New Orleans and the true story of despair

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December 10, 2005 latimes.com : National News E-mail story Print

Anxiety Is the Cornerstone

Set aside the French Quarter and the trucks hauling away debris. New

Orleans is not bouncing back. 'We are not OK. We are desperate.'

By H. King, Times Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS — More than half the city may remain in moldering ruins,

its residents scattered, confused, anxious, its commercial activity

moribund, its political leadership adrift, and yet the people of

greater New Orleans at least have managed to come together and save

Katrina Ridge.

Katrina Ridge is not an actual neighborhood. It is a miniature

village laid out for the holidays in the middle of a suburban mall

near the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, at a place where children line

up to sit on Santa's lap and ride a tiny train around and around in

circles.

Nestled in fake snow, its houses decorated with twinkling lights, the

village seems pretty much standard issue for American malls in this

season — except for a few special touches.

In Katrina Ridge, blue tarps cover the rooftops of the tiny houses. A

plastic helicopter airlifts a figurine in a basket. Little toy men

and women balance on chimney tops. Downed trees rest against

buildings. And finger-sized refrigerators set at curbside carry such

warnings as " You Loot. We Shoot. "

Ho. Ho. Ho.

Of course there was a stink. Two weeks after it went up, mall

management ordered the volunteer designer to remove the Katrina

touches " out of respect for those who found it offensive and in poor

taste. " This, though, only created a bigger stink. Letters and e-

mails of complaint flooded into the mall by the hundreds, running 50-

1 in favor of restoring the village — overturned cars and all.

" The city has lost almost everything — except its sense of humor, "

went a typical missive. " If you take that away and steal the laughter

you are not any better than a looter after the storm. Keep the

display!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "

And so last week, the village was restored, except for the

hieroglyphic markings on the little houses, which in the real world

designated how many dead bodies had been found within. There are

limits.

Silly as it all may seem, the battle over the Christmas village

reflects larger emotional plates moving beneath the city — the

struggle to come to grips with the depressing reality, not only of

the devastation Hurricane Katrina wrought more than 100 days ago, but

also the halting pace of the early recovery efforts and the long,

grim passages that lie ahead.

On radio talk shows, the questions and complaints of callers seem to

have changed little from the first days of the crisis: dreary

incantations about hapless federal disaster agencies, absent

insurance adjusters, shoddy levee work and an overall lack of

leadership.

While media here herald the rebirth of each icon and institution —

beignets are being sold again at Cafe du Monde; another private

school has reopened; horse-drawn carriages clip-clop through the

French Quarter once more — much of the city remains abandoned and

dark at night.

Entergy New Orleans has restored enough of its system to make power

available to 120,000 of its 190,000 customers, but it estimates half

that number has returned to the grid.

Few of the tens of thousands of houses that eventually must come down

have been demolished, and it is possible still to drive through mile

upon mile of badly damaged houses and commercial strips. The sight

still has the power to shock.

" I still find it compelling, riveting, to see " the cityscape, said

A. McLachlan, director of the Center for Bioenvironmental

Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities. " You can't see it without

having an internal sense of loss of what the city was.

" You will be looking at a house where, three months and a day ago,

there were children playing, or someone was playing cards, or they

were listening to music, or they were planning what restaurant they

were going to go to, and now, now you see instead these ubiquitous

brown lines of water and the code they use to say whether someone was

dead….

" You would think by now you could drive by and it would be just like

anything else you can see anywhere else, but it's not. "

Tourists have begun to trickle back, but now they come for more than

jazz and gumbo. At Cafe Maspero in the French Quarter, a woman who

appeared to be a resident could be heard the other day plotting out a

visitor's itinerary.

" Now all through here, " she told the young man, running her finger

across a street map, " it's really devastated. You'll want to go

there. And over here, that's really, really devastated. That

neighborhood won't be coming back for a while…. "

In neighborhoods that have begun to be reoccupied, piles of garbage

grow in the streets, with the financially strapped city unable to

pick them up. Appearances aside, however, about 7 million tons of

debris, a third of the expected total, has been hauled away.

That figure, said Chuck Brown, a state official involved with the

logistics of debris removal, represents " the low-hanging fruit. " The

pace will slow, he said, when the more difficult job of actual

deconstruction begins.

But for that he has a secret weapon: the Annihilator, a giant

pulverizing machine touted by its manufacturer as " the Mother of All

Shredders. " This week, Brown took the long drive down to Plaquemines

Parish to witness a shredder at work.

The landfill presented a Mad Max-like scene. Dump trucks were backed

up in a long line, waiting to add their payloads to a mountain of

broken house frames and siding and other hurricane debris. Bulldozers

and huge excavating machines scrambled about the mountain, their

engines screaming.

Mouthfuls of debris would be dropped into the maw of the box-shaped,

bright yellow Annihilator, parked at the base of the pile. The

machine then would grind the material into bits and spit it out,

having reduced its volume by more than half.

The " vision, " Brown said over the din, was to scatter these grinders

throughout the worst-damaged neighborhoods, in one swoop making

quicker work of debris, reducing the number of trucks in traffic and

saving precious landfill space. He returned to the state-owned SUV a

satisfied man.

" This is what we are dealing with right now, " he said. " The cleanup

is going to come, and the rebuilding is going to come. But it is all

going to take patience. "

Beyond the gritty debris work, though, it can seem at times that the

principal activity of the rebuilding effort is to meet and ruminate

about what was before Katrina — " BK " in confab-speak — and what might

be in the new New Orleans — " AK. " Blue-ribbon commissions seem nearly

as abundant as the blue tarp roof-coverings that have flowered across

the city.

" We talk, " quipped Kroloff, dean of architecture at Tulane

University, " about getting together to talk about the next time we

are going to get together to talk about what we need to be talking

about. "

These sessions are earnest, often attended by bright minds from

around the country. After half a dozen or so, however, the meetings

begin to run together.

Inevitably, they begin with full-throated vows to build back New

Orleans better than before. At some point someone can be counted on

to warn against becoming " another Disneyland. " That the nation owes

New Orleans a debt — for its port, its petroleum products, its music,

its cuisine, its style — is suggested.

Whenever ticklish topics of racial inequities, crime and poverty pop

up, there tends to be quick agreement that they must be tackled and

then the discussion quickly moves on. At some point, an angry

resident or two can be counted on to rise and complain, apropos of

nothing on the agenda, that their refrigerators still have not been

collected from curbside.

Finally, a Cassandra intrudes on the proceedings to announce: All

this talk means nothing unless the federal government builds a levee

system that can withstand a Category 5 hurricane. At which point the

attendees nod, pack up their new pile of study guides and work

papers, and head home — or to wherever they have managed to find

temporary lodging.

Without question, the failure of Washington to commit to construction

of a greatly enhanced levee system is cited most frequently as the

root cause of the city's collective inertia.

" We are in limbo, " said Kroloff, " because the federal government

won't make a decision in a timely fashion, because the federal

government basically is holding the city hostage. Part of it, I

think, is willful. Part of it is just the way Congress works. Things

take time.

" You have a city that is effectively put on hold…. Everything else

hinges on those levees. Insurance companies won't insure. Businesses

won't invest. Nothing can happen until people understand, without a

doubt, that in the shortest possible order this city will be

protected from at least the giant storms and then quickly thereafter

will be protected at a higher level. "

Indeed, individual residents, or displaced would-be residents, find

themselves trapped in intricate spider webs of uncertainty: Can they

rebuild? Should they rebuild? Will insurance cover their losses? Will

government help make them whole?

For others, though, it would be a step forward to be confronted with

these sorts of questions. , a community activist from the

Lower 9th Ward, has waged pitched battles to secure permission merely

to see her squat brick house.

" The whole thing is to damage the morale of all these black

homeowners, " said, " so they will just shoo, go away. "

Shooing away potential residents would seem counterproductive at this

point. Employers are desperate for workers. Newspaper and radio

advertisements seek everything from riverboat pilots to hamburger

flippers.

And yet people can't take jobs without a place to live; and there

won't be places to live if there are not people to restore or repair

the flooded housing stock.

The sense of stalemate can be dispiriting. A few weeks ago, Cecile

Tebo, a social worker for the Police Department, received an e-mail

from a sister in Florida congratulating her for the quick steps

toward recovery New Orleans had taken. After all, she'd seen on TV

reports that the French Quarter was reopened and that plans were

being laid for Mardi Gras. They've even begun to patch up the roof of

the Super Dome.

" You must be so much better, " the sister wrote.

Her timing was not perfect. Tebo, 45, a native and daughter of a

former police superintendent, received this well-meant note shortly

after one of her best friends, a pediatrician and father of three,

hanged himself.

" He had lost his business, " Tebo recalled. " His business partners

were moving away. His house had serious damage. He just felt

helpless. He was as affected as I was, and that is what scared me. "

On her job, she was called to a bridge where a man was poised to

jump, holding an umbrella. " Don't take this umbrella, " he told

officers who talked him down. " It's all I have. " She went to the home

of a woman in breakdown. A piece of red construction paper had blown

onto her porch. The woman mistakenly believed the city had tagged her

home for demolition.

" People are killing themselves, " Tebo said this week in a Garden

District coffee shop. " All these meetings aren't working. All these

plans they talk about aren't working. "

She had watched herself growing more and more depressed, unable to

sleep or do her job.

After her sister's e-mail, she arose from her bed at 3 a.m. and,

weeping, wrote a response in the form of a letter to the editor of

the Times-Picayune:

" The attention received in the early days of this tragedy was

relentless…. But now, though thousands continue to suffer and drown

in grief and despair, the cameras have turned elsewhere. We are left

to suffer alone with fear and broken promises….

" I want the word to get out. We are not OK. We are desperate,

depressed, anxious, angry. People are killing themselves.

Relationships are deteriorating. The antidepressants are not working.

No, we are not OK. "

Her letter ran last Saturday on the op-ed page.

Though Tebo said she was doing better now — for starters, her

insurance company finally delivered — she was struck by something a

friend had told her.

" She said: 'Do you know what our problem is, Tebo? We've forgotten

how to laugh. We're not laughing anymore.' And she was so right. I

used to laugh all the time, all the time. "

And with that she provided directions to the Lakeside Shopping

Center, home of the mythical, miniature Christmas village