What became of the refrigerators abandoned after Hurricane Katrina?

10 years ago, the United States, and more specifically New Orleans, suffered huge impacts and damage from Hurricane Katrina. More than 1 million people had to evacuate the region and over a thousand died. The storm surge left 80% of the sunken city reaching the milestone of one of the most destructive hurricanes have hit the United States.


The hurricane, which devastated, too, the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005, ruined thousands of homes and, with them, a lot of appliances. However, damaged refrigerators belonged to a completely different realm of problems. When Katrina forced people to evacuate their homes, some residents were able to empty their refrigerators, but the vast majority, contained food inside.



In fact, the population had no idea it would lose the refrigerator for weeks, or even that would not be able to return home until a month later. At this time, the food was all rotting in all refrigerators with an internal and sweltering heat of about 90 degrees.



Everything rots: vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, dairy, etc. The result was a sticky mess, with absurd stench and all full of worms. The people who came back and opened their refrigerators, repented bitterly! The food has undergone a transformation so toxic that melted plastic, corroded metals and dissolved rubber liners inside of refrigerators. According to reports, the smell was unbearable!



Many residents do not hesitate to open their refrigerators. They sealed coolers with tape and pushed the "horrors box" out of their homes and onto the street. Eventually, refrigerators began to emerge in the streets like mushrooms after the rain, even in parts of the city that were not flooded. An overwhelming smell of death and decay hung over the city ...



The putrid task flow of these machines fell on local government, which assigns a special team to work. These men were trained to handle hazardous materials and were armed with equipment and devices for special operations. Even with all the team structure, the destruction was so great that the cleaning operation took months to complete the task.




Starts in the streets, refrigerators abandoned soon began to attract graffiti and turned into personal expressions platforms. As time stretched, some of them were even decorated with ornaments and festive Christmas greetings.



For months, refrigerators painted with spray became ubiquitous symbol of post-Katrina New Orleans. People began to photograph the refrigerators and organize exhibitions, other written books about them and that same year, on Halloween, the Katrina refrigerators turned into costume ideas for the popular festival,



In December 2005, the end of the cleaning crew operation contracted by the local government, some refrigerators were taken to a junkyard for recycling, while others, about 150,000, were dumped in a landfill. In early 2006, the last of them was gone.