NEW ORLEANS (CN) - Five years since Katrina and doors all across New Orleans still have crosses painted on them. The crosses have a date - the day the rescuers first arrived to the neighborhood after the storm. Another number represents the number of bodies found inside. The eeriest houses after the storm were those whose front walls were pulled clean off. The furniture inside might have remained in place, dusty under remnants of pulled-down attic molding, and then next door, no sign of even the foundation where once stood a house.
Perhaps the eeriness of flooded neighborhoods was better stated by actor Brad Pitt: "It was, like I said, a blank canvas. It was Obliterationville. It was a blank, blank, blank canvas. A house sitting on top of a house on top of a house sitting on top of a station wagon with a boat jammed through it. It was, you know, shocking devastation.
The place looked like a giant eraser had come in and just erased away those homes. You know, these weren't just houses. These were people's lives shattered. Families in pain, memories washed away, just obliterated."
In 2006, Pitts' nonprofit Make It Right Foundation commissioned 13 architecture firms to design affordable, eco-friendly houses. The foundation so far has built 30 of them in the Lower 9th Ward, at the spot where the Industrial Canal levee breached August 29, 2005.
"The Lower 9th had become a clean slate," Pitt said. "Everything had been washed away. So quite naively - and I know I'm naive - I said let's start at ground zero, the very historic neighborhood that got devastated by Katrina. ... The Lower 9th is the iconic spot of Katrina.
"It's where the levees breached. It represents a marginalized people stuck in a manmade disaster. ... Let's face the facts: Shoddy Army Corps levee work was the culprit behind the 2005 flooding of New Orleans. ...
"But, lo and behold, the Lower 9th is now the greenest - I don't even like the word green - it's the most high-performing clean neighborhood in the world, according to the Green Building council," Pitt said.
"The corps caused the disaster, not the hurricane," said Joseph Bruno, lead attorney in the case that resulted in a groundbreaking verdict against the corps of engineers for the failure of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet shipping channel following Hurricane Katrina.
In his verdict last November, U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. ruled the corps' negligence with respect to the failure of the channel was responsible for the catastrophic flooding in the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish.
"It probably wasn't the soundest economic decision to make [to take the federal government to court over the flooding]," Bruno said. "Did we think we would win? We wanted to at least publicize the corps' negligence."
"We wanted to demonstrate to the world that the corps of engineers needs some serious revamping," he continued, "that the Army Corps of Engineers today is not the same corps that built the Panama Canal."
Ninety-eight percent of the houses from the Industrial Canal that separates New Orleans' Upper and Lower 9th wards through the end of St. Bernard Parish dozens of miles away were washed away by the flood. That means just 2 percent of houses were left standing.
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