Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  The other cochair of the mayor’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission was Barbara Major, a Canizaro favorite. The two had met in the late 1990s during the pitched fight over a housing project in the lower Garden District. A local developer named Pres Kabacoff had proposed that it be torn down and replaced with a mixed-income housing project. Major, who ran a low-income health clinic in the area, was among those leading negotiations for the tenants. Canizaro got involved because he owned an adjacent parcel and stood to make a lot of money if the city approved Kabacoff’s proposal. Major sought out Canizaro after growing fed up with Kabacoff, the son of a local liberal champion, who kept talking about all the benefits to the community of a plan that would see a large portion of the project’s residents lose their homes. “Pres Kabacoff wanted to come and save the black folk,” Major said. “And Joe Canizaro came and said I want to make money. So we said, ‘That’s the one we want to talk to.’ ”

  Canizaro was blunt at their first meeting. “People tell me you’re difficult to work with,” Canizaro said to Major.

  “I can be.”

  “You might hear things about me.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “Well, because my last name is Canizaro, you might hear I have some affiliation with organized crime.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’d love some organized crime because this disorganized shit is driving me crazy.”

  Through contacts in the social service world, Major learned about Canizaro’s generosity—the bikes he bought for underprivileged kids for Christmas, the help he gave families in need. “Stuff he never talked about but stuff I knew he had done. Christian things,” she said. Major, who was raised in the Ninth Ward by a great-aunt who stopped going to school after the fourth grade, saw a little of herself in this local mogul. He would become her champion.

  The Bring New Orleans Back Commission included an archbishop, the City Council president, and the president of Tulane University. Yet because of Canizaro, it was co-led by this woman who had spent part of her youth in a housing project and seemed to accept lip from no one. “People tell me, ‘You have a New York attitude,’ ” Major said. “I tell them, ‘No, I have a Ninth Ward attitude.’ ”

  Alden McDonald was an obvious choice for the commission. McDonald didn’t have time to sit around talking in New Orleans for several hours every week, but he also couldn’t afford to pass up a seat. “I always tell young people, ‘You want to be on the design side, not the behind side. Because when you’re on the behind side, you get shit on,’ ” McDonald said. The mayor asked him to serve and he agreed.

  The mayor unveiled the Bring New Orleans Back Commission at a press conference held at the Sheraton Hotel on September 30—one month and a day after the flooding. The seventeen-person panel included two women: Major and a corporate attorney with a big downtown firm. Of the fifteen men, no fewer than seven were CEOs, and three were bank presidents, including McDonald. From the start, Nagin reflected the comfort level of a mayor who had spent his career inside corporate America. “The importance of this group,” said J. Stephen Perry, the head of the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau, “is that it will give the federal government the confidence that the city is harnessing the private sector to do a lot of its work.” Barbara Major wasn’t nearly as impressed. Blacks represented two-thirds of the city’s population, not half. “I think some people don’t understand that an equal number of black and white isn’t the same as equity,” Barbara Major said on the day the commission was announced. “But I tell you what, I give them credit, at least it’s fifty-fifty.”

  * * *

  I. Katrina caused an estimated $135 billion in damages.

  II. Or selectively enforced the curfew laws. Five weeks after Katrina, Robert Davis, a sixty-six-year-old former teacher, black, was walking on Bourbon Street at around 8:00 p.m. He approached a small clot of police officers to ask about the curfew, and when he received no response to his question, he called them “unprofessional and rude.” A cameraman working for the Associated Press captured on video a trio of policemen, all of them white, punching and kicking Davis until they had him on the ground and in handcuffs—and still one officer delivered two more blows to his face. The police said they were detaining Davis on suspicion of public drunkenness (Davis claimed he hadn’t had a drink in twenty-five years) and for violating the city curfew. Two of the officers were fired and a third received a four-month suspension. The city would settle with Davis for an undisclosed amount.

  III. Several days after the flooding, the National Guard forced an exhausted pump operator named Ricky Ray to leave his post running a pumping station that sat astride the Orleans Avenue Canal, near Lakeview. He returned a few days later. The city’s pumps were so old and idiosyncratic that some still operated on Edison’s direct-current electrical system and were therefore incompatible with the alternating-current electrical system that the rest of the city used. Ray, who told his story to the New York Times’ John Schwartz, knew the sound and the feel of these ancient warhorses. He stayed until the city was dry.

  IV. The number inside the top of the X told a passerby the date that a home had been searched. A unit identified itself on the left (TXO, say, for the Texas National Guard), and the right was reserved for identifying any hazards the soldiers had encountered. On the bottom a soldier would identify the number of bodies found inside.

  V. And it wasn’t just television. “Rumors of gang rapes and wanton murder needed to be repeated only two or three times before reporters decided the rumors had been corroborated and repeated them in print,” according to the Times-Picayune’s Jed Horne.

  VI. The police showed up in force at least one time that week. A Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff, after learning that his wife and a female cousin had ended up in the Convention Center, reached out to a friend inside NOPD. A SWAT team of thirteen, Wil Haygood and Ann Scott Tyson reported in the Washington Post, burst into the facility on Thursday morning, along with the deputy sheriff. They found his wife and relative, both of whom were white, and then backed out the way they came in.

  VII. The group bought a minor league franchise that they renamed the Brass. Despite a few successful years, the team folded after five seasons.

  10

  BRICK BY BRICK

  Alden McDonald was alone the first time he saw his house after Katrina. Rhesa was still in Atlanta. She didn’t want to fly to Baton Rouge to join him for a drive into New Orleans just to have her heart broken. “I knew I’d be a wreck,” she said. That was one task she happily delegated to her husband.

  McDonald was on edge by the time he reached his exit on the I-10. He saw destruction everywhere once he passed over the High Rise Bridge and crossed the Industrial Canal into New Orleans East. For years all people saw of the East while whizzing by at sixty or seventy miles an hour were rickety two- and three-story wooden apartment complexes built on the cheap and housing a disproportionate share of the city’s working poor. Post-Katrina, they’d see these same buildings except with corners caved in and rooftops exposed. McDonald had to remind himself of the names of the inexpensive motels along the highway. The signage atop the Motel 6 a half dozen blocks from his home had blown out, just as it had at the nearby Days Inn, Clarion Inn, and the Shell station at the bottom of the ramp. He made a right and took in the strip malls that lined either side of the street. The plate-glass windows fronting nearly every store had been destroyed. The innards of each lay scattered across the asphalt.

  There were no traffic lights. Not that any cars were on the road. More than once McDonald needed to reverse down the street because of a fallen tree. Once even a boat blocked his way. He flinched when passing a car crushed by a falling tree, but then remembered that practically every car he saw had been ruined by floodwaters. His car, the BMW two-seater that he had parked in the garage, was ruined, but so, too, was the gold Lexus—Rhesa’s favorite—that McDonald had parked on the second floor of his bank’s parking lot. It had been smashed by falling debris.
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  McDonald’s house was a solid, two-story, brick split-level with a two-car garage. The grass was the color of dried dung as were the shrubs, but at least some green was in the trees. The roof would need patching and the gutters were at crazy angles, but the house didn’t look too bad from the outside. It was probably a good sign that he still needed a house key to get inside. Maybe the idea of rebuilding wasn’t so far-fetched.

  McDonald opened the front door. The odor knocked him back. The pungent, swampy stench was of a home soaking in dirty salt water for weeks of scorching, subtropical heat. The sodden furniture and carpeting in the living room gave off its own fusty perfume, but nothing compared to the kitchen. By that time, McDonald knew better than to open the refrigerator door. He had heard the stories from friends and friends of friends of odors so overpowering they couldn’t dislodge them from their sense memories. One had made the mistake of opening a freezer full of rancid meat, fish, and fowl and was haunted by the maggots that had spilled out onto the floor.

  McDonald needed to step carefully on floors slick with a thin film of left-behind muck. It was daylight, but without lights it was hard to see in places. He felt disoriented. He looked to where the big couch and chairs should be but instead saw random items on the floor. The furniture sat scattered and overturned around the room, wherever the water had left it. Swirls of mud were everywhere.

  Some greeted their drowned-out homes with tears. They’d see a favorite chair or an heirloom handed down from a grandparent and sob. That wasn’t McDonald, who fell into that category of New Orleanian who was numb rather than overwrought as he took in the destruction. His mouth agape, his chin thrust forward, his eyes bulging, McDonald stared. The emotion, it seemed, had been shocked out of him.

  The McDonalds had become empty nesters shortly before Katrina. Heidi, their oldest, had studied at Spelman College and then gone to Harvard to work on her master’s. Chip, their second-born, attended Harvard undergrad and then graduated from Harvard Medical School. He was doing a surgery residency in Dallas in 2005. Todd, the baby of the family, had recently graduated from Morehouse and was living on his own.

  The McDonalds had thought about downsizing but they loved the old place, rich with good memories. Another advantage in staying put in this house that had been their home for nearly twenty-five years was a master bedroom on the ground floor. That meant never having to worry about getting up and down the stairs once they were older. Instead of selling, they decided to give the home an upgrade. Now the hardwood floors that had a year earlier cost a fortune were warped and ruined. The light-colored silk couch they’d spent more on than either would care to admit was a muddy, waterlogged, smelly mess. Rhesa had always thought the dining-room set that they had moved from their prior home was wrong for the new place. A year before Katrina, she had finally replaced it with a handsome wood table large enough to accommodate fourteen, along with matching chairs. McDonald found the table sitting outside in the street.

  Once McDonald’s eyes adjusted to the poor light, he noticed the mold crawling up the walls, great blooms of green and red and black, nasty and evil looking. The wooden furniture looked swollen, the finishes blistering and cracking. A bottle of Chivas sat on a counter, as did jugs of Cheer and Woolite in the laundry room. That was part of the strangeness of Katrina, which left a dirty bathtub ring in houses around the city (for McDonald it hit at around the five-foot mark). Anything below that line was ruined. Anything above probably escaped the water.

  McDonald was thankful for some small miracles. Two decades earlier, in 1987, McDonald had served on the executive committee that had welcomed Pope John Paul II to New Orleans. He and Rhesa had met the pope, who gave them a rosary as a gift. The McDonalds displayed the rosary, along with a communion bowl and plate the pope had eaten from, in a china cabinet they had assumed had been destroyed in the flood. But apparently the water hit the cabinet in such a way that it sealed its doors and pinned it to the wall, protecting the contents. The miracle McDonald found in the backyard was even more incredible. A huge oak tree had fallen across the lawn. Yet somehow the statue of the Blessed Mother the couple had put at the base of the oak had gone untouched. McDonald found it where it was supposed to be, except now it was standing between the cleaved halves of the tree, as if this stone rendering of the Virgin Mary had been protected.

  The final miracle was their bed. Rhesa McDonald always made the bed first thing every morning, arranging the pillows just so. The rushing waters had settled the bed in the middle of the room, but it otherwise looked untouched. McDonald, always the jokester, told his wife, “You’ll be happy. The bed is still made.”

  Others in a subdivision like his—places where most people had a second floor—invariably ended their visit by stuffing the backseat and trunk with belongings retrieved from the upstairs bedrooms. Owning a home with a first-floor master bedroom was a disadvantage: closets and dressers had for weeks been soaking in the oily, dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Only the few items the McDonalds had brought with them to Atlanta would survive Katrina.

  Back at his car, McDonald scanned the block. He thought about the doctor next door and the pediatrician who had recently bought a home around the corner. Nearly a month after Katrina, each was no doubt already associated with a hospital if not a practice wherever they had ended up. McDonald had just driven past Methodist Hospital, one of two hospitals in the East. It looked so battered that he couldn’t imagine its opening for at least one or two years. He thought about the doctors in his social circle. Their offices were in flooded professional buildings around the East. They had privileges at shuttered hospitals; their patients lived in a hundred different zip codes. New Orleans seemed destined to lose a large portion of its black physicians to cities such as Atlanta, Houston, and Memphis. The neighbor who ran his own plumbing company would have plenty of business to keep him busy, as would the contractor who lived a few houses away. But what about the guy down the block who ran his own insurance office? Was he doomed given the catastrophic losses? Or the funeral director? Would it be worth it for him to rebuild or would he just need to start over somewhere else?

  “I don’t know if this place is ever coming back,” McDonald told more than one friend.

  THE THIRD TUESDAY NIGHT of every month, the Liberty board of directors would convene to talk bank business. It had been that way since the earliest days of the bank, when they were still in a trailer, and the tradition had continued in the new headquarters. It had been an extraordinary moment the first time they gathered on the bank’s top floor, sitting around a polished dark-wood conference table in a spacious conference room that offered soaring views of the East. Liberty’s executive offices were modest compared to the hushed palaces some bankers build for themselves. The furniture was high-end Home Depot, the chairs comfortable but not leather. The splurge was in the art that covered the cream-colored walls. McDonald was in his early forties when he bought his first piece, a Jacob Lawrence limited print for $1,000 that sold for closer to $20,000 when Katrina hit. By 2005, McDonald and the bank owned a trove of artwork by Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, and other renowned African-American artists. They lined the hallways and conference room on the building’s sixth floor.

  Twice the board of directors had the pleasure of gathering in Liberty’s new boardroom before Katrina. Their next meeting was held around several mismatched tables pushed together in the back room of a bank branch on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, one month after Katrina.

  McDonald couldn’t sugarcoat his presentation to the board. To raise cash, McDonald had started selling some of the $40 million in fixed securities Liberty held on to for emergencies. Already the bank had taken a $1 million loss on the first batch of bonds it had sold. Liberty was looking at severance for maybe a hundred employees and no telling yet how many tens of millions of dollars in real estate losses. Ronnie Burns, who had been with the bank since the beginning, had been visiting the Southern branch when a set of regulators came around to poke into some of Liberty�
��s records. “They were as kind as they could be,” he told his fellow board members, “but they had this tone, ‘I don’t know how this is going to work out.’ ”

  Liberty carried insurance, including flood insurance, on its headquarters and branches, McDonald reassured them. The bank also had business-interruption insurance. But that only meant they were in a position to negotiate a settlement that would come nowhere near their true losses. The more critical question was what portion of the bank’s loan portfolio was backed by flood insurance. From the insurance industry’s perspective, Katrina was less a hurricane and more a flood, and while a homeowner policy would theoretically cover damage caused by the winds, it wouldn’t cover anything destroyed by flooding. That’s why any borrower living in a flood zone was required to buy flood insurance, yet who knew how many people had allowed their coverage to lapse after they had closed on their loan. Without flood insurance, the remaining balance on any residential or commercial loan was a write-off. The magic number, McDonald told the board, seemed to be around 90 percent: unless 90 percent of their borrowers carried flood insurance, the bank might not survive without a government bailout.

  More pressing was the question of whether there would be a New Orleans East or a Gentilly or a Lower Ninth Ward moving forward. Kathleen Blanco had asked Norman Francis, Liberty’s founding chairman, to chair the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state equivalent of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. Both Francis and McDonald were hearing from influential voices inside the business community about the need to “shrink the footprint”—to right-size a city once home to more than 600,000 that had lost one-quarter of its population even before the city flooded. “Three of our branches I don’t see coming back for a long, long time,” McDonald warned the board. As for the rest of the bank? That was anyone’s best guess.