By Lubna Abdel-Aziz A sea of humanity, stranded, destitute, lost, and homeless, begging for money, bread or water -- visions filled with horror and dread have saturated our conscious and unconscious existence throughout the past weeks. The staggering aspect is not the parade of human misery, suffering, and despair -- our TV sets have made such scenes daily fare. The shocker was where these pictures came from, not from Asia or Africa, but from Boomtown USA, the richest, the most sophisticated, the most advanced country in the world. Nature had struck again with its mighty blow, hitting not one, but three of the US Southern states, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Her emissary -- a hurricane, prophetically named Katrina, came ashore spreading unprecedented ruin and wreckage in its path, demolishing their coastline, their property, their cities and their very lives. A hurricane by any other name is still a hurricane -- those circular winds with torrential rains that originate in the tropics. When they occur in the Pacific Ocean they are called "typhoons", in the Indian Ocean, "cyclones", and in the Atlantic, "hurricanes". The worst hurricane in history killed more than 20,000 and destroyed the naval fleets of the British, Spanish and French. It occurred in the Caribbean in 1780 and wiped out everything in its path, from the island of Barbados to Puerto Rico. Hurricanes are nothing new to American shores. They have come before and they have come often, strong, weak, and middling, destroying, demolishing, and decimating. Only last August, four consecutive hurricanes hit the Florida coast leaving it desolate and dismal. Because of modern meteorological forecasts, the loss of life has been kept at a minimum giving citizens ample time to evacuate and move to safer ground, leaving their property to satisfy the hungry beast. The most devastating hurricane in US history occurred a century ago, hitting the seaside town of Galveston, Texas, in September 1900. Though nameless it was the deadliest natural disaster in US history. It levelled 12 city blocks, in the island of Galveston, but the worst blow was the loss of life, estimated at 4,000 -- 8,000. Can this happen a century later? Katrina, with its brutal savagery, has no match. Its very name conjures the power and might of other great Kates of the past, like the Empress of Russia, and the queen of stage and screen, the mighty Miss Hepburn. Hurricanes are ruthless and they do not come cheap. They devour much and they cost more. In the last century 10 of the costliest hurricanes in the US totalled a loss of $50 billion. Katrina alone will cost more than $100 billion and the loss of life remains unimaginable. While several cities along the three states lay siege to wind and water, the most sorrowful sight was the drowning of the sparkling, lyrical, fascinating, colourful, most magical city in the whole of the US -- the city of New Orleans. Why and how could such a calamity befall a modern city, any city in the US, let alone the jewel of its crown. Even if you have never been there, this most diverse, vibrant city of the South is surely familiar to you -- its music, its culture, its food. Used as a backdrop to hundreds of Hollywood films, New Orleans conveys a sense of aesthetic pleasure as well as of sleaze and depravity. The "haunted city" has the mood and mien of mystery and magic, with a multitude of multi-cultural thrills and chills. It is a city of crime, corruption and crack, as much as it is a city of music, art, and culinary splendours. It comes alive in the works of Tennessee Williams, immortalised in his great plays. You have ridden one of her Streetcar-s Named Desire, visited her beautiful, bizarre French Quarter, accompanied Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara on their honeymoon in Gone with the Wind (1939), followed Gary Cooper as he followed Ingrid Bergman in Saratoga Trunk (1945). The Big Easy, where everything is slower, simpler and easy going, a nickname not without its negative implications, and not a name Orleaneans like to use. Lying below sea level and lacking natural drainage, New Orleans was surrounded by water, the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, and a myriad bayous, canals, and waterways. The city, helpless like a sunken, hollow, soup-bowl, relied on one of 112 pumps which could draw 25 billion gallons of water daily. In addition, the city built 206kms of walls called "levees" along the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain to help protect it from floods, Everything failed against Katrina. Inhabited by Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Natchez Indians, when the French explorer Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, sailed down the Mississippi from the Great Lakes region in 1692, and claimed the entire Mississippi valley, calling it Louisiana after King Louis XIV of France. "La Nouvelle Orleans" was built by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville and his brother Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville on the banks of the Mississippi in 1718. It became the capital of the French colony of Louisiana, which covered the central third of the present day USA. In 1762 King Louis XV of France gave Louisiana to his cousin King Charles III of Spain. Three decades later France regained the Louisiana territory and sold it to the US in 1803. Louisiana joined the union by 1812 and New Orleans became the state capital. The city has overcome mass floods, swamps, fires, disease, epidemics, mosquitoes, corrupt politicians, and of course hurricanes. Nothing could hinder it from evolving into the leading cultural centre of the South. Here we have the Opera, Philharmonic Symphony, "Le Petit Théâtre de Vieux Carré", summer pops, museums, parks, restaurants, but its greatest accomplishments is that it is the birthplace of "Jazz". Mostly black musicians, but some white, helped popularise jazz in bars, nightclubs on Basin Street, the home of Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, its favourite son. Its unique culinary artistry makes it the only place where you can walk down Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and sip your "café au lait" in the famous Café du Monde, munch on your crispy square "beignets" (sugary French-style donuts); taste your "andouille" (spicy sausage), base for the sumptuous "gumbo" (okra soup); "jambalaya" (fish, tomato and rice), and their famous "red beans'-n-rice". Where else could you eat "mud bugs", tiny lobsters known as "crawfish", a highly seasoned delicacy, devoured by kilogrammes, for hours and hours of gastronomic delight. Last but not least, this city, often referred to as the Paris of America, is the city of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday). Millions of tourists descend upon New Orleans throughout the year but mostly during carnival season (Feb/Mar), lasting two weeks, and ending on Shrove Tuesday. The finale is a grand parade with hundreds of floats tossing beads, toys and imitation gold coins, to the eager crowds. It has all the "devil may care", hedonistic display that is certainly no remnant of British Puritan ancestry. New Orleans takes pride in the fact that it was the French rather than the British who first established their city. The French, "adventurers and gamblers, fat with culture that made living a love affair of the senses," gave them their joie de vivre, their gourmet palate, and instead of burning witches, they preferred to dance with them. Creole/Cajun, French, Spanish, Acadian, Negro, and native Indian, have made New Orleans a uniquely American treasure. Today it is buried under a sea of water. While President Bush promises this jewel of a city will be rebuilt, can all or some of this unique cultural heritage be retrieved? Mother Nature has once again fooled helpless little man with all his "state of the arts" technology and equipment. With hurricance Ophelia threatening, maybe next time he will be better equipped to neutralise, challenge, resist, or thwart her merciless onslaught -- maybe! What a book, a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature! -- Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
