Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Nagin stood strong when members of the City Council lambasted him for a plan that might mean black people would temporarily live in predominantly white neighborhoods. One white member of the council stressed the importance of parks and playgrounds in the life of a child—in a city without children. Another council member, also white, said she resented those who were insinuating that race played any role in her vote—and then said she could support putting trailers in her district if they were reserved for first responders. When the council passed legislation giving an individual council member final say over any temporary housing slated for his or her district, Nagin vetoed the bill, setting up a legal battle. Across the Gulf Coast, communities were receiving bulk shipments of FEMA trailers, but not New Orleans.

  In Lakeview, people seethed over a mayor whom they had helped put in office several years earlier. Electricity had only recently been restored, and a few intrepid souls had started to work on their homes. Now Nagin wanted to put trailers on the neutral ground on West End Boulevard, a few blocks from the neighborhood’s western border, and more trailers and possibly a tent city in City Park, which served as Lakeview’s eastern border? “A lot of us agreed that the last thing that Lakeview needed was to be turned into a trailer park for the rest of the city,” said Jeb Bruneau, then president of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association. “The mayor was going to turn the park and our neighborhood into a dump”—without the courtesy, he added, of talking about it with anyone who lived in Lakeview.

  Nagin backed down. He agreed to grant individual members of the council veto power over any housing built in his or her district—and fought FEMA when it attempted to set up trailers at sites his administration had already approved. The trailer parks would instead be set up on the grounds of New Orleans’s public housing projects and other places where City Hall would receive no pushback. But while the mayor and City Council negotiated, the people of Lakeview weren’t taking chances. People were emptying the waterlogged innards of their homes, and small mountains of discarded appliances, couches, and other detritus formed around the neighborhood. “We figured, why not take care of two problems at once?” Bruneau said. “So we started piling all our trash on the neutral ground on West End.” How could the city set up trailers on a stretch of grass serving as the community dump?

  NOTHING SEEMED EASY, EVERYTHING seemed to spark a fight. More than half of the city’s inhabitants were renters. What about all those apartments around New Orleans filled with people’s possessions even as their occupants were living a thousand or two thousand miles away? Landlords had plenty of motivation for rehabbing units in a market where $550 apartments were renting for $800 or more and cheap motels ringing the city were charging downtown hotel prices. The governor had seemingly done the humane thing when she placed a moratorium on post-Katrina evictions, angering landlords. Nagin, by contrast, was inclined to take the side of the landlords in a city desperate for housing. When in the last week of October Blanco, under pressure, lifted her ban, landlords inundated the courts with eviction notices. “That’s somebody’s life in there,” a Legal Aid attorney told a Knight Ridder reporter. “You want a chance to save it.” Under Louisiana law, a person could be evicted and his or her possessions tossed into a Dumpster within ten days. But Legal Aid sued, putting the matter on hold.

  The city’s pending elections precipitated another legal battle. New Orleans was slated to have its first round of voting for mayor and City Council on February 4. Any runoffs would be held one month later. The obvious question was whether the city could even pull off an election in its disabled state. Racial issues also had to be considered in a city that was majority white in the fall of 2005. Civil rights groups were threatening a lawsuit if the election was not postponed, while prominent voices Uptown were making the case that Louisiana’s secretary of state, Al Ater, in whose hands this hot potato had landed, had no legal basis for ordering a delay. At the Bourbon House late one night, Greg Meffert admitted he’d probably had too much to drink when things turned unpleasant between him and a white legislator arguing that the election would be a chance for whites to grab back control of the city while most of the black community was scattered around the country. The woman’s husband, Meffert said, needed to intervene before things turned ugly. “There was this big push to white-ify everything,” Meffert said.

  Al Ater asked FEMA for $2 million to replace voting machines damaged in the flooding. FEMA turned down his request, just as its people said no when the secretary of state asked the agency to underwrite the cost of sending notices to displaced residents to let them know they could vote by absentee ballot. The Bush White House even rejected Ater’s request that FEMA share with the local election authorities the addresses of evacuees. Without help, Ater said, New Orleans would not be ready to hold an election by early February. To figure out what to do, Ater, who had been in office for less than two months when Katrina hit, assembled an advisory group. Members included both party leaders and civil rights advocates. The plan they devised included satellite polling places in Baton Rouge, Houston, Atlanta, and other cities home to a large number of evacuees. Based on their recommendations, Ater said the elections needed to be postponed for at least eight months.

  A Republican mayoral hopeful sued. So, too, did the developer Pres Kabacoff. A federal judge was sympathetic but emphatic. “Mr. Ater,” she told him, “if you don’t set a date in April, I’m going to do it for you.” Shortly thereafter, the secretary of state announced that the election would be held April 22 with runoffs scheduled for May 20.

  Dueling bureaucrats were the main combatants in the fight over Charity Hospital. Founded in 1736, Charity was the country’s oldest public hospital,I built after the death of a wealthy shipbuilder whose will instructed that his fortune be used to finance a hospital for the city’s indigent. Since the days of Huey Long, Charity had been housed in a handsome art deco–style building on the edge of the central business district. The staff, working with dozens of military personnel, had scrubbed clean the first three floors of the twenty-story hospital when the state agency that ran Charity ordered them to stop. We’re concerned for your safety, the authorities said, but the doctors, nurses, and others on whose behalf the state was acting saw the move as nothing but a cynical play for a bigger FEMA payout. For years the state had sought to demolish Charity and replace it with a hospital that no longer had as its main purpose treatment of the city’s uninsured. The state, several doctors charged, saw Katrina as a way to get the feds to pick up the bill.

  At first those ordered to stop working on Charity defied an order they saw as irresponsible in a city with an acute shortage of hospital beds. They would be chased out several times before the state locked the building. Their makeshift crews—populated with medical professionals—had worn shorts and T-shirts while working on the building. But when the state invited television crews inside the shuttered facility to see the damage for themselves, they insisted that everybody sign a medical release form and wear protective suits. The magic number in post-Katrina New Orleans was 50 percent. FEMA would pay to tear down and rebuild a structure rather than simply repair it if the damage estimate exceeded half the replacement cost. A consultant for the state declared that fixing the facility would equal 65 percent of the replacement cost, but a FEMA representative, doubting the damage was anywhere that extensive, said the agency would do its own assessment. In the meantime, this twenty-seven-hundred-bed hospital sat empty.

  Public housing was proving another flash point in post-Katrina New Orleans. More than five thousand families were paying rent each month to the Housing Authority of New Orleans at the time of Katrina, and HANO, as everyone called the agency, had another two thousand apartments sitting vacant. Many of HANO’s residents were older New Orleanians, but four in every ten residents worked. They were the working poor who changed bedpans, cleaned hotel rooms, and washed dishes. Reopening public housing as fast as possible seemed critical to reigniting the city’s economy. But rebuilding the proje
cts also meant inviting back a portion of the city’s population living on public aid or disability.

  Most public housing residents in New Orleans lived in complexes of low-rise, stolid brick buildings built in the 1940s and 1950s. Two of the city’s four largest housing projects escaped Katrina with little damage. In this city desperate for affordable housing, at least a couple of thousand units could be made habitable with only cosmetic improvements. Yet that wasn’t necessarily welcome news in a city where people were imagining much of New Orleans as a clean slate. “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” Richard Baker, a ten-term congressman from Baton Rouge, a Republican, was quoted as saying after Katrina. “We couldn’t do it but God did.” What a waste of a disaster, some argued, if the authorities simply allowed HANO residents to move back into their former homes.

  PEOPLE CONTACTED BARBARA MAJOR to do something about public housing. They reached out to her for help countering the forces trying to shut down Charity. They called to talk about the schools or the fight over the placement of trailers. But Major’s life then was her extended family and the epic fights she was waging with FEMA or an insurance company on behalf of one member or another of her clan.

  She recalls feeling powerless at the time, not despite her exalted position as cochair of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission but because of it. She wanted to help black-owned businesses feeling locked out of the bidding for contracts, yet she couldn’t get FEMA to return her own phone calls. “All I heard was pain,” Major said. “I’d see people and I couldn’t do anything.

  THE “PIG.” THAT’S WHAT the people who worked for the RTA called the former Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Baton Rouge that the agency leased following Katrina. The pig served as the RTA’s temporary offices and its maintenance yard and a barracks for those who couldn’t find housing in the area. This agency of thirteen hundred before the storm employed around three hundred as it struggled to rebuild post-Katrina.

  One early task was tracking down the RTA buses that didn’t drown. They’d sell for scrap the two hundred or so buses destroyed by the floodwaters, but another seventy buses had been parked on the high ground along the river. Those had been commandeered by people desperate to exit the city. Tracking them down fell to Jacques Robichaux, the agency’s superintendent of bus maintenance. “That was a good portion of my life for months,” Robichaux said. A few buses had been abandoned on the West Bank, but most they found scattered around the state. Two needed to be driven back from Houston. The agency would leave a pair upstate in Alexandria because town officials were asking the agency to pay what Robichaux thought were exorbitant towing and storage charges.

  Initially, the RTA put its drivers to work running buses in Baton Rouge to help with overflow. It also set up a commuter line to New Orleans. By November, the agency was running several bus routes in New Orleans. Other modes of transportation were also expanding their service as more people moved back home. Whereas by the end of September the city’s airport was handling thirty departing flights a day, that number doubled to sixty in November. Amtrak and Greyhound also started running more trains and buses to and from New Orleans.

  The city was still under a bottled-water advisory, but in November the city’s water agency declared water drinkable in every part of the city outside New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward. Isolated patches of the city were still without running water, a circumstance that could prove disastrous in the event of a fire, but most of New Orleans was protected. Nearly half the toilets in the city were still not connected to the sewer system. Forty percent of the city was still without electricity. Nearly 50 percent lacked natural gas for cooking or heat in a city where the nighttime temperatures were dipping below forty degrees.

  Dan Packer and his team, under pressure from the City Council, developed a plan for Entergy to provide electricity to at least 80 percent of the city by year’s end and gas service to that same proportion of its customers by mid-January. But those were just words on paper for a bankrupt subsidiary relying on its corporate bosses in Jackson, Mississippi, and volunteer crews from around the country. Entergy New Orleans was a utility with extraordinary expenses and only a small fraction of its pre-storm customer base paying for its services. Packer spent much of his time up in Washington, telling his woeful tale to anyone willing to meet with him, including Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff. “The bottom line is that as a regulated monopoly, we’re allowed to pass legitimate expenses along to customers,” Packer said. “So either the government was going to help pay for a lot of the damage or ratepayers would.”

  In November, Bush announced that Donald Powell, who since 2001 had served as chairman of the FDIC, would replace Admiral Thad Allen as the federal recovery czar. The city also had a new best friend in Richard Baker, the Baton Rouge Republican overheard cracking that God fixed public housing in New Orleans the way no mortal could. His penance was a bill that proposed that the federal government pay 60 percent of the pre-Katrina value on any property abandoned by a homeowner or business choosing not to rebuild. The property would then be the city’s to redevelop. The state’s entire congressional delegation was behind what everyone was calling the Baker bill, as were Nagin and Blanco. Joe Canizaro also supported this legislation, which would provide the funding mechanism needed to rebuild New Orleans more sensibly.

  “I think we all believed there would be more happening than is happening right now,” Canizaro said in early December. Maybe Baker would break the logjam.

  AFTER DENIAL COMES ANGER. The fall was also a time for recriminations and finger-pointing. Culprits were everywhere during the multiple hearings held by both the US Senate and the House looking into what went wrong in the days following Katrina. Depending on the day and who was talking, everything was Bush’s fault, Nagin’s, Blanco’s, or that of the people who failed to get themselves out of harm’s way. “Just baloney,” Michael Brown had said of the White House’s claim that they didn’t realize a disaster was taking place in New Orleans until at least twenty-four hours after the levees broke. The Bush administration refused to make senior officials available to congressional investigators. The White House also held back a large portion of the Katrina-related documents that Congress had requested.

  Across the river from New Orleans in Gretna, officials might have considered themselves lucky. In an era of twenty-four-hour news, their small burgh might have become another Howard Beach or South Central Los Angeles—a locale whose name invokes a racially charged incident that took place there—if not for a media distracted by so many other angles to the Katrina story. Yet even the relatively small amount of attention the story received sparked a defensiveness among town leaders. Two weeks after Katrina, the Gretna City Council unanimously approved a resolution supporting the “chief of police’s decision to deny access to the city of Gretna.” Signs started popping up on lawns around town: WE SUPPORT CHIEF LAWSON. People on the other side of the bridge, including some of those part of the RTA contingent, were talking to lawyers about a civil rights claim against the city. When the first of those suits were filed that November, Chief Lawson said, “It’s being made into a racial issue by certain individuals, but that’s not what it was all about.”

  It was a season for filing bold lawsuits. One local lawyer sued the Army Corps of Engineers, claiming fraud. The Corps had promised a levee system that could withstand a Category 3 storm, yet Katrina, a weak Category 3, if not a 2, by the time it hit New Orleans, caused the city’s flood-protection system to collapse. John Cummings, a prominent trial attorney who was part of the big tobacco settlement years earlier, also sued the Corps. He didn’t charge the Corps with incompetence or negligence but criminality. “If your supervisors are asleep—they simply don’t supervise the installation of the sheet piling—that’s incompetence or gross negligence,” Cummings said. “But when they certify that the sheet piling is twenty-three feet and it’s really seventeen feet, that’s a crime.” Others sued the Orleans levee board, which was responsible for
maintaining the levees that the Corps had built. Suits would be filed as well over MR. GO.

  Before the lawyers took aim at one another, the battle for the truth needed to be waged on the ground in New Orleans. On one side was the Corps, an operation with roots dating back to 1775 and a reputation to uphold. In the months after Katrina, spokespeople for the Corps insisted that the city’s flood-protection system failed because it had not been built to withstand a storm as strong as Katrina. The levees had overtopped, they claimed, and the force of the water rushing over the walls had caused small sections to give way. On the other side were scientists such as Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, and among the first to suspect that the Corps was not being completely candid with the public.

  For years, van Heerden had been outspoken in warning of the potential for catastrophic flooding following a bad hurricane. But Katrina had been a “decidedly mild hurricane,” van Heerden said, at least from New Orleans’s perspective. The levees should not have overtopped, according to the storm-surge models he and his colleagues had created. Their thesis was that the levees had collapsed due to faulty designs or problems in their construction, if not both. To figure out what happened, the state asked van Heerden, who taught in LSU’s Civil & Environmental Engineering Department, to assemble a group of colleagues. Team Louisiana, as they were called, looked through wrecked homes in search of battery-powered clocks and interviewed dozens of survivors to figure out what time the floodwaters hit a community. Others picked up shovels to sift through the dirt and sometimes taste it, to see what clues the soil might offer. The more time van Heerden spent in deserted sections of New Orleans, the more he thought of all the lives lost and disrupted, and the angrier he grew.

  “Call it a blame game if you must,” van Heerden said, “but some of us were determined to find out exactly what had happened and to demand justice from the responsible parties.”