I'd like you to take a look at something:

That's the long, lonely road that takes you out to a FEMA-run trailer camp in Baker, Louisiana. When I visited the Baker camp back on October 3, 2005, a contractor called the Shaw Group was just putting the finishing touches on the installation of 573 trailers, and a thousand or so Hurricane Katrina evacuees living in shelters or bunking with friends or relatives were preparing to move in.

The Baker camp is some 10 miles outside of Baton Rouge and about 95 miles northwest of New Orleans. When I visited in late 2005, no bus or other mode of public transportation served the Baker trailer camp, and area commerce consisted of a convenience store attached to a gas station. The camp's immediate surroundings were the sort of remote, open space where you might think to build a prison. In fact, the nearest building of any real size was a juvenile detention center.

Perhaps not the best of settings for housing evacuees from New Orleans, a densely-packed urban environment teeming with life. But these were emergency measures. This was short-term solution. It was temporary.

Today, some 442 days later, I open up the New York Times and read this*:

BAKER, La. -- There are hundreds of children in the trailer camp that is run by FEMA and known as Renaissance Village, but they won’t be having much of a Christmas. They’re trapped here in a demoralizing, overcrowded environment with adults who are mostly broke, jobless and at the end of their emotional tethers. Many of the kids aren’t even going to school.

...

The enormity of the continuing tragedy is breathtaking. Thousands upon thousands of people are still suffering. And yet the way the poorest and most vulnerable victims have been treated so far by government officials at every level has been disgraceful.

More than a third of the 1,200 people in this sprawling camp are children. Only about half of the school-age youngsters are even registered for school; of those, roughly half actually go to school on any given day. The authorities can’t account for the rest.

A number of officials who asked not to be identified told me they are concerned that large numbers of children are remaining isolated at Renaissance Village, holed up in the trailers day in and day out, falling further and further behind educationally, and deteriorating emotionally.

And this is the last of the Katrina photos for the year. Remember, the full set lives here all the time.

You can see from the post-Katrina photos I picked out to show you these last couple of days that I was intrigued by this idea of things being destroyed below a certain level and still alive above it. Thus the water-level photos and this one of the bushes as well.

I know I'm going a bit crazy with the Katrina photos but I promise it's almost over. Notice how high the water level got in this one. Camera left was a school and playground.

As seen from a Blackhawk helicopter.

A downed street sign in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. I'll admit that I didn't know much about much of the specifics of the ancient city of Babylon and so I got a little bit of a kick out of the Webster's reference: "a city devoted to materialism and sensual pleasure."

Driving into Slidell, Lake Ponchatrain runs right into the land. Where the docks were there are now just pilings. I just talked to Ju (ed -- my mom, a Louisiana native) and asked her what Slidell looked like before. She said that it sort of was like Jackson where Aunt Joyce and Uncle Walt lived, a nice developed area. Her cousin's widow lived in Slidell and was evacuated. 80 years old and the water was up to the ceiling.

Drove by a house along the highway -- spray-painted along the side just says "Alive." Passed a piece of plywood nailed to a post, Highway 11, "Still No Water." Seems like a boating community, the sense of Pawleys Island (ed. -- in South Carolina). Immense piles of trash everywhere. And you get the sense that the lake is what did this to them... This is just what happened when the lake came over. And the wind came over...My thought here was "my god, I hope you had flood insurance." Or that you can say that this was hurricane damage and not flood damage...If they didn't have flood insurance...will this push them into poverty, bankruptcy at least? People that were doing all right.

All of the supermarkets are closed. All of the stores are closed...Where people are eating, shopping, getting what they need for their kids? A Shell station says "We're open. We have gas. Cash only." One thing you could hope is that you had cash on hand. Behind a Bank of Louisiana building there is just a sea of clothing -- thousands of pieces, piled up. One of the craziest things I've seen.

Next Tuesday is, as you probably know, the one-year anniversary of when Hurricane Katrina touched down in Louisiana. I had the fantastic opportunity to travel down to Baton Rouge and New Orleans just a few weeks after as a guest of the Louisiana NAACP and I took a whole bunch of photos of the incredible devastation I found there. They're not overly good -- it was during what I like to call the "point-and-click" phase of my photographic development -- but I still never get tired of looking at them. They still capture, for me, what it was like to be there -- just a whole lot of emptiness and destruction. So I'm planning on pulling out and posting some of them in this space over the next couple of days. Notice the water level across the windows and doors of these two cars -- that's how high the flooding got in this neighborhood and it stayed that way for quite a while.

Though I'm now working on focusing this blog on technology, social organizing, networks -- with a dose of food politics and Top Chef -- I want to take a minute to touch back on something I've spent some time on in the past: New Orleans, and specifically the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Just about a month after Katrina came through the Gulf Coast region, I was lucky enough to spend time in New Orleans as a guest of the Louisiana NAACP. One of the days I spent down there an NAACP staffer and I headed up to Baton Rouge to have a look at what was somewhat grandly being called Renaissance Village -- a FEMA-run collection of small trailers collected in a gravel pit of sorts several miles outside town. This was just before the camp was set to open, and so we watched as contractors hurried to hook-up the trailers to what there was of a infrastructure grid.

Poking around Renaissance Village that day, it amazed me to realize that the best federal plan we'd come up with for responding to the crisis was to have entire families live in trailers that were literally not big enough to swing a cat in. The trailers were cramped, the setting desolate, and the location remote. How, I wondered, were kids and old people especially be expected to survive here for more than a few weeks?

That was my thinking in October of 2005. It's now the summer of 2008, and FEMA is right now in the process of moving the last residents out of Renaissance Village. I'm not here to rail against FEMA or pretend that there are easy answers on how to handle thousands of people being displaced from an already dysfunctional city. It's hard, complicated, tiring work. But man we're in serious trouble if we don't get it through our thick skulls that we have to start asking better questions now if we ever want to arrive at acceptable answers.

Oh, wow, I almost forgot the point of this little rant. The New York Times has a great photo collection up on Renaissance Village's close.