A few weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast, I was sent by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to document their animal rescue efforts in New Orleans. IFAW, along with hundreds of other organizations, had set up camp at the Lemar-Dixon Expo Center about 20 miles outside of New Orleans. Every day, teams of animal rescue workers went into the city to search homes for surviving animals. While I knew that New Orleans was changed beyond recognition by Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that accompanied it, what I confronted was hard to comprehend: a modern American city destroyed and abandoned beyond my wildest imagination. Icons of American culture like MacDonalds and Walgreens sat ghost-like on the urban landscape. Abandoned cars lay everywhere, many with their windshield wipers still in the up position. Trees and utility poles criss-crossed streets like fallen soldiers. In the most severely flooded areas, a brown residue covered homes and trees alike and turned neighborhoods into what looked like the site of a nuclear holocaust. I followed a few animal rescue teams as they made their way from home to home searching for surviving animals. The conditions were challenging. The heat and humidity was oppressive and the smell of the toxic liquid we were moving through was often overwhelming. Because many of the city's manhole covers were blown off during the flooding, there was the constant worry that one of us might step into an open manhole so we gingerly slid our feet along the ground. Entering people's homes was a surreal and often painful experience. Family photographs, children's toys, books and decorations lay everywhere and made real to me the people whose lives had been so suddenly and indelibly changed. Often we found that the animal we were searching for had not made it. We did find some animals alive and it was always a miraculous and joyful moment. The following series of photographs documents my few days in New Orleans during this extraordinary time in its history.
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