Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Petie had what she called her “pantry”: the dresser drawers of spices, red beans, and other dry goods. Cassandra’s mother had a small refrigerator in her room and a hot plate. Between them they were good for at least a few home-cooked meals a week. A local church was still bringing food each evening to evacuees stuck at the Microtel, and Monday nights after their weekly meeting the family would treat themselves to a meal at the Applebee’s down the street.

  Cassandra was starting to like Baton Rouge. Or at least she wasn’t disliking it as much as her sisters. You’d only have to mention their adopted town to Petie to get a lecture on proper hospitality. “They have a real attitude toward us,” she would say. “We’re these bad people who are going to destroy their community. We keep these crazy hours. No one sleeps.” Over a Big Mac one night, Petie caught an unvarnished glimpse of the hostility when she overheard the workers complaining about the people from New Orleans. The McDonald’s workers were even blaming the evacuees for the longer hours they were asked to work. “I’m sorry if our flood inconvenienced you,” she told them. It didn’t help her view of Baton Rouge that it had taken so long to find a place where her son Garrett could attend school. “They’re telling me, ‘Wait till you’re called,’ but I’ve got my kid running around at the Microtel,” Petie said. “Of course I’m calling them.” Not until the second half of October did they find a spot for him.

  Cassandra defended Baton Rouge when she was with her sisters. Think of the church ladies still bringing food to the Microtel months after Katrina, she said. Think about the stresses the flooding was causing in their adopted city. Baton Rouge’s population didn’t quite double post-Katrina, as the locals thought, but there were an extra 100,000 people living in a city home to 228,000 prior to the storm. The traffic was horrendous and the wait for everything longer—in the grocery-store checkout line, at a favorite restaurant. The schools might have moved slower than Petie would have liked, but the academic year had already started when thousands of students arrived in need of a spot.

  Yet a feeling of unwelcome wasn’t just in the heads of Cassandra’s sisters. A contingent of fifty-five Michigan state troopers had volunteered to help in the Gulf Coast after Katrina. They were asked to assist the police in Baton Rouge, where multiple officers said they were under orders: make life unpleasant for New Orleans evacuees so that they will relocate elsewhere. One trooper quoted a local cop’s reference to blacks as “animals” who needed to be “beaten down.” As a thank-you gift, another trooper said, he was invited to “beat down” a man in custody. A small squadron of state troopers from New Mexico also assigned to Baton Rouge told a similar story. A complaint the New Mexico commander filed with the city stated that his people had witnessed illegal searches, physical abuse, and other behavior that a top officer summed up as “racially motivated.”

  Petie was also hearing it from Garrett, her youngest, for whom the storm’s timing had seemed especially cruel. When Katrina hit, he had just completed his first week as an upperclassman at St. Augustine, a storied all-boys Catholic school in town that counted the city’s second African-American mayor and other local African-American luminaries as graduates. Now he was attending some anonymous school in Baton Rouge, where his grades started to slip. That November, officials from St. Aug, which had taken on five feet of water, teamed up with St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic school that had also flooded. Both schools were partnering with Xavier Prep, the all-girls school that Garrett’s mother and his aunts had attended, to open a school on Xavier Prep’s campus Uptown, which had not flooded. The combined school would include faculty and students from St. Mary, St. Aug, and Xavier Prep and be called the MAX. “After that it was ‘the MAX, the MAX, the MAX,’ ” Petie said.

  Their mother, Daisy Wall, was also adamant about getting home to New Orleans. Pushing seventy-five, she had been diagnosed with cancer before the storm. The family home in Central City, on the edge of Uptown, had suffered modest roof damage but no flooding. She wanted to sleep in her own bed.

  “My mom wanted to come back,” Petie said. “My son wanted to come back. I was coming back.”

  It was too soon to think about moving back to New Orleans East. Entergy wasn’t even giving a date for when it might restore power to the neighborhood. But they had the family home and also a small Uptown rental property her mother owned. Thanksgiving at a Baton Rouge restaurant had been “cheesy,” Petie declared, and told her sisters, “I promise you a better Christmas.” The next day, Petie began making daily trips to New Orleans to work on her mother’s house and eventually the rental. By January 1, she had given up their room at the Microtel.

  The pressure on Cassandra to move back to New Orleans was growing. The Friday after Thanksgiving was also the day that cousin Robyn moved back into the city. She earned a good living working as a paralegal for a local litigator, who put her back to work four weeks after Katrina. The room at the Microtel was free, courtesy of FEMA, but the commute to and from New Orleans was brutal. She found a condo for rent in the Warehouse District near work. The price was exorbitant for New Orleans—$1,250 a month for a small one-bedroom—but it was a nice place conveniently located and the best she could find in a city with an acute housing shortage. A week later, Tangee, who worked as an administrator at the University of New Orleans, rented a unit just down the hall. The university had lost use of its engineering building and also a dorm, but its administrative offices were reopening as of December 1.

  In retrospect, the sisters and their cousin admit that they may have ganged up on Cassandra. But with three-fifths of them back in New Orleans, the center of gravity was shifting back home. They wanted their sister back with them in New Orleans. Cassandra spoke on behalf of herself and her husband, who worked as a medical technician. “We can’t go back,” Cassandra told them. “There’s no hospitals. There aren’t the schools. There’s no shopping.” They responded by throwing back at her the words she had said from the podium at their Monday night meetings, which they discontinued now that several of them were back in the city.

  Cassandra reminded them that while at least a couple of them had jobs bringing them back to New Orleans, she was a tutor without clients in a city devoid of school-aged children. Her husband had secured work at a Baton Rouge hospital. It was a step down after heading the cardiovascular testing unit at a New Orleans hospital, but Cassandra was relieved he had found any job.

  There was also their son Brandon to consider. He had started the seventh grade in New Orleans, and he was adjusting to the middle school they had found for him in Baton Rouge. What sense would it make to move him into a third school midway through the academic year? She thought about all the unknowns of life back in New Orleans. Would they have adequate flood protection? What kind of insurance settlement might they receive? Moving forward, would insurance companies even write policies in parts of New Orleans? “They moved back and said they’d figure it out,” she said of her sisters. “That’s the way they are. I need to see the big picture before I leap.”

  PEOPLE CALLED THAT PART of New Orleans built along the high ground that had remained mostly dry when the rest of the city flooded the “sliver by the river”: Uptown, the French Quarter, the Marigny, and Algiers on the West Bank. By the time Petie, Robyn, and Tangee moved back to the city, an estimated seventy-five thousand people were living in this area, which others called the “isle of denial.” It was anyone’s guess what portion of the sliver’s residents had lived in New Orleans prior to Katrina and were not newcomers there to help with the recovery.

  A degree of normalcy was returning to this part of the city. Every day seemed to bring another mini-miracle. Mail service resumed in early October, and UPS trucks started delivering packages around that same time. The City Council was again meeting in its regular chambers. (It had held its first two meetings after Katrina at the airport.) A movie theater reopened, a grocery store carried fresh produce, the city’s once-robust restaurant scene was springing back to life, one establishment at
a time. Bill Hines baffled his law partners in Baton Rouge when in October he announced that he was giving up his borrowed room in a colleague’s air-conditioned home to move back to a flood-damaged home still under repair in a town with few amenities. Yet that also meant he was back in New Orleans the day Red Fish, one of the city’s more popular seafood restaurants, reopened. Red Fish offered a one-item menu that night, cheeseburgers and fries served on styrofoam plates. The drink choice was beer or bottled water. Yet this small taste of the familiar, Hines said, left him crying with joy.

  Yet more common were the moments that left people in tears of frustration. Dry parts of town experienced frequent power outages in an overstressed system. Garbage pickup had resumed, but New Orleans often looked as if the city were in the third week of a sanitation workers’ strike. Sure, UPS’s familiar brown trucks were back, but the delivery company’s main facility in the area had flooded, and now its entire New Orleans operation was being run out of a trailer in the western suburbs. And UPS driver James Conerly, who worked a small section of the central business district before the flood, was now covering almost the entire area by himself. Two months after Katrina, one-third of the city’s office high-rises were still shuttered, Conerly estimated, “and I’d say there’s only two or three buildings at least fifty percent occupied.” The US Postal Service may have resumed deliveries, but the mail would show up for three days running and then there’d be nothing for a week.

  The reminders that New Orleans was still broken were constant. In normal times, the Port of New Orleans ranked as the fifth busiest in the United States, yet more than two months after Katrina, it was still at only 30 percent of its normal capacity. The Saints were playing in another city, as were the Hornets, the city’s NBA team. The Sugar Bowl would be played outside New Orleans for the first time in seventy years. The city got a boost at the end of October when the American Library Association announced its next annual convention would be in New Orleans—in June. The district attorney and his staff took over an old nightclub, the PBS NewsHour correspondent Betty Ann Bowser reported, conducting business “beneath the glare of a disco ball.” The public defender was forced to lay off more than thirty of its lawyers, leaving only nine attorneys to handle thousands of cases.

  “Life in Refrigerator City,” the Times-Picayune’s Chris Rose labeled those first post-storm months in his book 1 Dead in Attic, a collection of columns he wrote in the first eighteen months after Katrina. People thought they were leaving for a few days and returned weeks later to freezers full of putrefying meat. So even the dry parts of New Orleans were lined with ruined refrigerators that stood as a small, semipermanent billboard for voicing displeasure in frustrating times. When it seemed that Tom Benson, the owner of the Saints, might move the city’s football team to San Antonio, Texas, discarded, duct-taped refrigerators around town announced TOM BENSON INSIDE.

  Life along the river felt congested even in a city still missing most of its people. Traffic lights were out everywhere, turning busy intersections into a four-way stop. Rubble from the storm still blocked main thoroughfares. The St. Charles streetcar line remained shut down for more than a year. A refrigerator could sit curbside for months even in parts of town that had remained dry—and an estimated one hundred thousand wrecked cars littered the streets all over town.

  People had small complaints about finding a doctor or a dry cleaner and larger-scale laments about a mayor many feared would not be up to the task of rebuilding the city. The consensus among those residing in this isle of denial was that the answer to the city’s woes was simple: offer people buyouts in low-lying communities, starting with residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, and focus on fixing up dilapidated homes in parts of the city that had been blighted before Katrina. Anyone doubting the wisdom of that solution needed to look no further than the side-by-side maps the Times-Picayune had published on its front page that fall. One map showed the city as it existed in 1870. The other showed the areas that had flooded after Katrina hit. The area that remained dry and the city boundaries as they existed in 1870 were nearly identical. The city’s Greg Meffert seemed to get it when he told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien in early November, “The answers to our present are really in our past. All we’ve got to do is do what people were doing in the late 1800s.” But then the mayor would speak as if he hadn’t seen the front-page maps. “If the president follows through with his pledge to provide us with enough resources,” the mayor said that same week, “we can rebuild New Orleans totally.”

  The graffiti on the refrigerators around town asked the question: WHERE’S NAGIN? “Each time Ray and I would talk, I would walk away more angry,” Ron Forman said. Much of the city was still without electricity or drinkable water. Most of its residents were living scattered across the country. People were making do on couches and doubling up with relatives. Yet Nagin didn’t seem to be working half as hard as Forman or any other chief executive he knew.

  “There was this lack of engagement, this lack of urgency,” Forman said. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. “I told him, ‘This is getting personal with me. We gave up everything to be behind you and you’re not doing your job.’ I was fed up.”

  RAY NAGIN HEARD IT all the time: Why couldn’t he be more like Rudy Giuliani, the New York mayor who had acted so decisively in the days after September 11? Giuliani’s star turn had produced a bestseller, followed by a lucrative speaking career, and even a short-lived run at the presidency. Nagin had a copy of Giuliani’s Leadership on a bookshelf in his office, a freebie he had picked up at a charity golf tournament a year or two earlier. People around Nagin doubted he had even looked at it given the mayor’s irritation when Giuliani’s name came up. Nagin would offer the same response each time. He had been marooned on a small island of high ground and slept in a blasted-out hotel that had lost its power and had no working toilets. The death total was greater inside the World Trade Center than on the streets of New Orleans. But Giuliani slept in his own bed the week of September 11, left to worry about the significant but small corner of his city that had been destroyed.

  “You’ve never had a city devastated like this,” Nagin said repeatedly—to friends, to reporters, to anyone pressing him about the city’s rebuilding efforts. Insurance companies were already declaring Katrina the most expensive disaster in history. Historians were labeling the dispersal of the city’s residents the largest American diaspora in history, bigger even than the displacement caused by the winds and drought of the Dust Bowl. The American Water Works Association declared that New Orleans had experienced the most catastrophic multisystem failure by a US city in modern history. The destruction of the city’s power grid and also its gas system were unprecedented, as was the blow to the New Orleans economy. “It’s not going to be a pretty process,” Nagin said two months after Katrina, “but I’m sure the Harvard Business Review will be doing case studies on this for years.”

  By early November, a team of fifty-plus city inspectors had graded 60,000 of the 110,000 homes in the flooded parts of the city. Two in every three they tagged with either a yellow sticker, meaning it was more than 50 percent destroyed, or red, indicating that the city thought it needed to be bulldozed. Contractors working for FEMA had removed an astonishing 1.3 million cubic yards of debris (fallen trees, wrecked cars, pieces of broken homes blocking a street, discarded furniture), yet that represented only a tiny fraction of the garbage that the authorities predicted they would need to clear. “Housing is probably our most pressing issue right now,” the mayor declared—and yet every time he or one of his people approached FEMA about trailers, they were met with excuses. The same federal government that had moved too slowly right after Katrina, Nagin said, was now dragging its feet on the recovery.

  Nagin phoned his new friends inside the White House. “I told them, ‘I really can’t wait until you figure out what the final deal number is,’ ” Nagin said. Let them work out inside the Beltway whether the region would receive $100 billion or $200 billion or $250 billion
. He asked the White House to free up $100 million as a down payment on money that would eventually flow to the city, “to help us cover the cost of operations for the next three to six months.” Officials promised to see what they could do, but nothing happened. While on the phone with someone from the White House, Nagin repitched a more modest version of the tax plan that David White had devised right after the storm. What if any business or individual agreeing to move back to New Orleans got a 50 percent reduction (rather than the 100 percent they had originally asked) in taxes for seven years (instead of ten) as a way of inducing people to rebuild? Nagin was turned down.

  “I’ve thrown out some pretty creative ideas,” Nagin told a pair of Times reporters he had invited into his office two months after the storm. The problem was that the bureaucracy couldn’t see beyond its byzantine rules. Even the city’s business community hadn’t caught up to the reality of post-Katrina New Orleans, he said. He mentioned the casino idea he had floated and their reaction to it as if he had suggested carving out an Amsterdam-like red-light district in the center of town. “I have a tendency—and I’m not being bravado about this—but I have a tendency to see things probably a little quicker than others,” Nagin said.

  NAGIN WAS CAPABLE OF acting boldly. When, later that fall, FEMA announced it had thirty-one thousand trailers available to any Gulf Coast community needing them, Nagin invoked the emergency powers the City Council had granted him after the storm. He would have trailers delivered to parks and playgrounds around the city. He would set them up on the neutral ground in any community with the necessary utilities. Nagin also endorsed the idea of temporary tent cities in the city’s parks. “We need to let people come back home,” the mayor proclaimed.