orleans. Most of these homes are in the Broadmoor and Mid-City neighborhoods. Remember that 80 percent of the city was flooded, and less than 100,000 of some 400-500,000 original residents are now living in the city. The discovery of a house with Christmas decorations is not common in many of these neighborhoods where people are living in a frontier ghost town with few, if any, neighbors.













































More Katrina Christmas photos can be found in earlier PGR posts here and here.

If you know of any other homes that need to be added to the collection, please let me know by leaving a comment.