Tourist trips to stricken New Orleans start

NEW ORLEANS - A bus company has launched tours of devastated sections of New Orleans, amid controversy over whether so-called disaster tourism would help, hurt or humiliate the hurricane-ravaged city.

Two sold-out Gray Line tour busses slowly prowled along the city's broken levees, through its rubble-strewn streets and past the heavily damaged Superdome where desperate residents took shelter when Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29 and most of the city flooded in the aftermath.

Plans for the "Hurricane Katrina - America's Worst Catastrophe" tour, at US$35 ($51) per person, prompted debate over whether it is appropriate or exploitative to turn devastation into a tourist attraction.

Gray Line, which runs more than 150 tours around the world, plans to donate US$3 of each New Orleans ticket to charity. The three-hour tour will run once a day, Wednesday through Sunday.

"Gray Line thought long and hard before making the decision to send this tour out," said tour guide Barbara Robichaux, 56. "But it's not our private property. It's the world's property. It's up to everybody to see what's happened here."

The tourists on the busses, most of them visiting family in New Orleans, sat quietly as the guide pointed out high flood-water marks on the sides of houses, holes chopped in roofs where people used axes to flee the rising water and the spray-painted numbers left on collapsed houses by search-and-rescue teams to indicate if any dead bodies had been found inside.

Retired attorney Edward Freeman, 57, whose home in Mobile, Alabama, was battered by three hurricanes this past autumn, began to cry as soon as the tour began.

"Here I am feeling sorry for myself," he said, "and it was nothing compared to what these people went through." Visiting from Fort Worth, Texas, Joe Gaines said the tour is a way to keep the needy city in the public eye.

"Congress has a very short memory. The more the media keeps this in front of Congress, the more chance there is of help," said the 62-year-old orthopedic surgeon, who owns a condominium in New Orleans.

"They'll cut their own throats if they stop exposing what's going on."

Helping clean a badly damaged house in the city's Ninth Ward, Corrie Carton, 56, declared the tours "disgusting."

"From the inside of a bus? It sounds ghoulish to me, looking at people grieving up close," said the 56-year-old volunteer worker from New Haven, Connecticut.

A few blocks away, Vanessa Bertrand, a 38-year-old engineer, said she thought such tours would be beneficial.

"I don't think you should hide the effect of government failure," she said as she photographed the remains of her grandmother's collapsed house in the Lower Ninth Ward. "Exposing that can only lead to something better."

Some of the most heavily damaged parts of New Orleans already have become tourist attractions, and streets of areas such as the heaviest-hit Lower Ninth Ward are filled with visitors taking photographs from inside slow-moving cars.

The tour guide said Gray Line opted not to take the busses through the Lower Ninth Ward in an effort to show how the devastation was spread around the rest of the city. Some 80 per cent of the city flooded following Katrina.

Booker Jackson, 70, sitting on his stoop in the Ninth Ward, suggested the tour bus drive around New Orleans, fill up with remnants of ruined homes and take the rubble to President George W Bush at the White House.

"Tell him we're hungry," he said. "Tell him to start worrying about what's here."

- REUTERS