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The Island

Erik Hansen returns home to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.

Erik Hansen

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BEFORE AUGUST 29, 2005, New Orleans was humming along like any other major, if dysfunctional, American city. Ifyour refrigerator stopped working, for example, you could open the Yellow Pages and choose from a dozen names. After athe island few rings, a New Orleans accent would answer and a repairman would be dispatched. A few hours later a white van would pull up and you’d hear the guy on his cell phone, cursing the traffic over the bridge. That’s how it used to go. That’s how society worked. It was like the refrigerator’s hum—difficult to detect until it stops. But in the weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, returning evacuees experienced the astonishing silence of a society stopped all at once.

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