City of New Orleans

I flew south yesterday. When I got to N.O. we stopped at cafe Dumond and walk on the Moonwalk by the river. This guy was syphoning some of the Mississippi into a Gatorade bottle. When asked why he replied 'I am headed to Maryland tomorrow, and I want to take some of it with me'. He seemed heartbroken to leave the Quarter, and said he felt as though he was abandoning his city. He related his tale of how he had stayed during and after the hurricane to assist his elderly neighbors. When the looters came for his house he dropped a flowerpot on their head, and they promptly left. His friend had left him a firearm, but he said he couldn't pull the trigger. He didn't seem to be the guy who could shoot another person, and I'm glad he didn't have that to weigh on his soul.
They seem to be having a trash collection problem in the city. The piles on Canal street are 8 feet high. Rue Bourbon seems somehow skeezier than when I was last there. I was informed that the sewers where all broken, adding the smell of shit to the normal urine and booze smell. Great swaths of the eastern parts of the city are still abandoned, the brick shells of ranch houses empty and dark. They say 9 out of ten people had no flood insurance. Faced with the prospect of trying to capitalize a repair on a house in a neighborhood without civic services, especially if the mortgage is higher than the house is now worth, people have been abandoning the city. I'm not about to question that move. People are rational.