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For two and a half years, ever since the Katrina hurricane disaster in New Orleans in August, 2005, I have known that whatever I read in newspapers, heard on radio and saw on television was not describing an accurate picture of the disaster. For some situations, no television camera lens is wide enough and no description is clear enough to give us a good idea of exactly what is going on.

Last week, I was in New Orleans on business. My wife and I stayed an extra day just to try to comprehend the disaster. We had been in New Orleans a number of times before 2005, but we took the usual Gray Lines tour of the city in the morning, anyway. Then we took a special Gray Lines tour of the Katrina disaster in the afternoon. It lasted three hours, and it had a guide in addition to the bus driver.

If you are ever in New Orleans, take the time to get on that three-hour tour. You won’t regret it.

The French Quarter has largely come back as a tourist attraction, since it was the only area of the city on high ground. Hotels are now re-opening to serve the tourists. But go just a few blocks from the French Quarter and hotel district and experience the shock of a crippled city. Much of it looks as though it had been nuked. All the major hospitals just a few blocks from the downtown are sitting there crippled. Wind and water damage, then the awful mold as a result of heat, humidity and no electricity have made them uninhabitable. It will be easier to tear them down than to gut and rebuild them. They will be torn down. Only 500 hospital beds now serve that once-great city.

When the dikes broke, and the brackish waters of Lake Poncetrain came rushing in, most of the city’s homes were flooded up to the second story. Almost three-quarters of the city was devastated, the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States. Today, almost three years later, a majority of those homes still seem lifeless. One can see the water marks at the second story level. Still visible are the large Xes on the outside of the houses where various National Guard units marked that the house had been inspected and how many bodies had been found inside. Most marks recorded zeros, but many still have the mark of one, two, three, four, five, six.

The above-ground tombs in New Orleans are sometimes called the Cities of the Dead. That description also fits large parts of New Orleans. Some 300,000 people who once lived there have departed; most will not come back. The Six Flags entertainment park just paid the city $10 million to break its contract. It will not rebuild. There will not be enough people in the area to make the park a financial success. The brackish water killed 100,000 trees. Almost all the beautiful magnolias for which the city was known are leafless and dead.

The citizens of New Orleans generally feel abandoned. Fewer than half of our 100 US senators have visited the city since the disaster, according to our guide, and only one-fifth the members of the House of Representatives.

“If we were in Iraq or Darfur,” our guide said, “The United States government would be pouring resources in to rebuild our city.”

Maybe that is New Orleans’ epitaph for now. The city will come back, but not for many years. Visit New Orleans if you have a chance. You will see the picture with your own eyes.

This is Radio Ralph with a comment at midweek for AM 850.