A Bus Tour Of Hurricane Hell
Katrina's Wake Is Gray Line's Hottest Sightseeing Ticket
Chicagoans Judith and Keith Kelsey-Powell, both members of the clergy, take in the devastation during a bus tour.
(By Steve Helber -- Associated Press)
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Saturday, February 18, 2006
NEW ORLEANS -- The Katrina devastation tour is Gray Line's most popular sightseeing experience here in the city.
Our guide this afternoon is Sandi Smith. She lost the roof of her home in Algiers Point. Her husband is a certified public accountant who now has to work in Houston. Her son flies Black Hawk helicopters in Iraq. She knows something about the fragility of life.
A dozen curious people -- some wrestling with the moral questionability of paying a private tour company to roll past destroyed homes and lives -- pony up $35 apiece and board the boxy bus with large windows near the corner of Toulouse and Decatur streets in the French Quarter.
Standing up front, Smith, 58, is upfront about her own misgivings. She says she and her boss debated the pros and cons of putting together a Hurricane Katrina tour and profiting from the disaster. They decided that the right thing would be to take tourists out to the rubble and ruins to show them that New Orleans is still hurting.
In a similar vein, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D), realizing that many of her state's legislators could not comprehend the scope of the tragedy unless they witnessed it, organized bus tours for elected officials.
"We need you people here desperately," Smith says. She has a pleasant Southern accent and is refreshingly honest for a tour guide. Smith notes the bad places to eat as well as the good. She recommends one bar with $2 martinis. This is, after all, New Orleans.
Smith points out that some of the city is 14 feet below sea level. "We are the City Below the Sea," she says.
"We have three times as many canals as Venice," she says. She speaks in the present tense.
As the bus passes the city aquarium, Smith says rescuers saved the penguins and a giant old sea turtle. However, thousands of fish have died. She points to a shopping mall that was looted and an upscale store that was burned.
The driver eases the bus through downtown streets past landmarks of Katrina -- the Superdome, the convention center, thousands of abandoned and worthless cars and that heat-zapped stretch of Interstate 10 where people lived for days. There are still FEMA trailers in the parking lot of Mother's Restaurant on Poydras Street.
In the New Orleans Municipal Harbor, boats that lost their moorings are up on docks, crashed against other boats.
"That boat," she says, pointing to a white one with blue trim, sitting wampy-jawed on dry land, "that boat belongs to my ex-husband, who insisted on getting it in the divorce proceedings. So you see, ladies, there is justice in the world." Humor on this tour, but not too much.
