Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Cassandra figured she made at least ten trips into New Orleans to meet with adjusters or others about the house. That was about all the glimpse of life in New Orleans East she needed. The traffic lights weren’t working. There were no streetlights. The big Home Depot was open, as were a few car dealerships along the I-10 and a couple of fast-food places, with a few trucks serving Mexican food to the work crews. But that was about it. “What are you going back to?” she asked her sisters. In March, the couple bought a home in Baton Rouge not far from their hotel. Cassandra made up some flyers to advertise her tutoring service. Any more big decisions would be put off until the people in charge started making up their minds.

  THE CITY WAS STILL in emergency mode and still producing weekly situation reports. The news wasn’t always bad. By January, the city was claiming New Orleans was home to around 158,000 people—about one-third its pre-Katrina population. Government-issued trailers were starting to show up in the most damaged communities. But taken as a whole, the reports were a snapshot of a city still far from recovery. The city was now estimating that Katrina had created 50 million cubic yards of storm-related debris. As of early February, 6 million cubic yards had been removed—12 percent of the total. Countless cars still sat abandoned around the city.II Streets were still barricaded. That winter and through the spring they were still finding the occasional corpse.

  The newspapers carried stories about a second wave of looters working abandoned parts of the city. They picked clean the second floor of Cassandra’s home, a stash that included a fur coat she was kicking herself for not taking when she saw it there in October. The Times-Picayune’s Chris Rose told readers about a woman from the Ninth Ward who had for years done food prep at Antoine’s: the crystal and china she had inherited from her mother had survived the flood but not the looters. “What kind of man picks over the bones of a destroyed life?” Rose asked.

  The bad news seemed to come with each day’s newspaper. Fixing the Superdome was essential in a football-mad city that also used the stadium to generate revenue. That was slated to cost $32 million.III The airlines were still operating less than half the flights as pre-Katrina. “Archdiocese Shutters Dozens of Churches,” the front page of the Times-Picayune trumpeted in February. That included St. Augustine in Tremé, founded in 1841 and, the paper explained, “the mother parish of black Catholics in New Orleans.” (The church would reopen after a pitched fight.) That same front page carried a story about rules so laxly enforced at a city-owned landfill that reopened after Katrina that a report concluded the city might be looking at a Superfund site in the middle of Gentilly. Only six months after Katrina, already two-thirds of the charitable donations given in the name of New Orleans had been spent.

  The city was generating much more in sales tax—$5 million a month—than anyone had anticipated. But that still put it at less than half its pre-Katrina levels, representing tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues. The property tax bills hadn’t even been sent, let alone collected on. Short of a bailout from somebody, the city was looking at a deficit of between $150 million and $200 million. “We’ve never seen anything like this, at least not in our lifetime,” Roy Bahl, the dean of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University and an expert in public finance, said of New Orleans.

  The big law and finance firms were the first to return to the city’s office towers. Those employees who didn’t live Uptown or on the West Bank moved in with relatives or took a hotel room. Next came larger companies that had the economic means to fix up a facility and also cover the extra costs of doing business in a disabled city. Chevron started moving its people back into New Orleans at the start of February, but only after purchasing an ambulance and hiring a paramedic in a city with an unreliable 911 system. Shell flew its thousand-person exploration and production unit back to the city later that month—but only after an extraordinary investment. Prior to Katrina, the US subsidiary of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group owned no residential properties, but it would spend $32 million on housing in the months afterward. “We bought condos,” a Shell exec said. “We bought a lot of single-family homes. And we leased them out at cost to any Shell employee in need of housing.”

  Six in ten businesses operating in the central business district had reopened six months after Katrina, according to Don Hutchinson, the city’s economic-development director. But even that figure was deceptively high. A lot of companies were moving back only some of their workforce. Dominion Resources, for instance, a large energy company, was leaving 40 percent of its people in Houston.

  The view of the economy outside the central business district was dismal. The city had twenty-two thousand businesses within its borders before Katrina. Six months after Katrina, two thousand were open, Don Hutchinson said—less than one in ten. The one bright spot was the city’s restaurants, yet by March only 29 percent of these had reopened. “The question isn’t whether New Orleans is going to take a huge hit in terms of job loss,” said Jay Lapeyre, a local business owner who had taken the reins of the Business Council from Jimmy Reiss. “The real question is where we’ll have to rebuild from once we know where we’ve bottomed out.”

  NAGIN ASSEMBLED A COMMITTEE to advise him about Mardi Gras. They had plenty of reasons for canceling carnival that year. The city had no money, yet Mardi Gras meant paying for extra police protection and overtime for the sanitation crews. Most of the city’s hotels were full with relief workers, contractors, and evacuees. Some worried about how it would look if CNN showed clips of people parading down St. Charles while the city’s representatives were in Washington begging for billions. The death toll alone—eighteen hundred across the Gulf Coast, more than one thousand from New Orleans—might be motivation enough to cancel Mardi Gras.

  Yet there was never any question the city would be holding its annual bacchanal, even if shortened by a few days. Mardi Gras was good for business, and it would be good for the psyche.IV Nagin didn’t waffle. Of course they would parade. The mayor never looked more take-charge than on Mardi Gras Day—Fat Tuesday—sitting atop a white horse, dressed in the black beret and desert combat gear favored by Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, leading the Zulu parade down St. Charles Avenue in the morning sun.

  THE LEADERSHIP RUNNING THE Lakeview Civic Improvement Association started talking immediately after the storm. Al Petrie, a Lakeview Civic board member, had fled to Houston, where he worked the phones in a borrowed office. “We had our first conference call five days after Katrina,” Petrie said. In January, Petrie and others back in Lakeview started meeting every Friday morning at the Gulf Coast Bank branch in the neighborhood. The meetings were run by Martin Landrieu and open to anyone in Lakeview, but the people who showed up on the second floor every Friday tended to be those most active in Lakeview Civic, which dated back to 1924. Landrieu, a partner in a big downtown law firm, put himself in charge of zoning. Freddy Yoder, whom FEMA was paying to clean up Lakeview, took on infrastructure. Maybe they were meeting to prove their viability to the city, as Joe Canizaro had suggested they do, or maybe their gatherings were about devising their own recovery plans. Eventually, they created seventy-two subcommittees, including one that took on the task of mapping every broken streetlamp in the neighborhood, and another that investigated the mosquito problem caused by people’s abandoned swimming pools.

  A group from the Lower Ninth Ward met Uptown every Thursday evening at a Methodist church on Carrollton Avenue. They were from Holy Cross, the better-off corner of the Lower Ninth along the river, where the ground was higher and the homes generally nicer. Pam Dashiell, a single mom who did contract work for Shell, was president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association. As soon as her cell phone started working again after Katrina, Dashiell, who had endured several weeks perched in the St. Louis home of an acquaintance she hardly knew, was running up big bills trying to track down neighbors. “And when I wasn’t calling, I was e-mailing and texting,” she said. By mid-February, Dashiell and two others had tracked down
three hundred of their neighbors—only a small fraction of those representing Holy Cross’s fifty-five hundred residents. The treasurer’s report in February indicated their homeowners association had less than $1,000 in its accounts.

  Yet Dashiell and her neighbors were well ahead of the rest of the Lower Ninth. No New Orleans neighborhood had as many of its residents dispersed around the country as the Lower NinthV and its residents generally did not have the means to fly in for meetings. Another factor was that the people who ran the area’s homeowners association were just as overwhelmed as everyone else. In mid-February, Charmaine Marchand, the area’s state representative, created one. “No one else was organizing,” Marchand said, “so I felt it fell upon me as the only elected official from the Lower Ninth to do something.” So while other neighborhood organizations were counting heads and thinking about what they might say about their community to a planning body, those behind the newly minted Lower Ninth Ward Homeowners Association were writing bylaws and selecting officers.

  Around eighty-five people showed up for their first meeting, held on a rainy Saturday afternoon near the end of February. This gathering, held on the second floor of the Holy Angels Academy in the Upper Ninth Ward—the parochial school Marchand had attended as a girl—was less about figuring out how to draw up a plan and more about the proper methods of mold remediation, the state of the levee system, and possible help from various governmental bodies, including FEMA, which had a representative in attendance. Rumors that the levees had been bombed came up a couple of times during a question-and-answer session, as did the charge that government negligence was responsible for their misery. “This wasn’t a flood,” bellowed one audience member, pointing a finger at the pleasant-looking FEMA woman with a perma-smile on her face. “A flood is an act of God. This was the government—the government!—doing a bad job of building levees and destroying our homes.”

  “We have to do more,” Congressman Barney Frank, the Massachusetts liberal, told a group of storm evacuees who had traveled to Washington that February for yet another congressional hearing into Katrina. “I hate to have to say this about my own government, but I believe what we are seeing with regard to New Orleans and the surrounding area is a policy frankly of ethnic cleansing by inaction.”

  MAYBE GREG MEFFERT HAD gotten a little ahead of himself. Touring the Lower Ninth in those first months after the storm could bring out the doomsayer in anyone. The cameras rolled as Meffert walked Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes down a single street north of Claiborne Avenue, a few blocks from the levee breach. The camera lingered on one house sitting cockeyed and cracked on its foundation, and another that the floodwaters had split in two. Standing there in the street, Pelley asked Meffert how many houses he imagined they would have to demolish. “It could go up to fifty thousand homes,” Meffert responded, nearly a third of the city’s housing stock. That prompted Pelley to speculate that New Orleans was looking at what was “likely the largest demolition project in US history.” It wasn’t enough that all of New Orleans was worrying about the city’s sending bulldozers to revert their street to swampland. Now they had to worry that the bulldozers were coming because some bureaucrat had deemed their home too far gone to save.

  Just before the Christmas season, Meffert announced that the city had finished its block-by-block inspection of the flood zone. They had slapped just over fifty-five hundred homes, not fifty thousand, with the red tag that Meffert said meant a structure needed to be razed as a threat to public safety. The city would bulldoze the first set of twenty-five hundred homes over the next few weeks, Meffert said, while his people took a closer look at the remaining three thousand. The pronouncement opened a new chapter of court challenges, protests, and dueling press conferences. As in most every other hard decision in New Orleans following Katrina, individual rights were set against what the authorities thought was best for the wider community.

  Meffert felt misunderstood through the entire ordeal. In his mind, he was the valiant public servant moving with deliberate speed to remove rubble that was not only hazardous but stood in the way of recovery. The city had the power to demolish a home without the owner’s consent, he declared, if a structure posed an imminent threat. But the US Constitution, the Supreme Court had long ago said, requires the government to give people “a meaningful opportunity to be heard” before seizure. The majority of houses in that first batch of twenty-five hundred were in the Lower Ninth, a part of the city that been open to residents for only a few weeks at the time of Meffert’s announcement. Yet with little warning, the city was sending in bulldozers.

  “In the Lower Nine, we understand and recognize that many of those properties will have to be demolished,” said Tracie Washington, an attorney who represented several residents and advocacy groups bringing suit. Some only wanted a chance to pick through the remains in search of any small mementos that might have survived the storm. Others wanted time to see for themselves if it made more sense to start over than to rebuild.

  A large protest formed outside City Hall two weeks after Christmas. Speaker after speaker denounced the mayor, including the City Council’s Oliver Thomas, who threatened to stand in front of the bulldozers himself if they tried to knock down his family home without their consent. “If you’re talking about my mama’s house, I’m standing in front of it before you tear it down,” said the hulking Thomas. “You got to be a bad dude to get through me.”

  The city avoided another protracted legal battle a few weeks into the new year by cutting a deal with those bringing suit. The city singled out over a hundred homes in the Lower Ninth that officials felt needed to be torn down immediately. Owners of these properties would have seven to ten days to challenge the city’s decision. Others the city deemed in imminent danger of collapsing would have up to thirty days. “As a city, we have to move beyond playing victim, and we have to rebuild for everyone,” Meffert said after the deal was announced. NO BULLDOZING signs started popping up not only on homes but also on trees and surviving segments of fencing around the Lower Ninth.

  REBUILD AT YOUR OWN risk. That was Ray Nagin’s advice on March 20 when he responded to the recommendations the Bring New Orleans Back Commission had presented to him two months earlier. Under the plan worked out by Canizaro and his committee, March 20 was to have been the deadline by which every neighborhood needed to have submitted the names of returning residents. Key components of the Canizaro blueprint were the panels of planners and other experts that would help communities as they wrestled with a plan. Those had yet to form. Still, Nagin said he expected reports from each of the flood-prone neighborhoods by June 30.

  Nagin officially rejected Canizaro’s suggestion that the city impose a temporary moratorium on work in parts of the city. That was no surprise with the election a month away. At the same time, he embraced the equally controversial suggestion made by the ULI that the city put off rebuilding the hardest-hit areas—what he dubbed “delayed recovery zones.”

  “If you go in those areas, God bless you,” Nagin said when releasing what he called his “general guidelines” for rebuilding. “We’ll try to provide you with support as best we can. But understand we’re concentrating city resources in the areas that are in the immediate recovery zone.” Barbara Major was among those speaking out against this idea of favoring healthier parts of New Orleans over those most devastated. Sure, planners had smart ideas for rebuilding the city more rationally, but they failed to understand a fact about neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, and New Orleans East. “Black people only moved there because all the high ground had been taken,” she said.

  * * *

  I. More specifically, the maps would indicate the minimum elevation of the first floor of any building to be eligible for the government’s flood-insurance program.

  II. Another estimate put the garbage left behind by Katrina at 12 million tons—or seven times the volume produced when the Twin Towers fell.

  III. Katrina’s gusts, Jeff Duncan wrote in
the Times-Picayune, “peeled the thick black rubber sheets from the Dome’s exterior like an onion, dislodged three massive ducts, and punctured eight smaller holes in the surface.”

  IV. Nagin also thought it would be cost-free to the city given all the outside contractors making millions off the cleanup. The city hired a company to attract sponsors to underwrite some of the expense. Nagin hoped to raise $2 million, but only a single corporate sponsor stepped forward: Glad, which gave an unspecified six-figure donation along with a hundred thousand trash bags. Two days before the first parade, the City Council unanimously approved a bill to spend $2.7 million on police overtime and other city services without specifying the source of the money they were authorizing.

  V. That according to Muriel Lewis, director of the National Association of Katrina Evacuees.

  17

  CHOCOLATE CITY

  Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, was in New Orleans for the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend to speak at what his organization was calling a Black Family Summit. Weeks earlier, Nagin had promised the local Baptist church where the event was to be held would have electricity, but at the last minute Farrakhan’s people needed an alternative venue. Four months after Katrina, even the mayor didn’t have the clout to turn on the lights in a church only minimally damaged by the storm.

  The hotels in New Orleans were running at capacity that weekend. Evacuees were in town for an event sponsored by the city’s big social aid and pleasure clubs, which have been fixtures of the city’s black community dating back to Reconstruction. A group of them had joined together to put on a giant second-line—a New Orleans tradition where groups of musicians led revelers through the streets. They would be parading through Tremé that Sunday on King’s birthday. Thousands had traveled home to New Orleans, at least for the night. “We’re coming home!” the revelers started chanting. “We’re back.” Yet just as the musicians stopped playing, gunfire broke out. Three people were brought to the hospital for gunshot wounds.