2/25/2006 Community Gumbo

Small steps for one resident of a hard-hit Gentilly neighborhood

New Orleans resident Sharon Hinton talks about growing up in her Gentilly neighborhood, her struggle to cope with a flooded house, and how she's trying to tackle life's problems one step at a time.

Listen to Sharon's story at New Orleans Indymedia (note: sound quality somewhat degraded occasionally due to wind conditions).

Photos of Sharon Hinton's house:






















Happy Katrina Mardi Gras: Post-Katrina sounds and perspectives

Sounds and conversations with New Orleanians on the parade route during the first carnival season after Hurricane Katrina.

Listen to the sounds of this post-Katrina Mardi Gras at New Orleans Indymedia

2/18/2006 Community Gumbo

Wherever there's great beauty, there's great danger.

Caroline Skinner has a unique perspective on the Hurricane Katrina disaster. She was living in New York City when terrorists struck the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. After spending many years in New York, she returned to the Gentilly neighborhood where she grew up. Then, Hurricane Katrina struck.

This edition of Community Gumbo can be heard online at New Orleans Indymedia.org.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License.



See where the London Avenue Canal was breached, the extent of flooding in the Gentilly neighborhood, and the Gentilly ridge that kept some homes dry, in this Times-Picayune map.

The Gentilly Civic Improvement Association Web site has a street map of the Gentilly area posted on its Web site, as well as information about upcoming activities, how to contact its members, how to become a member, and a bulletin board forum to share information with other residents of the neighborhood.

The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center also has a map and description of different neighborhoods within Gentilly.


The photo of Caroline Skinner's grandparents, vignetted by water damage. The quilt was made by Caroline's grandmother from old neck ties.


The boxes of photos recovered from the Bay St. Louis house.


One of the recovered photos from the Bay St. Louis house.

2/11/06 Community Gumbo

2/12/06 update: The problem uploading the Lauren Anderson interview has been resolved by bypassing the Indymedia site and uploading instead to another host server.

2/13/06 update: Back to Indymedia -- technical staff there appear to have corrected the upload problem, which is good, because Indymedia does a better job streaming media files than the fall back server did.

In this edition of Community Gumbo, a conversation with Lauren Anderson (2/07/2006), the Director of Neighborhood Housing Services, and a member of "Women of the Storm." Anderson talks about her trip to Washington, D.C. with Women of the Storm to urge members of Congress to travel to New Orleans to witness the destruction from Hurricane Katrina, the array of challenges confronting home owners, the Baker bill, home owners who didn't have flood insurance, the plan to reduce the city's footprint, and the federal government's obligation to homeowners.

Listen to the archived audio at Indymedia.org (35 min, 14.5 MB, 56 kbps).


Lauren Anderson, Director of Neighborhood Housing Services


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.


Also, an excerpt from the Thursday 2/09/06 "After the Storm" forum, “New Orleans & Its Environment Before and After Katrina." The panelists heard in this excerpt are (in order heard):

• Maura Woods (Senior Louisiana Representative, Sierra Club)
• John Barry (author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America)
• Mark Schleifstein (Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental reporter, Times-Picayune)
• Carlton Dufrechou (Executive Director, Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation)

Also present at the forum, but not heard in this excerpt, were:

• Richard Campanella (Tulane-Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research and author of Time and Place in New Orleans)
• Craig Colten (Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography & Anthropology at Louisiana State University and author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature)
• Robert Thomas (Loyola Chair in Environmental Communications)
• Craig Hood (professor of biological sciences, Loyola University New Orleans)

Listen to the archived audio at Indymedia.org.

New Orleans 8th Ward Homeowners Are Ready to Rebuild

Listen to archived Democracy Now programs at DemocracyNow.org.

In the 2/04 edition of Community Gumbo:

8th Ward homeowners are gutting their homes to prove they want to return, but local, state, and federal officials still have to come up with a plan to help them rebuild. Includes an interview with two 8th Ward residents who didn't have flood insurance for different reasons, and with an ACORN community organizer. ACORN is helping residents to gut their homes, and is organizing a Katrina Survivors rally in Washington, D.C., February 8th and 9th.

Listen to Community Gumbo at Indymedia.org.

More about ACORN can be found at ACORN.org.