Drowned city
What if...?
By Jyri Raivio in New Orleans
Imagine an idyllic early-autumn drive south to Helsinki, a charming city of around half a million inhabitants on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
If a terrible storm had turned its attentions instead to Finland's south coast and the Gulf of Finland rather than the Gulf of Mexico, how would the trip have been...
The traffic begins to thin out on Highway 3 already soon after Hämeenlinna has been by-passed. Around Klaukkala, still some 30 kilometres from the centre of the capital, police are flagging down all motorists and stopping anyone who cannot provide a very good reason for their journey towards Helsinki.
Thereafter, the two southbound lanes of the motorway are practically empty, save for a few emergency vehicles with blue lights flashing. The northbound carriageways, meanwhile, are well populated with cars stuffed with suitcases, bags and bundles, with perhaps the odd item of furniture perched on the roof-rack or dangling from an open tailgate.
By the time we hit the outer ring road and the intersection leading towards Helsinki-Vantaa International, some 15 kilometres from the downtown area, there are already signs in the landscape of major structural damage.
Houses have collapsed either in part or entirely, and some have trees draped across their shattered roofs.
The windows of large office blocks stare out bleakly - the glass has been shattered or physically torn out of its frames.
There is water flowing ankle-deep in the streets.
The car radio announces that both Helsinki-Vantaa and the smaller Malmi aerodrome are under water.
Passing through the western suburbs of Vantaa, the damage increases in intensity.
Just inside the Helsinki city limits, at Kannelmäki, the motorway has been commandeered as an emergency landing site for rescue helicopters. The choppers are touching down in a steady stream and people are carried out bodily and pitched into ambulances.
After Kehä I, the inner ring road, the motorway slopes gently downhill towards Haaga - and ends abruptly in deep brown water. An armada of small boats is carrying evacuees from the city to dry ground and into ambulances and hastily-collected buses that are to take them on to refugee centres.
There is no longer any use for a car: driving into the city is out of the question.
The big underground parking halls downtown are up to their roofs in water. There is nothing to be seen of the hundreds and hundreds of cars parked in the city streets. Here and there the roof of a delivery van pokes above the debris-littered surface.
High water everywhere, and it is rising all the time in the city centre. The 13,000-seater Hartwall Arena out in Pasila has become a large evacuee centre, and it is anything but an entertainment complex.
Conditions in the squat building above the railroad tracks soon become insufferable. The surprising Indian summer heatwave raises the temperature in the hall to that of a bad Swedish hotel sauna.
The toilets are overflowing, food and water are fast running out.
The stench is terrible. Tempers are fraying.
Attempts are under way to shift thousands of people to safety at the Elysee Hall in Turku, but there is a crying shortage of both buses and navigable routes out of town.
To make matters worse, the arena in Turku has filled up to the rafters in the first phase of the evacuation programme.
All the other ice-hockey halls in Southern Finland have to be requisitioned as temporary shelters for the homeless. The Finnish League season is cancelled until further notice.
It's money that matters, here as elsewhere. Most of the wealthy managed to get out earlier in their cars.
The poor have neither money nor a ride to safety. They are left at the mercy of society, practically abandoned to their fate.
The power is off in the Hartwall Arena, just as it is across the entire city. Fixed phone lines are dead, and the mobile networks along with them. The water and sewage systems are all shot to hell and back.
Out on the streets, it's the survival of the fittest and the strongest.
Your standard Matti and Maija Virtanens are looting stores in a desperate search for food and water.
There are armed gangs abroad, too: out stealing whatever they can carry off.
Outside the big glass doors of the Stockmann department store, people push anything that floats through the thigh-deep water, the craft piled high with TV sets, clothes, shoes, furniture...
Bursts of small-arms fire periodically interrupt the work of rescue teams. Smoke rises from rooftops after fires break out that no firefighters can hope to reach.
The Finnish Defence Forces send in all the troops they can muster from nearby garrisons.
More than 30,000 soldiers are given orders to arm up and shoot to kill if the wave of looting cannot be quelled by other means.
There are bodies everywhere. On the sidewalks, and floating facedown in flooded Keskuskatu and the square by the main railway station.
Nobody knows how many dead there are, but the authorities are talking in the thousands.
Out of a city of half a million, there are perhaps a few tens of thousands left here.
These last stragglers are being desperately urged to evacuate inland.
The Daughter of the Baltic is a dead city, an empty, sodden husk of its former self.
No, come ON... this sort of thing could not happen even in the crappiest of over-the-top Hollywood disaster movies, you say. And least of all in a country like Finland.
Or the United States for that matter.
But this is precisely what is going down in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in a city the size of Helsinki.
In New Orleans, the Big Easy, the Crescent City, the City that Care Forgot, America's most "unAmerican" city in tone and ambience, the good times have abruptly stopped rolling.
The chaos continues.
No city deserves such a fate. Of all of America's large metropolises, New Orleans perhaps deserves it least.
I've been to New Orleans two or three times in the last couple of years.
I've gaped at the decorated ironwork balconies on the old buildings in the French Quarter and admired the marble tombs and monuments in the cemeteries, and I've listened to New Orleans jazz from the wooden benches of Preservation Hall. I've pushed through the tourist throngs on Bourbon Street and wondered if I ought really to come down for Mardi Gras next spring.
I've even taken a buggy ride around the French Quarter, powered by the totally independent and stubborn ornery mule Jack. The sights were pointed out to me by Jack's owner Cyril Dumaine, a proud descendant of one of the oldest French families in the city.
"What? Hurricane danger? Yeah, people talk about it all the time, but this city will come through", Cyril explained to me, at the beginning of June this year.
For many, the buggy ride with Cyril was perhaps just another example of tacky tourist kitsch. Maybe it was, but the people of New Orleans had to make a living somehow.
Apart from the Port of Southern Louisiana, there was precious little else by way of gainful employment left here besides tourism.
The port can and must be rebuilt, but for the city's tourist industry, Hurricane Katrina has been a crushing blow.
Unless, of course, American ingenuity and entrepreneurship is capable of turning this catastrophe into a sales-point in a few years' time:
"Come to New Orleans and see the drowned city that has risen again from the deep - a modern-day Atlantis!"
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 4.9.2005
Translator's Note: The photographs accompanying this article are naturally all taken from the Gulf Coast disaster following Hurricane Katrina's rampage through Louisiana and Mississippi. The captions, meanwhile, have been edited to reflect the situation in a possible "Helsinki Scenario".
JYRI RAIVIO / Helsingin Sanomat
jyri.raivio@hs.fi
|
| 6.9.2005 - THIS WEEK |
 Drowned city |
|
