Massive rebuilding effort is required

Fellows Melissa Manware (far left) and Gina Barton (second from left) pose with their work crew in New Orleans.

Charlotte Observer public safety reporter Melissa Manware reports being struck by how massive the clean-up and rebuilding effort is -- and will be -- and she wonders how tourists in the French Quarter could party through their vacations without being exposed to the devastation ...

Imagine a two-story house with fresh paint, a newly manicured lawn and a front porch perfect for a wooden rocking chair. Plants sit on the porch and in boxes outside the windows.

Now think about the homeowner -- so proud to have rebuilt -- standing on his porch. As far as he can see there is nothing but gutted-out houses, most still bearing the ominous markings of a search for the dead. If he's lucky, a few neighbors might be living in FEMA trailers parked in the front yards of their flooded-out homes.

This is post-Katrina New Orleans. The scene is similar in most every neighborhood. To me, it looked like a sad and a lonely place. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen.

There is so much work to be done.

Years ago, I rode a school bus to eastern North Carolina with a high school football team that was going to gut a house flooded by Hurricane Floyd.

The images -- and smells -- of that trip came rushing back as I toured New Orleans. It was early on a Saturday morning when the school bus turned onto the street and people were already working, not just on the one mucky, moldy house the team was there to gut. People were working on every house on the street.

New Orleans isn't like that -- at least not now, a year and a half after the levee breeches. The houses are mostly dry and the smell is mostly gone.

But so are many of the people who made New Orleans the quirky, wonderful place it used to be. There is still so much work to be done.

And then there's the French Quarter. I know a lot of people see hope there, but not me. At least I didn't see it on this trip.

The Quarter -- with all its mixed-drink specials, funky art and beignets -- made me even more sad. A few books and smart-ass Katrina T-shirts were the only signs of the storm. A tourist could easily spend a long weekend and have no idea of the devastation just a few miles away. I know it's necessary to get us shallow Americans to be tourists there again. But it's not right!

Make people see the mess. Make them aware of abandoned neighborhoods. Do whatever it takes to get them to stay a few days longer so they can help rebuild. There is so much work to be done.

Don't get me wrong, I did see hope:

* A large group of college kids chose New Orleans instead of Cancun for Spring Break. They were there to work, not party.

* An older man mostly just watched as we gutted his daughter's house. But he filled a cooler with bottles of cold water and offered me one. It was his way of saying thank you. It was the best water I ever drank.

* The daughter of another homeowner -- the mother has died since the storm -- told workers 15 times about a barbecue she's planning to thank workers who've helped their family through the storm. She said she'll have it at their new home in a neighboring town. She told me she hoped I'd make a trip.

I hope so too. I will do my best to be there. Not because I think I earned a cheeseburger for scraping up and carrying away her dead mother's tile floor. But because I want her to know I care.

I care about her and her city. And if I can get back that weekend, I can do a little more to help. There is so much work to be done.

--Melissa Manware