Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  “Worse?” a startled Uddo asked.

  “Connie, Iraq is a few bombed-out buildings. When we blow up a bridge in Iraq, we fix it. And guess what? I can skype from Iraq. Here you can’t even get a freakin’ phone line.” That night she shared her exchange with Hood with her husband. She had conjured up the worst war zone her mind could imagine, but Mark told her of course Lakeview looked more battered than Fallujah or Tikrit. “I remember feeling sick to my stomach,” she said. Nothing had changed, but she now felt overwhelmed.

  Uddo already had the phone numbers for several tree cutters from her months running a Beacon of Hope out of her home. She knew whom to contact to haul away a flooded car. The challenge was gathering more numbers. “It’s like a scavenger hunt after a disaster,” Uddo said. “How do I get that tree off my roof? What do I do with my car? How do you make sure the mold doesn’t come back? I hear there are all these volunteers, but where do I find them?” The advantage of the recovery center she was running was that she’d only need to answer each of those questions once. “We called ourselves the second responders,” she said.

  Uddo proved resourceful. People complained that living in a FEMA trailer or perched on a second floor meant they had no way to wash their clothes. So Uddo used a small part of her budget to create a laundry room in a double-wide in the church parking lot. She set up computers for visitors to use and made sure they had enough shovels, wheelbarrows, and other tools for both volunteers and homeowners needing to borrow them. She also came up with a solution to contractor fraud. “You had people coming into town, slapping a magnet [sign] on their car, and saying, ‘Hi, I’m a contractor, give me thirty thousand dollars and I’ll get started on your house,’ and that’s the last you’d hear from them.” So Uddo started a version of Angie’s List: plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and others who were bonded, certified, and endorsed by neighbors. Volunteers who wanted to help Lakeview called, but not if it meant sleeping on the ground in the Good News Camp. So Father Hood found her around twenty-five army cots, and they converted the upstairs of St. Paul’s Homecoming Center into volunteer housing.

  Uddo had plenty of help. Another five Beacons had opened across Lakeview. There was also Lakeview Civic and Freddy Yoder’s army of block captains. “We counted everything,” Yoder said. “Sunken streets. Recessed curbs. Manholes, catch basins, you name it. If there was any damage to the infrastructure of the community, we documented it.” They’d meet every Thursday to plot the damage on grid maps of Lakeview and prepare reports that Yoder would pass along to the city’s Public Works Department.

  Uddo also had the help of a woman everyone called Miss Rita—Rita Legrand. Legrand, seventy, and her husband, seventy-five, had moved back to Lakeview a few months after the Uddos, in April 2006. She helped Freddy Yoder organize the precinct-captain system and eventually took over Lakeview Civic’s Blight committee. It was her job to police her fellow homeowners and go after those not taking care of their property.

  The City Council had given communities a powerful tool when it passed, eight months after the storm, the Good Neighbor Plan. Under Good Neighbor, homeowners who had not gutted their home by the one-year anniversary of Katrina were technically in violation of the law. The bill was championed by Lakeview’s representative on the City Council. “It’s Good Neighbor that we used to pressure people into making a decision,” Legrand said. Let other communities fret over the rights of the displaced and worry that their neighbors needed more time to repair a home. “I’d really push people,” Legrand said. “I’d tell ’em, ‘Fix it up or sell it, you have to make up your mind.’ ” And if they still failed to act, she’d invoke Good Neighbor. “We started going to City Hall and pushing to have hearings,” Legrand said. “I’m very good at aggravating people when I have to.”V

  NEW ORLEANS SEEMED STALLED as 2006 turned into 2007. On the eighth floor of City Hall, where once the clerks were issuing four hundred residential building permits a day, now they were averaging maybe fifty. The determined pioneers who had either the money or the grit had moved home, but everyone else seemed to be in Baton Rouge or Houston or with relatives in Cincinnati or Phoenix. A second family moved back to Uddo’s street a year after Katrina. But six months later, they were still the only two families on their block. “You brought me here to help Lakeview rebuild,” Uddo groused to Father Hood. “But instead I’m still spending all my time cleaning up.”

  Uddo used trees to lift people’s spirits and perhaps her own. She knew little about landscaping so she turned to Al Petrie, who headed Lakeview Civic’s beautification committee. Petrie used his connections in the oil and gas business to raise $75,000 to start a tree fund. Teams of volunteers did the planting, including around a dozen West Point cadets who spent their spring break in New Orleans. Crews started digging on upper Canal Street, planting live oaks, slash pines, bald cypress, and other trees. “People would honk their horn, they’d raise their fists out the window,” Uddo said. “People would stop their car, get out, and cry. It meant a lot.”

  Meanwhile, Uddo and everyone else in flooded New Orleans struggled with the Road Home application process. “It took a master’s degree to figure out the forms,” Uddo said. She eventually convinced Road Home to send a counselor to her center once a week. “Every week we’d have a line out the door,” she said. The better she got to know the Road Home representative, the more dispirited she would feel. “Policies are inconsistent,” the woman confided in Uddo. “Every day something changes—and then you have some employees saying one thing and some saying something else.”

  People who had once struck Uddo as eager to move home were giving up. Even some of those who were back home seemed to be losing their nerve. “They’d tell me it was their neighbors that made them love Lakeview,” Uddo said, “but now the only neighbors they have are the rats and possums and raccoons living in the blighted houses all around them.”

  THE ROAD HOME PROGRAM, as conceived, was simple. Road Home would make up the difference, up to $150,000, between the pre-storm worth of a home and the insurance payments people received. There were caveats. A homeowner who’d lived in a flood zone but failed to carry flood insurance was penalized. Those choosing to walk away from a property were sent a smaller check than those who committed to rebuilding. But for those rebuilding, the math was easy. If a couple received $220,000 in insurance payments for a home an assessor appraised at $300,000 prior to Katrina, they would receive a Road Home check for $80,000.

  Blanco insisted that Rita victims be included in Road Home. “I’m governor,” she said. “Am I going to say to people hit by Rita, ‘You were in the wrong storm, sorry’?” She also decided to hire an outside firm to administer the program. “There was this constant chatter, this repetition that Louisiana is corrupt,” Blanco said. She wouldn’t give Washington more excuses for holding up the state’s money. In June 2006, the state hired ICF International to decide how much each homeowner would get.VI

  The price tag for ICF’s services was a staggering $900 million. That was more revenue than the company had booked in the previous four years combined. This consulting firm that boasted of the work it did for the federal government and global oil companies was based a thousand miles away in Virginia, explaining a travel budget of $19 million. A month before securing the Road Home deal, ICF filed to go public. So on top of everything else, the executives put in charge of what was being billed as the largest housing-recovery program in the country’s history were distracted by an impending IPO. By summer 2006, more than 80,000 people had submitted a Road Home claim. By year’s end, 123,000 had applied.

  Every Road Home applicant was photographed and fingerprinted. ICF blamed the policy on the antifraud guidelines established by the LRA. Nagin brayed that the company was treating people like criminals. A state senator from Baton Rouge named Cleo Fields facetiously suggested that the company should take a DNA swab from every homeowner. The fingerprints were only an early safeguard in a process that Daniel Rothschild, a researcher with the
Mercatus Center, a conservative policy group at George Mason University, found had fifty-seven steps, until ICF trimmed it to a forty-three-step process. ICF would demand documents that a drowned-out homeowner wouldn’t reasonably be expected to have. Everyone seemed to know someone who’d submitted a thick packet of supporting materials only to be told that ICF couldn’t find it.

  In November 2006, Cassandra Wall and a couple of her sisters took part in a protest in Baton Rouge to demand the state do better. Fifteen months after Katrina and six months after the company had taken charge of Road Home, ICF had disbursed all of $700,000 to eighteen homeowners. Blanco exacted a promise from ICF to inform at least ten thousand homeowners by month’s end of the dollar amount they would be receiving. ICF did—and then sent out thousands of follow-up letters apologizing for informing an applicant of the wrong grant amount. “Road Home or Road Block?” the New Orleans Tribune asked on its cover that month.

  In December, the legislature held hearings looking into Road Home. Only a paltry eighty-four homeowners had received a check. Legislators expressed their frustrations over a program that, from the outside, didn’t seem complex. Verify that people are whom they claim to be and that they in fact owned the property they were claiming. Check with the assessor’s office to see what a house was worth prior to the storm or use some of the hundreds of millions of dollars the state was paying the company to hire its own appraisers. The insurance payments could be confirmed by checking industry records. Both the House and Senate passed resolutions directing the governor to fire ICF International. The vote in the House was 97–1.

  No one was more frustrated by Road Home than Charmaine Marchand, who for three days camped out on the capitol lawn to draw attention to her grievances. She lamented all the money the state could have saved—and the locals that could have been put to work—if the state had run the program out of its community development program. “Instead, ICF is flying its out-of-town people to Louisiana, racking up bills,” Marchand said—and also boasting about all the money it would be making off Road Home in the documents it filed to go public. Blanco convinced Marchand to take down her tent by inviting her and other New Orleans legislators to the governor’s mansion for a meeting with Michael Byrne, the former Homeland Security official ICF had put in charge of Road Home. “I share the frustrations of our people and the legislature, but common sense must prevail,” Blanco said. “This isn’t a time to start from scratch, which would make people wait even longer.” Byrne vowed that they’d soon be sending out five hundred checks a day. Again ICF fell well short of its promises.

  In February, California congresswoman Maxine Waters brought her Housing subcommittee to New Orleans for a hearing on Road Home. “I’m on the phone every day pushing for solutions,” Blanco testified. At least the governor could reach someone with ICF. Others testified about their difficulties even reaching anyone connected with Road Home. A recorded message greeted callers with a promise to return any message within forty-eight hours—except Michael Byrne confessed that winter that ICF hadn’t hired enough people to follow up on that promise.

  Blanco was up for reelection that fall—November 2007. Smelling blood, Bobby Jindal declared his candidacy that January, setting up a rematch of their 2003 race. Two months later, Blanco gathered her staff together to tell them she wouldn’t be running for reelection. “I am choosing to do what I believe to be best for the state,” the governor declared in a televised address. She had already raised $3 million in campaign funds but polls showed her with only 35 percent of the vote in a head-to-head race with Jindal. “This may be the first time in history that a non-term-limited governor decided to step down rather than seek reelection,” declared Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette. The only comparison Cross could conjure up was LBJ’s decision to drop out of the 1968 presidential race because of Vietnam.

  In May, Mary Landrieu invited Connie Uddo to Washington to talk about Road Home at the Senate’s ad hoc subcommittee on Disaster Recovery. Only 10 percent of the Road Home applicants had received a check but a top Blanco aide announced that Road Home was on pace to run out of money long before every eligible homeowner received a payment. I’m exhibit A of the problem confronting New Orleans twenty-one months after Katrina, Uddo told the senators. “I’m the cheerleader who keeps telling people to hang in there,” she said. Yet even the captain of the pom-pom club confessed that she was wrestling with despair.

  AT LEAST ONE SET of government functionaries were on the job: the bureaucrats in City Hall overseeing the list of condemned properties. In July 2007, the city published so many thirty-day notices on homes deemed a “serious, imminent and continuing threat to the public health, safety, and welfare” that the list filled twenty-five pages in the Times-Picayune. “We don’t want to demolish anything if the owner is taking action,” a city attorney explained. “But the onus is on the property owner.” Feeling frustrated by the constant delays, FEMA officials had told the city that the agency wouldn’t pay the demolition costs for any home after August 29, 2007—the two-year anniversary of Katrina. Bulldozing a home and carting away the debris could cost anywhere between $6,000 and $10,000. City officials were determined to knock down as many as they could before the federal government’s deadline.

  The city kept one list. FEMA kept another: for the demolition crews it kept under contract. Getting your home off one didn’t necessarily get it off both. IdaBelle Joshua was a seventy-nine-year-old, disabled widow temporarily living 150 miles from the two-story brick home she owned in the Lower Ninth Ward. Joshua had spent more than $5,000 gutting and cleaning her place. She even stopped by City Hall in early July, where two employees, she said, assured her that her house was safe. Yet two days later, a nephew phoned Joshua with bad news. He had stopped by to mow the lawn. The house was gone.

  The Wall Street Journal told Joshua’s story in a page-one article by Rick Brooks. The reporter seemed to have little trouble finding people shocked to learn their property was on a demolition list. A man named Michael DeZura told Brooks about a building he was fixing up. It would have been reduced to rubble, DeZura said, if a friend hadn’t called him in Houston to let him know a city crew was disconnecting the utilities. Mary Harrison had already put a new roof on her home and had people working on the wiring and the plumbing when she heard from a neighbor that a demolition order had been slapped on her door. She spoke to people at City Hall and then phoned FEMA, but no one could help her. “They can’t find me on the list to take me off,” she said.

  * * *

  I. The bands played a modified version of “The Saints Are Coming,” a song by the Skids. A recording of the song was sold to raise money for Music Rising, a charity cofounded by U2 guitarist The Edge and aimed at replacing instruments destroyed by Katrina.

  II. A jury would find four of the seven officers guilty of using a weapon in the commission of a violent crime. One, a sergeant named Kenneth Bowen, was also convicted of stomping on Ronald Madison, a forty-year-old disabled man. A second sergeant was found guilty of aiding in an attempted cover-up of the crime. The convictions were vacated in 2013 on charges of “grotesque prosecutorial misconduct” after a top lawyer in the US Attorney’s office was caught posting inflammatory online comments before and during the trial. A new trial was ordered.

  III. A federal judge found that the ordinance violated federal antidiscrimination laws. The parish was forced to pay fines and court costs exceeding $1.8 million.

  IV. “Delay, deny, defend”—that’s how a Rutgers professor named Jay M. Feinman described the insurance industry’s strategy in a book by that title published several years after Katrina. The strategy, Feinman reported, had been laid out in a PowerPoint presentation that came to light during a lawsuit against Allstate. When a policyholder files a claim, the aggressive insurance company makes a low offer, a McKinsey & Co. consultant explained: let people fight if they think they deserve more.

  V. The Nagin administration would quie
tly end its Good Neighbor program a year after it went into effect, citing a shortage of inspectors. At that point, there was a backlog of seventeen thousand citizen complaints that the city had yet to review.

  VI. ICF was founded in 1969 as the Inner City Fund, a venture-capital firm whose mission was to finance inner-city businesses.

  21

  “YOU’LL SEE CRANES IN THE SKY”

  He had no written contract. There was no job description. He didn’t even have an official title, only that generic moniker the media gives anyone in a job like the one he was taking. Ed Blakely was the “recovery czar” no matter what it might say on any org chart.

  The airport terminal looked like a morgue and smelled like one, too. That at least was Blakely’s perception on that winter day in 2007 when he landed there to start his new job. The ride into town was “nauseating,” he said. Again it was the stench. Eighteen months after Katrina, was it possible dead animals were still rotting in the streets? Sitting in the passenger seat of a city-issued SUV dispatched to pick him up, he saw piles of garbage everywhere. Abandoned autos were stacked in piles and tucked under overpasses. Passing City Hall, he noticed a neon sign with several burned-out letters: C TY H L. He shook his head and asked himself what it meant that he would be working somewhere people didn’t have the good sense to kill the sign’s switch until it was fixed.

  The next day—Blakely’s first on the job—began at Le Pavillon, where Nagin had reserved a corner table for them. Donning the red power tie that his wife had picked out for him, Blakely expected to talk strategy. At the least Blakely hoped they could settle on a job title. Instead Nagin brought along an aide and the three of them worked on a press release to announce Blakely’s hiring. Their next stop was a City Hall press conference, where reporters pounded Blakely with questions about the recovery. Back in the mayor’s office, Blakely called it a “rough and irritating start.” Nagin told him to get used to it—and then “giggled uncontrollably,” Blakely said, “like a schoolboy telling a dirty joke.”