Lower Ninth Ward

Today I made a trip down to the Lower Ninth Ward.  Before Katrina, the Lower Ninth was not extremely wealthy, but it was a reasonably well-off blue collar area of town.  However, the neighborhood took the brunt of the flood.  Even though the hurricane missed NOLA entirely, the water from the storm surge caused the levee along the industrial canal to fail.  That levee borders the Lower Ninth, and everything in the area was flooded.  While the Lower Ninth is not a ghost-town, it is a shadow of what it once was.

Many of the houses that existed before the hurricane have been torn down, a few are being rebuilt, and several are simply empty shells.  The photos below are of a vacant house a few blocks from the levee.  The last photo is where the levee gave way during Katrina.  As always, click the photos for a larger view.