The Old Man and the Storm

This week on FRONTLINE, as waves of dismal economic news threaten Detroit and other cities around the country, producer and reporter June Cross takes a hard look at one American city that the nation watched go under--live on TV--more than three years ago.

In "The Old Man and the Storm," airing this Tuesday night (check local listings), Cross offers a poignant, tough-minded portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans, beginning among the ruins of a public high school that may never be rebuilt. "You could fill this building with all of the studies done since Hurricane Katrina," Cross says, "and still not comprehend what it means when 500,000 families are displaced, what it means to lose 200,000 homes, 220,000 jobs, 600 congregations. You wouldn't understand what it means to lose even one neighborhood."

To reckon with Katrina, Cross introduces us to Herbert Gettridge, an 82-year-old man who's returned by himself to the city's Lower Ninth Ward to reconstruct his house, and to revive his devastated extended family's fortunes. "Why am I back here?" Gettridge asks Cross when they first meet. "My whole family's scattered... Everybody's gone. This is what this storm did to us...But I ain't about to leave..."

"When I met him that Ash Wednesday," says Cross, "he seemed like Sisyphus, shoveling out a yard of endless debris."

Over the next year-and-a-half, during some twenty-two trips to New Orleans, Cross follows Gettridge's epic struggle to rebuild his house. At the same time, she charts the equally epic bureaucratic failures--at the local, state, and federal levels--to deliver the billions of dollars in aid that was promised to Gettridge and others in the immediate aftermath of the storm. The result is a devastating chronicle of a family, and a city, still facing nothing but questions as they confront another new year, post Katrina.

We hope you'll watch this Tuesday night, and join us online to explore the Gettridge family's deep roots in New Orleans, how rebuilding efforts are going in New Orleans and watch the film again online at http://www.pbs.org/frontline/katrina/