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The Only Sign of Life
Janice Rozetcki points at a withered bush outside her storm-ravaged New Orleans home. "This was my beautiful lemon tree," she says. The house is marked with spray-painted symbols left by search crews, its interior stripped to the studs. In the yard, sunflowers she never planted have sprung up, the only sign of life.For the past four years, Rozetcki, 51, had rented half her home to her close friend, a 49-year-old aspiring writer named Janice Mahaney. Before Hurricane Katrina, she and Mahaney fed stray pets in this quiet neighborhood, had them spayed and neutered -- even adopted a few. The women loved to have guests over for crawfish boils. Both were transplants to New Orleans, and neither wanted to live anywhere else. "This is a city where there was always something going on," says Rozetcki, a restaurant manager, originally from New York. "This was a place that celebrated life."
But that was before the storm. Rozetcki's neighborhood lies within the Gentilly district, but because it abuts Lakefront, residents call it Lakefront/Gentilly. It was built on marshland and, like much of New Orleans, is below sea level -- in this case by some 13 feet. The London Avenue Canal, designed to drain water from the city, is eight blocks west, and massive Lake Pontchartrain sits about a mile to the north.
Katrina caused flooding in more than 108,000 homes in New Orleans. Lakefront/Gentilly was among the areas hit hardest. A February report estimates that 81 percent of Gentilly's homes -- nearly 14,000 properties -- were damaged or destroyed. And little progress has been made since.
Before Katrina, Rozetcki's community was a model of racial and socio-economic harmony. Blacks and whites, working and middle class, occupied its well-kept cottage-style homes, built in the 1940s. On hot summer evenings, neighbors gathered in the grassy medians of Pasteur and Vermillion boulevards, sharing stories beneath the trees. Kevin Reed's house, next to Rozetcki's, was the designated spot to shoot hoops. "My sons had a backboard on wheels," says Reed, 42. "Kids came from all over to play."
As Hurricane Katrina approached -- a Category 5 storm with winds of up to 175 miles per hour -- most residents evacuated and have since shuttled between shelters, friends' homes, apartments and hotel rooms in strange cities. For many, that journey is not over.
Only a few, including Janice Mahaney, stayed behind to ride out the storm. Rozetcki pleaded with her to evacuate, but Mahaney, sick with the stomach flu, refused. "I can't do 16 hours in a car right now," she insisted.
By the time the storm, downgraded to a Category 3, passed, Rozetcki had made it to a friend's home a few hours away. She phoned Mahaney to check on her. "Everything's fine," Mahaney said. The wind and rain had caused extensive damage, but this didn't look like "the big one."
Six hours later, New Orleans was underwater.
A 10-foot storm surge whipped up by high winds had blown in off Lake Pontchartrain, traversed the London Avenue Canal and caused a 60-foot breach in its wall. Eventually, the 11-mile-long east-west residential corridor surrounding Lakefront/Gentilly was under 6 to 12 feet of water. It was one of 50 breaches that caused the flooding of 80 percent of New Orleans, a 120-square-mile area.
Ten months later, the streets are lined with vacant homes, each bearing a scummy yellow water line several feet off the ground. Dead grass and trees litter the yards and medians, where derelict cars and mounds of garbage rot in the sun. At every sixth or eighth property, there is some sign of life -- a FEMA trailer parked out front, a team of workmen wielding sledgehammers, a family tentatively rebuilding. Of the 170 homes in the six-block area where Rozetcki lived, only one is currently inhabited by its owner.
It belongs to Ellis Mix, and has stood out in the neighborhood ever since he built it three years ago. Unlike the one-story homes that surround it, the Mix place, painted a bright coral color, has two floors.
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