Harriette Brainard, a reporter for the Addison Independent, recently visited New Orleans and begins a three-part series on the status of the city and its recovery with this personal commentary. The next installment will be Monday, June 5, followed by reports next Thursday, June 8. The reporter is a former resident of New Orleans and has attended Jazz Fest, an annual spring music festival, for the past 17 years.
“The dead don’t need flood insurance to buy a new house, and for that you almost have to envy them. Taking the pulse of the town and its citizenry, the driver told me: “I’ve never seen or felt anything like this. I’ll tell you, brother: I’m scared. I’m real scared.�
Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series on New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
By HARRIETTE BRAINARD
“This place has no name, and all of us know it. The city is exposed: flesh and blood, muscle and bone. New Orleans is a fresh wound, sliced open by the shrapnel of a storm.”
So notes CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper in his upcoming book on the wreckage left last August in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina called “Dispatches from the Edge.” On the scene for weeks, Cooper recalls the immediacy of the need just to survive and of the serious wound inflicted by the storm.
