Living in Houston, worried about NOLA
Unlike with Katrina, the Bayou City can’t help New Orleans with this disaster
In early September 2017, New Orleans tourism officials were preparing to launch their fall ad campaign when someone realized that it targeted the Houston region, still staggering from the floodwaters of Hurricane Harvey.
The New Orleans officials regrouped with a different approach: a full-page love letter in the Houston Chronicle and Texas Monthly. It spoke to the city that had cemented a special place in the hearts of New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina had overwhelmed the levees and flooded 80 percent of the city.
New Orleans was my home for 27 years before I joined the Chronicle’s editorial board in January. I lived through Katrina and its brutal aftermath. I can tell you that it’s times like those when you find out who your friends are. And there was no truer friend to New Orleans than Houston, taking in up to 250,000 Louisiana evacuees, providing food, clothing, shelter, schooling and jobs. As many as 40,000 of my former neighbors decided to stay and start their lives over in Houston.
“Twelve years ago, you took in hundreds of thousands of us,” the ad began. “You opened your homes, closets, and kitchens. You found schools for our kids and jobs to tide us over. Some of us are still there. And when the rest of the world told us not to rebuild, you told us not to listen.
Keep our city and traditions alive.”
While others were criticizing the Louisiana government as a banana republic and calling for New Orleans to be bulldozed, the unquestioning kindness and support from Houstonians seemed to be saying, We got your back. We know a little about hurricanes, floods and doubters. You’re going to be OK.”
And we were. And we never forgot.
Now, I find myself at the other end of the equation, a recent transplant to Houston looking back at my longtime hometown with angst and a sense of helplessness.
A different kind of natural disaster, the new coronavirus pandemic. It’s like a hurricane, somebody said on Facebook, a Category 5, but there’s nowhere to evacuate. At midweek, the whole state of Louisiana had more than 9,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 300 dead. New Orleans alone had more than 3,000 of those cases with 125 reported deaths. The curve continues to climb exponentially toward more sickness and death.
By comparison, all of Texas, with a population six times that of Louisiana, had 4,700 confirmed cases. Harris County had 847 of those and six deaths.
My Louisiana friends and family warn me not to get complacent, pointing to the fact that Louisiana ranked third nationally in the number of tests performed per capita while Texas was 44th. We just don’t know how bad it might get here.
But looking down I-10, we can get an idea of what’s possible if we don’t take this seriously.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has said that New Orleans could run out of health care capacity this week or next, the dire scenario when there simply aren’t enough doctors, hospital beds or emergency equipment to treat the seriously ill.
There’s not much either city can do for the other at this point but to pray for the best and promise to offer a helping hand — as soon as it is safe to grasp that hand without fear of infection.
I worry about the folks back home and they worry about me. What else can we do? My son and daughter worry that I’m in Houston all alone and I worry that they are in New Orleans not alone enough. Our shared seasonal allergies is the phone conversation equivalent of a false positive: “Are you sure you’re OK? You don’t sound OK.”
Headlines like “Deaths, intubations swamp New Orleans doctors in coronavirus surge” and “Coronavirus expert Dr. Peter Hotez: New Orleans is a hot spot. Will Houston be next?” are the stuff of nightmares. Good thing I’m not sleeping much.
I’ve assured my kids that I’m better off in Houston with all its wellequipped hospitals and modern medical centers. But saying that only makes me more apprehensive about what is happening in New Orleans.
It was a punch in the gut to read last week that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was ordering state police to stop cars with Louisiana plates at the border and order two-week quarantines. Still, it’s hard to argue with its purpose.
As one friend said, “We’re all living in the new abnormal.”
Nathan Chapman, the founder of a national marketing and consulting agency and a 35-year resident of the French Quarter, said he’s never seen anything like this.
“For a long time it just felt like sadness,” he said. “But now there is a lot more nervousness.”
Chapman, 59, was the president of the Vieux Carré Property Owners, Residents & Associates, a neighborhood watchdog and preservation group, when Katrina hit in 2005.
He spent some of his time, ironically, dealing with issues of zoning, noise, parking and the operations of the so-called “ghost tours” of allegedly haunted sites in New Orleans.
None of those concerns is an issue at the moment.
“When I look out, even on the weekends, at night, it’s just really odd, more desolate than I’ve ever seen it,” he said, noting that even the raucous Bourbon Street was all quiet last Friday night and the chronic problem of finding a parking spot in the Quarter is no more. “It’s a crazy ghost town ... with no ghost tours.”
Houston can’t come to the rescue this time. And if it hits Texas hard in the coming weeks, who knows what shape New Orleans will be in by then.
The two cities, tied together by decades of oil booms, busts and tropical storms, are on their own. But there is still some comfort to be found in that 2017 ad.
“Now, no two storms are the same,” it says. “Comparing rising waters is a waste of energy when you need it most. But you know this — in our darkest hour, we found peace and a scorching, bright light of hope with our friends in Texas. And we hope you’ll find the same in us.”
It may feel as though we have never been farther apart. But we are all in this together. From Houston to New Orleans: Be careful and be safe.