By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer
Bates teachers who own a house in New Orleans are watching a nightmare unfold.

LEWISTON – Charles Nero was relieved to know that his loved ones and his second home in New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina.

Relieved, but not happy.

Disaster aid to the ravaged city has been a tragic, shameful joke, the Bates College professor said Friday. The first order of business should have been to evacuate the city before the hurricane hit.

“The people wouldn’t be looting if they weren’t there,” he said.

Barring that, state, local and federal officials should have done more to get survivors out after the storm had passed. Aid is getting to the area too slowly, Nero said.

“We’re the richest nation on the Earth, and this is all we can do?” he said.

He noted a profile among the looters, the survivors and the people waiting for help: They are mostly poor and mostly black.

“I had a friend tell me that New Orleans was the most African city in the United States,” Nero said. “It practically is African. Well, that’s how it’s being treated now – abandoned.”

He and his partner, Baltasar Fra-Molinero, a Bates College Spanish professor, have been watching the events carefully. Nero grew up in New Orleans, and his elderly mother, father and an aunt still live in the city. He loves the city, its culture and history.

He and Fra-Molinero bought a house three years ago in New Orleans’ Faubourg Marigny precinct for the area’s historical significance.

“It’s one of the earliest settlements in New Orleans, created by free blacks in the 19th century,” said Nero, a professor of American culture and black history.

The neighborhood was built in the 19th century and is on high ground between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, just east of the French Quarter. Nero’s house is about 5 feet above sea level, and that’s been just enough to keep it out of the flood waters in Hurricane Katrina’s wake. Streets all around his neighborhood are flooded, according to reports from friends.

“Where you see most of the flooding, those areas had been reclaimed in the 20th century,” he said.

His family managed to escape to Baton Rouge before the hurricane hit. They’re all fine, and so are most of his friends still in the city. They’ve been told they might not be allowed back in the city for months.

Nero keeps up with news of the city via the Times-Picayune newspaper’s Web site, satellite TV and text messages on his cellular phone.

“Cell phone coverage has been bad,” he said. “They can call out, but we can’t call in. But text messages seem to work fine, so far, and they almost always get through.”

All he can do now is check the news reports, send text messages and wait. He doesn’t expect to be back in New Orleans until the spring.

“I couldn’t go now if I wanted,” he said. You can’t get there if the roads are closed and the airport is under a foot of water.

“It’s scandalous that we let things get this bad, that the security in one of our nation’s biggest cities cannot be guaranteed,” he said.

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