birch road blog

Looking down Keller St

Abita's beautiful tree canopy has been lost, this is in front of Ruth and Phillip Sipos' house where we stayed our first night in the area. Ruth says the dreaded sound is now the chain saws, FEMA has mandated that all trees be cut back within 30 feet of the roadway if they have 30% damage. So now, not only the loss of the downed trees and broken trees is a grief, but many perfectly viable trees that only needed to be trimmed back are being sawed down at the stumps. Abita has spent 1.6 million dollars already on hauling debris from town. Lumber yards are running 24 hours a day trying to keep up with the fallen timber. St. Tammany parish is now concerned about spring rains and flooding in the parish because of the amount of trees that have fallen into waterways and are clogging rivers and streams. They do not have the manpower to remove them. On our last day in the area we read in the Picayune that coliform has been found in trace amounts in a recent water testing in Abita Springs and the town, after years of being able to avoid chlorinating it's water supply, will now chlorinate the water.


Monday Night we stayed with our Abita friends Ann O'Brien and John Preble and their sons Andrew and William. We ate at a lovely Thai restaurant that is reopened in Covington with another couple traveling from Vicksburg to the Gulf South, Lesley and Daniel. These people run a gallery in Vicksburg, MS and Lesley's family home was in Ocean Springs. Their trip, like ours, was their first since Katrina. It was a working pilgrimage as they were gathering art from John Preble and other Gulf Coast artists for a show in their gallery called "Searching for Normalcy". You can see their website at atticgallery.net where they are supporting artists whose work has been impacted by Katrina. And, just to point out the scope of this storm, Vicksburg was out of power for 9 days following Katrina even though it is several hundred miles north of the area of impact. Lesley said that her parent's home had lost all but one wall during Huricane Camille in the 60's and they had rebuilt. She said that nothing was left following Katrina. Her parents no longer lived in the home, but she had needed to see for herself what was left behind.

posted by Kathryn @ 9:45 PM