Were Louis Armstrong alive today, the irrepressible Satchmo might be forgiven for playing a dirge for his beloved New Orleans. The corridors of the airport that bears his name are ghostly quiet now, closed to all scheduled commercial traffic. They will be for weeks; probably months. While it is not flooded, there is no power at MSY, no way to run instrument landing systems or runway lighting.

“There is no timeline for the resumption of air service into the New Orleans area,” says MSY’s Web site, which also warns: “Passengers will not be allowed to retrieve vehicles in our parking garages until further notice.”

For the foreseeable future, most of those needing to get to New Orleans—primarily relief officials—will flow first through Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport, 78 miles up Interstate 10, an hour and a half away.

“This is a new era for the airport,” says BTR spokesman Ronnie Pickard. Indeed. Since Katrina came ashore—grotesquely rearranging the geographic, commercial, and psychological landscape of south Louisiana—commercial traffic to Baton Rouge has grown by a third. Where there were 30 to 40 flights per day, there are now more than 60. Where regional jets dominated, now MD-88s, 737s, and even 757s pull up to BTR’s modern, airy terminal.

American, Delta, Continental, and Northwest are the prime players at Baton Rouge. But Pickard says he’s gotten inquiries from Southwest, JetBlue and even Central American-based TACA about initiating temporary service.

Temporary is the operant word in this part of the South right now. Everything residents of the Crescent City held permanent--from the French Quarter, to the Garden District, to the robust central business district--is in gradations of ruin, and what’s left is being plundered by a portion of the populace driven to something just short of madness.

New Orleans today is anything but “the City that Care Forgot.”