So begins Maureen Turner’s January 10 email to her parents, Harry and Emma Turner of Sandy Hook and New York City, and several of her friends. Her letter is a poignant inside look at the city nearly five months after the city’s levees burst under the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina, and terrifying winds and rains ravaged the Gulf Coast city in one of the United States’ worst natural disasters this century.

In a telephone interview with The Bee, Ms Turner elaborated on her email, offering further insight into her recent trip to the Crescent City.

“People who have not been [to New Orleans] cannot fully understand that this is not just a few weeks recovery. People are struggling to rebuild and get on with their lives,” said Ms Turner.

Ms Turner was living in the lower Garden District of New Orleans and enrolled in a graduate program at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University, and her boyfriend at the University of New Orleans, when Katrina interrupted their studies.

“What I had learned from previous hurricane seasons was that usually nothing happens,” she said. But when Katrina grew to a Category 5 hurricane, they knew it would be bad if it hit their city. “We thought we would go to family and friends in Houston and stay maybe a week.” The week stretched into two, then three weeks, with no real information coming out of New Orleans as to the condition of their home area.

When she was able to return after one month, Ms Turner was not sure what she would find. Her apartment was located just two blocks from the New Orleans Convention Center, which had attempted to house refugees forced to flee their New Orleans homes as Katrina unleashed her wrath.

She knew that looting was a possibility, but found her apartment in reasonably good condition, except for being “really, really hot. There was still no power there, even though the area had not been flooded. The most disgusting thing was the refrigerator, with the mold and maggots.”

She cleaned out what she could, stored her furniture, and headed up to New York City, where Tulane University had arranged reciprocity with Columbia University, to finish her degree. She did not visit New Orleans again until the beginning of this month.

Her initial visit had shocked her with the number of trees uprooted, creating unnavigable streets. The destruction was overwhelming. Her return trip was a mixed bag of emotions.

“The first thing that struck me when I drove through the streets was the absolute silence that fills these once packed residential neighborhoods. Not a single house remains occupied today,” she wrote.

Ms Turner visited two sections of New Orleans while in the city. Chalmette is a mostly white, working and middle class population and the Lower Ninth Ward is a predominantly black, poor neighborhood. Both neighborhoods were brought to equal footing by the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina. Houses were torn from their foundations, shattered into kindling, torn in two and swept off their lots, whether the rich or the poor owned them. While some homes remain structurally intact, Ms Turner said, all of the homes that remain must be gutted completely, due to water damage.

In Chalmette, Ms Turner visited her boyfriend’s grandmother’s home. The house, she said, appeared intact from outside, but the inside was another story.

“The floors and furniture are covered in a thick black sludge which resulted from a mixture of the toxins which leaked out of nearby oil refineries…. Toxic black mold is creeping up the walls.”

Even outside, she noted, “Oranges and lemons which still hang from trees in the backyard are covered in the same black muck.”

Piles of debris cover the front lawns as residents in the Chalmette neighborhood try to clean up.

“Nothing is salvageable,” she despaired in the letter. What disturbed Ms Turner the most, however, was that people ignored warnings to wear masks and equipment as they cleaned out their environmentally compromised homes. “Whether or not their health will be affected in the long run remains to be seen,” she acknowledged.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, where not a single white face was ever seen prior to the August storm, Ms Turner observed a group of young, white adults camped out to help locals rebuild. It raised her hopes that positive race relations in New Orleans could rise from past differences that had plagued that neighborhood.

“There is a lot of sadness and depression here and it breaks my heart to see all the shopkeepers who are struggling to stay open without much business,” Ms Turner went on to say. In the French Quarter, once a bustling, lively section, she said, “You might see two street performers, not ten. Or one carriage driver, not a dozen.”

Restaurants are struggling to serve the customers they have, hindered by a lack of workers. “A whole demographic of civil servants is gone from New Orleans,” Ms Turner pointed out. “There are just not enough workers.”

Despite the difficulties, Ms Turner believes that the city will return to its previous glory. “You have generations that have been there. People can’t just leave because their home gets wrecked. New Orleans has a real chance ... If you are looking for another way to help, think about coming for Mardi Gras or a visit any other time. Beautiful weather … those southern goodies … and all the rest of the great Cajun and Creole cookin’!”

Having received her degree the end of the fall quarter, Ms Turner is now in the job market. She hopes to land a job in New Orleans as part of the recovery effort.

With a degree in public health, she asks, “How can I not return to New Orleans when there are so many similar public health issues as in an undeveloped country?”