Katrina: After the Flood (54 page)

RAY NAGIN WAS FED
up. Here he had a delegation from Congress visiting the city, and on TV, Lee Zurik, the same reporter who had been hounding him about his schedule, was accusing the city of wasting precious dollars through a city agency called NOAH.
^I
The
Times-Picayune
had jumped on the story, as had the ever-ambitious Stacy Head. “The gotcha mode, it’s got to stop,” Nagin demanded at a news conference that summer. Nagin singled out Zurik, whom he called “reckless” for basing his reporting on “amateur investigations.” The mayor didn’t mention her by name, but he was talking about Karen Gadbois.

Gadbois was indeed an amateur, but that made it even more remarkable what she had dug up. Gadbois was a textile artist and an art dealer, not a muckraker, and a newcomer who had moved to New Orleans a few years before Katrina. Her passion wasn’t the local food or music but the city’s brightly painted bungalows, Victorian shotguns, and Creole cottages with crumbling cornices and sagging roofs. On the city’s demolition list were historic homes in her neighborhood that to her eye had suffered minimal structural damage. She created the website Squandered Heritage, which documented her search for answers. Gadbois focused on NOAH because that seemed the one agency that might be able to help. NOAH housed a $3.6 million city program created to gut, clean, and board up the storm-damaged homes of people too poor or too old to take care of the job themselves. Surely officials at NOAH would appreciate the importance of saving some of these structures.

Sifting through the public records, Gadbois noticed that houses NOAH claimed to have gutted were on the city’s bulldoze list. Driving the city in her green Honda Element, she visited hundreds of properties that NOAH claimed to have cleaned up. Only a small portion had been touched. Zurik at WWL-TV and the
Times-Picayune
discovered that NOAH claimed to have gutted homes cleaned out by a church group.
“Completely untrue,” the mayor said of the charges Gadbois, Zurik, and others were leveling at NOAH—and then the FBI raided NOAH’s offices. When three weeks later Nagin appeared before the City Council, he said, “The record keeping we’re finding, with NOAH, is not that good.”
^II

NAGIN WAS IN AN
irritable mood on the morning of the third anniversary of Katrina. A small crowd gathered at a cemetery several miles from City Hall where the bodies of unknown flood victims were buried. There, with the television cameras rolling, Nagin lashed out at those attacking him. People talk about loving New Orleans, he said, but “you go to a blog, or you read something, it’s divisive, it’s hateful, it’s mean-spirited. My question to you is, how can you love New Orleans if you don’t love all of us?”

The National Guard was still patrolling New Orleans three years after Katrina. The visitors bureau could accurately claim that violent crime dropped in 2008, but that’s only because so many murders and armed robberies occurred in 2007. Nine people were shot during the 2008 Mardi Gras, five of them during an argument between two teens outside the big Holiday Inn where the National Guard operated a command post. More than one-third of the city’s homes were still vacant. The last of the FEMA group trailer sites closed in May, but that meant thousands were again living in hotel rooms subsidized by the federal government.

The demographics of the city were changing as Jimmy Reiss and some of his wealthy Uptown friends had hoped. Data from the Social Security Administration showed it was sending out half the number of retirement checks as it did pre-Katrina and making only 40 percent as many disability payments. State figures showed a 50 percent drop in
the number of kids in New Orleans covered by Medicaid. Public school enrollment was still barely half of what it was pre-Katrina. Public transportation ridership was down three-quarters.

Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation the day after the third anniversary. Hurricane Gustav was bearing down on New Orleans, and the National Hurricane Center was warning that it had Category 5 potential. “The mother of all storms,” Nagin declared, potentially larger and more dangerous than Katrina. This time the city made plenty of buses and trains available to those needing help getting out of town. All but ten thousand people left the city ahead of the storm. Gustav ended up a Category 2 storm that veered shortly before reaching New Orleans. The media cast Nagin as Chicken Little. “Next Time, We Won’t Leave,” read the headline over a
Times-Picayune
column
.

The year 2009 proved worse for Nagin than even 2008. A lien was filed against the town house in Dallas. The couple were apparently so far behind in paying their dues that the homeowners association was threatening to auction off the property to collect the $1,500 they owed. In May, the
Times-Picayune
revealed that a city contractor, not Greg Meffert, had paid to send Nagin and his family to Jamaica after Katrina—five first-class tickets costing more than $6,000. That same firm, NetMethods, paid the tab on a trip Nagin’s family took to Hawaii (prior to Katrina) and also leased a private jet to fly Nagin to Chicago for a Saints play-off game against the Bears. Meffert, who accompanied Nagin on all three trips, had brought NetMethods into City Hall to install free Wi-Fi around town as a way of closing the digital divide between black and white. That never happened, but Meffert charged more than $130,000 on a NetMethods American Express card in his last eighteen months on the city payroll. That fall Meffert was indicted on more than forty felony counts.

Nagin’s team continued to dwindle. Not even Blakely stuck around. Despite his vow to stay until his job was done, one year before the end of Nagin’s term, he declared that the city was well into its recovery and patted himself on the back. “The fastest recovery that anyone has ever seen,” he said in his farewell press conference. Six months after moving back to Australia, he told an interviewer that while he believed a little bit of racism was in everyone, “it’s deeper, more viral, more visible, and more
entrenched in New Orleans than any place I’ve ever seen.” This time he focused on what he observed in white New Orleanians: “There’s blood in the water, and they can recapture the political apparatus and kind of put their foot back on black people’s throats.”

Before the storm, Nagin drew consistent approval numbers in the 70 to 80 percent range. A poll taken a few months before Nagin left office, in mid-2010, showed him with an approval rating of 24 percent. “My family can’t wait until I’m out of office,” Nagin told CNN. “My wife has a countdown in her head that she can recite for you anytime you ask.” The station then cut to Seletha: “Seventy-six days, six hours, thirty minutes, and maybe five seconds.” Presumably, her husband’s time in the spotlight would soon be over.

I.
More formally, the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corporation.

II.
Ultimately, five people pled guilty to charges connected to the NOAH probe: four contractors who confessed to taking pay for work they didn’t do and Stacey Jackson, the woman Nagin had put in charge of the program. Jackson, who confessed to taking kickbacks, was sentenced to five years in jail.

24

VANILLA CITY

The Lower Ninth Ward’s Pam Dashiell knew she could sound strident when correcting people who referred to the
natural disaster
that had destroyed much of New Orleans. The city, Dashiell insisted, had been the victim of a
man-made disaster.
If not for the catastrophic collapse of the city’s
man-made
flood-protection system, the media would have been reporting on some roof damage in New Orleans and a modest amount of water in the streets before returning to the ruined Gulf Coast. Blaming
nature
for the flooding of four-fifths of New Orleans, Dashiell and others argued, was to absolve the federal government of responsibility for the city’s near death.

Various lawyers had made that same argument in class action suits filed on behalf of homeowners against the federal government. The shock came when a federal judge added his voice to those making the man-made argument. Four years after Katrina, in November 2009, Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. ruled in favor of a group of homeowners who had brought suit against the Army Corps of Engineers. The US government was largely to blame for the flooding of New Orleans, Duval wrote, and must therefore compensate homeowners and businesses that suffered due to its negligence.

Duval’s ruling had limits. It wouldn’t benefit anyone living in New Orleans East, for instance, or Lakeview. That’s because the suit pertained only to the Army Corps of Engineers’ failure to maintain MR. GO, not the shortcomings of the city’s levees. Duval left no doubt that, if he could, he would have ruled against the government in the numerous class action lawsuits brought over defects in the flood-protection system. “Many of the levees protecting New Orleans and the surrounding area were tragically flawed,” Duval wrote, and the Corps was “not free, nor should it be, from posterity’s judgment concerning its failure.” The law, however, granted the government immunity, even if a plaintiff could prove that the levee system was poorly designed or badly built. Yet in Duval’s reading, that immunity did not apply to a man-made shipping channel such as MR. GO, nor did it protect government from its responsibilities as a steward of its projects.

“Once the Corps exercised its discretion to create a navigational channel, it was obligated to make sure that channel did not destroy the environment surrounding it, thereby creating a hazard to life and property,” Duval wrote. As early as 1988, he found, the Corps knew that “all of the engineering blunders that it had made now put the parish of St. Bernard at risk.” They knew, too, from the multiple reports submitted by one of its own consultants, a geologist, that MR. GO was hastening the disappearance of the wetlands and causing erosion along the levee banks. Yet the government failed to heed its own consultant’s warnings or take any of the remedial steps he and others recommended.

“The Corps’ lassitude and failure to fulfill its duties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property in unprecedented proportions,” Duval wrote. He found that MR. GO wasn’t the main reason New Orleans East was covered in water, as lawyers for the group of homeowners bringing the case claimed, but saw it as a primary culprit in the flooding of St. Bernard Parish and the adjacent Lower Ninth Ward.

“My head is spinning,” Dashiell told the
New York Times
’ Campbell Robertson after Duval’s ruling. “Maybe things are really breaking for the people.”

FOOTBALL GAVE NEW ORLEANIANS
another reason to cheer in the fall of 2009. The Saints won their first few games of the season and then the
next several, causing people to believe that maybe this Saints team was good enough to make the Super Bowl. They kept winning until they were 13 and 0, and people were talking not just about the Saints winning their first Super Bowl, but the possibility that they would register only the second perfect season in NFL history. Waitresses working even white-tablecloth restaurants dressed in black-and-gold jerseys, as did musicians performing in local clubs. The Saints’ Super Bowl run caused people to band together in happy delirium rather than split apart in their suffering post-Katrina.

The team faltered near the end of the regular season but kept winning in the play-offs to earn its first trip to a Super Bowl. Churches canceled evening mass on Super Bowl Sunday; schools canceled class the next day. A game pitting the Saints against Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts set the Nielsen record for the most viewed telecast in broadcast history, drawing five hundred thousand more people than the 105 million Americans who tuned in for the final episode of
M*A*S*H
. The Saints won the game by two touchdowns. That night, New Orleans taught other cities how to celebrate a championship.

The only downside in the Saints’ improbable run was the timing: the election to choose a new mayor was scheduled for the day before the Super Bowl. The municipal elections were already taking place barely five weeks after the holidays and in the midst of carnival season. Who would govern New Orleans for the next four years was critical, but the football coverage ensured that one could turn on the television and forget there was even an election.

The Saints’ good fortune was also Mitch Landrieu’s, the front-runner in the race. Landrieu, the state’s lieutenant governor, had told people he wasn’t a candidate. He had even called a press conference in the summer to declare himself uninterested in making a run for mayor in 2010. But then a few days before the filing deadline, he announced that he had had a change of heart. “I will do everything I can to make sure that I bring the people of this city together,” he said, “to heal the racial divide that has kept us apart for so long.” The black front-runner, a longtime state legislator named Ed Murray, dropped out a few weeks later. He was confident he would force Landrieu into a runoff, he said, but to win he would need
“to make an emotional appeal based on race and that wasn’t something I wanted to do.”

There would be no runoff this time. Landrieu may have been running in a city divided between black and white, but he was also the only candidate on the ballot who had ever held elected office. After eight years of Ray Nagin, New Orleanians seemed in no mood to hand the reins to another neophyte. Landrieu trounced all comers in the white community and won a majority among black voters—at least among the 28 percent of black registered voters who cast a ballot. Landrieu captured two of every three votes and beat the second-place finisher by more than 50 percentage points. When he assumed office in May 2010, several months shy of the fifth anniversary of Katrina, he was the city’s first white mayor since his father left office in 1978.

THE SAINTS LEFT THE
city giddy. And Landrieu’s victory—or at least the end of Ray Nagin’s tenure—left many New Orleanians feeling hopeful about politics. But a few weeks before Landrieu’s inauguration, an explosion on an oil platform just off the Louisiana coast killed eleven workers, and the rupture released 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.