Katrina: After the Flood (30 page)

PEOPLE CONTACTED BARBARA MAJOR
to do something about public housing. They reached out to her for help countering the forces trying to shut down Charity. They called to talk about the schools or the fight over the placement of trailers. But Major’s life then was her extended family and the epic fights she was waging with FEMA or an insurance company on behalf of one member or another of her clan.

She recalls feeling powerless at the time, not despite her exalted position as cochair of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission but because of it. She wanted to help black-owned businesses feeling locked out of the bidding for contracts, yet she couldn’t get FEMA to return her
own phone calls. “All I heard was pain,” Major said. “I’d see people and I couldn’t do anything.

THE “PIG.” THAT’S WHAT
the people who worked for the RTA called the former Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Baton Rouge that the agency leased following Katrina. The pig served as the RTA’s temporary offices and its maintenance yard and a barracks for those who couldn’t find housing in the area. This agency of thirteen hundred before the storm employed around three hundred as it struggled to rebuild post-Katrina.

One early task was tracking down the RTA buses that didn’t drown. They’d sell for scrap the two hundred or so buses destroyed by the floodwaters, but another seventy buses had been parked on the high ground along the river. Those had been commandeered by people desperate to exit the city. Tracking them down fell to Jacques Robichaux, the agency’s superintendent of bus maintenance. “That was a good portion of my life for months,” Robichaux said. A few buses had been abandoned on the West Bank, but most they found scattered around the state. Two needed to be driven back from Houston. The agency would leave a pair upstate in Alexandria because town officials were asking the agency to pay what Robichaux thought were exorbitant towing and storage charges.

Initially, the RTA put its drivers to work running buses in Baton Rouge to help with overflow. It also set up a commuter line to New Orleans. By November, the agency was running several bus routes in New Orleans. Other modes of transportation were also expanding their service as more people moved back home. Whereas by the end of September the city’s airport was handling thirty departing flights a day, that number doubled to sixty in November. Amtrak and Greyhound also started running more trains and buses to and from New Orleans.

The city was still under a bottled-water advisory, but in November the city’s water agency declared water drinkable in every part of the city outside New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward. Isolated patches of the city were still without running water, a circumstance that could prove disastrous in the event of a fire, but most of New Orleans was protected. Nearly half the toilets in the city were still not connected to the sewer system. Forty percent of the city was still without electricity.
Nearly 50 percent lacked natural gas for cooking or heat in a city where the nighttime temperatures were dipping below forty degrees.

Dan Packer and his team, under pressure from the City Council, developed a plan for Entergy to provide electricity to at least 80 percent of the city by year’s end and gas service to that same proportion of its customers by mid-January. But those were just words on paper for a bankrupt subsidiary relying on its corporate bosses in Jackson, Mississippi, and volunteer crews from around the country. Entergy New Orleans was a utility with extraordinary expenses and only a small fraction of its pre-storm customer base paying for its services. Packer spent much of his time up in Washington, telling his woeful tale to anyone willing to meet with him, including Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff. “The bottom line is that as a regulated monopoly, we’re allowed to pass legitimate expenses along to customers,” Packer said. “So either the government was going to help pay for a lot of the damage or ratepayers would.”

In November, Bush announced that Donald Powell, who since 2001 had served as chairman of the FDIC, would replace Admiral Thad Allen as the federal recovery czar. The city also had a new best friend in Richard Baker, the Baton Rouge Republican overheard cracking that God fixed public housing in New Orleans the way no mortal could. His penance was a bill that proposed that the federal government pay 60 percent of the pre-Katrina value on any property abandoned by a homeowner or business choosing not to rebuild. The property would then be the city’s to redevelop. The state’s entire congressional delegation was behind what everyone was calling the Baker bill, as were Nagin and Blanco. Joe Canizaro also supported this legislation, which would provide the funding mechanism needed to rebuild New Orleans more sensibly.

“I think we all believed there would be more happening than is happening right now,” Canizaro said in early December. Maybe Baker would break the logjam.

AFTER DENIAL COMES ANGER.
The fall was also a time for recriminations and finger-pointing. Culprits were everywhere during the multiple hearings held by both the US Senate and the House looking into what went wrong in the days following Katrina. Depending on the day
and who was talking, everything was Bush’s fault, Nagin’s, Blanco’s, or that of the people who failed to get themselves out of harm’s way. “Just baloney,” Michael Brown had said of the White House’s claim that they didn’t realize a disaster was taking place in New Orleans until at least twenty-four hours after the levees broke. The Bush administration refused to make senior officials available to congressional investigators. The White House also held back a large portion of the Katrina-related documents that Congress had requested.

Across the river from New Orleans in Gretna, officials might have considered themselves lucky. In an era of twenty-four-hour news, their small burgh might have become another Howard Beach or South Central Los Angeles—a locale whose name invokes a racially charged incident that took place there—if not for a media distracted by so many other angles to the Katrina story. Yet even the relatively small amount of attention the story received sparked a defensiveness among town leaders. Two weeks after Katrina, the Gretna City Council unanimously approved a resolution supporting the “chief of police’s decision to deny access to the city of Gretna.” Signs started popping up on lawns around town:
WE SUPPORT CHIEF LAWSON
. People on the other side of the bridge, including some of those part of the RTA contingent, were talking to lawyers about a civil rights claim against the city. When the first of those suits were filed that November, Chief Lawson said, “It’s being made into a racial issue by certain individuals, but that’s not what it was all about.”

It was a season for filing bold lawsuits. One local lawyer sued the Army Corps of Engineers, claiming fraud. The Corps had promised a levee system that could withstand a Category 3 storm, yet Katrina, a weak Category 3, if not a 2, by the time it hit New Orleans, caused the city’s flood-protection system to collapse. John Cummings, a prominent trial attorney who was part of the big tobacco settlement years earlier, also sued the Corps. He didn’t charge the Corps with incompetence or negligence but criminality. “If your supervisors are asleep—they simply don’t supervise the installation of the sheet piling—that’s incompetence or gross negligence,” Cummings said. “But when they certify that the sheet piling is twenty-three feet and it’s really seventeen feet, that’s a crime.” Others sued the Orleans levee board, which was responsible for
maintaining the levees that the Corps had built. Suits would be filed as well over MR. GO.

Before the lawyers took aim at one another, the battle for the truth needed to be waged on the ground in New Orleans. On one side was the Corps, an operation with roots dating back to 1775 and a reputation to uphold. In the months after Katrina, spokespeople for the Corps insisted that the city’s flood-protection system failed because it had not been built to withstand a storm as strong as Katrina. The levees had overtopped, they claimed, and the force of the water rushing over the walls had caused small sections to give way. On the other side were scientists such as Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, and among the first to suspect that the Corps was not being completely candid with the public.

For years, van Heerden had been outspoken in warning of the potential for catastrophic flooding following a bad hurricane. But Katrina had been a “decidedly mild hurricane,” van Heerden said, at least from New Orleans’s perspective. The levees should not have overtopped, according to the storm-surge models he and his colleagues had created. Their thesis was that the levees had collapsed due to faulty designs or problems in their construction, if not both. To figure out what happened, the state asked van Heerden, who taught in LSU’s Civil & Environmental Engineering Department, to assemble a group of colleagues. Team Louisiana, as they were called, looked through wrecked homes in search of battery-powered clocks and interviewed dozens of survivors to figure out what time the floodwaters hit a community. Others picked up shovels to sift through the dirt and sometimes taste it, to see what clues the soil might offer. The more time van Heerden spent in deserted sections of New Orleans, the more he thought of all the lives lost and disrupted, and the angrier he grew.

“Call it a blame game if you must,” van Heerden said, “but some of us were determined to find out exactly what had happened and to demand justice from the responsible parties.”

I.
Bellevue Hospital in New York was founded that same year.

14

LOOK AND LEAVE

Nearly two months after Katrina, forty thousand people were still sleeping shoulder to shoulder in emergency shelters around Louisiana. Kathleen Blanco’s solution was an emergency order granting her the right to use state-owned lands to house evacuees, even if prohibited by local ordinance. Six hundred trailers were trucked to a small town on the edge of the Baton Rouge metro area. There, next to a juvenile prison, FEMA opened the first of a dozen-plus trailer parks around the state. FEMA opened similar camps in another sixteen states to shelter another thirty thousand evacuees, the majority of whom had been saved from New Orleans once the buses started rolling up to the Superdome or the Convention Center.

The largest number of evacuees went to Houston. Most of those ended up in either the Astrodome or the Reliant Center, where a professor named Caroline Heldman was horrified by what she found. Heldman, who taught political science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, had been so angered by images out of New Orleans in those first days after the flooding that she convinced the Pacifica radio station in Southern California to give her the press credentials she would
need to get into New Orleans. En route, she stopped at the two indoor stadiums. There she found “fluorescent lights and loudspeaker announcements twenty-four hours a day, smells emanating from the bathroom, and guards walking patrols with M16s.” That was in “stark contrast,” Heldman said, to what she observed at the Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego (counselors, back massages, a bounty of fresh food) after a wildfire had made hundreds of people homeless several years earlier. Heldman, who is white, could walk freely through the two shelters, while a black colleague was “harassed” by soldiers, she said, though both wore the same press badge. People were free to hop a cab to the airport and fly anywhere they wanted if they had the money. But most of those who ended up in Houston were stuck wherever they had landed. Ninety-three percent of those in a Houston-area shelter, one poll found, were black. Three-quarters had kids with them.

Communities around the country showed great generosity toward the New Orleans diaspora, starting with the invitation to welcome people into their towns. Church groups organized clothing and coat drives, local businesses donated Pampers and toiletries and book bags for school-aged kids. One Houston school was so serious about its promise to teach the New Orleans evacuees that officials there checked in every day with the local shelters to make sure children were attending classes. Parents arrived without birth certificates and immunization records, but school officials told them to worry about that later. Churches held potlucks and campaigns to find spare rooms for those in need.

Yet the same television images that stirred up fears among officials in Gretna and Baton Rouge also impacted officials wherever New Orleans evacuees showed up. At a high school in the Kansas City metro area, Dominique Townsend, a sweet-faced sixteen-year-old, black, was brought to the auditorium with all the other kids from New Orleans. There the authorities laid out a strict set of rules that had evacuee kids staying after school for infractions that didn’t earn local kids the same punishment. “We were seen as the trouble children,” Townsend said. They were even forbidden from sitting together in the cafeteria because, Townsend said, “we were known as the NOLA gang—whatever that meant.” (NOLA—short for New Orleans, Louisiana—is a common way people refer to New Orleans.)

In time, the New Orleanians were the houseguests who overstayed their welcome. Just before Thanksgiving, a brawl between the locals and Katrina kids at one Houston high school was so big it made the newspaper. Similar melees broke out at high schools in Dallas and San Antonio. A white political science professor at Rice University in Houston overheard the black woman working the register at his local grocery store talk about “those people.” He was baffled—until he realized she was referring to a group of evacuees from New Orleans.

Officials in Washington were also looking at the calendar. Three months into the disaster, the government was picking up the tab for the 150,000 or so storm victims still living in hotels around the country. The Bush administration decided that it had had enough in mid-November. That’s when FEMA announced that people would be responsible for their own hotel bills on December 1. The agency paid contractors to slip warnings under the doors of evacuees and hired caseworkers for anyone needing help finding an apartment or other temporary housing. People would still be eligible for as much as $800 a month in rental assistance, a FEMA official announced, through the end of February. They just needed to be someplace other than a hotel.