Photo: Reuters
My friend Susannah Breslin, a periodic guest contributor to Boing Boing, has written a piece for the Atlantic about her experience as a survivor of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
When I did return to New Orleans, the city was ravaged, its great oak trees broken, its buildings crumbling, a refrigerator stranded on a dark sidewalk like a ghost. My neighborhood was deserted. A sign on the front of the house where I had lived indicated the roof shingles, which had come off during the storm, contained asbestos. I was in the 20 percent of the city that hadn't flooded, but portions of the roof had come off during the storm.After Hurricane Katrina, Years of Post-Traumatic StressInside, the rain had spawned black, green, and yellow mold that crawled the walls. I could see the sky from the living room through the exposed wooden slats of the structure's bones. The ceiling was in the bed. In the backyard, a towering pecan tree that had stood for probably 100 years had been uprooted from the ground and tossed aside like a toothpick by a bored giant.
I took the boxes and my papers from the mostly undisturbed kitchen. From the rest of the house, I picked and chose from the things that didn't appear to have mold or asbestos on them. The following day, I drove out of the city. There was a boat in the middle of the street. The houses gaped, slack-jawed and empty-faced. I drove across the eastbound span of the Twin Span Bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, and parts of the westbound span of the bridge were simply gone. I drove an hour through a destroyed forest, and when I looked up in the sky, I tried to imagine a thing so big that it could destroy so much.
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An image gallery that shows New Yorkers will approach any task, even boarding up windows ahead of a storm, with attitude and style. Above, a Thai restaurant chose a vibrant, complex pattern of artisanal mango-yellow tape, while the Apple Store's sandbags are "a handsome gray-green, hand-filled and -tied." 
