Much has been reported on in the national media about how slowly relief agencies responded to Hurricane Katrina. However, NationsRent had loaded up a dozen tractor-trailers full of supplies from its regional base in Fort Worth, and had a team of 15 relief workers on the way to New Orleans before the levees broke and the floods began. If FEMA and other agencies had anticipated and reacted the way NationsRent did, well in advance of the scope of the disaster, more lives would have been saved and many personal tragedies might have been avoided. Other rental companies, distributors, and manufacturers have played important roles in post-Katrina support as well.
For this month's cover story, I had the opportunity to ride around New Orleans and Baton Rouge with NationsRent's regional vice president Francis Hassis, Dallas/Fort Worth district manager Robert Cycon, and Louisiana regional manager Chris Scott for a couple of days last month. I also spent time with mechanics and truck drivers and counter personnel, many of whom suffered great personal losses, which we'll report more on in upcoming issues. Some lost their homes; others were separated from family members for a while, but they continued working long hard hours to keep the rental business running.
One might say NationsRent, based in Fort Lauderdale, knows something about hurricanes, and no sooner did we go to press with this issue than Hurricane Wilma battered it again. The NationsRent relief team that came to Louisiana from Texas worked as many as 20 hours a day helping employees, setting up supply lines and providing support for relief agencies and municipalities.
Probably none worked harder than Scott, who lost his New Orleans home to flooding. Scott spoke passionately about his city and its people and history and culture. Many of us think about New Orleans as a place to go to conventions, enjoy great food and party until dawn, hurricanes being something to drink, but Scott emphasized the city's rich cultural traditions and the hard-working men and women who keep the tourist industry going, and who built the plants and refineries and ports and roads. And while he still doesn't know if he can rebuild his flooded home or just where he and his young family will live, he is unequivocal about one aspect of his future — he will continue to live in New Orleans.
On my second day we visited the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish, where the world saw TV footage of people on tops of roofs being rescued from the rising waters. We had been talking non-stop — Scott and Hassis pointing out the sites, telling me stories of the storm and its aftermath and relief efforts; me, ever the journalist asking questions. But as we rode through those devastated areas, mile after mile of vacant houses with structures left standing but hardly a soul to be seen except the odd person doing cleanup around their home, a silence fell over us. We were awestruck by the enormity of what we were seeing, large sections of a great American city silent and empty like a ghost town. The structures, or at least the vast majority of them, were still standing, albeit in some cases with damaged doors and windows and roofs. But the insides had been gutted by floodwaters. On some houses water lines were visible, eight or 10 feet up. On many houses, the paint looked like it had hardly been damaged, some more recently painted looked bright on this typical New Orleans warm sunny day. But the insides were rotting away and were already giving way to a destructive mold.
These neighborhoods were un-comfortably silent. Cities are noisy places and while the noise may sometimes bother us, the lack of it was disturbing. There were no teenagers playing loud music on their boom boxes; no kids riding their bikes, no family laughter, no family arguments. Life isn't perfect anywhere, nor is New Orleans any different. But the lack of it is ghostly, eerie, like the aftermath of war.
I've seen it in movies, I've seen it on the news, and I've seen the aftermath of war during an earlier phase of my journalism career. But this was New Orleans, 2005, the city of Mardi Gras, the city that is preparing for another Mardi Gras in 2006.
Now Hurricane Katrina is off the front pages of our newspapers and no longer the top story on our TV news, if indeed it's mentioned at all. But thousands of people still have major needs and it will take a bit longer for them to rebuild their shattered lives. I hope none of us forget.
