Hurricane Katrina Devastation Tours Selling Out Like Beignets

By Linda Orlando

Gray Line Tours is offering a new tour bus destination for sightseers who want to take a vacation that’s a little different. Surprisingly, the tours continue to sell out as tourists pay to drive by and gawk at the sadness and misfortune of others. Demand was so high for the new tour that the company added a third tour on the very first day.

Gray Line’s website describes the tour as, "An eyewitness account of the events surrounding the most devastating natural disaster on American soil!" At the end of each tour, passengers are given a packet containing pictures of the destruction.

New Orleans residents are questioning whether the tours are just morbid exploitation of people recovering from horrific tragedy and loss, or whether showing that loss is a good way to help people understand the disaster and offer to help. Even some of the people taking the first tour had mixed emotions about what they were seeing. One of the riders told reporters, "I felt guilty about going out and looking, but it’s something we had to do."

The three-hour tour is called "Hurricane Katrina—America’s Worst Catastrophe, and it costs $35 per adult and $28 for children. The tour takes passengers down Canal Street, where many businesses are still boarded up due to the floods that swept through 80% of the city. Tour guides are residents of New Orleans directly affected by the hurricane. Guide Joe Gendusa, whose childhood home in the Gentilly neighborhood was flooded, is a retired teacher and has lived in New Orleans all of his life. "This is not just a tour for me," Gendusa tells his passengers, "This is my home." When he drives his bus through the ravaged areas, he describes to passengers his own grim experiences during the hurricane, including floodwaters trapping him inside a tall building where had sought shelter. He describes the horror of seeing dead bodies floating in the water.

The tour takes passengers by the Superdome, where thousands of people took refuge for days while awaiting rescue. Then tourists are taken to the now-vacant Morial Convention Center, where hundreds waited and some died while waiting for rescue. Then it’s off to view some of the residential neighborhoods that were hit worst by the storm. In Lakeview and Gentilly, roof-high water pushed homes off their foundations, and collapsing houses await demolition, surrounded by mountains of debris. The buses also drive past an actual levee that breached, releasing the water that destroyed so many people’s lives.

There are a few areas of the city that have been spared from the gawkers, including the Ninth Ward, where only residents have been allowed to return. Authorities have warned that debris-laden streets in some residential areas may be so damaged that traveling them could be hazardous. But local Gray Line executive Julee Pearce said that the company expects the tours to sell out for some time to come. According to Pearce, their phone lines are clogged with callers wanting to know more about the tours, including inquiries from school groups.

Callers to a radio talk show on the first day of the tours voiced a mixture of reactions. Some said the tour is blatantly exploitive, and others said they hope the tour will help the rest of the country realize the extent of the damage to the city. Eric Tapp, owner of a restaurant near the tour route, could do nothing but shake his head when a reporter asked him if he resented the bus of curiosity seekers driving through the destruction of his Gentilly neighborhood. "It’s an open city," he said. "There’s nothing you can do about it."

Gray Line’s attempt to justify making a profit from the tragedy of others is to say that they’re actually helping the city, even though only a mere $3 from every tour ticket will be donated to charities related to the recovery effort. But many people wonder if their so-called generosity is just a thinly veiled way to recoup some of the losses they suffered themselves from damage to the tourism industry. It would have been nice if they had been philanthropic enough before the hurricane to use their buses to get people out of the area.