Katrina: After the Flood (25 page)

“That was the meeting where we scared everybody so bad,” Nagin said, “I felt obliged to tell them it was okay if they didn’t want to come back for meeting number two.”

The most daunting moment for Bollinger came when fellow commissioner Dan Packer, the CEO of Entergy New Orleans, rose to talk about the city’s electric and gas systems. Packer told them about the ruined substations, switchyards, and power plants and confessed that the utility had no idea when they might be able to restore power in much of the rest of the city. He also said it was too early to tell how many tens of miles of cracked gas lines they would need to replace. First they needed to flush out the salt water corroding a system that was more than a century old.

Marcia St. Martin gave a similarly dire presentation. Her agency may have pulled off a miracle when it dewatered the city in three weeks, but that was only step one in fixing a devastated water and sewer system. Just prior to the storm, St. Martin had instructed her people to open the valves and dump raw sewage into the Mississippi. The decision, while controversial, was smart given the flooding, but one month later, sixty-six of the pump-and-lift stations her agency used to move wastewater were still not operational. Her people were installing temporary pumps and generators around the city, but meanwhile, whatever people flushed down the toilet—“untreated product,” St. Martin called it—was still being dumped in the river. The agency’s two waste-treatment plants had been badly damaged, and one of the agency’s two giant water-purification plants was incapacitated. Even the water they were drinking that day at the Sheraton had been trucked from the West Bank.

One-quarter of the city’s police cars had been destroyed in the flooding. More than half its fire engines were lost along with a large percentage of its ambulances. More than 200 of its 272 buses had been destroyed. Each bus would cost around $300,000 to replace unless the city upgraded to hybrids; then the cost would be closer to $500,000. The RTA didn’t lose any of its St. Charles streetcars, but falling tree limbs had destroyed the overhead wiring that powered them. But the two dozen pristine streetcars used on the old Canal Street line the agency had revived only
sixteen months before Katrina were damaged. All twenty-four would need to be refurbished at a cost of nearly $1 million apiece.

The city could count on FEMA to cover a large share of the damage. But the federal law that spells out the rules of disaster assistance, called the Stafford Act, stipulated that the federal government would only reimburse for overtime pay, not base salaries, and capped at $5 million the amount a municipality could borrow to cover its operating expenses. The city had an annual budget of around $500 million and six thousand people on its payroll. The city normally collected an average of $13 million in sales taxes each month, “but we expect that number to be closer to zero for the foreseeable future,” Reggie Zeno, the city’s finance director, told the group. The city’s second-largest source of revenue, property taxes, was also unreliable. The tax was based on the assessed value of a property, but what was a person’s home or business worth in New Orleans East or Lakeview? The parking tickets people wouldn’t be paying in a near-empty city; the taxes New Orleans imposed on the utilities, which were largely out of commission—these and other fees added up to millions more in missing revenues. The city owed payments on more than $300 million in bonds. Yet its only reliable source of funds, Zeno told them, was the $1.5 million Harrah’s was required to pay the city every month even as its casino doors remained closed. Widespread municipal layoffs seemed inevitable.

The bad news kept coming. More than 100 of the public school system’s 128 buildings had seen flooding, including the district’s headquarters. The commissioners also learned that the city was without a criminal justice system. The local courts were closed indefinitely and the evidence room flooded. The parish prison took on four feet of water at its main complex, rendering it unusable. Inmates awaiting trial had been dispatched to prisons around the state, where they remained in a holding pattern.
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The city aquarium, one of New Orleans’s leading
tourist attractions, had lost five thousand fish and other creatures in Katrina, and City Park, at thirteen hundred acres one of the country’s largest urban greenspaces, had lost a thousand trees during the storm; another thousand were on the critical list. All trade shows and annual meetings scheduled for New Orleans had been canceled through at least March 31, 2006, in a city third only to Las Vegas and Orlando in convention business.

The city’s damaged flood-control system barely earned a mention that day, but that didn’t make it any less pressing a problem. “As far as I’m concerned, the levee system is the number one issue,” Boysie Bollinger said. “Because if you can’t protect what you’re talking about rebuilding, what’s the use of doing anything?” But Bollinger, a generous donor to the Republican Party, was nothing if not a realist. “In the last hundred years, we’ve had less than five Category Fives hit America,” he said. Could the city reasonably expect the US government to pay for a system strong enough to withstand a Category 5 storm when the city’s list of needs was so long?

Another question no doubt preoccupied many in the room that day: Should the city permit people to rebuild wherever they wanted, even if that meant they were putting themselves in harm’s way again, or should the city ban rebuilding in the lowest-lying parts of the city? Even if they allowed people to rebuild wherever they wanted, would they have the money to promise police, fire, and other city services to the whole city? Once a city of 625,000, New Orleans was down below 500,000 people by Katrina—and who knew if and when the population would get back to even 300,000? “It will be a smaller New Orleans,” Alden McDonald said. “Except no one has decided which part.”

A KIND OF BLUE-SKY
syndrome infected New Orleans after Katrina. To many, a flooded New Orleans meant a blank slate on which to create a new and better city. “Build up, not out” was a familiar mantra voiced in the weeks after Katrina. Entire neighborhoods were being reimagined as parklands, while other parts of the city would be transformed into mini-metropolises thick with condo developments. The mayor used the Bring New Orleans Back Commission to avoid voicing any opinion on
the city’s future. “We’ve put a process in place,” he repeated. “Now let that process work.”

For residents, though, the mayor’s commission seemed one more irritant to endure. People’s displeasure was a constant on WWL, which was still the only radio station operating in New Orleans. Ann Marie was on the line from Gentilly, carping to talk-show host Garland Robinette about the mayor’s putting their lives on collective hold for at least three more months. One heard the frustration when the Wall sisters and their neighbors gathered on Monday evenings at True Light Baptist. “We’re not pieces on a chessboard for people to play with,” boomed a speaker at one early meeting at True Light Baptist.

Would Lakeview be included on a citywide “do not resuscitate” list? And even if not, what would the neighborhood be like if only half its residents chose to rebuild? Two people not waiting to find out were Artie Folse and Tonja Osborne. Every day, Folse and his eighty-year-old father showed up at their house in Lakeview. Working eight- and ten-hour days, they cleared out the ruined furniture and other debris before turning to the mold. “You scrubbed, bleached, and let everything dry out—and then did it again,” Folse said.

Five weeks after they started, Folse and his father started to rebuild. Tired of driving back and forth across the bridge to their temporary perch in the West Bank, Folse, who was fifty-three, camped out in a bedroom on the second floor, though technically he was in violation of the mayor’s look-and-leave policy. “The first thing we did was put in a hot-water heater so I could wash up,” Folse said. Let some blue-ribbon commission tell them Lakeview should revert to swampland. By the time the mayor’s commission would get around to making any grand pronouncements, Folse, Osborne, and other like-minded pioneers scattered around the flooded zone would have invested tens of thousands of dollars in their homes. Declaring any part of the city off-limits to redevelopment would mean destroying homes for a second time.

FREDDY YODER DIDN’T PLAN
on giving a speech at the big rally some of his Lakeview neighbors had organized near the breach in the Seventeenth Street Canal. But even the elected officials who spoke that
day weren’t providing answers. “People were desperate for information,” Yoder said. “They were desperate for some semblance of hope. And they were getting neither from their government.” Would people need a city permit to start gutting their houses? The answer was no, but the question elicited an ambiguous response. Whose job was it to cart away the ruined insides of their homes? Yoder knew the Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for the cleanup, but the person posing the question was told, “I don’t know.” So in front of a crowd he estimated at five hundred people, Yoder stood up to share what he knew.

Yoder was president of Durr Heavy Construction, one of the largest construction companies in the New Orleans metro area. His firm laid the sewer and drainage lines in the city’s public housing projects; they installed water and electrical systems in buildings throughout the region. In the aftermath of Katrina, no one needed Yoder for the kind of underground systems that were Durr’s specialty, but his firm owned trucks and other heavy equipment. A call from Phillips & Jordan, one of the big multinationals hired by the federal government to help with the cleanup, proved a double payday for Yoder, a past president of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association and still a member of the organization’s board. “I was hired to do all of the storm-recovery work in Lakeview,” Yoder said. “Helped with the dewatering, pushed aside debris, removed vegetation, picked up debris, hauled it to the landfill.”

Yoder is heavyset with sleepy eyes and a matter-of-fact attitude even toward the eight feet of water that covered his neighborhood for weeks. “To me Katrina was just something you’d have to get past,” he said. At the rally, he answered people’s questions, but more important, he reminded the community that it had the resources, the pull, and the drive to survive. “Don’t let anyone tell you Lakeview isn’t coming back,” he told his neighbors. “We’re coming back and stronger than ever.”

A WEEK AFTER THE
city’s finance director laid out the grim news for the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Nagin held a press conference to announce he was laying off half the city’s workforce—nearly three thousand people. Each of the laid-off employees would receive three months’ pay, dating back to the day of the storm. “We’ve talked to local banks
and other financial institutions, and we are just not able to put together the financing necessary to continue to maintain our City Hall staffing at its current levels,” the mayor told reporters. Most of those laid off were clerical and support staff, so the city was cutting closer to one-third its personnel expenses rather than half. One exception was the Planning Department. At a time the city seemed desperate for experienced planners, the mayor shrank that department from thirty-six to eight.

All seven-thousand-plus employees of the Orleans Parish schools were placed on what the district called “disaster leave without pay” and then laid off en masse. That meant more than ten thousand public employees, a large portion of them black, were out of jobs at the same time most were also without a home. Layoff notices had been sent to people’s pre-Katrina addresses and directed teachers seeking an appeal to show up at an office that had been closed since the flood. Teachers had contracts and most were tenured, yet the authorities maintained no recall list. Teachers were free to apply for a job when new schools reopened, but no one would be guaranteed a position, no matter what his or her seniority. A lawsuit filed by teachers would drag through the courts for years.

The city looked to Baton Rouge for help, but it was New Orleans’s further misfortune to need the state when officials were reeling not just from Katrina but also Rita. The twin strikes meant disaster zones in both the southeast and southwest corners of the state that flooded a combined 125,000 homes. New Orleans would need to share whatever money the feds disbursed through the state with more than a dozen other parishes. Workers who had lost a job because of Rita or relocated to someplace outside the state meant tens of millions more in lost state income tax. Fewer cash registers operating in the southwest corner of the state meant millions more in missing sales tax money. Greg Albrecht, the chief economist for the state’s Legislative Fiscal Office, calculated that the two storms added up to nearly $1 billion in lost revenue.

Citing a state statute that dictated that a governor must keep her budget in balance, Blanco, at the start of October, summoned legislators to Baton Rouge for an emergency legislative session. Then even before they arrived, she announced more than $400 million in unilateral cuts, including the entire budget of New Orleans’s Charity Hospital. Charity had suffered relatively minor damage, but keeping the hospital closed
saved the state tens of millions of dollars. “Charity’s patients aren’t in the city,” Blanco rationalized. “They’re in Houston or Philadelphia.” Blanco proposed that the state cover the remaining $600 million deficit by dipping into its reserves and issuing bonds.

The emergency session proved another blow to a governor whose approval rating had already fallen from a pre-storm 55 percent to 38 percent. Blanco took flak from Republicans, who charged that she didn’t go far enough in making cuts, but her left flank was what worried aides. The governor had good relations with the legislature’s black caucus, but several days into the two-week special session, they sued, charging Blanco with breaking the law when she slashed the state budget without legislative approval. “In this tragic time, we can’t balance the budget on the backs of poor people and the backs of the very people displaced,” said Representative Cedric Richmond, who represented parts of New Orleans in the state legislature. No one questioned the governor’s claim that Charity’s patients were living elsewhere, but members of the black caucus and others argued many couldn’t come home without a hospital for the working poor and others without insurance. Charity would remain closed while their suit worked its way through the courts.