As the fourth anniversary of the destruction of large swaths of the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina approaches, it'd be easy to post pictures of the rubble and rot that still remain in places like the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. Instead, that's a picture of the trailer that houses the firefighters of the Lower 9th. The firehouse has not been rebuilt since the storm.
There's been promises, made a year ago, with the outside hope that something might be there sometime in 2010, with Engine 22 and Engine 39 combined into a single station. Katrina wrecked 22 out of 33 firehouses in the city. About half of those have been rebuilt, including Engine 38, which serves the wealthy area of uptown New Orleans.
Although that's unfair to say because even those have been rebuilt primarily due to the efforts of volunteers and private donations. As the head of the NO firefighters said this week, "Federal, state and local government failed us." Government officials say FEMA dollars are part of the equation, although that's a pathetic statement. A great deal of credit, though, goes to actor Denis Leary's foundation, which has done more to assist the firehouses of New Orleans than any government entity.
And while that's a credit to Leary and to all the volunteers, it is another of the utter disgraces in this fucked city's too-long battle to return to normalcy. And it begs the question of what could happen if there were government entities that could take care of this, not just with subcontracting the work out to profiteering bloodsuckers who would slice their mother's throats if it let them have the winning bid, but with actually hiring the people to do it. In other words, unlike those who scream that government is the problem, the lack of it is not the answer.
