Sinkage.

Sinkage. I wonder if people in the city of roses are familiar with the term. Now that I am on the outside looking in, sinkage seems like a strange word. Here in Portland, it seems like you might notice a rut in your yard one day and think only that something is sinking over there. But the "...age" in sinkage -- a word everyone in New Orleans knows all too well -- denotes a common problem, a phenomenon. Do they have sinkage in places like Portland, or would you say merely that your yard is sinking? Is that sinkage, or just a crack in your driveway?

Mud Hog is one of the firms in New Orleans that will come in with as much river sand as you need. 2 or 3 truckloads every ten years or so will cover it, more if your whole front and back yards are badly sunken. The DIY-ers have the truckloads of dirt dumped on their front lawn and spend the next 5 weekends wheelbarrowing and shoveling it under the house, only to find a large dead spot of St. Augustine grass under where the heap of dirt was. But Mud Hog will come in with a truck outfitted with a water tank and long flexible pipe. The sand and water are mixed together and pumped under your house. Presumably someone gets under your house with the end of the pipe to see that it is evenly distributed, and that your sewer pipes attached to the underside of your slab don't get broken in the process.

Earl's Plumbing tank trucks were a common sight on my block. Their job was to find the breaks in your sewer pipes, fix them, and fill back up the underside of your slab with dirt. Occasionally I'd actually get to see the poor sap who was one of a crew of 3 or 4 assigned to the truck -- sucking himself out from a narrow mud hole under the house. Strongly evoking images from both the movie Raising Arizona and Booty Call (remember the saran wrap scene?). The only skin showing on these guys is a piece of the face. Most often I saw them in a rigged outfit consisting of a welders hat, boots and workgloves, looking something like a mud torpedo, but the lucky ones got a rubberized suit. These were the poor guys who had to go down there.

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New Orleans houses have traditionally been built on 2 or 3 foot brick piers -- enough to let the floodwater go under but not in. The 1950's ushered in the era of the brick ranch house -- a house that never should have taken root in New Orleans. But it just so happens that many of the low-lying reclaimed swamp areas that Katrina decided to take back were the very areas that were sprouting up brick ranches in the 50's.

I swore I'd never buy a slab home in New Orleans.

It's the sinkage. If the ground under your raised house starts to sink, your house doesn't move (hopefully) because it is likely built on a chainwall which is in turn on top of long wooden pilings driven deep into the ground. You just throw some more dirt around and maybe put a new carpet of grass, new driveways and sidewalks down every 15 years or so. But if the ground is under your slab house, somebody has to go down under there to put that dirt in, and usually it is after your sewer pipes that were supposed to be attached to your slab have fallen off and broken, something that sooner or later happens to everyone. When there was a strong rain and the ground was saturated, something in the air outside...just...wasn't... Well, I wouldn't want to be one of the guys who had to go under there and see what wasn't holding up.

In the end (was it the end?) Katrina didn't discriminate between slab home owners and raised home owners. Most everybody in the previously-called backswamp area got standing water, courtesy of our esteemed levee system. May have been 4 feet, may have been 12 feet. In our house it was 6 1/2 feet. How long it stayed that high, we don't know. We never did see it. But the water didn't get gone for more than 4 weeks.

The carpets are still squishy.