Rebirth for New Orleans

Prospering in the face of adversity. How many cities can say that they’ve responded to a crisis in the same manner as New Orleans? Nestled in between the Mississippi river and lake Pontchartrain, a huge proportion of the city actually sits below sea level. However, despite the widespread destruction of New Orleans at the hands of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it was never reported that large parts of the city were left relatively untouched. The damage, which was started by a storm, was finished by overblown media reports shattering the reputation of a town reliant on its thriving tourism industry.

“Bad news sells – good news doesn’t,” says Robert Jumonville, director of cruise and tourism at the port of New Orleans. “That is what really slammed us, more than any physical aspects of the storm. The media’s portrayal of New Orleans was concentrated on certain sections of the city that were devastated.”

Modern cruising started in New Orleans in 1984, although historically there has been a port on the site since it was founded by the French in 1718. Housed in the building that was used to host the 1984 World’s Fair, the Julia Street No.1 terminal originally saw eight calls a year from Bermuda Star Lines (which was merged into the now defunct Commodore Cruise Line in 1990).

From those relatively humble beginnings the port has seen a more or less continuous expansion inline with the growth of the cruise industry. What started off as eight calls in 1984 had become 52 by 1991 and by 1993 the port had attracted Carnival’s 1,200-passenger Tropicale. New business necessitated more facilities – and by 2001 the original terminal had undergone four separate renovations. After Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean both displayed an interest in New Orleans, the decision was made to build Julia Street No.2.

In 2004 the port recorded its best year ever with 734,000 passengers coming through the terminal. The following year looked to be another record breaker when, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit. What followed was the costliest natural disaster in history – with an estimated US$81 billion worth of property damage and a loss of life in the region of 1,800. Although the devastation of New Orleans was widely reported, what wasn’t seen on the news reports was the lack of damage sustained to the cruise terminal area and French Quarter – which are both located in the oldest part of the city, on the Mississippi River.

“We had our problems, the city had infrastructure problems, flooding problems, but the areas where the cruise terminals are, and the tourism areas of New Orleans – the French Quarter – comparatively speaking were barely affected by the storm,” continues Jumonville. “In fact there were bars in the French Quarter that never even closed.

“The cruise terminals are built on top of the river levees, so the bottom floor of the cruise terminal is 22 feet above sea level,” he explains. “The city average is about four feet below – as you get closer to the river you get higher. None of the flooding to the city came from the river, it came from Lake Pontchartrain, which is north of the city."

The Mississippi River did not overtop or breach the levees in the vicinity of the city. The storm, and subsequent media attention, meant that the damage to New Orleans’ reputation was total. Overnight the amount of ships in the terminal, or due to port, hit zero. The subsequent campaign to restore faith in the area is one of the city’s biggest triumphs.

“It took a while and I have to give credit to the state’s department of tourism, which is run by the lieutenant governor of Louisiana (Mitch Landrieu at the time, who is now Mayor of New Orleans), and to the local tourist and convention centre bureau, which came up with some fantastic ad campaigns to instil confidence in the public to start coming back,” he says.

“Our best year ever was 2001/02 when we had ten million visitors to the city. In 2005 we ere poised to go to around eight million, and it took just three years to get back to that number. Last year, for instance, we were around 8.5 million. So I think the public were a little bit more discerning than the news media.”

Despite the plummeting of passenger numbers, the port pushed on with the building of the Erato Street terminal, which had started before the storm hit. The project was delayed by just four months before its completion in October 2006 – a day before the return of the first ship to New Orleans, on 16 October.

Fast-forward to 2011 and the future looks bright for the city. Not only is work well underway on combining the two Julia Street terminals, in order to better accommodate the 3,838 passenger Voyager of the Seas, but there is another terminal on the horizon: Poland Avenue, a project Jumonville expects to be completed by February 2013.

“It’s a project for which we have successfully applied to the state for funding,” he explains. “We will still have to provide matching funds. The port receives no tax dollars for our operations and as an economic catalyst we bring in about US$200m a year – not to mention the amount of jobs (about 3,000 from the cruise business alone) that the port creates through our impact on the city.”

It’s an interesting and often overlooked point: the business that the port has brought into New Orleans has aided and, to an extent, facilitated the city’s regeneration. However, while the port has brought jobs and huge injections of much needed cash into the local economy, it is a partnership where both the city and the port have been reliant upon each other.

“The city has a lot to do with our success in the cruise business,” says Jumonville. “We could have the best cruise facilities in the world – and we have by the way – but that’s not going to be the deciding factor as to whether the cruise line will sail out of our port. They have to be able to entice future passengers to embark on the ship. If they can do that then they’ll come to the port and be a loyal customer. The tourism reputation of New Orleans helps us a great deal by giving the cruise line an extra selling point. ‘It’s two vacations in one.’”