WWNO

A daily a daily report on the Louisiana legislative session.

As the 10th hurricane season begins since the landfall of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, 89.9 WWNO — New Orleans Public Radio is launching a new weekly podcast and radio feature: Katrina: The Debris, stories about what was left behind by the storm and the floods that followed.

‘Storyville’ is a partnership between WWNO and the University of New Orleans. Students in the creative writing workshop at UNO record their own original works about the Crescent City.

In New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, The Bayou Bienvenue Wetland Triangle of today is what is called a “ghost swamp”. Until the 1960s, it was a full of cypress trees, part of the central wetlands system that ran from the Lower 9th Ward all the way to Lake Borgne. But destructive forces — from levee and canal construction to invasive species — turned this freshwater swamp into a saltwater marsh, killing all the cypress trees in the process. You see their dead trunks like scarecrows in the water, and don’t see much else. Five people walked out to the Bayou Bienvenue platform, a wooden walkway at Florida and Caffin Avenues, to overlook the land as it is now and consider these questions.