Mardi Gras Marathon

February 5, 2006

I've made a separate page for the usual pictures of me finishing and my medal.

The Mardi Gras Marathon was the first major sporting event in New Orleans after Katrina. We started at the superdome and ran through what was left of the city. Some pictures from the non-running part of my visit are in the travel section. I couldn't find a small enough camera to take with me on the course for the Mardi Gras Marathon, so I have pilfered these pictures from copyrighted sources. The first 6 are from the Times Picayune and the last is from the Washington Post.

The race started in the French Quarter, which had some broken windows and downed street ligihts, but generally looked ok. Then, we started getting into neighborhoods that were totally abandoned. There would be a FEMA trailer at maybe 1 out of 20 or 30 houses, and the rest were empty. There was no one around.

High water marks were visable on the houses, sometimes above the windows. You could see mold and rotting sheetrock inside some houses. After we passed a certain point, all of them still had the spray painted marks from the rescue teams. And this wasn't a short little part of the race where the rest of it looked fine. The whole city was like this. There was just no one there.

This was a pretty, two-story home with lots of danger messages painted on it.	Here, we passed under a bridge. In the background, you can see the shells of all the cars that were flooded out and left there.
This is one of the FEMA trailer setups. We ran about a mile into this neighborhood and back out. All of the houses were these little one floor models, with water lines up to the roof. Only 3 or 4 had FEMA trailers. The rest were abandoned.	At the mile markers, they had these posts to show how high the water had reached.
I have to say I wondered how much worse it could get when we saw this sign.	Hahahahahahaha.
This is a good example of how everything looked. I can't say enough - it wasn't just one or two spots that were like this. EVERYTHING was like this. In this photo you can see the water line on the blue-grey house on the door. On the white house, you can see the orange spray painted marks left by rescuers (an X with the date, and numbers in various places to indicate who checked it, when, and what they found). Almost all of the houses had this. It's hard to tell which of these were good neighborhoods or bad before Katrina because they are all in such terrible shape now.