We're joined now in New Orleans by independent journalist Jordan Flaherty, who was in New Orleans when the hurricane hit, returned to the city soon after being evacuated, to help with relief efforts and to report on what was happening in the streets, particularly to the poor Black communities that were most affected by the hurricane. He's won awards for his reporting on people left behind in the New Orleans city jail after the hurricane and is the author of Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He's joined us many times over the years.
While not officially a sequel to his two HBO projects ("When the Levees Broke" and 2010's follow-up, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise"), Lee's latest look at the Big Easy still feels like a capper - perhaps an epilogue, given its truncated length (88 minutes as opposed to four hours), revived themes, (when a subject mentions "systemic racism," Lee plasters the words onscreen like a title card),
Researchers have defined mass trauma as wars, natural disasters, mass shootings, and pandemics (Theodoratou, Kougioumtzis, Yotsidi, Sofologi, and Megari, 2023). The label of mass trauma also indicates that the trauma is persistent and widespread; the nature of mass trauma also results in human needs being greater than the available resources, thereby hindering the potential for those affected to be able to heal.
A few months after Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana in August 2005, Jenna Jordan went on a search for other queer women. She was looking for camaraderie with people like herself who had returned to New Orleans after the storm. Some neighborhoods with sizable gay populations such as the French Quarter were largely spared from flooding, but areas with queer people of color and lesbians, such as Mid-City, weren't as fortunate.
"Come on in," she says. "As you look to the left, you'll see one of the trademark X's. These were put here by first responders. Each symbol has a meaning. This is the date, September 22nd. This is the number of people deceased in the home." If searchers find hazards like gas or a collapsed structure, they note it in the X. A musty smell lingers inside the home, re-created by artists. "This is actually all carefully placed, even though it looks like chaos," Rosenthal says. "This is what the survivors would have seen when they returned home," after the water receded.
