This is New Orleans on August 3, 2006.

Lakeview is the New Orleans neighborhood closest to the 17th Street canal, which broke wide open that day and flooded a large percentage of the city. Lakeview sustained tremendous damage from the force of the rushing floodwaters. Entire blocks of homes were wiped off their foundations.

This shot shows multiple water lines on a house that remained in place. The markings around the spray painted cross to the left of the door indicate that the house was inspected on 9/25/2005 and that no bodies were found inside.

This sort of speaks for itself, and sums up the plight of a great many New Orleanians.

Street musicians in Jackson Square in the French Quarter.

Note that there are virtually no passersby - where are the tourists? New Orleans cannot possibly survive without the tourist trade.

Everything below this point is from the Ninth Ward.

Fats Domino’s place has had a lot of work done, but the trash is still piled up in front. Garbage pickup is irregular and infrequent at best.

The bizarrely twisted sign below reads “MAGEE"S FOOD STORE.” New Orleans, being an Old World kind of place, still has small corner groceries in the neighborhoods.

This looks like it happened yesterday, but it wasn’t yesterday, or last week, or last month.

The floodwaters were high enough to leave sections of fence, among other things, on top of houses as they receded.

It appears the occupants used the planks poking through the roof to break out through the attic.

The sign on the left reads “I AM COMING HOME! I WILL REBUILD! I AM NEW ORLEANS!” The one on the right says “No Bulldozing!”

Multiple tags on this church...the one on the left indicates the SPCA visited on 9/29/2005 and found no dogs. Many buildings in the Ninth Ward are tagged with the number of dead dogs, or dead humans, found inside. The dogs, like the people, often reacted too slowly to escape the flood. You’ve got to figure that most of the dogs, like so many of the people, had no choice but to depend on human beings to get them out.

This double, as duplexes are known in New Orleans, was definitely inspected on 9/16/2005, but it appears to have been visited three times. Note the faded tags near the two front doors. The symbol in the west quadrant of the center tag indicates who did the inspecting, but I have no idea how to decode it. Likewise for the “NE” in the east quadrant.

This is the sign in front of Common Ground’s Blue House project. They are one of the few locations in the Ninth Ward that has electricity.

This is New Orleans on August 3, 2006. There are many courageous and hardy souls working to rebuild, but for vast areas of the city, nothing much has changed in nearly a year. It is a bitter pill to swallow, especially for those of us who have ties to the Gulf Coast region.