Debris, Misery Pile Up for New Orleans
The piles of plaster, plumbing and broken appliances top 6 feet in some places, filling the gutters and spilling onto the sidewalks.
Despite the heat _ it’s already in the high 80s _ the piles are moist from the still-waterlogged material ripped from flooded homes. Something in each of them attracts hordes of flies that buzz up at every disturbance.
Eight months after Hurricane Katrina pounded New Orleans, this is the first sign of an attempt to revive the “Gert Town” neighborhood, a poor, mostly black part of the city.
Quintocha Johnson, 30, looks at the debris along her block of Broadway Street with a combination of hope and despair.
The houses now being worked could bring back longed-for neighbors, but she worries about her two young sons getting hurt playing around the debris, which attracts flies, rats and snakes.
“You have to stay on that porch and watch them,” Johnson said, pointing at Mandingo Reed, 1, and James Moffett, 3. “If you don’t stay on that porch, no telling what might happen. The other day, I was sitting on the porch and I saw three nutria rats up on the poles there.”
breitbart.com