Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Emptiness, silence of city makes haunting impression

Members of the U.S. Marshals Service view the skyline of New Orleans while flying Monday over the Mississippi River. Photo by Jeff Scheid. An Oklahoma National Guard truck creates a wake Monday on Poydras Street near the Louisiana Superdome. Photo by Jeff Scheid.

NEW ORLEANS -- Block after block, through the silent concrete canyons of a once-vibrant downtown in America's original city of sin, there was the eerie calm of a sunken city abandoned.

Apart from a sprinkling of National Guardsmen and U.S. marshals, few souls could be seen just before sunset Monday near the shadowy high-rise towers battered by Hurricane Katrina and in a city emptied by the storm's aftermath.

A tour by military all-terrain vehicle from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center to the Louisiana Superdome -- a ride of roughly two miles one-way, going north on Convention Center Boulevard and west on Poydras Street, just south of the French Quarter -- revealed the city's center as a sprawling ghost town.

It was a little bit "Mad Max," a little bit "Escape From New York," and extremely sobering to realize this wasn't the movie set of a post-apocalypse thriller; rather, it was the aftermath of a real-life evacuation of biblical proportions.

Amid the haunting emptiness were reminders of civilization put on hiatus. Stoplights that once blinked red were now dead. An endless sea of debris surrounded garbage cans bearing the slogan, "Trash Your City, Trash Yourself."

There was little flooding in the area and none of the stink of stagnant water and rotting trash that some had described. But near the trash-strewn Convention Center grounds, a wind shift would bring a fetid whiff to nostrils.

But one didn't have to go far to find signs that the area had been deluged. Outside a high-rise tower on Poydras, a motorboat was parked curbside, in front of a sign reading "No Parking Zone."

Up the boulevard, the city's Riverwalk Mall had what you would expect on this Labor Day holiday: people admiring the Mississippi River from its promenade and others firing up a grill. Except on this day, the spectators were a handful of National Guard members taking a break and homeless New Orleans police officers preparing a barbecue for their day's only hot meal.

Farther north, a dozen military policemen leaned up against barricades outside Harrah's hotel, where first-floor windows were still boarded up, and doors were still lined with sandbags as a pre-storm precaution.

The sign over the hotel's Gordon Biersch restaurant had a mix of missing letters, resembling a "Wheel of Fortune" puzzle that was far from being solved.

Along Poydras, one of the city's main drags, there were broken tree limbs and torn shrubbery everywhere, lining medians and filling sidewalks and gutters.

Many street signs were bent or missing, but makeshift wooden signs bearing the letters EMS, short for Emergency Medical Services, spray-painted in Day-Glo orange were posted intermittently on Poydras, pointing the way to a line of ambulances at the Convention Center.

The oft-mentioned snipers were nowhere to be seen, at least on this day and in this part of town.

Outside the Bell South building, a line of utility trucks was parked in the street, with telephone crews heading in and out, making it one of the few beehives of activity in the city's center.

Nearby, just about every other window was blown out of the high-rise Amoco Building. Sets of blinds waved lazily through the gaping holes.

In better days, a 1 1/2-mile stretch of Poydras, between the river and the Louisiana Superdome, was a busy urban center with people hustling between office towers and hotels. Only a handful of civilians could be found Monday afternoon.

On a corner stood an older man in a white wide-brimmed hat with a befuddled look on his face. What he was waiting for was unclear. He jauntily waved his cane at a passer-by.

A few blocks away, a gaunt-looking man in a long coat sat on a bench in front of an office complex, staring off into space.

And a third man with beads around his neck pushed a shopping cart, overloaded with possessions, down the middle of Poydras. Where he was coming from, or going to, was his secret.

Past the abandoned U.S. Courthouse and Lafayette Square, a bus sat abandoned in the roadway.

Still, there was plenty of room on the road. Only a smattering of cars traveled the streets, mostly Louisiana State Police squad cars, National Guard trucks and an occasional TV news truck.

Many drivers simply barreled through intersections without as much as a brake tap. The odds of a T-bone accident seemed remote.

In the air, the constant churn of helicopter rotors provided the only soundtrack in a place where honking horns, surging engines and the chatter and clatter of people walking from here to there once dominated.

Dirty brown floodwater emerged on Poydras near the Superdome and adjacent City Hall, both of which had been abandoned as waters rose and civil order broke down in the city.

The curving hulk of the Superdome rose out of the waters like a metallic volcanic island. A shredded piece of roofing flapped lazily from one side as a convoy of rescue vehicles cut a wake through the street.

The Superdome, like the Convention Center, was a "shelter of last resort" and a rallying point for evacuations, where thousands of evacuees were once trapped in squalor. This week, the dome, like the Convention Center, appeared largely deserted.

So did the adjacent Hyatt Regency hotel, which the better-off used as a for-a-fee "vertical shelter" during the storm. And city government had abandoned its headquarters and moved to Baton Rouge days ago.

From the air, those once-majestic structures rose from the dead city's center, surrounded by waters that appeared dark blue from above. As the sun sank into the horizon, the once-glittering skyline receded into darkness, reclaimed by Mother Nature.