JERT

katrina: one year of stupid bullshit
one year ago my wife and i had the rug yanked out form under us by a giant fucking hurricane.......
we evacuated neworleans one hour before the first mandatory evacuation in orleans parrish history was issued........ we watched the carnage from a motel room in austin texas over the course of the next week and subsequently moved to st.louis for two weeks, then on to orlando for 6 months and finally atlanta in march of this year.........there is really too much to tell and i don't have the patience to type it...... i've spent the last year filling out paperwork and dealing with fema, listening to morons give me their opinion on something they'll never understand, and trying to convince the electric company that i don't live in new orleans anymore, so im pretty fucking sick of the whole thing.... i know that this blog is usually just drawings but i figured you guys might wanna see some of the pictures i took when my wife, tamara, and i returned to new orleans 5 weeks after the storm, to collect our belongings........*click on photos to enlarge



this is one of the pump stations that make it possible for new orleans to exist. these stations pump the water from the low lying areas to lake ponchatrain, keeping the city from turning into what it is truly meant to be...a swamp, most of these stations are over a hundred years old, they are true mavels of civil engineering, unfortunatley they are not infalable




this used to be a house


that is a container ship.... its supposed to be in the water







the superdome from claiborne ave










the city was full of rotten refrigerators on the sidewalks

there were boats on the road everywere


in new orleans i managed 2 retail caricature locations for fasen arts, one was at six flags new orleans. SFNO was in new orleans east, one of the most heavily damaged areas, some parts of the park were under like 9 feet of water...... to this day i belive i am the only retail caricaturist that has watched his park destroyed by the hands of god on television........be carefull what you wish for


the other location i managed was the riverwalk mall, next door to the covention center, it was crazy to watch geraldo rivera running around in front of my work,on tv

every single door was spraypainted by the national guard ,you can see that this house was checked on 9/10 by the new jersey national gaurd... i dont know what the 5 means......

the crusty brownness is the highwater mark in this part of my neighborhood



this is what we came home too.........yayyyyy

mobile alabama ( about 90 minutes away) was the closest city with hotel rooms, we had to commute this distance each day, on top of packing and throwing away all of our worldly possessions. the only food available between the two cities was a mcdonalds in mississippi, my wife is extremely vegetarian and was stuck with the choice one night of eating a quarter-pounder or starving (they had sold out of everthing else). she took about 2 bites and got violently ill.....

tamara and i had to wear protection(Goggles,Rubber gloves, face masks, and vapo-rub under our nostrils) when we were in our house, the refrigerator had sat in the kitchen for 5 weeks with out electricity and the smell was un-fucking-godly........


......seeing soldiers in the streets was the surreal cherry on the shit sundae......