In this article from today’s New York Times about the ongoing recovery efforts from Katrina, the difficult to accept fact is that so much remains to be done it seems little has actually been done.
We just cannot let this happen here.
Here is an excerpt.
June 9, 2006
The Road Back
100-Ton Symbols of a Recovery Still Suspended
By DAN BARRY
BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala., June 7 — To understand a little about this small crustacean of a city nine months after Hurricane Katrina, you have to accept a counterintuitive concept: Boats in the trees.
About two dozen shrimp vessels, some of them 80 feet long and weighing more than 100 tons, list in suspended state amid scrub oak and pine, many yards from the bayou where they belong. Removed from the blue and shoved into the green, their white masts and rigging rise like bleached treetops in a forest.
Here is the Gold Star, rooted in the sand and brush like a huge and dangerous jungle gym. Here is the Peaceful Lady, its charts neatly rolled up inside, its bow planting a hard kiss on a pine. Here is the Mee Mee M, the bottle of soy sauce in its cabin just one of the hints that many of these stranded boats are owned by Vietnamese immigrants.
The only things darting beside the exposed hulls are yellow flies — and shrimp season started Wednesday.
Trying to comprehend the reasons boats still nestle in trees so long after the storm can hurt the brain: the owners never acquired or could not afford insurance; the federal government saw no compelling need to remove them; there are protected wetlands to worry about, and even an Indian burial ground.
If Katrina ever slips momentarily from one's mind here — if — the plain sight of these boats in the woods snuffs the daydreaming. The slow, complicated efforts to extricate the hurricane-stranded vessels mirror the slow, complicated efforts to extricate this hurricane-damaged city of 2,100 from that one day last August.
