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<p class="byline-dateline"><span class="byline" itemprop="author creator" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" >By <span class="byline-author" data-byline-name="MICHAEL G. WHITE" itemprop="name">MICHAEL G. WHITE</span></span><time class="dateline" datetime="2017-09-10T01:48:10-04:00" itemprop="dateModified" content="2017-09-10T01:48:10-04:00">SEPT. 7, 2017</time>
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="203" data-total-count="203">NEW ORLEANS — Nearly 12 years ago, in October 2005, I made a fearful, six-hour drive from Houston to my New Orleans home. My neighborhood had simmered in flood water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina. <br></p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="614" data-total-count="817">As I crossed into the city, an old jazz band’s haunting version of the funeral hymn <em>“</em>Just a Closer Walk With Thee” played on the radio. I navigated wet, muddy streets cluttered with felled trees, overturned cars, parts of houses and swollen animal corpses. As I got out of the car outside my wrecked but still-standing ranch-style house along the breached London Avenue Canal, the stench of rot was strong. Everything was covered by grayish mud. Spray-painted on the opened front door was a red X with numbers around it, indicating that no bodies had been found when the National Guard broke in to search it.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="109" data-total-count="926">Most striking was the silence. The city that normally vibrates to the rhythms of second-line bands was still.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="452" data-total-count="1378">A humid heat and even more putrid odor greeted me as I went through the door. The afternoon sun did little to illuminate the dark interior, so what I saw was silhouettes of overturned, waterlogged furniture and unidentifiable objects covered in wet mud. On the walls a filmy waterline, inches from the ceiling, showed where the “toxic gumbo” of flood water mixed with chemicals, rotting food and animal and human remains had reached its high point.</p><div id="story-ad-1" class="story-ad ad ad-placeholder nocontent robots-nocontent ">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="109" data-total-count="2267">I returned to my temporary home in Houston exhausted, overcome with grief and sickened by mold and toxic air.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="243" data-total-count="2510">As devastating as the loss of my possessions was, those painful feelings soon gave way to more immediate and serious concerns: finding housing and food, dealing with insurance companies and government agencies, and affording basic necessities.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="445" data-total-count="2955">In the coming months, as the storm lost its “breaking news” designation, the tragic stories didn’t end. I learned that people I knew had drowned. Others had died later from floodwater infections, auto accidents, stress-related illnesses and even suicide. I worried about the future of my employer, Xavier University of Louisiana, which was damaged by the floods. And what of my music career, much of which was spent performing in the city?</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="410" data-total-count="3365">I found myself in the role of primary caregiver for my nephew recovering from a heart transplant and for my mother and aunt, both in their 80s. After she escaped New Orleans, my mother’s early-stage dementia turned much worse. A doctor attributed her decline to displacement and the stress from watching Hurricane Katrina coverage. She died in 2008; although New Orleans rebuilt, she never made it back home.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="311" data-total-count="3676">I now know everything can be lost in an instant. My thoughts about possessions and what is important in life are very different. Now all of my relatives have passed, except my sister Janice. A month ago, we reluctantly sold our maternal home — something we never would have considered in our pre-Katrina life.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="554" data-total-count="4230">Hearing about the devastation that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have wrought in Houston and the Caribbean and the looming disaster in Florida brings back painful memories. More than that, I’m filled with dread for the storms’ survivors because I know what they will experience after the water recedes and after the nation’s attention moves on. Just as I did a dozen years ago, I see familiar places submerged and scores of panic-stricken people suffering from the initial shock of losing everything and beginning the often lonely process of recovery.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="389" data-total-count="4619">Thousands of people with the misfortune to live in the paths of these storms are now making long, fearful drives to waterlogged homes, just like the one I made in 2005. They’re digging through ruined belongings and realizing that while they’re lucky to have their lives, those lives may be forever changed. They still have many urgent questions to be answered and decisions to be made.</p><div id="story-ad-2" class="story-ad ad ad-placeholder nocontent robots-nocontent ">
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                <div class="story-notes"><p>Michael G. White is a jazz clarinetist and composer, and a professor of African-American music at Xavier University of Louisiana.<br /><em></em></p></div>
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