New Orleans Today: It's Worse Than You Think

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Sunday, Nov. 20, 2005

New Orleans Today: It's Worse Than You Think

Neighborhoods are still dark, garbage piles up on the street, and

bodies are still being found. The city's pain is a nation's shame

By CATHY BOOTH THOMAS NEW ORLEANS

On Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, the neon lights are

flashing, the booze is flowing, and the demon demolition men of

Hurricane Katrina are ogling a showgirl performing in a thong. The

Bourbon House is shucking local oysters again, Daiquiri's is churning

out its signature alcoholic slushies, and Mardi Gras masks are once

again on sale. But drive north toward the hurricane-ravaged housing

subdivisions off Lake Pontchartrain and the masks you see aren't made

for Carnival. They are industrial-strength respirators, stark and

white, the only things capable of stopping a stench that turns the

stomach and dredges up bad memories of a night nearly three months

ago. Most disasters come and go in a neat arc of calamity, followed

by anger at the slow response, then cleanup. But Katrina cut a

historic deadly swath across the South, and rebuilding can't start

until the cleanup is done. In much of New Orleans, the leafy coverage

of live oaks is gone. Lingering in the sky instead is a fine grit

that tastes metallic to the tongue. Everyone's life story is out on

the curb, soaked and stinky—furniture and clothing, dishes and

rotting drywall, even formerly fabulous antiques. Dump trucks come

periodically to remove the piles, taking some to a former city park,

now a heap of rubbish several football fields long, towering above

the head. The smell is sweet, horrific.

They're still finding bodies down here 13 weeks after Hurricane

Katrina hit—30 in the past month—raising the death toll to 1,053 in

Louisiana. The looters are still working too, brazenly taking their

haul in daylight. But at night darkness falls, and it's quiet. " It's

spooky out there. There's no life, " says cardiologist Pat Breaux, who

lives near Pontchartrain with only a handful of neighbors. The

destruction, says Breaux, head of the Orleans Parish Medical Society,

depresses people. Suicides are up citywide, he says, although no one

has a handle on the exact number. Murders, on the other hand, have

dropped to almost none.

Mayor Ray Nagin opened up most of the city to returning evacuees last

week, but only an estimated 60,000 people are spending the night in

New Orleans these days, compared with about half a million before

Katrina. The city that care forgot is in the throes of an identity

crisis, torn between its shady, bead-tossing past and the sanitized

Disneyland future some envision. With no clear direction on whether

to raze or rebuild, the 300,000 residents who fled the region are

frustrated—and increasingly indecisive—about returning. If they do

come back, will there be jobs good enough to stay for? If they do

rebuild, will the levees be strong enough to protect them? They can't

shake the feeling that somehow they did something wrong just by

living where they did. And now the money and the sympathy are drying

up. People just don't understand. You have to see it, smell it, put

on a white mask and a pair of plastic gloves, and walk into a world

where nothing is salvageable, not even the mildewed wedding pictures.

Beyond an island of light downtown, most of Orleans Parish is still

in the dark. Of the city's eight hospitals pre-Katrina, only two are

open to serve a population that swells to 150,000 during the day. The

public school system—destroyed by back-to-back hurricanes—is in limbo

while the state considers a takeover and charter-school advocates vie

for abandoned facilities. One lone public school for 500 students is

set to open this week. The once flashy city has become drab. The

grass and trees, marinated for weeks in saltwater, are a dreary gray-

brown. Parking lots look like drought-starved lake beds, with cracks

in the mud. Within a few hours, anyone working outside is covered in

a fine layer of grit. The trees that gave New Orleans such character—

the centuries-old live oaks with their grand canopies and graceful

lines—are toppled, exposing huge root balls 10 ft. or more in

diameter. It's all the more surreal because the Garden District,

which survived the flood, is lush and beautiful once again.

The tax base has been shredded, forcing New Orleans to limp along on

about a quarter of its usual income of $400 million to $500 million

per year. The city has lost an estimated $1.5 million a day in

tourism revenues since Katrina, and only a quarter of the 3,400

restaurants are open. Moody's has lowered the city's credit rating

from investment grade to junk. The latest insult? The nation's flood-

insurance program ran out of money for the first time since its

founding in 1968, and some insurers temporarily stopped issuing

checks.

That may have consequences for people like Marguerite Simon, 82. She

worked hard cleaning other people's homes, earning just enough to buy

into the Ninth Ward, one of New Orleans' poorest neighborhoods. She

was wearing rubber gloves, rubber boots and a paper face mask last

week, cleaning black amoebic splotches of mold off precious family

treasures. Inside the small house, her well-made furniture, with its

carved arms and curved legs, lay scattered as if some giant Mixmaster

had been whirling away. Sitting on her tiny porch, she managed a

laugh. " You have to laugh, " she said, " but it don't come from the

heart. " She wants to stay in her neighborhood, even though bodies are

still being found there. Across the street, a widower was found dead

by his visiting son just last week. Simon had a small flood-insurance

policy, but even so, she's not sure she can afford to rebuild or that

she will be allowed to. The cost of demolishing a house is several

thousand dollars and rising. For now she's living with her daughter

Pamela in nearby Algiers, but Simon hates the loss of

independence. " Inside, I'm hurt, " she says. " I miss having things my

way. " is helping her complete Federal Emergency Management

Agency (FEMA) paperwork to get a trailer to place at the back of the

lot in Algiers. " I believe there's a lesson and a blessing in

everything. We just haven't found it yet, " says Sharon Welch, another

daughter who is visiting from Chicago, and the women laugh.

Real estate agent Sherry Masinter, 46, lived with her lawyer husband

Milton, 73, in the Lakeview neighborhood until the 17th Street Canal

levee broke and flooded their house with 8 ft. of water. Today mold

grows up the walls. The couple paid for flood insurance faithfully

for 20 years and were reimbursed, but their neighbors are still

battling with their insurance company over arcane formulas. Milton

argues—as did independent experts from the National Science

Foundation and the American Society of Civil Engineers recently—that

poor levee design by the Army Corps of Engineers caused the flood,

not Katrina. That puts the burden on Washington to help, he says. The

breached levee, shored up with sandbags, is still leaking onto city

streets. " It's very frustrating, " says Sherry, " to the point where

we've talked of going to Washington for a peaceful protest just to

say, `You've forgotten us.' "

Repair and cleanup are linked, to some degree, with planning what New

Orleans should look like five years from now. The Louisiana Recovery

Authority, appointed by Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, met in

November with hundreds of New Orleans residents to develop

priorities, brainstorm ideas with planners and businessmen, and

present a unified voice. The Authority vice chair Walter Isaacson

petitioned Congress last week for help in establishing a " recovery

corporation " as a vehicle for the city's rebuilding neighborhoods.

, the new hurricane czar appointed by W. Bush,

said his job is to listen and gather facts to help the

President " understand the vision of the local people. " The one-time

banker, who admits he has a little boning up to do on levees, says he

will spend the next few weeks shuttling in and out of the hurricane

area, developing a blueprint for federal reconstruction help.

Washington approved $62.3 billion to help hurricane victims after the

trifecta of Katrina, Rita and Wilma. With an additional $8.6 billion

in tax breaks and programs for the region, the total tab of nearly

$71 billion is far beyond the $43.9 billion dedicated to emergency

spending after the 9/11 attacks. But congressional Republicans are

picking up strong signals from the White House that the

Administration is not going to move forward with any grand coastal

plan. " There's not a sense of urgency anymore, " says a senior House

Republican aide.

Louisiana's recent request for $250 billion, perilously short on

details, got a contemptuous reception from Republicans ( " Nonstarter, "

said a Senate aide), editorial writers (who dubbed it the " Louisiana

looters' bill " ) and even a few Democrats ( " They're thieves, " said a

House aide involved with budgeting for Louisiana relief).

Olivier, Louisiana's secretary of economic development, points out

that Katrina devastated a far larger area—23,000 acres—than 9/11 did

and destroyed nearly 284,000 homes. With 71,000 businesses shut down

by Katrina and a further 10,000 by Rita, and with local governments

short on tax revenues, he says, " We're looking at potentially the

largest business insolvency since the Depression, and a government

insolvency. " FEMA continues to be a four-letter word in Louisiana. In

Kenner and Metairie, suburbs west of New Orleans, blue tarps provided

by FEMA dot the roofs of homes damaged by wind, but there are few in

the worst-affected neighborhoods like Lakeview, the Ninth Ward and

East New Orleans—a policy defended by the agency. " What's to

protect? " asks FEMA spokeswoman Nicol s in Washington. She

argues, like the insurance companies, that most of the damage east of

New Orleans was from floodwaters, not wind. Tarps, she says, would be

a waste of money. " There are still houses left standing, but you

wouldn't let any living thing you cared about get near them [after

they had soaked in] standing black water for four weeks, " says

s.

FEMA trailers for temporary housing are a rare sight in East New

Orleans, largely because there is no electricity and inundated city

inspectors are behind on approving utility hookups. Entergy New

Orleans, which filed for bankruptcy protection after Katrina, plans

to double its repair work force so that most of the remaining 75,000

customers will have power by year's end, thus clearing the way for

trailers to be installed. The move comes none too soon, since FEMA is

cutting off payments for hotel rooms by Dec. 1 to encourage families

to move into permanent homes, using money they were given for

apartment deposits. Olivier told a gathering of planners in New

Orleans that FEMA's trailer parks had been held up by epa

requirements for an environmental study. " They told us that we have

to protect the endangered species, " said Olivier, who then delivered

his applause line. " I told them, `Hell, we are the endangered

species!' " s says the agency does not mandate such studies.

The delays and squabbles mean that Congress's $62.3 billion largesse

has mostly gone unspent. More than half—$37.5 billion—is sitting in

FEMA's account, waiting for a purpose. Under fire for being slow to

respond, the Bush Administration had rushed two emergency

supplemental bills to Congress with little thought about how the

money would be spent or how fast. Now FEMA is " awash in money, " says

a Democratic appropriations aide. Of the nearly $25 billion assigned

to projects, checks totaling only about $6.2 billion have been

cashed. As a result, a third supplemental-funding bill sent to

Congress suggests taking back $2.3 billion in aid. Mayor Ray Nagin

attempted to shore up support for the city's recovery before Congress

last week, but he came home with little new. The comment of a G.O.P.

aide was typical: " We want to see them helping themselves before they

ask us for help. "

The mayor's Bring New Orleans Back Commission has created buzz in the

city by involving thousands of people in public life. But what

residents want most is something the mayor pragmatically believes may

be impossible for the moment—levees that will protect against

Category 5 hurricanes. The Corps of Engineers plans to repair 40

miles of the 300-mile system before the next hurricane season. Nagin

won promises from the Corps to rebuild the system to withstand a

Category 3 storm " plus some, " which means they plan to fix the flaws

that reputedly caused the levee breaks that flooded 80% of the city—

for as long as four weeks in some areas. The improved levees will be

17 ft. high, vs. 12 ft. to 13 ft. pre-Katrina. With $8 million

pending for a two-year Category 5 study, the mayor seems content to

bide his time. " There is no science to build a Category 5 levee

protection now anyway, " says Nagin.

New Orleans has a more immediate problem: its health-care

system. " Should we have another hurricane, multiple accidents, a

major fire or a flu epidemic, it could overwhelm our system, " warns

Dr. Breaux. Fewer than 15% of the doctors are back, nurses are in

short supply and medical records are missing or destroyed. The Navy

hospital ship is gone, replaced by a makeshift treatment center that

moved out of tents and into the New Orleans Convention Center last

week. Level One trauma care, for the most seriously wounded, is

available only in the next parish. " If you're in a major car

accident, have been stabbed or shot or hit over the head with a pipe,

the soonest you could go into the operating room now is about an hour—

and that's if you `schedule' your trauma between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., "

says Dr. DeBlieux, an internist at the temporary convention

center site.

Eighteen months before Katrina, business leaders in New Orleans

created an economic development vehicle, GNO Inc., with a five-year

goal of creating 30,000 jobs. They may make their goal quicker than

that, but the jobs will be in Baton Rouge, or perhaps Houston and

Atlanta, thanks to the hurricane. At a downtown job fair last week,

Leo G. Doyle, a sales-training manager for UPS, said his company lost

30% of its work force after Katrina and was looking for drivers and

package handlers. " We have a lot of good workers who have been

displaced, a lot of good workers with loss-of-family issues, loss-of-

spirit issues, " says Doyle. " If we had housing, they would return. "

Burger King is offering a $6,000 signing bonus to anyone who will

work in New Orleans for at least a year.

New Orleans will never again be the New Orleans of Aug. 28, 2005, the

day before Katrina hit. But that New Orleans was not the city of 30

years ago either. There is no reason to think New Orleans will not

once again be a vibrant place, but it will take time, and more time

than one might have thought just a month ago. As Jim ,

director of the Public Administration Institute at Louisiana State

University, puts it, New Orleans is not a traditional hurricane-

recovery model. " It's more like a war zone. You're looking at a 10-

year recovery, not two years. "

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