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Disaster Tourism
Are tourists who visit New Orleans rubbing salt into wounds?
It's a phenomenon you see in New York City every day: visitors gazing at the former World Trade Center site, where an estimated 2,700 people perished on September 11, 2001. I saw it in Thailand the year after the tsunami: tourists wanting to tour Khao Lak on the Andaman coast, where a series of three 25-to-30-foot waves, 30 minutes to one hour apart, killed 500 unsuspecting people on December 26, 2004. In New Orleans, there is still no official death toll for lives lost due to Hurricane Katrina on August 25, 2005, though conservative estimates range from 1,000 to 1,600.
Post-Katrina city tours are run almost daily by Grayline ($35) and the popular and highly recommended outfit Tours by Isabelle ($58). Both begin in an air-conditioned bus in the French Quarter. This tourist district was largely untouched by Katrina flood waters, but it's where the history of the once booming city starts. Raised houses dating back to the 1700s suggest that city planners knew even then that these lowlands were a sketchy place to build. An explanation of New Orleans' waterways – Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and the canals— provide a better understanding of the levee system and why it failed, swamping Gentily and New Orleans East and devastating the lowlands of the Ninth Ward and Chalmette. Collapsed houses, overturned trucks, empty foundations, mobile homes, house frames with the eerie spray-painted circle identifying how many dead were found on what date, or how many cats or dogs were left behind, and messages for loved ones with phone numbers painted onto walls: These are among the profound artifacts that will one day be cleared away by cleanup crews (who the locals grumble are taking way too long).
Taking one of these tours is a bit like rubbing salt into fresh wounds. Everyone in the city, regardless of race or class, age or physical ability, was devastated by these events. Two years later, everyone is still talking about it, not just your tour guide (who may be using the tour as a form of therapy). Residents are still struggling to understand what happened and vacillating wildly between the urge to fight to save the ship or abandon it and find a new one (perhaps just temporarily).
Post-Katrina city tours are run almost daily by Grayline ($35) and the popular and highly recommended outfit Tours by Isabelle ($58). Both begin in an air-conditioned bus in the French Quarter. This tourist district was largely untouched by Katrina flood waters, but it's where the history of the once booming city starts. Raised houses dating back to the 1700s suggest that city planners knew even then that these lowlands were a sketchy place to build. An explanation of New Orleans' waterways – Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and the canals— provide a better understanding of the levee system and why it failed, swamping Gentily and New Orleans East and devastating the lowlands of the Ninth Ward and Chalmette. Collapsed houses, overturned trucks, empty foundations, mobile homes, house frames with the eerie spray-painted circle identifying how many dead were found on what date, or how many cats or dogs were left behind, and messages for loved ones with phone numbers painted onto walls: These are among the profound artifacts that will one day be cleared away by cleanup crews (who the locals grumble are taking way too long).
Taking one of these tours is a bit like rubbing salt into fresh wounds. Everyone in the city, regardless of race or class, age or physical ability, was devastated by these events. Two years later, everyone is still talking about it, not just your tour guide (who may be using the tour as a form of therapy). Residents are still struggling to understand what happened and vacillating wildly between the urge to fight to save the ship or abandon it and find a new one (perhaps just temporarily).
What People Are Saying…
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