‘We can’t wait’: Grassroots solutions ease flooding in New Orleans
Year after year, wet season after wetter season, water keeps flowing down New Orleans’ streets – in Tremé and across the Upper Ninth Ward and the Seventh Ward, which Angela Chalk calls home. Just a few inches of rapid rainfall can turn the neighborhoods into a pint-sized Mississippi River, aluminum and plastic trash gushing down the potholed pavement.
Hurricane Katrina changed the city’s fabric in 2005. Since then, as New Orleans resurrects itself, a host of suits and ties and, presumably, good intentions have visited neighborhoods like the Seventh and Ninth Wards. Promises are made but rarely unfold in these historically diverse communities that were among those that took Katrina’s brunt. Meanwhile, rainfall only seems to gather faster every year.
In Ms. Chalk’s mind, you can only sit and listen to others’ ideas for so long. Rather than wait for local government to, joined forces with the environmental outreach group , a collective launched in 2013 as part of a broader movement of local citizen engagement.
