Katrina: After the Flood (40 page)

Adding to everyone’s sense of doom were the news reports questioning the competence of the Army Corps of Engineers—the same Corps overseeing the levee repairs. Two independent forensic science teams had been investigating the cause of the flooding. One headed by a pair of Berkeley professors uncovered any number of mistakes at the hands of the Corps and the private contractors whose work they were responsible for monitoring. Sections of floodwall had been built on sand, clay, and marshland, which, one engineer offered, was like “putting bricks on Jell-O.” In some cases, the contractors hired to do the work had not dug down deep enough. Dr. Raymond Seed, a professor of engineering at Berkeley and coauthor of the resulting report, would call the failure of the storm system “the worst engineering disaster in the world since Chernobyl.” Team Louisiana was nearly as harsh. They concluded that if not for design flaws by the Corps, New Orleans would have experienced no more than a day of mild street flooding. Spokespeople for the Corps defended an agency that dates back to the Revolutionary War—until its own people released a six-thousand-page report confirming many of the outsiders’ criticisms. “This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, ‘We’ve had a catastrophic failure,’ ” said Lieutenant General Carl Strock, the commander of the Corps.

“Mad City,” read the headline over a column by the
Times-Picayune
’s Chris Rose. Chatting with his “fidgety glassy-eyed neighbors,” he wrote, he found himself in line at a pharmacy speaking as if waiting for a table at one of the city’s better restaurants: How’s the Valium looking today? The Xanax didn’t agree with you last week? I’m thinking of ordering the Paxil. “Everybody’s got it, this thing, this affliction,” Rose wrote. “This affinity for forgetfulness, absentmindedness, confusion, laughing in inappropriate circumstances, crying when the wrong song comes on the radio.”

Yet ten months after Katrina, the local mental health system was still in near collapse. Suicides tripled in the months after Katrina. A fifty-three-year-old filmmaker took his own life as did an Uptown physician, who left behind a wife and children. Two parents with young children at the Academy of the Sacred Heart on St. Charles took their
lives within a couple of weeks of each other. Brobson Lutz, a doctor whom
New Orleans
magazine labeled the “city surgeon general” a few years before Katrina, worried about the health of those who had moved back to New Orleans. Yet it wasn’t airborne contagions or toxins in the soil that concerned this former public health director. “I have said from the beginning that the mental health concerns here are far greater than those we can expect from infectious diseases,” Lutz told the
Times-Picayune
’s Chris Rose.

THE RTA HAD A
little more than half its employees back when the agency started debating whether to resume limited bus service to Gentilly, to the Ninth Ward, and other parts of the city where small pockets of people had moved home. Barbara Major, named to the RTA board by Nagin in 2002, was among those arguing that the RTA had a central role to play in the repopulation of damaged parts of the city. “How can we expect these working-class communities to ever come back if we don’t provide people with bus service?” asked Major.

RTA chairman Jimmy Reiss opposed offering bus service in places where there were so few people. With ridership down 75 percent ten months after Katrina, they didn’t have the money. The agency was surviving only due to help from the federal government. “My job was to right-size the organization so its survival wasn’t dependent on continued outside funding, which I knew would eventually be going away,” Reiss said. “And she wants to run lines out to New Orleans East, where there was nobody.” His priority, Reiss announced, was “running buses in the core because people need to catch a goddamn bus or streetcar to get to work.”

At their monthly meeting, Reiss told his fellow board members that an outside consultant group had told him they needed to lay people off. Major responded with a speech about the teachers and city employees and others already fired. “The black middle class can’t take another blow,” she continued. A frustrated Reiss said they didn’t have the money to run empty buses in deserted parts of the city. In response, Reiss said, “Barbara unleashed a racial diatribe at me publicly. So I called for us to go into executive session. She continued to rant and rave about racial issues. So I just walked out.”

Major had already spoken to Nagin. “I’m getting rid of Jimmy Reiss,” she told him. The mayor didn’t defend his RTA chairman but instead asked, “Do you have the votes?” She did, she said. She quotes the mayor as telling her, “Then go for it, tiger.” The part she left unsaid was that she was only doing what Nagin should have done months ago. “If he won’t, I’ll man up and do it,” she joked with friends.

There was no showdown. Reiss called Nagin the day after he walked out of the executive session. The mayor didn’t return his call so the next day he sent Nagin an e-mail. When that, too, went unanswered, Reiss resigned via a letter he sent to the
Times-Picayune
. “I basically gave up everything I was doing for five years to run the agency for the people who needed the transit, most of whom were poor and black,” Reiss said. “I decided I wasn’t going to take it anymore. So I quit.”

“CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’RE ONE OF
the first ten families in all of Lakeview!” a police officer told Connie Uddo. It was January 2006 and Uddo, her husband, Mark, and their two children had just moved back into their flooded home. The cop had seen lights on in the house and the next day knocked on the door. He was trying to make her feel good but his words caused her to cry. Nearly eight thousand homes in Lakeview, and they were one of the ten families crazy enough to move back.

“Everything smelled,” Uddo said. “It was disgusting. I was miserable.”

The Uddos had escaped to Houston ahead of Katrina. They stayed those first weeks after the storm in Kingwood, a suburb forty minutes north of the city. They lived with one of her husband’s cousins until Uddo found them a borrowed home. They enrolled their kids in the local schools and found an apartment. Yet not a week after moving into their third temporary home, they’d moved into a fourth when Uddo’s sister found them a place closer to home, in Mandeville, Louisiana, only thirty miles from New Orleans. The only catch was they needed to be out of the house by mid-December. That meant doubling up for a week or two with Uddo’s sister’s family so the kids could finish the semester. Just before Christmas, they moved Uptown into Uddo’s mother-in-law’s house—their sixth address in four months.

Back in New Orleans, Mark Uddo tried to convince his wife they
were among the lucky ones. They owned a three-story home and rented out the bottom floor to a pair of tenants. They had taken on seven feet of water, but nothing reached the top two floors, where they lived. Their tenants were the ones who’d lost all their belongings. An electrician said that he could restore power in their house, and Country Day, the private school where Mark worked as a chef, was eager to get him back into the kitchen. Only a few minutes from their Lakeview home, Country Day was opening in time for January classes, as was Mount Carmel Academy, the private Catholic school their daughter attended. One of the city’s top Catholic boys schools was in the next neighborhood over and had an opening. Just before Christmas, they held a family meeting to talk about moving home.

Mark was eager to get back to Lakeview. They would be close to his work and the kids’ schools. And his back might stop aching. “I’m tired of sleeping on air mattresses,” he declared. The kids said they were tired of living out of boxes. “We miss our home,” both said. Uddo pointed out how depressing it would be to live there, but Stephanie, the fifteen-year-old, offered a rejoinder that left her mother unable to argue the point: “Mom, we’re already depressed. We’re going to be depressed here or depressed there, and I’d rather be depressed in my own bed in my own house.” They’d move back to Lakeview soon after the start of the new year.

Those first months back home were harder than Uddo had imagined. Mark was understaffed in the kitchen and working long hours. One or the other of them would drop off the kids at school and then she’d be by herself. “I was in a kind of survival mode,” she said. “A low-grade depression, just hanging on.” One day while walking the dog she noticed there were no birds. That made her laugh: “Even the birds knew it was too early to come back,” she told herself.

Uddo, who is white, is short and fit with hazel eyes and short, brown hair. Prior to Katrina, she taught tennis at City Park, a few minutes from their home. The flexible work schedule allowed her to stay involved in the lives of her children, yet she resented that she needed to work at all. “I was always telling my husband, ‘You don’t make enough,’ ” Uddo said. They’d go away on vacation—and Uddo would dwell on the second home they couldn’t afford. “I had all this junk around money,” Uddo said.
“Jealous of friends who had it. Scheming to get more.” Now she lived in a home with a boarded-up first floor.

“There was no mail for a year,” she said. “There was no newspaper delivery. There were no stores. There was nothing here. For the longest time, you’d have to go to a different part of the city just for a stick of butter.” A twenty-foot sailboat rested in the yard next to hers with a note: “I’ll come pick it up.” A small motorboat sat for nine months on a train-trestle overpass near her house.

Uddo at least felt a sense of peace when she was inside the house. Everyone’s bedroom was the same as it was before the storm. They were starting to reestablish routines. But around Easter, someone broke into Uddo’s car. “That’s when I wouldn’t sleep,” she said. Her part of the city had no streetlights, and she seemed to read or hear about another looting every day. “I felt like a sitting duck,” she said.

She told Mark, “I can’t do this, I’m afraid for the kids. I’m afraid for myself.” While the rest of them were busy all day, she was walking the neighborhood, alone with her fears. “It felt unsafe, healthwise, all these moldy houses, all these toxins in the soil. I was concerned for what we were breathing,” she said. She told her husband she wanted to sell the Lakeview home and move back to his mother’s until they could formulate a new plan.

Mark could sympathize. “What we don’t realize is how empty our tanks are,” he told his wife. He gets up in the morning, he said, and it’s like he’s starting his day at empty. “We’re physically and emotionally exhausted, and when you’re that way, you just crumble at any small thing.”

But he also appealed to his wife’s practicality. He brought up the kids and how much happier they seemed now that they were back home. His job was intense, but he liked it, and it was only a few minutes from their home. “Do you want to drive from Uptown every day?” he asked her. That would add an hour or two of driving to their days. There would be the strains of once again living perched in someone else’s home, and there were also the economic realities of walking away. Every bit of their net worth was invested in a home that seemed worthless unless they were living in it. Rather than give up on their Lakeview home, he hoped to rehab the first floor so they could fill it with tenants. The renters
pre-Katrina covered two-thirds of the mortgage. “You need to find a purpose, Connie,” he told his wife, “because this is our only option.”

Not long after that conversation with her husband, Uddo spoke to a man who lived a few doors down from them, a doctor traveling regularly to the neighborhood to work on his house. She confessed how vulnerable she felt, and he suggested she host a neighborhood-watch meeting. “Who’ll come, you and me?” she cracked, but organizing a meeting would feel as if she was at least trying. Maybe more people were camping on a second floor or sleeping in a car than she realized. She printed a flyer inviting people for gumbo and wine at the Uddos and walked her small patch of Lakeview, leaving one on the windshield of any car she came across. Thirty-five people showed up on a May evening in her desolate stretch of New Orleans to talk about crime in the community. That included the area’s local police commander,
^I
who came back the next day. “He tells me, ‘Yours is the first organized meeting in Lakeview since the storm, I encourage you to keep going,’ ” she said. The commander suggested she meet Denise Thornton. Thornton lived next door in Lakewood, a pricey enclave of around four hundred homes that also flooded after Katrina.

Thornton, too, was back home despite her better instincts. Her husband, Doug Thornton, was responsible for reopening the Superdome by the start of the next football season. The Thorntons gutted their home a month after Katrina and had power before anyone else in their section of New Orleans. “My husband was connected and I used those connections,” Thornton said. At first they lived upstairs, cooking on a portable stove in a makeshift kitchen, while a crew renovated the ground floor. By Valentine’s Day, their two-story, brick house had been restored, and Thornton hung a banner declaring her home a beacon for the rest of the community. “I wanted a place where neighbors could come to get a drink of water, make a phone call, cool off in the air-conditioning, take a
break from working on their house,” she said. When she spotted a cable guy from Cox on a pole, she begged him to run a line to her house so she could offer visitors Internet access. By the mayoral runoff, she had put in new sod and prettied up her property with flower beds and saplings. “I figured anyone driving back to the city to vote is someone who is coming to see the neighborhood,” she said, so she bought three hundred steaks and threw a block party. Mary Landrieu was one of her guests on that day in May 2006, as was Connie Uddo. “She came over looking all dirty and ugly,” Thornton said of Uddo. “And very depressed.”

Before the storm, Uddo had always steered cleared of politics. She rarely bothered to vote: “I’d be like, ‘They’re all corrupt anyway so why should I bother?’ A very Mardi Gras mentality, I call it. Let’s just have fun, let’s look the other way if things get too serious.” Yet she followed Thornton’s lead and opened her home as an oasis for anyone needing a respite. Thornton had dubbed her home a Beacon of Hope, so they called Uddo’s place a second Beacon and the first inside Lakeview. “I had air-conditioning,” Uddo said. “I had a phone. I had a fax machine and Internet if people needed it.”