A story by Tung Ly
Most of my adult life can be described in relation to Hurricane Season.
The first photo is an aerial view of a home I bought in 2011 a few days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As you can see a few feet of the first floor flooded. We’ll come back to this house later in the photo album.
The second photo is the Christmas after Hurricane Katrina 2005. Months after returning, our dead fridges filled with rotting food spoiled in a rushed and long term evacuation stayed on our curbsides. I decorated mine with a FEMA tarp.
I worked as an IT analyst for a statewide non-profit housed in New Orleans after Katrina. Multiple times my job was to evacuate with data in hand and return as soon as Hurricane force winds diminished. This often meant driving out and back within a day or less.
In 2011 I purchased a home and started working for City government. A number of times over the next years thunderstorms would nearly flood my home. Generally I would be working the Emergency Operations Center, but sometimes the storms were so sudden that I was home.
Flooding was often and then started happening in other parts of the city. The basic infrastructure that moved stormwater away from homes was failing everywhere.
Even my working conditions began failing with access controls breaking and elevators in disrepair. To make maters worse, a cyber attack required every computer used by city government to be rebuilt at the end of 2019. Our department shifted into emergency operations non-stop, not just a few days for a hurricane.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic extended the non-stop emergency. I moved in with my girlfriend, where I found out floods often as well. Not only was I working emergency 12 hour shifts, but also spending my lunch break waiting in line for COVID testing. Building maintenance started doing strange things like leaving urinal cakes in our office as air fresheners.
I was able to capture the scene outside the Emergency Operations Center during the eye of Hurricane Zeta. I also came to work the Emergency Operations Center in my Halloween costume. I cooked dinner at home using solar backed up from earlier in the day and candles.
Property crime became much more pervasive. We had our cars broken into multiple times. Once we captured video of the individuals breaking in armed with automatic rifles. We decided to stay somewhere else in the summer of 2021. Although I was committed to public service and we both loved the culture and lifestyle in New Orleans, the cost of having to leave for hurricanes, the increasing burden on failing infrastructure, the breakdown of families coping or failing to cope, and the relation of these costs to our new priorities of raising our own family were not compatible. We decided while away that we would move away before the next hurricane season. Before we returned Hurricane Ida caused a small amount of damage to our homes that if we had not left could have mitigated.