Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

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  I. Bellevue Hospital in New York was founded that same year.

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  LOOK AND LEAVE

  Nearly two months after Katrina, forty thousand people were still sleeping shoulder to shoulder in emergency shelters around Louisiana. Kathleen Blanco’s solution was an emergency order granting her the right to use state-owned lands to house evacuees, even if prohibited by local ordinance. Six hundred trailers were trucked to a small town on the edge of the Baton Rouge metro area. There, next to a juvenile prison, FEMA opened the first of a dozen-plus trailer parks around the state. FEMA opened similar camps in another sixteen states to shelter another thirty thousand evacuees, the majority of whom had been saved from New Orleans once the buses started rolling up to the Superdome or the Convention Center.

  The largest number of evacuees went to Houston. Most of those ended up in either the Astrodome or the Reliant Center, where a professor named Caroline Heldman was horrified by what she found. Heldman, who taught political science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, had been so angered by images out of New Orleans in those first days after the flooding that she convinced the Pacifica radio station in Southern California to give her the press credentials she would need to get into New Orleans. En route, she stopped at the two indoor stadiums. There she found “fluorescent lights and loudspeaker announcements twenty-four hours a day, smells emanating from the bathroom, and guards walking patrols with M16s.” That was in “stark contrast,” Heldman said, to what she observed at the Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego (counselors, back massages, a bounty of fresh food) after a wildfire had made hundreds of people homeless several years earlier. Heldman, who is white, could walk freely through the two shelters, while a black colleague was “harassed” by soldiers, she said, though both wore the same press badge. People were free to hop a cab to the airport and fly anywhere they wanted if they had the money. But most of those who ended up in Houston were stuck wherever they had landed. Ninety-three percent of those in a Houston-area shelter, one poll found, were black. Three-quarters had kids with them.

  Communities around the country showed great generosity toward the New Orleans diaspora, starting with the invitation to welcome people into their towns. Church groups organized clothing and coat drives, local businesses donated Pampers and toiletries and book bags for school-aged kids. One Houston school was so serious about its promise to teach the New Orleans evacuees that officials there checked in every day with the local shelters to make sure children were attending classes. Parents arrived without birth certificates and immunization records, but school officials told them to worry about that later. Churches held potlucks and campaigns to find spare rooms for those in need.

  Yet the same television images that stirred up fears among officials in Gretna and Baton Rouge also impacted officials wherever New Orleans evacuees showed up. At a high school in the Kansas City metro area, Dominique Townsend, a sweet-faced sixteen-year-old, black, was brought to the auditorium with all the other kids from New Orleans. There the authorities laid out a strict set of rules that had evacuee kids staying after school for infractions that didn’t earn local kids the same punishment. “We were seen as the trouble children,” Townsend said. They were even forbidden from sitting together in the cafeteria because, Townsend said, “we were known as the NOLA gang—whatever that meant.” (NOLA—short for New Orleans, Louisiana—is a common way people refer to New Orleans.)

  In time, the New Orleanians were the houseguests who overstayed their welcome. Just before Thanksgiving, a brawl between the locals and Katrina kids at one Houston high school was so big it made the newspaper. Similar melees broke out at high schools in Dallas and San Antonio. A white political science professor at Rice University in Houston overheard the black woman working the register at his local grocery store talk about “those people.” He was baffled—until he realized she was referring to a group of evacuees from New Orleans.

  Officials in Washington were also looking at the calendar. Three months into the disaster, the government was picking up the tab for the 150,000 or so storm victims still living in hotels around the country. The Bush administration decided that it had had enough in mid-November. That’s when FEMA announced that people would be responsible for their own hotel bills on December 1. The agency paid contractors to slip warnings under the doors of evacuees and hired caseworkers for anyone needing help finding an apartment or other temporary housing. People would still be eligible for as much as $800 a month in rental assistance, a FEMA official announced, through the end of February. They just needed to be someplace other than a hotel.

  A federal judge, a New Orleans native appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton, ruled that two weeks’ notice wasn’t enough warning. FEMA would announce several more final dates—December 15, January 7—but that only led to more legal wrangling. How could FEMA expect people to make long-term housing decisions, lawyers for the evacuees asked, when the city itself was still making up its mind about the future of their neighborhoods? Many clients wanted to move into a FEMA trailer on their property—except they still didn’t have electricity or gas in their part of the city, and the long waiting lists suggested the agency wouldn’t have a trailer if they did. The government managed to get almost everyone out of the hotels by the end of February, but that led to a new crisis as emergency shelters faced an influx of Katrina castoffs. They would need to be housed somewhere—a hotel, perhaps—until space could be found in a FEMA trailer park.

  “I don’t know if you understand the magnitude of this disaster,” a FEMA spokesman told the New York Times. Nearly 1.5 million people registered for assistance in a disaster zone the White House was describing (somewhat hyperbolically) as roughly the size of Great Britain. Hundreds of thousands of people were also affected by Rita. Every household registering with FEMA for help received a minimum of $2,000, no questions asked. (Larger families could qualify for more.) FEMA picked up the tab for the buses and planes that shipped people around the country and spent another $3 billion on trailers. The government provided rental assistance to more than seven hundred thousand families after Katrina and Rita, at a cost of more than $4 billion. One item FEMA doesn’t cover, however, is a return ticket home.

  “As a practical matter, poor folks don’t have the resources to go back to our city, just like they didn’t have the resources to get out of our city,” Joe Canizaro told the Associated Press. “So we won’t get all those folks back. That’s just a fact. It’s not what I want, it’s just a fact.”

  A MASTER PLAN BY the end of 2005 had been the mayor’s mandate to his Bring New Orleans Back Commission in September. A plan in hand by the start of the new year was “a personal commitment we made to the president,” Boysie Bollinger said in October. Yet by Thanksgiving even commissioners were admitting that they would miss their deadline. “Five weeks to get even a draft done? That’s unrealistic,” declared Tulane president Scott Cowen. The new deadline would be the president’s State of the Union at the end of January.

  The mealtime options were slim in small-town New Orleans. So when a subset of the commission—Canizaro, cochair Mel Lagarde, and a few others—would join Nagin at the Sheraton in a private room, they were doing so in plain view of the other commissioners, who tended to eat at the same second-floor restaurant before meetings. Alden McDonald never cared that he wasn’t part of the in-crowd—“I have plenty to keep me busy,” he said—but others did. “Just a few friends getting together with the mayor to talk,” Joe Canizaro said. Countered Oliver Thomas, “No one goes over with us what they discuss at these lunch meetings. It would be nice if they did.”

  Canizaro’s lament wasn’t divisions within the commission but the lack of meaningful dialogue among its members. “I think we’re at the point,” he said in the second half of November, “where the commission has to ask whether or not it’s going to be able to make the tough decisions we need to make.” A case in point was the first meeting held after the Urban Land Institute presented the cit
y with its recommendations. The commissioners spent more of their time excoriating 60 Minutes for its piece the night before called “New Orleans Is Sinking” (“Can we or should we put New Orleans back together again?” correspondent Scott Pelley had asked at the top of the show) than talking about any of the ULI’s recommendations.

  Canizaro took a final shot at sparking a debate in mid-December. He reiterated his contention that he didn’t think they could afford to rebuild all of New Orleans, but this time he cited findings of the ULI and also a Rand study that predicted that even three years after Katrina, nearly half the city’s population would still be living outside the city. He offered a compromise: What if we let people rebuild anywhere they want and then reevaluate?

  Alden McDonald spoke right after Canizaro. McDonald had remained relatively quiet whenever the commissioners met in public. “He’s never a guy who says much in group settings,” said Sally Forman, “but that only means people really listen when he does.” McDonald began by giving his bona fides. He lived in a neighborhood that the experts were suggesting should be converted back to marshland. Most of his customers, too, lived in affected communities. Yet it would be cruel to encourage people to move back home “without first giving them all the facts,” he said. The ULI had given a name to one fear—the jack-o’-lantern effect—but he had others. “We really need to ask what kind of community it will be if there aren’t adequate services, if there aren’t grocery stores and other things that people need to make a community worth living in,” McDonald said.

  Yet there the discussion ended. No one seconded Canizaro’s motion, no one took up where McDonald had left off. Instead the commissioners declared this public meeting their last, then wished one another a good holiday season. It would fall on the committee chairs to work out the details of the plan, which is how a wealthy white Republican from the suburbs came to decide the future of New Orleans’s low-lying neighborhoods.

  FINDING WORKERS WAS DIFFICULT in a city still without most of its residents. The big debris-removal companies passed out flyers in central New Orleans promising $17 to $20 an hour plus benefits. Those willing to swing a sledgehammer gutting a home or business could earn nearly that much. Burger King was offering a $6,000 signing bonus at its New Orleans outlets, and Rally’s, a local restaurant chain, nearly doubled its pay to $10 an hour for new employees. The city’s hotels, claiming they were understaffed at a time virtually every room was booked for the foreseeable future, even won the right to import workers from overseas under a special government guest-worker program.

  Boysie Bollinger, who ran one of the country’s largest shipbuilders, was more aggressive than most in his search for workers. That September, Bollinger sent recruiters to FEMA camps across several states, yet still fell six hundred employees short of the number he needed to meet his orders. He blamed FEMA. What incentive did potential employees have, he wanted to know, when they were living on FEMA’s dime? Bollinger even argued the point with George Bush. “I told the president, ‘I think you’re empowering people to stay where they are,’ ” Bollinger said. “He said he wasn’t sure a two-thousand-dollar check meant someone was living it up.”

  Bollinger was a large man with a jowly face and gray hair he wore on the long side. He would dress up for commission meetings, sporting a blue blazer with an American flag pin, but invariably the bottom of his trousers would be up by his knees, showing off a pair of black alligator boots. “When I talk, people think I’m from New Jersey or Philadelphia,” Bollinger said, “but I’m from the swamp.” He was from Lafourche Parish, an hour south and west of New Orleans. Under Bollinger’s edict, an employee of Bollinger Shipyards returned to work immediately or was given two weeks’ severance and lost all health benefits at the end of the month. “We used termination as an incentive to get them back,” Bollinger said.

  But Bollinger seemed to be fighting a losing battle. The welder he paid $17 an hour could earn $25 an hour hanging Sheetrock. He needed to raise wages if he wanted to compete, but then there’d be no profit left, he claimed, in the deals he had already signed. Instead, Bollinger walked away from $700 million in contracts, though he had devoted part of the previous two years securing them. “I can make you a list three miles long of things the government is doing to hinder our attempts to get back and operating,” he groused three months after Katrina.

  LAKEVIEW GOT ITS POWER and other utilities before New Orleans East or most of the other low-lying neighborhoods. It was still October when Robert Lupo, who owned more commercial real estate in Lakeview than anyone else, hired a crew to clean out his properties along Harrison Avenue, the community’s main business strip. “They brought their own food, their own water, plus showering and cooking gear,” Lupo said.

  New Orleans East wasn’t completely dead that November, despite a lack of electricity. Sporadically a visitor would hear the beeping of a backhoe or see other pieces of heavy equipment at work. “Those are FEMA contractors,” Alden McDonald explained, clearing away rubble. Every half dozen or so blocks, a group of workers, invariably all of them Latino, would be gutting a home. McDonald didn’t know what he was going to do about his house. Neither did Cassandra Wall. But the longer a home sat untouched, the more it would deteriorate. Both were among those out in the East putting up the $10,000 or so it cost to clear out their ruined belongings and also the waterlogged Sheetrock that provided nourishment for the mold. “We wanted to keep our options open,” McDonald said.

  At least people out in the East and in Lakeview had options. Nagin’s “look and leave” edict—the mayor’s plan for staggering access to the city’s worst-hit neighborhoods and therefore not overwhelming a fragile city—was still in effect. Even two months after Katrina, armed soldiers were still posted at the bridges leading into the Lower Ninth Ward. Not even those who could prove they lived there prior to the storm would be allowed past a checkpoint. Not until December 1 did the city lift the lockdown and grant residents of the Lower Ninth access to their homes.

  A few residents managed to get past the barricades prior to the neighborhood’s official opening. Greta Gladney, who runs a nonprofit in the Lower Ninth, hitched a ride with a journalist whose press pass allowed them in. Two main arteries bisect the Lower Ninth: Claiborne and St. Claude Avenues. The homes north of Claiborne were closest to the levee breach. These homes had been decimated, but not her mother’s home, in the middle of the Lower Ninth, between Claiborne and St. Claude, nor most of the homes on the other side of St. Claude, closer to the river. Aside from that area north of Claiborne, the Lower Ninth looked like much of the rest of New Orleans. And also like St. Bernard Parish, whose predominantly white, working-class suburbs began just on the other side of Delery Street, less than ten blocks away from the home where Gladney grew up. There in St. Bernard, you could see the occasional house pushed off a foundation or a car leaning against a tree. Telephone poles and wires were dangling on either side of Delery. Yet its parish leader didn’t bar residents from access to their homes once the waters receded.

  “It was the people with means who got back to the city first, and they were the ones making the decisions,” Gladney said. Not until May was drinking water turned back on. The electricity wasn’t restored until June. “The Lower Ninth seemed last on everyone’s list for everything,” she said.

  Nearly two thousand people showed up on the December day the city reopened the neighborhood. Among them was Willie Calhoun Jr., a fifty-five-year-old airport inspector and part-time minister who had lived in the Lower Ninth his whole life. His journey that day began with an armed National Guardsman checking his ID. A city official warned a group of them about the “extremely dangerous conditions,” and the Red Cross passed out gloves, masks, water, and ice. Once on the other side of the bridge, Calhoun noticed that the FEMA contractors cleaning up other parts of New Orleans had spent almost no time on the Lower Ninth side of the Industrial Canal. “A wasted three months,” Calhoun told himself.

  For most, the visit confirmed the obvious:
in a neighborhood of one-story shotguns and cottages that had taken on as much as twenty feet of water, there was little to salvage. People would find a bowl or a favorite piece of jewelry and call out. One woman found a framed picture of a son who had died a decade earlier. Yet despite the loss, Calhoun proclaimed the day joyous. “You saw neighbors you hadn’t seen in the last three months,” he said. “You saw people you had heard had died.” He also saw, finally, progress. With the opening of the Lower Ninth, a Rubicon had been crossed. Insurance adjusters could now work up estimates. The FEMA crews could start clearing the streets. If nothing else, the authorities could at least remove the enormous steel barge that sat on top of a block of pulverized homes in the neighborhood. “I was still naive enough at that point to think the city really wanted to help us come back,” Calhoun said.

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER Katrina, Congress had approved a $62 billion emergency-relief package for the Gulf Coast. That would cover the cost of the early rescue efforts, including the deployment of thousands of troops to the area, and also the housing bills for all those hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by Katrina. In Mississippi, Governor Haley Barbour had declared forty-seven of the state’s eighty-two counties disaster areas. Some of that $62 billion would be used to reimburse each for overtime and other storm-related costs. The same would happen in a large part of Louisiana. The bulk of the money would be used to help rebuild the roads, public buildings, and other essential infrastructure covered under rules established long before Katrina.

  The question for Washington to answer was how much more money, if any, the region would receive to help with the rebuilding. Early on, Louisiana’s two senators had put together an aid package for the region—and were mocked inside the Beltway. The $35 million they earmarked for a seafood marketing campaign provided cocktail-party fodder, as did the $25 million for a sugarcane research laboratory and the $8 million for the state’s alligator farms. Their package included $40 billion for levee repairs and another $50 billion for unspecified projects the government would fund through a massive community-development grant. In all, the bill called on the government to commit to a combined $250 billion more in federal aid for the Gulf Coast recovery. “I think everybody realizes the Christmas tree was a little heavily ornamented,” Boysie Bollinger said after the package’s introduction.