Katrina: After the Flood (19 page)

No big housing projects were in this part of town, where almost everyone seemed to live in a house built by a parent or a grandparent if not ancestors dating back further than that. Homeownership was high in the Lower Ninth—higher than most other places in the city. Most people had a job, even if a low-paying one at one of the city’s hotels or kitchens. The place was more hardscrabble working class (with a ghastly high crime rate: its homicide rate was twice that of a city that ranked as one of the country’s most murderous), but to the wider world, the Lower Ninth might have seemed little different from a run-down slum on the edge of a third-world city. “It was just distasteful being called a ‘refugee’ on American soil and ‘the poor, poor people of the Lower Ninth Ward,’ ” said Ronald Lewis, a retired streetcar repairman from the Lower Ninth who lost his home in Katrina. “We weren’t even given credit for being working-class people.”

After Katrina the area’s residents were scattered around the country and reeling. “Nothing out here can be saved. At all,” said New Orleans’s homeland security director, Terry Ebbert, a former colonel in the Marines, of the Lower Ninth Ward two weeks after Katrina in an interview with the
New York Times
. Even the mayor piled on when he incorrectly said of the Lower Ninth, “I don’t think it can ever be what it was, because it’s the lowest-laying area.” A week later, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson delivered the area’s death sentence after a meeting with Nagin in New Orleans. “I told him I think it would be a mistake to rebuild the Ninth Ward,” Jackson said. Most of New Orleans had flooded, yet the world fixated on the future of this small, two-square-mile patch.

Charmaine Marchand, who represented the Lower Ninth in the state legislature, was among the few people sticking up for the area. Marchand was a child of the Lower Ninth, raised by a schoolteacher and a mailman, a single mother who had put herself through law school
working as a paralegal. Standing not quite five feet tall, she had been representing the area in the state legislature since 2004. Marchand had been behind the wheel driving her son, her parents, a brother, and other family members to Houston the day before Katrina. She then had ordered everyone back in the car once she learned about the Lower Ninth flooding and headed to Baton Rouge.

Marchand spent those first days in the state’s Emergency Operations Center, helping organize the efforts to rescue people trapped in the Ninth Ward or surrounding communities. “We’ve got people calling from a rooftop and I’m guiding the helicopters,” she said. Her next big job was helping residents find missing family members. People who had been rescued from the Superdome or Convention Center were put on airplanes or buses. Often they didn’t know where they were headed until they were in transit. “I asked FEMA who was keeping the names of people in the different shelters, and FEMA said Red Cross,” Marchand said. “When I asked Red Cross, they said FEMA.”

Marchand needed to find a school for her son, who was about to start high school. Her father had Parkinson’s and was exhibiting the early signs of dementia. He needed specialists, as did her brother, whom she described as bipolar and depressed. “I’m figuring out doctors for everybody,” she said. “I’m finding us a place to live.” But she was also the only elected official who lived in the Lower Ninth at the time of Katrina.

Marchand had too much to do in Baton Rouge when one day a couple of weeks after Katrina she pointed her car toward New Orleans. Like everyone else, she was hearing talk about giving up on the Lower Ninth. “I literally sat outside Mayor Nagin’s room at the Hyatt, with the windows blown out and everything, until he’d meet with me,” Marchand said. “To get him to confirm our right to rebuild our community, just like everyone else.” She’d get enough of a promise out of him to get on television “and tell everyone of the commitment the mayor had just made.” Then she watched in the coming weeks as the mayor flip-flopped on the future of the Lower Ninth, depending on his audience.

WITH RITA BLOWN OVER,
Ray Nagin again pushed to repopulate. This time, though, he avoided another confrontation with Washington by
initiating a more gradual plan. “We’re not asking people to come back who have a lot of kids, a lot of senior citizens,” the mayor said at a press conference. “That’s going to be the reality of New Orleans moving forward.” He urged all business owners to come home, but otherwise he would reopen New Orleans neighborhood by neighborhood by zip code. The city would start by welcoming people back to Algiers. Once the mayor and his people had a chance to assess progress, they’d give a date for officially reopening the French Quarter, Uptown, and other dry patches of the city. Those living in parts of the city that had flooded would be allowed in the city under a program Nagin called Look and Leave. These residents would be permitted to work on their homes but not sleep on their property overnight. In another nod to Washington, the mayor announced a daily dusk-to-dawn curfew—a mandate that went largely unenforced, just like his staged repopulation of dry parts of New Orleans.
^II

The city distributed brochures so that people knew the risks they were taking. It recommended that people get a tetanus shot before returning to a city that had little medical care to offer and advised them to drink bottled water until further notice. “Standing water and soil might be seriously contaminated,” the city warned, so one should wash as soon as possible with an antibacterial soap if exposed. The sewer system, the brochure said delicately, was “compromised” (most of the city’s toilets were still not working), and federal authorities were quoted as suggesting people limit their exposure to mold by wearing masks, gloves, and other protective gear.

Police headquarters had flooded. So, too, had the crime lab, the evidence room, and the local jail. The police brass moved its operation from the driveway of Harrah’s to the Royal Sonesta, a stylish Bourbon Street hotel with marble floors and a lobby fountain. Until further notice, the city’s bus and rail station served as the city’s makeshift jail. The state dispatched flatbeds of chain-link fencing to the city, and where buses would normally be loading and unloading passengers, the National Guard built a series of makeshift holding cells, each topped with razor wire. Camp Greyhound, the guards and inmates dubbed it.

The city’s police force was in shambles. About one-third of the force went AWOL during Katrina, the department acknowledged. Hundreds faced disciplinary charges. Yet New Orleans in those first months after Katrina might have been one of the safest spots on earth. In normal times, about fifteen hundred police officers patrolled a city of 450,000. Post-Katrina, somewhere around fifteen thousand National Guardsmen were in a largely deserted city.

Cops who had lost their homes, like other essential city and parish personnel, were generally assigned to one of two cruise ships docked on the Mississippi near the Convention Center. FEMA had agreed to pay Carnival Cruise Lines $236 million to borrow for six months a pair of ships named
Sensation
and
Ecstasy
. The police were assigned cabins on the latter of the two ships, which meant endless jokes about cops on ecstasy. “It was weirdly an okay experience,” said Linda Santi, who worked for the city. Those months they spent together had a communal feel something like college, except everyone had a private berth and the food was better. The bosses were mainly still in Baton Rouge, where most of the directors, assistant directors, and top City Hall aides retreated pre-storm. Inside the Capitol Annex, a handsome, six-story building across the street from the capitol, New Orleans had set up a kind of government in exile. They were there at the invitation of Mitch Landrieu, the state’s lieutenant governor and also son of Moon Landrieu and younger brother to Senator Mary Landrieu. Mitch Landrieu worked on the building’s top floor. The city’s chief administrative officer was given an office near Landrieu’s, while other department heads worked wherever they could find an empty desk. Economic development set up shop on the second floor, finance on the third.

New Orleans had few residents, but it was anything but a ghost town. The center of the city could seem crowded, with soldiers in uniform, countless government officials, and virtual battalions of middle-aged white men wearing tucked-in polos bearing the name of their cleanup company or demolition business. By Sally Forman’s rough count, three weeks after Katrina more than a thousand media people were in town. Yet to venture out beyond the central business district was to encounter a dead city. There were no people and no cars and none of the normal ambient sounds, such as the rumble of a passing bus or children playing. The view at night was even more stark. The streetlights were working in the French Quarter, the central business district, and Uptown, but the rest of the city was a black void.

A permanent stench infected New Orleans, even parts that had remained dry—like a seaside community near the end of summer, except that the brackish smell was mixed, not with the odor of rotting alewives, but with hints of oil, sewage, rancid meat, and death. Decaying human bodies were cooking in the intense New Orleans heat along with those of cats, dogs, and other animals that had been caught in the flooding. The surviving dogs only added to the strangeness of the city back then. These weren’t roaming bands of mangy beasts but abandoned pets looking emaciated. Cars routinely drove the wrong way down one-way streets, sometimes because people didn’t care or because a tree blocked the way. Often it was because people didn’t know where they were going in a city that had lost many of its street signs. Around town, blue-and-white newspaper boxes that had not been destroyed by the flood displayed the August 28
Times-Picayune
, with its prescient front page: “Katrina Takes Aim.”

The airport reopened to commercial flights fifteen days after Katrina, but where once Louis Armstrong International boasted nearly two hundred departures a day, it was down to thirty. The few open hotels seemed like armed fortresses. Typical was the Sheraton, a giant rectangle rising forty-nine floors above Canal Street. Though often it felt as if more soldiers were on the streets than civilians, for security the Sheraton hired Blackwater USA, which placed hulking slabs of beef dressed in black at its entrances, armed with AR-15 assault rifles. Rooms were cleaned only sporadically, but in other ways it was still a Sheraton,
including a twenty-four-hour hotel channel advertising restaurants and clubs that sat boarded up and closed to the public.

Meals tended to be utilitarian. A town known for its food had virtually no restaurants. At the Royal Sonesta, for instance, those first weeks after Katrina, dinner tended to be from the jars of peanut butter the management left out, along with bread, green apples, utensils, and paper plates. For the FBI agents, FEMA workers, and other government employees, the Salvation Army truck was another option. The bars of Bourbon Street opened immediately after Rita (and stayed open late, despite the curfew orders), followed by the strip clubs. Rarely was a city as overwhelmingly male as New Orleans was following Katrina, and never more so than on Bourbon Street, crowded with disaster specialists and construction workers and muscular US marshals with guns strapped to their waist.

THE CITY’S NUMBER ONE
priority was dewatering. Only then could officials remove the remaining dead bodies and assess the damage. New Orleans had a wondrous system for pumping water out of the city, but its giant pumps, each around the size of a locomotive engine, were useless without electricity.

The Army Corps of Engineers had estimated that it would take eighty days to drain the 250 billion gallons of water the experts estimated covered greater New Orleans. In that timetable, the city wouldn’t start cleaning up the worst-hit areas until at least Thanksgiving. But the Corps’ engineers had made their calculations based on the capabilities of the portable pumps the federal government had shipped to the area. The chief engineer of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, the agency responsible for the interconnected network of drainage canals and pumping stations that kept this low-lying city livable, dismissed them as “Tinkertoy pumps.” They were so small, he said, that it was like “going to the seashore with a soda straw and trying to empty it.”

The city would drain in just under three weeks rather than the almost three months the Corps had said it would take.

The Corps deserved some of the credit. Their main task after Katrina was fixing breaches in the levees, but some of its people had experience
cobbling together electrical systems on a battlefield, which proved invaluable. Water agencies from around the country also pitched in, loaning the city pumps and personnel. The Water Bureau of Portland, Oregon, alone sent sixty employees to New Orleans after Katrina. Luck was also a factor. The city’s largest pump stood at the edge of the flood zone and close enough to the neighboring parish for a team to jury-rig lines to a working electrical switching station. Eight days after Katrina, the first pumps coughed back to life. There was always some burp—large chunks of storm debris, a leaky gearbox—but the city was slowly draining.

Yet mainly credit goes to the ridiculously named New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board. “Ours is an agency with a storied past,” said Marcia St. Martin, who had taken over as executive director of the Sewerage and Water Board two years earlier. Some of its pumps ran on aging motors designed by Thomas Edison, and A. Baldwin Wood had been among its employees. “We have people whose fathers and grandfathers worked here. It’s in their blood,” said St. Martin, who is black. The agency stationed people inside pumping stations and other facilities around the city, but despite the flooding, not a single one abandoned his or her post.
^III

About half of St. Martin’s staff of three hundred slept in the bunk rooms of pumping stations or power plants around the city. The rest stayed on the other side of the river at the big water-purification plant the agency operated on the West Bank. They had large stores of food and other supplies there, along with backup generators and plenty of fuel. To help it feel more like a base camp, St. Martin dispatched trucks and crews to the homes of anyone living in a dry part of town. They picked
up barbecues and sleeping bags along with refrigerators and washers and dryers. They’d set up one area for washing clothes and another for cooking. By the second week, FEMA had driven in food-service trucks along with tents and a laundry trailer.