Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  “I’ll confess to being frustrated,” said Norman Francis, whom Blanco had put in charge of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. “Without a plan, I don’t see how we bring our low- and moderate-income renters back.”

  TO HER SURPRISE, CASSANDRA WALL began working on her old house. Eventually, they’d be moving home or selling the place; either way, she figured, it couldn’t hurt to fix it up. Shortly after she started work, though, she discovered the home had been broken into. “They stole every last copper pipe out of there,” she said.

  Cassandra was still making regular trips to New Orleans. She visited her mother, who was sick with cancer, and made the long drive when her sisters tried to revive their tradition of Sunday-night dinners. But she also felt the pull of her new life in Baton Rouge. She had found work teaching composition at a local community college and was making progress reviving her tutoring business. Her husband was having a hard time dealing with a job that meant a demotion in responsibility, and Katrina was taking a toll on Brandon. He was doing well in school, but he was looking at another school year in Baton Rouge, rather than eighth grade back in New Orleans with his friends. “You’re fighting here, you’re fighting there,” Cassandra told her sisters. “You realize you can’t fight everyone and everywhere at once.” That was her way of informing them that work on her old house would cease until further notice.

  Tangee was the first of Cassandra’s sisters to move back into her home. She burned through most of her savings, but she was intent on showing the world that the East was coming back. “Our community paid our taxes,” she declared at around the one-year anniversary, with her home around 80 percent rebuilt. “We pumped money into the economy. We deserve the right to return like any other part of New Orleans.” On Saturdays, she ventured farther east to a meeting in the Village de L’Est, a Vietnamese community coming back faster than other subdivisions in the area. “A group of us decided to get behind this push for everyone in the East to pull together, rather than it being a subdivision-by-subdivision thing,” Tangee said. Father Vien The Nguyen hosted the weekly meetings. Petie showed up at these meetings when she could, as did Robyn.

  Petie was making progress on her place but at a slower pace than Tangee—room by room, Petie said, “if not one wall at a time.” Whenever she had the money, Petie would head to Lowe’s, where day laborers, almost all of them Latino, lined up each day looking for work. “You go saying you’re looking for people to hang Sheetrock and offer one hundred dollars a day,” she said. “And then if they do a good job, you pay them more and keep them going to the next thing.” One year after Katrina, she figured her home was about 40 percent rebuilt.

  Robyn was back in New Orleans, but she hadn’t done any work on her home. She was busy at work and didn’t feel like competing for contractors, plumbers, and electricians. “It was crazy, the prices people were asking,” Robyn said. “I took my time because I could afford to.” Once the lease expired on the condo she had rented in the Warehouse District, she moved back to her mother’s home in Broadmoor. Cassandra’s sister Contesse was still in Baton Rouge. Contesse had gutted her home to preserve her investment, she said, but that was it. “I’m not making up my mind,” she announced, “until the people in charge make up theirs.”

  Tensions formed between the sisters. That was obvious one year after Katrina when the five of them gathered at a crowded Barnes & Noble café in Metairie to talk about the recovery. That week the Times-Picayune had run a page-one story declaring that without a major upgrade to the levee system, New Orleans East, sandwiched between Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain, with MR. GO acting as an accelerant, would remain vulnerable. The article reinforced for Tangee the desire to fight for the East, but for Cassandra it was another reason to wait until people in Washington had a chance to work things out.

  “I’m not coming back until I know we have Category 5 protection,” Cassandra said.

  “We need a massive protest in Washington to make sure that happens,” Tangee responded. “It’s our constitutional right to have our government protect us.”

  The five of them agreed that life would not be easy for anyone choosing to rebuild. The question was what responsibility they had as de facto spokespeople for the area. “Only the strong will survive,” Petie declared.

  “Then why are you encouraging everyone in the East to rebuild?” said Contesse, who made no effort to hide her irritation. She was single and self-employed. She sometimes struggled to make her bills. Even if she had wanted to start rebuilding, she didn’t have the savings to float a six-figure repair bill while waiting on insurance companies and any help the state might provide through Road Home.

  “If a community doesn’t come back,” Petie said, “people will condense. They’ll move to an area that’s coming back.” She sounded like Joe Canizaro, suggesting that people pour everything they had into returning—and if it didn’t work out, our apology for having put you through all that trouble.

  “It’s dangerous to encourage people to move back someplace where there are no hospitals,” Contesse snapped. “You don’t encourage people to come back when there are no schools or adequate day care.” Pre-storm, Contesse taught an average of thirty students at her seminars on intellectual property. Could she even draw a class of ten if she moved back to New Orleans right now? “I love my community like everyone else, but it’s not fair what you’re asking of people,” Contesse said.

  “This is where we chose to live,” Tangee said. “This is where all of us chose to live.”

  Seeking a safer subject, they talked of the good things going on in the East. Tangee told them about Rodney’s Snowball opening on Lake Forest Boulevard and a Super Cajun, which at least meant decent takeout. “And who’s eating there?” Cassandra asked. Driving around earlier that day, she had seen maybe three trailers in her subdivision of seventy-five homes. Contesse had also been shocked by how little activity she saw when she visited her neighborhood on a Saturday. “A few people repairing roofs,” Contesse said. “A few trailers but few people actually living—”

  “I’m living out there,” Tangee interjected. “There’s a lot more activity than she’s saying.”

  “Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m there two or three times a week,” Contesse said. “I’ve lived there since 1988, I know what my neighbors are thinking.” Contesse brought up the displeasure she felt toward Tangee as one of those working to block the rebuilding of the apartment buildings along the interstate. “That’s discrimination,” Contesse charged. “You can’t say the homeowners deserve the right to return but not the people in the apartments.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this gloom-and-doom talk!” Tangee exclaimed. The media and the politicians were bad enough, but her sisters had joined the naysayers. “We need to give people hope, not tell them everything that might be wrong,” Tangee said. The day before, she had been at the big New Orleans East neighborhood meeting organized by planners working with Lambert. “They put forward a wonderful plan.” Tangee told them about the better class of retailer they would draw to the area and also the higher-caliber restaurants. “And that’s not a fight I’m willing to run from.”

  Several sisters chimed in at once, but Contesse kept talking until the others were silent. She reminded them of her community involvement over the years and caused snickers when she claimed, not for the first time, that the idea for Eastern New Orleans United and Whole was hers, not Tangee and Robyn’s. (“With Contesse, it’s always me, me, me,” Petie later said.) “I’ve always been very outspoken,” Contesse said. “I’ve always been politically active. But I’m being practical.”

  Normally, Tangee plays peacemaker, but she was one of the main combatants. Robyn stepped into the breach: “No one is saying the East is coming back tomorrow. No one is saying the East is coming back next year. But I think we can all agree the East will be back in five years. And I for one am going to do my part to see that it comes back as someplace we’d all want to live.”

  “And what
do you do during those five years?” Contesse asked.

  Robyn: “I live in my house.”

  Petie: “You live in your house and be happy you’re home and you stop complaining.”

  One of the sisters growled in a playful way to suggest a catfight, prompting a burst of giggles. Contesse, however, was not in a laughing mood. Her voice louder, her tone stentorian, she said, “You’re still talking individuals. I’m talking community. I’m talking about looking at the greater good.”

  RAY NAGIN SLIPPED BACK into his Katrina wear with the media in town in anticipation of the one-year anniversary. The mayor donned a red, short-sleeved polo for a tour of the Lower Ninth for 60 Minutes. Nagin was probably aiming to play the role of the leader who has everything under control, but even he seemed shocked by the lack of progress there. The Lower Ninth in August 2006 looked as bad as it had when 60 Minutes was there in October 2005.

  Nagin started Ray-Raying about the bulldozers and property rights and the delays these fights were causing, but the reporter assigned the story, CBS’s Byron Pitts, cut him off. Pitts pointed to the flood-damaged cars lining the road and a splintered home with only a small corner of its roof still intact—objects that could have been cleared months earlier without a complaint. A defensive Nagin tried to appear nonchalant, but his words would echo for days on cable and elsewhere: “That’s all right. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later.” “New Orleans Mayor Takes a Swipe at NYC,” read a CBS press release that guaranteed Nagin’s inelegant words would overshadow talk of New Orleans twelve months after the storm. “I meant no disrespect for anyone,” Nagin explained on that week’s Meet the Press. But he would refuse to apologize, earning the mayor a stern lecture from Tim Russert about what the country owed those who lost family members on that hallowed ground.

  Closer to home, Nagin pontificated on the future of some of New Orleans’s neighborhoods in a sit-down with the Times-Picayune’s Gordon Russell for a big anniversary piece they would be running in the Sunday paper. “New Orleans East is showing some signs [of recovery], but it’s vast, it’s going to hit the wall,” Nagin said. “There’s just such a big footprint, I don’t think they’re going to get the clustering they need. So I think you’re going to have little pockets in the East.” He was more pessimistic about the Lower Ninth: “I’ve been saying this publicly, and people are starting to hear it: low-lying areas of New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward, stay away from.” Nagin singled out the area north of Claiborne Avenue by the levee breach: “We can’t touch that.” At a press conference that same week, he offered this advice to the citizens of New Orleans: “You can’t wait on government. You have to figure out a way to partner with your neighbors.” Then, sounding more fortune cookie than mayor, he added, “The road to recovery is long and arduous.”

  Nagin was traveling a lot—too much according to some. There was even a rumor that the mayor had moved to Dallas, where his wife was still living a year after Katrina. No one could begrudge the mayor his flights to Washington, but he also made fund-raising trips to Baton Rouge, Philadelphia, and New York, according to a website called wheresnagin .com. A local radio talk-show host took to referring to the mayor as “Ray Nay-gone.” A new Onion-like publication, the New Orleans Levee, ran a Ray Nagin version of Where’s Waldo?

  Nagin post-Katrina was a man without allies and with few friends. The first three years of his tenure had been marked by breakfast meetings at Le Pavillon with the likes of Joe Canizaro and dinners with representatives of the business elite at Clancy’s, where tuxedo-clad waiters served the Uptown royals their shrimp rémoulade and crawfish étouffée. Forget Ron Forman—the “so-called friend who ran against me,” as Nagin put it on the campaign trail. The two saw one another around town, but Forman described their encounters as civil but brief. “He was always cool Ray: ‘Hey, man, how you doing?’ A high five, maybe a hug,” Forman said. There’d be no contact between Nagin and Jimmy Reiss, and it was over with Nagin’s former friends from the Business Council.

  It didn’t need to end between the mayor and Bill Hines, who had helped run the mayor’s 2002 transition team. The managing partner at the city’s largest law firm, Hines was an old-fashioned Rockefeller Republican who pushed a pro-business agenda but was otherwise liberal on most issues. He was a generous philanthropist who could be counted on to support any effort that had as its goal helping the less fortunate. Voluble and fun-loving, intent on eating each day the best New Orleans had to offer, Hines was in the business of getting along with everyone. He would see former mayor Marc Morial at a Hornets game—at least when the city had a professional basketball team (the Hornets would play their home games in Oklahoma City for two seasons after Katrina)III—and give him a hug hello, scandalizing his Uptown friends. Hines and his wife had gone out with Nagin and Seletha during the first term, but any semblance of a friendship ended after Hines threw his support to Mitch Landrieu. Despite Hines’s efforts, he and Nagin were now just nodding acquaintances. “I think Ray lumped me in with the rest of the white business community and that was that,” Hines said.

  David White had stuck by Nagin. “Probably Ray Nagin’s only real friend,” Ron Forman said. Yet White was also shy, and his relationship with the high-profile Nagin put him closer to the spotlight. Money was also a complicating factor. “I didn’t really get involved in city politics in Ray’s second term,” White said.

  The rest of Nagin’s inner circle was also disintegrating. Greg Meffert resigned that summer. The two hadn’t known one another before Nagin offered him a top job in his administration, but within several years they were vacationing together with their wives and kids. They were in Hawaii in 2004 and Jamaica a couple of months after Katrina. “We were daredevils, action junkies, whatever you want to call it; that’s why we got closer than anybody else,” Meffert said. “Otherwise, there was very little I have in common with the dude.” Meffert had never made it a secret that the $150,000 a year he was earning as a top mayoral aide was nothing compared to what he could command in the private sector. In a farewell press release, Nagin described Meffert as “instrumental in our recovery and revitalization.”

  Nagin hired a white woman named Donna Addkison to retool his executive team after Meffert left. Addkison had been the deputy chief of staff to a Mississippi governor. Nagin charged her with running about half the city bureaucracy. She would be gone after a year. About the only top person left from Nagin’s pre-Katrina days was Brenda Hatfield, the old friend he had brought in to serve as his chief of staff after his first two picks washed out.

  “I don’t know if Ray ever recovered from the hurricane,” said Ron Forman. “He seemed a real lonely figure in his second term without anyone to really talk to.”

  RAY NAGIN CLAIMED NEW ORLEANS had a population of roughly 250,000 at the one-year anniversary—a little over half of its pre-Katrina population. Entergy, however, claimed they were delivering power to only eighty thousand customers that summer, including trailers—barely 40 percent of its pre-storm load. The post office estimated that New Orleans was a city of 171,000—37 percent of its population before Katrina.

  Most every part of the city had electricity, gas, and sewer service. Drinkable water was available everywhere but the Lower Ninth and small pockets around the city. Yet not until November 2006 could Nagin announce that every part of New Orleans had working sewers, drinkable water, phones, and power. Even then, he couldn’t make any promises. The water system was a sieve: because of thousands of cracks in the lines, the city was pumping 130 million gallons to deliver 50 million gallons of drinking water to customers, the Times-Picayune’s Michelle Krupa found, at a cost of $200,000 a day. But at least residents could count on water when they turned on the faucet. The city’s gas and electric company, Entergy, was in bankruptcy and claiming $680 million in storm losses. The Bush administration had already rejected its request for a taxpayer bailout, and the utility was threatening a 25 percent rate increase without stat
e aid from Baton Rouge. Twenty-one months after Katrina, Louisiana would give the company $172 million in aid through its community development block grant program. Meanwhile, blackouts were frequent in a jury-rigged power system sensitive to overloads and even the weather.

  The city had made progress. A baler had crushed three hundred thousand ruined refrigerators into one-ton, rectangular-shaped cubes and sold them for scrap. The Corps and its contractors had begun to remove the tens of thousands of abandoned cars littering the city’s streets. Yet even as the Corps did its job, the trash continued to pile up as more people cleaned out their homes. The Corps shipped in giant shredders for the ruined Sheetrock, soaked furniture, and the other detritus the city was kicking to the curb. That helped reduce the volume, but the garbage still needed to end up somewhere. In February, with the city’s landfills filling up, Nagin issued a temporary six-month permit allowing for a dump site along the border of the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, on the eastern edge of New Orleans East. That led to another battle. The proposed dump was down the road from the Village de L’Est, whose residents blockaded the road until Nagin agreed he wouldn’t extend the temporary permit. That left the city scrambling to find alternatives.

  People around the city were getting sick from mold. The “Katrina cough,” locals called it—a dry, persistent hack brought on by mold spores and other irritants in the air. To John Biguenet, a local playwright who had more than four feet of water in his home, people who had endured a year of Katrina couldn’t fully enjoy a movie or a favorite TV show. “People lost their ability to let go and allow themselves to fully inhabit another character,” Biguenet said. On Sundays, Biguenet and his neighbors would gather at what some called the Pretend Café. They’d brew their coffee at home, take a folding chair and the paper, and head for Fair Grinds Coffeehouse, though the popular Mid-City café was still closed. During these weekly gripe sessions, Biguenet usually carped about his insurance company and the frustrations of starting over again with a new claims adjuster. He remembered six or seven adjusters, but his wife swears they went through nine in twelve months. “We were like traumatized war victims,” Biguenet said. “You don’t realize how strange things are when you’re in the middle of it.”