History > 2006 > USA > Louisiana > Mississippi

Rebuilding (II)

A woman read a list of the deceased at a ceremony today.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Bush Repeats Vow to Help New Orleans

NYT

30.8.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/us/nationalspecial/30katrina.html

Bush Repeats Vow

to Help New Orleans

August 30, 2006
The New York Times
By ANNE KORNBLUT
and ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 — Still at pains a year after Hurricane Katrina to demonstrate his concern over the devastation it caused, President Bush said Tuesday that he took “full responsibility” for the slow federal response to the disaster as he made a carefully choreographed pilgrimage to the city that suffered most.

As bells rang out through the streets, citizens gathered for prayer services and residents hung banners in front of their tattered homes to commemorate the anniversary of the storm, Mr. Bush sought to do what he had not accomplished a year earlier: Demonstrate the depth of his understanding of the emotional and physical toll the hurricane took on New Orleans.

“I’ve come back to New Orleans to tell you the words that I spoke on Jackson Square are just as true today as they were then,” he told a largely friendly audience at Warren Easton Senior High School, referring to his major nighttime address on the storm last September.

That speech, itself a carefully planned event that came after most of the victims had died, was seen as a turning point by White House advisers who recognized the political damage done by the flawed government reaction.

“I have returned to make it clear to people that I understand we’re marking the first anniversary of the storm,’’ he said, “but this anniversary is not an end. And so I come back to say that we will stand with the people of southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi until the job is done.”

Speaking at a former public school that was rebuilt as a charter school after the storm, Mr. Bush restated his acceptance that ultimately he was responsible for the federal response to the hurricane, which killed more than 1,700 people in the gulf area and left hundreds of thousands of others displaced.

“I take full responsibility for the federal government’s response, and a year ago I made a pledge that we will learn the lessons of Katrina and that we will do what it takes to help you recover,” Mr. Bush said, drawing applause from the crowd.

He also said he would try to get Louisiana a greater share of offshore oil revenues and urged businesses to return to the region.

In repeated nods to the city’s extraordinary cultural past, Mr. Bush visited the home of the music legend Fats Domino in the Lower Ninth Ward and listened to a brass band. He talked about restoring the “soul” of New Orleans, even as he acknowledged that much of the damage had not yet been repaired.

The city, he said, was calling its children home.

“I know you love New Orleans, and New Orleans needs you,” Mr. Bush said. “She needs people coming home. She needs people — she needs those saints to come marching back, is what she needs.”

He did not stray far from his script nor venture out of his motorcade as it sped past some of the worst destruction in the Lower Ninth Ward, where rows of gutted homes stood along deserted streets.

Instead, in a series of upbeat events designed to underscore progress, Mr. Bush struck an optimistic — and at times almost defiant — tone. He portrayed the anniversary as a starting point, deflecting questions about slow results. And although he faced several challenges throughout the day, including a large banner that read “Bush Failure” as his motorcade passed, Mr. Bush kept his focus on future improvements. He met privately with several residents, but the White House did not disclose their conversations.

Away from the presidential tour, there was private weeping at some of the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward, and at City Hall bereaved family members signed a giant banner with hundreds of fleurs-de-lis, the city’s symbol, one for each victim. At 9:38 a.m., Mayor C. Ray Nagin sounded a large silver bell on the City Hall steps to mark a catastrophic early levee breach.

Huddling with loved ones at home, attending a ceremony in the heat or simply working on their houses, the city’s citizens, it seemed, were reflecting Tuesday on the disaster one year ago that altered a way of life here for a long while, if not forever.

In its warm and breezy quiet, the day was very unlike the one filled with violent winds and somber hints of catastrophe of a year ago. Out in the neighborhoods, work went on, painfully and defiantly, in the 100 degree-plus heat. Plunging on ahead with rebuilding, as more than one demonstrated they were doing Tuesday, was a way of remembering too — of not being conquered by the long-tentacled disaster and its aftermath. Several people said there were far more important things to be done this day than attending one of the downtown events.

“All this stuff on TV and all, nobody in this city has time to fool with that,” said John Parker, a musician, outside his house, which took in over four feet of water, on a ruined block of Upperline Street. “I figured it’s a good day to get the ball rolling on fixing the house. So I got up and made an appointment with our electrician.”

Mr. Parker and his wife gutted their home months ago, but are still months away from moving back.

The memorial parade was just gearing up downtown, but Robert P. Davis, an electrical inspector, was having no part of it.

“I’m working on my home, that’s what I’m doing,” Mr. Davis said brusquely, on a block of Marengo Street where few of the neighbors have returned.

“What happened has happened,” he said, proudly showing off his “totally gutted, reframed” house.

Mr. Davis is living, for now, in a FEMA trailer in the backyard. “We’ve got to move on,” he said.

Others were not so sure that was possible just yet.

“It’s been a big day for everybody,” said Kirk Reasonover, a lawyer, hurrying across Camp Street downtown.

Exiled from the city and his home for nearly four months, Mr. Reasonover said he was determined to “spend time with my family” on this day. “Everybody who was here on Aug. 27 and Aug. 28, 2005, is thinking about it,” he said. “It was one of those moments you will never forget.”

The city does not need reminders of the storm; they are everywhere. But the date itself, so often referred to since the storm, is its own particular sharp jog to memory. Tuesday was special in that regard, and many here, including Mayor Nagin, were feeling it.

This was a rough patch for the city, the mayor said. “I am personally having a very difficult time with it,” he told several hundred assembled on the steps of City Hall.

Mr. Bush’s day — a whirlwind more of sights and sounds than of substance — began with a memorial Mass at the Cathedral-Basilica of St. Louis on Jackson Square and concluded with Mr. Bush returning to his ranch outside Crawford, Tex.

After giving Mr. Domino — who was feared dead for a time in the early days of the hurricane — a replica of a National Medal of Arts award that had been lost in the storm, he drove past gutted homes to arrive at a group of freshly constructed houses put together by Habitat for Humanity volunteers in recent months.

After spending the night at his ranch, Mr. Bush will spend the rest of this week shifting his focus away from Hurricane Katrina and back toward another landmark of his presidency, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He is scheduled to make campaign stops in Arkansas and Tennessee on Wednesday before delivering what is expected to be a major address on terrorism in Salt Lake City on Thursday.

Mr. Bush had at least one exchange with a local resident that made reference to the flawed response last year, and his role in it.

As Mr. Bush squeezed through tables at a pancake house where he ate breakfast, , a waitress asked, “Mr. President, are you going to turn your back on me?”

“No, ma’am,” he replied, with a laugh and a pause. “Not again.”

    Bush Repeats Vow to Help New Orleans, NYT, 30.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/us/nationalspecial/30katrina.html

Richard Crowson        The Witchita Eagle, Kansas        Cagle

30.8.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/crowson.asp

A year later,

hearts still heavy in New Orleans

Posted 8/29/2006 12:47 AM ET
USA Today
By Anne Rochell Konigsmark

NEW ORLEANS — The Big Easy isn't easy anymore.

One year after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is frustrating, tiring, expensive and frightening. Hearts are heavy from living amid so much destruction. Nerves are jangled as the 2006 hurricane season heats up. And spirits are dampened every time another friend gives up and moves away.

"I survived Katrina but the anniversary killed me," jokes Mary Lee Murphy, 35, who moved back to her unflooded Uptown apartment in November.

For some, the city has proved unbearable. The suicide rate has tripled, according to the coroner's office. Others here search for ways to feel normal again. Freshly planted flowers are blooming in front of gutted, uninhabitable homes in the Broadmoor section of town. The local news ran a 10-minute feature on the highly anticipated reopening of Commander's Palace, one of the city's most famous restaurants, closed since the storm.

In the days before Aug. 29, 2005, as the approach of Katrina triggered the annoying annual evacuation odyssey, New Orleanians had no idea their dreamy, professionally lethargic, down-but-not-out lifestyle was about to be taken from them. For weeks last September, virtually all 460,000 residents were stuck on someone's sofa, in a hotel or on a cot in an arena somewhere. The shattered pieces of a city, a culture, were strewn across the country. It has taken a year just to get 200,000 people back.

That changes people, and it changes a place. The Rev. Aldon Cotton, pastor of Jerusalem Baptist Church, counsels his weary flock with these words to encourage endurance: "Whatever you had before Katrina, it didn't take two weeks to get it. It took years."

Like thousands of New Orleanians, Cotton's congregants work at jobs by day and on their broken personal lives by night. They come to him with their exhaustion, their anger and their fears, he says. Cotton, who lost not only his church in Central City to Katrina's floodwaters but also his home in eastern New Orleans, tells them to focus on something simple.

"I tell people to pace themselves and look at what you did accomplish today," says Cotton, who commutes to New Orleans daily from a rented apartment 30 minutes away in Luling. "I was able to move a box today. I found a friend today."

Heartaches and headaches

New Orleans, which always prided itself on being carefree, is now full of headaches and heartaches. While people spent the first part of the year worrying about big things — the levees, the amount of federal aid New Orleans would get, the city's very survival — these days people are focused on little things.

The cost of home repairs has skyrocketed, and hiring a contractor can take months. Meanwhile, rents are up 40% and insurance rates have doubled for many homeowners. Exasperated residents have taken to creating their own street signs to replace those still missing. Looting continues, especially at homes under construction.

And everywhere, depressing piles of garbage and storm debris make it feel like Katrina happened days ago, not a year ago.

"I just want the trash picked up," says Bill Hines, an attorney. Every other week, he says, the trash haulers don't show up on his Uptown street near Tulane and Loyola universities. "That's a sign the wheels have fallen off. It's like the Third World. I just want the place to look normal. I am tired of explaining it away."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says red tape is holding up the city's ability to access federal recovery money for things like cleanup. "The dollars have flowed extremely, painfully slow," he said recently.

In neighborhoods all over the city, 80% of which flooded when the levees broke following Katrina, houses sit empty, waiting for homeowners to make tough decisions.

Cotton recently got an estimate for repairs to his home, which sat in 8 feet of water after the storm. "It was more than the house cost," he says. He can't get started until he receives money from the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which will hand out as much as $7 billion in federal dollars to more than 100,000 homeowners this fall. Meanwhile, he's paying both his monthly mortgage and his rent.

Cotton's church was so badly damaged it must be demolished. He plans to rebuild across the street. Asked where he'll get the money for a new church, Cotton says, "Well, that's a walk of faith." He has applied for a loan from the Small Business Administration and for a donation from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund set up by the former presidents.

"There's just a lot to be done," says Cotton, who lost both his legs in a train accident when he was a boy. It wouldn't occur to Cotton to leave New Orleans.

The same is true for Susan Spicer, chef-owner of several New Orleans restaurants. Even though her Lakeview home flooded, even though business at her most famous restaurant, Bayona, in the French Quarter, is down almost 40%, she's here for the long haul.

"It feels pretty good to be here, but it's a little scary," she says. Tourists, who make up a large portion of her clientele, are noticeably absent these days. And running a restaurant is more expensive, Spicer and others say. Wages are up because of a severe worker shortage. Electric bills are at least 20% higher.

At the one-year mark, Spicer and her husband are still talking about what to do with their house. "We're thinking we'll rebuild," she says. "But there was no point in rushing back to a neighborhood that isn't really viable yet. Are we going to spend all this money to redo a house when next door to us is a house that hasn't been touched? It looks like a jungle."

Spicer worries that another hurricane could throw things further off track. "We need one hurricane season with no problems under our belts," she says. "Then people will breathe easier."

Even those who didn't lose homes or loved ones are suffering emotionally, says Alvin Rouchell, chairman of psychiatry at Oschner Hospital, one of a handful of open hospitals in metro New Orleans. He and other mental health professionals say they have seen a rise in alcohol and drug abuse.

In a recent survey by the Council on Alcohol & Drug Abuse For Greater New Orleans, 13% of respondents said they were drinking more since the storm. Bacco, a French Quarter restaurant, has a post-Katrina special: Three glasses of wine and one appetizer for $25.

"Most of us have been grieving the loss of the city we knew," Rouchell says. "Every day you see destruction, abandoned houses. The recovery is taking longer than anyone anticipated. People are tired, people are frustrated."

Obsessed with the storm

Mary Lee Murphy says she remains obsessed with the storm. "Last night, my roommate and I had people for dinner and, dang it, if we didn't talk about where we went when we evacuated. And we all know where we went."

Murphy says she dreams about Katrina almost nightly. "I've spent the last year trying to understand what happened," she says. "What happened with the levees? Why did all these people end up at the convention center and no one knew about it? I drive out to Lakeview, drive out to the 9th Ward."

Every newspaper article, every newscast, every dinner conversation and encounter at the bank eventually ends up being about Katrina. Everywhere are grim reminders: The dirty water lines on the sides of houses. The cryptic markings left on doors by rescue workers, indicating whether bodies were found inside. The holes in roofs, hacked by residents climbing to escape the flood.

Murphy is hoping the anniversary will bring some relief. "Maybe the emphasis can change from 'where were you, what happened to you?' to talking about rebuilding, imagining where our city can be," she says.

Darren Smith would like to rebuild. At every turn, he says, something bars his way. "Going back to New Orleans, it's not as easy as it sounds," says Smith, 40.

A year ago, Smith, his wife and his three daughters huddled in their attic as floodwaters swept through their Lower 9th Ward home. They retreated to the roof, were rescued by a boat, spent three nights at the Superdome and eventually wound up in Houston. Smith, a longshoreman, lost his job when his company asked him to return to New Orleans without his family and live on one of the cruise ships reserved for first responders and Port of New Orleans workers.

"My kids were in shock" then, he says. "We saw the bodies in the water. I couldn't leave them."

Smith says he tried unsuccessfully to get a job in Houston. Recently, he came back to New Orleans and lived in a relative's trailer while he tried to gut his home himself. He did not have flood insurance.

"I can't get any of the volunteer agencies to gut it, because they're all overcrowded," he says. He can't get his own trailer, because the Lower 9th Ward still lacks power and drinkable water — and FEMA won't set up trailers there until utilities are reconnected.

"Home for me is not the French Quarter or the Garden District," he says, referring to unflooded neighborhoods that today look exactly as they did before the storm. "It's going to be at least three to five years before my area of the city is ready. We all miss New Orleans, and we want to come home, but home is not ready for us."

Smith was in Mobile, Ala., on Monday, interviewing for a job. "My neighbors are dead, all my stuff is destroyed. It is really getting to me. I don't think I want to deal with Louisiana anymore."

About 200,000 people have decided they have the means, and the will, to tough it out. Van Gallinghouse, 43, owner of an Internet marketing company, says he and his wife thought briefly about staying in Atlanta, where they evacuated last August. Their New Orleans home flooded, and they have since sold it.

"Atlanta seemed to have all the luxuries we would want and all the opportunities," says Gallinghouse, a New Orleans native who has three small children. "But there's something about New Orleans. It's the culture and the people and the soul."

Like many who have decided to stay, Gallinghouse and his friends have become more civically active. They formed the organization Bravehearts to raise money to encourage economic development, improve education and clean up trash.

"We know it's going to work out," he says. "It has to work out. Among my peers, there's a great deal of resolve and hope."

And more gravity. "People are more serious now," Gallinghouse says. "This is top of mind, and we're all concerned."

Today, Cotton says he will tell his parishioners this: "You have survived — you're still alive." He'll remind them that at least 1,740 died in the storm, and about 140 are still missing. "Just take a deep breath and let it out slow and get ready to get back to work."

    A year later, hearts still heavy in New Orleans, UT, 29.8.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-28-katrina-anniversary_x.htm

New Orleans Marks 1 Year After Katrina

August 29, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:14 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A year after one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, this shattered city turned its attention to rituals of mourning and celebrations of life.

In pockmarked neighborhoods choked with weeds, in church pews and at City Hall, residents were to gather Tuesday for vigils marking the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

They plan to remember the dead, ringing bells to mark the moment one of the city's flood walls breached and water engulfed the northern edges of the city.

Wreathes will be laid on the site of each successive levee break, dotting the city with bouquets in a commemoration of the flood.

In one of the Crescent City's age-old traditions, a jazz funeral was to wind through downtown streets, beginning with a somber dirge and ending with a song of joy.

At the city's convention center, where for days haggard refugees waited in vain for food, medical assistance and buses, President Bush was expected to join an ecumenical prayer service. Others planned to mark the occasion privately at home with their own prayers -- including personal calls for protection.

''I'm going to pray to the good Lord that he put his arms around the levees. I'm praying that he hug the levees tight so they don't break again, that he keep us safe,'' said 58-year-old Doretha Kitchens, whose home in the Lower Ninth Ward was submerged under a 10-foot wave.

Katrina grazed Florida before making landfall at 6:10 a.m. on Aug. 29, 2005, in Buras, a tiny fishing town 65 miles south of New Orleans on one of the fingers of land jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico. Entire blocks of houses, bars and shops vanished, whipped into the Gulf by a wall of water 21 feet high.

In New Orleans, the sun came out after the violent winds subsided, but the worst was yet to come: The industrial canal began to leak, and when two sections of the wall fell, a muddy torrent was released that yanked homes off their foundations.

Throughout the city, other parts of the levee system began to fail. With each breach came a cascade of water, until 80 percent of the city was submerged.

Nearly 1,600 people died in Louisiana, and the rest of the nation watched in horror as survivors begged to be rescued from rooftops or freeway overpasses. Forty-nine bodies remain unidentified in the city's morgue.

Throughout the city, white trailers still line driveways in neighborhoods where debris is stacked up in piles and unchecked weeds have overtaken abandoned houses. Only half the population has returned. Emergency medical care is doled out in an abandoned department store, while six of New Orleans' nine hospitals remain closed. Only 54 of 128 public schools are expected to open this fall.

The one-year mark is a reminder of how much needs to be done -- and of how far each survivor has come.

''Only when it's dark can you see the stars,'' said the Rev. Alex Bellow, at a gathering outside a school in the Lower Ninth Ward. ''So when they tell you, 'You're not going to make it,' you keep looking up.''

    New Orleans Marks 1 Year After Katrina, NYT, 29.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Katrina-One-Year-Anniversary.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Katrina rebuilding "long way off"

Tue Aug 29, 2006 3:02 AM ET
Reuters
By Caren Bohan

GULFPORT, Mississippi (Reuters) - One year after Hurricane Katrina battered the U.S. Gulf Coast and his political standing, President George W. Bush acknowledged on Monday that a complete recovery was still a long way off.

"There is hope down here, there is still a lot of work to be done," Bush said. "This is an anniversary but it doesn't mean it's an end. Frankly it's just the beginning of what is going to be a long recovery."

The August 29 anniversary of Katrina, which killed about 1,500 people and devastated New Orleans, holds perils for Bush as it rekindles memories of government missteps in the initial response to one of the worst U.S. natural disasters.

As the midterm election approaches in November, Bush's approval ratings are near 40 percent, never having fully recovered from the damage they suffered in Katrina's aftermath.

Listing progress on the Gulf Coast, Bush said Mississippi beaches, once littered with debris, were now "pristine" and school districts across the area had reopened, though many had to hold classes in trailers.

Stopping at a shipbuilding company where employees wiped gray boats with cloths, Bush told reporters that the company, United States Marine Inc., was hiring and noted there was a worker shortage, but housing also was scarce.

Pressed for a time frame for the rebuilding, Bush said: "Well it's hard for me to say. I would say years, not months."

Bush flew later to New Orleans, where his motorcade passed neighborhoods with some newly built homes and others with tattered roofs. He rode past the Convention Center, where many flood victims fled only to become stranded in stifling heat.

A sign on the Superdome said, "Reopening 9-25-2006, Go Saints," and a sign on a pole said, "We tear down houses," with a phone number on it.

RACIAL AND ECONOMIC DIVISIONS

Bush was to dine with New Orleans officials, including Mayor Ray Nagin, who said he wanted to see a faster flow of resources to the local level.

The horrors experienced at the Superdome and elsewhere in New Orleans stoked concern about racial and economic divisions because blacks and the poor bore the brunt of the suffering.

Asked if he believed race was a factor in the slow federal response to Katrina, Nagin said: "If it would have been a bunch of rich people in New Orleans, I think there would have been a different response. I really do."

Bush rejected the idea that race influenced the response.

"Whoever says that is trying to politicize a very difficult situation," Bush told American Urban Radio Network in an interview. But he acknowledged the hurricane had exposed a racial divide in the United States and said he hoped the rebuilding could heal it.

Democrats, vying to win control of at least one chamber of Congress in the November midterm election, are intent on reminding voters of flaws in the Bush administration's relief effort and of dissatisfaction that continues in the region.

House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said the storm exposed a "tragedy" of mismanagement and that the government was not fulfilling its pledges.

"Hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens still await the help in rebuilding their hospitals, schools, businesses, and homes that was promised last fall," Pelosi said.

In Mississippi, Bush said that a "large check" in the form of $110 billion in federal funds dedicated to the Gulf Coast was proof of the government's commitment.

Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott said there was progress in the rebuilding but frustrations remained with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the flood insurance program.

"But we're going to be working on this recovery for years, literally," Lott said. "I view this not as an anniversary, not as a celebration, but as a memorial, a moment to remember what we have been through -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- and to recommit ourselves to going forward."

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria)

    Katrina rebuilding "long way off", R, 29.8.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-08-29T060707Z_01_N28316893_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Bush Visits Gulf Coast, Stressing Progress

August 29, 2006
The New York Times
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 28 — On the eve of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s strike here, President Bush returned to the devastated region on Monday promising to continue federal assistance and, with his presidency still under the shadow of the slow response to the storm, eagerly pointed out signs of progress in reconstructing the Gulf Coast.

But as another storm rolled toward Florida, with thousands of victims from Hurricane Katrina still uprooted, Mr. Bush admitted there were “a lot of problems left.”

Winding his way through tattered towns in Mississippi on his way here, Mr. Bush spent the day demonstrating empathy and optimism, touring rebuilt areas and meeting with local officials and residents in his 13th trip to the area since the storm.

The journey was part of a continuing effort to recast his image from last year, when Mr. Bush stayed on the West Coast before cutting short his vacation to deal with one of the most significant crises of his administration. His popularity was severely damaged after the storm, which killed about 1,500 people and flooded most of New Orleans, and it has never fully recovered.

In sweltering midday heat, his shirt soaked with sweat, Mr. Bush told a group of Biloxi, Miss., residents that he knew the rebuilding was so slow that to some it felt as if nothing was happening.

Still, Mr. Bush said, “For a fellow who was here and now a year later comes back, things are changing.”

“I feel the quiet sense of determination that’s going to shape the future of Mississippi,” he said.

In an event with echoes of his prime-time speech in Jackson Square here last September, Mr. Bush spoke in a working-class neighborhood in Biloxi against a backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. But just a few feet away, outside the scene captured by the camera, stood gutted houses with wires dangling from ceilings. A tattered piece of crime-scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Mr. Bush spoke. A toilet sat on its side in the grass.

After a dinner Monday night with New Orleans officials, including Mayor C. Ray Nagin, Mr. Bush is scheduled to tour city neighborhoods on Tuesday and deliver another speech. He is also planning to return to Jackson Square for a memorial service at St. Louis Cathedral.

As the president spoke in Biloxi, he was flanked by Mississippi’s two senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran and Gov. Haley Barbour, all three of them Republicans, and Don Powell, the Gulf Coast reconstruction coordinator. Watching from the sidelines was Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, whose presence was a reminder of the reshuffling at the White House after the former chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., failed to manage the storm crisis.

Nearby, along the ocean, ravaged antebellum homes and churches dotted the waterfront. The beach from Gulfport, Miss., to Biloxi, was deserted. Debris hung from trees and motels stood shuttered. Blue tarpaulins still patched the roofs of most dwellings. Written in green spray paint on a fence around a home in Biloxi was “You loot, I shoot.”

In Washington and around the country Monday, Hurricane Katrina continued to occupy a prominent place in the political arena. Both the White House and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill issued “fact sheets” with competing assertions about the rate of progress and the nation’s ability to cope with another disaster.

“One year later, neither the tragedy Katrina caused — the flooding of New Orleans and the devastation of the Gulf Coast — nor the tragedy that it exposed — the extent of the federal government’s failure to provide a life of security and dignity to all of our citizens — have been adequately addressed,” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said in a statement.

In late August of 2005, as the hurricane approached and scientists warned of a potential disaster, Mr. Bush was on vacation at his ranch outside Crawford, Tex., where the most pressing problem was an antiwar protest.

When the storm actually hit and his advisers began to realize the scope of the catastrophe, Mr. Bush was in Southern California on a campaign-style travel swing. Images of a remote president playing guitar on a military base, then later posing for a picture as he peered out the window of Air Force One as it flew over the devastation helped fuel the perception that Mr. Bush failed to respond adequately to the storm.

This year, Mr. Bush is also returning to Crawford — his final stop on Tuesday — before heading out to campaign in Arkansas, Tennessee and Utah this week. The overnight stay comes after an abbreviated vacation, in Crawford earlier this month and at his parents’ home in Kennebunkport, Me., last weekend, and two days of commemorating the hurricane anniversary.

Speaking to reporters Monday after visiting United States Marine Inc., a company in Gulfport that builds military boats, Mr. Bush predicted that the rebuilding effort would take “years, not months.”

“There will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered,” the president said. “Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses.”

But, he continued: “It’s hard to describe the devastation down here. It was massive in its destruction, and it spared nobody. United States Senator Trent Lott had a fantastic house overlooking the bay. I know because I sat in it with he and his wife. And now it’s completely obliterated. There’s nothing.”

    Bush Visits Gulf Coast, Stressing Progress, NYT, 29.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/us/nationalspecial/29bush.html?hp&ex=1156910400&en=b47f879f3d3b3864&ei=5094&partner=homepage

'Sense of renewal' in Mississippi impresses Bush

Updated 8/28/2006 11:07 PM ET
USA Today
By David Jackson

BILOXI, Miss. — A year ago, President Bush visited this area ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and saw piles of rubble strewn over beaches and neighborhoods. He met with people who lost everything.

On a return visit Monday, he said 98% of the debris is gone, the beaches are pristine, and the Biloxi-Gulfport area is slowly rebuilding. He praised the region's rebirth and the resolve of its residents to restore their lives.

"It's a sense of renewal here. It may be hard for those of you who have endured the last year to really have that sense of change, but for a fellow who was here and now a year later comes back, things are changing," Bush said in the first part of a two-day swing to mark today's anniversary of Katrina.

"There's still challenges. There's still more to be done," Bush said, noting that it will take "years, not months" for a full recovery.

Bush, who spends today in New Orleans, said he understands the frustration of some local residents who need housing grants. He said state housing plans are in effect, and "checks have begun to roll." He pledged the federal government's help, but only with state and local officials as partners.

As a hot sun beat down, Bush took a brief walking tour of a neighborhood where temporary trailers abut houses under reconstruction. It was one of the first areas he visited last year shortly after the hurricane reached land.

Bush's visit came as he and members of his administration were briefed on Tropical Storm Ernesto, which was on track to hit Florida.

Neighborhood residents gave Bush a warm reception in this reddest of red states that he easily carried in two elections.

"I think he's an all-right guy," said James Konz, 38, who does painting and drywall work in Saucier, Miss. Konz, wearing a tank top that read, "I Survived Hurricane Katrina," said Bush and his administration "did the best they could" given the ferocity of the storm.

Others were less impressed. "He could have done better than he did," said Mary Millender, 63, a retiree from Moss Point, Miss. "I'm not going to pay him any attention."

The Mississippi coast still bears some scars of Katrina. Many buildings have holes in them or are hollowed out completely, from old wooden churches to Las Vegas-style casinos, modern condos to the antebellum mansion that once belonged to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Among the flattened palm trees and bent restaurant signs are signs of change. One homemade sign says, "On The Road To Recovery." Another: "We Are Home — Will Shoot — No Looting."

"I'm seeing a lot of progress, a lot of things coming back," said Donald Griggs, a general contractor from Biloxi who has been keeping busy, after he listened to and applauded Bush's remarks. "This tragedy that hit New Orleans and us was bigger than anyone imagined."

In listing his post-Katrina efforts, Bush cited new plans for government responses to disasters. He also promoted $110 billion in federal aid, including programs for tax incentives, small-business loans and education assistance.

"Some of the hardest work is still ahead. We'll ensure federal money reaches the individuals who need it to build their homes. And we'll stand by you as long as it takes to get the job done," he said.

    'Sense of renewal' in Mississippi impresses Bush, UT, 28.8.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-28-bush-gulf-coast_x.htm

Emotional devastation surfaces from Katrina

Posted 8/28/2006 8:19 PM ET
USA Today
By Steve Sternberg

A year after Hurricane Katrina scoured the Gulf Coast, the storm still rages in the minds of survivors, who now suffer twice as much severe mental illness as existed in the region before landfall, researchers reported Monday.

Katrina forced 500,000 people to evacuate and carved its initials in a swath of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

The first major attempt to probe survivors' mental status found that about 15% of residents of the counties and parishes struck by the storm, or 200,000 people, have depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and other forms of mental illness, twice as many as before.

About 11% now have severe mental illness, compared with 6% before the hurricane. Nearly 20% said they had mild to moderate mental illness, compared with under 10% before.

Yet fewer people reported they were considering suicide than before the storm. The finding didn't entirely surprise researchers, who say people can be remarkably resilient when they have to be.

"Suicide rates always go down in times of war. ... People pull together," says Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School, who led the study published online by the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

The finding seems to conflict with reports that New Orleans' suicide rate tripled. But in an event such as Katrina, the vast majority of those who may have contemplated suicide may be less likely to act on it because they realize they are part of something bigger. Conversely, those with suicidal thoughts who don't have others with whom to share the disaster experience may be more inclined to kill themselves. So the findings are not inherently inconsistent, Kessler says.

Kessler says the absence of suicidal thinking reflects a newfound faith in the ability to start over. But he added that "optimism only goes on for so long" after a devastating event.

Psychiatrist Eugenio Rothe of the University of Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital, who wasn't involved in the study, says there's reason to worry. "We did a study in Miami after Hurricane Andrew," he says. "The first year, people were busy getting through the day, rebuilding, getting their lives back in order.

"Then it hits them how much they've lost. They start mourning their losses."

The new study, sponsored by the federal government, took advantage of a survey carried out every 10 years to assess the nation's mental health. More than 820 participants in that survey lived in the region hit hardest by Katrina.

The responses, recorded from 2001 to 2003, were compared with a new survey of 1,043 Katrina survivors.

Among other findings:

•Almost half of people who didn't evacuate said they wanted to leave but couldn't get away.

•Seven percent had to be rescued, had a brush with death or were assaulted.

•Almost 90% said their experiences helped them develop a deeper sense of meaning in life. More than 75% said they had become more spiritual or religious.

    Emotional devastation surfaces from Katrina, UT, 28.8.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-28-katrina-emotions_x.htm

New Orleans visitors find a tale of two cities

Mon Aug 28, 2006 5:15 PM ET
Reuters
By Peter Henderson

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Alabama native Sarah Jane Keith, 30, stopped on a desolate street of the New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward where porches had teemed with neighbors a year ago, before Hurricane Katrina.

"I stood in the middle of the street and screamed. I cried. Nobody heard me," she described from another corner, across from a house reduced to splinters.

But the night before she had cruised down Bourbon Street, beneath neon daiquiri signs and past barkers for strip shows, jazz and rock bands. "Things almost looked normal," she said.

A year since Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, visitors to New Orleans are surprised to find two cities in one. The historic heart of town, such as the French Quarter and the mansions of the Garden District, is pumping with life, but around it vast neighborhoods are only starting to recover.

Katrina hit land on August 29, 2005, and killed about 1,500 across four states according to the National Hurricane Center, but the brunt of the hurricane missed New Orleans, as is clear from the nearby Mississippi coast, which was flattened and largely still is.

The jazz city was laid low from floods when its levees burst.

Fetid water inundated 80 percent of the city and sat for weeks, but the historical areas built on the highest ground were relatively unscathed, requiring repairs and paint, but rarely rebuilding.

'BETTER THAN BEFORE'

"In many areas we go, 'God, that looks better than it did before.' There is some cleanup they procrastinated about for years," said Ernie Hinz, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, strolling through the French Quarter in the week before the first anniversary of Katrina.

He visits the city once a year in late summer with his wife, Vicki, and they felt safe among the brick and wrought iron of the Quarter. The familiar smell of old beer and fish that wafted through Bourbon Street evoked memories, not fear.

"It is hard to say if the stench is worse than it ever has been because it (always) is terrible," Vicki said.

Shriner conventioneer Lasala Stancil, who was in New Orleans for the first time in his life, said the Quarter looked fine, although he had not seen it before the storm.

"We're having a ball," he said.

French Quarter merchants, in fact, say they are suffering because not enough potential visitors realize the heart of the city is fine. Many in storm-damaged areas, by comparison, say Americans think the city is recovering well and have quit paying attention.

Only about 230,000 residents are back in the city of New Orleans, about half the pre-storm population, although some demographers say as much as 80 percent of the residents of the metropolitan area have returned, squeezing into unflooded housing outside the city proper.

STRUCK BY ENORMITY

Schools are opening for those back, and residents can measure painfully slow progress in terms of each new house gutted of rotting furniture, each boat pulled off a median, each new sandwich shop opening in a desolate area.

That was not clear to Fred and Pat Smith, two retired Californians looking around the Lower Ninth. Their visit to their daughter in the Uptown area near the Garden District had not prepared them for the storm damage still evident a few blocks from where the Industrial Canal opened up.

Many square blocks have been cleared and lie vacant, but beyond that street after street has houses pulled off foundations, twisted by the elements, full of refuse and showing the dirty line where the flood waters sat.

"I'm absolutely overwhelmed at the destruction. It is unimaginable. Oh my goodness, what is that over there?" asked Fred, pointing to a roof sitting in the branches of a tree.

"You look at it on television or in the newspaper, and it doesn't even begin to capture the magnitude of it. Not close," he said.

"That's right," agreed Pat, struck by the enormity of it a year after the storm hit. "I can't think of enough adjectives to tell you."

(For more stories related to the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, please go to http://today.reuters.com/news/GlobalCoverage.aspx?type=katrina&src=GLOBALCOVERAGE_wire )

    New Orleans visitors find a tale of two cities, R, 28.8.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=inDepthNews&storyID=2006-08-28T211444Z_01_N22233792_RTRUKOC_0_US-WEATHER-HURRICANE-VISITORS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-inDepthNews-2

Anniversary Brings Out the Politics of Commemoration

August 28, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 27 — On the eve of Hurricane Katrina’s first anniversary Tuesday, this city has become a giant political talking point.

Finger-wagging Democratic congressmen are pouring down here, hoping to score points a year into the stuttering recovery, and President Bush’s cabinet secretaries have been staking out hopeful counterpositions among the ruins. The president himself will spend two days in the region this week.

Weary citizens, meanwhile, await with apprehension the day and its revival of painful memories. In New Orleans the anniversary will be marked with a solemn bell-ringing ceremony on the steps of City Hall to commemorate the levee breaches, and with a host of prayer services, wreath layings, colloquia and discussion panels.

Democrats are seizing this moment of reckoning with something approaching glee, while Republicans are handling it gingerly. For Democrats there are the persistent scenes of destruction and the ongoing misery of lives upended, handy backdrops for criticism of the Bush administration.

“We know the storm was a tragedy, but a bigger tragedy is how the federal government responded,” Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, said Thursday to television cameras and a handful of onlookers in the parking lot of St. Bernard Parish’s only functioning grocery store.

For Republicans there are more arcane indicators like the percentage of debris removed or the number of Small Business Administration loans approved. A lengthy report released last week by President Bush’s Gulf Coast recovery chief detailed these and other initiatives, down to the number of passports being issued per week by the reopened New Orleans passport agency (25,000) and the number of air mattresses provided by the federal government (20,000).

Mr. Bush is set for visits to Mississippi on Monday and to New Orleans on Tuesday that are expected to include speeches, neighborhood stops and attendance at an ecumenical prayer service. He has designated Tuesday a National Day of Remembrance. Last week, he pre-emptively played down the importance of the event, cautioning that “a one-year anniversary is just that” and saying that “it’s going to take a while to recover.”

The White House, aware of the widespread skepticism about its commitment to rebuilding, will use this week’s visit to reinforce the message that the president cares about the region and is intent on helping it recover. Instead of heralding the money that has been allocated and spent, said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, Mr. Bush will sound uplifting themes “to shine a light on the true grit and character of the citizens who are rebuilding.”

Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Bush wanted to “send a message on behalf of all Americans” that the storm’s victims would not be forgotten. “The president,” he said, “as most Americans, will focus on the anniversary to reflect and remember and to recommit ourselves to seeing the job through.”

Nonetheless, the White House sent five cabinet secretaries — from the Departments of Commerce, Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development — as well as the Gulf Coast reconstruction czar, Donald Powell, to announce mini-initiatives and emphasize that progress was occurring, despite visual evidence suggesting otherwise.

A housing project overhaul, more prosecutors for the local United States attorney, $235 million for displaced students, millions more to rebuild oyster beds: Mr. Bush’s deputies have been working to counter persistent dissatisfaction from outside Louisiana with the quality of the federal response.

In New Orleans, resentment remains deep, particularly among blacks. At the premiere of Spike Lee’s HBO hurricane documentary on Aug. 16 at the New Orleans Arena, the crowd hooted vociferously when Mr. Bush appeared on the screen. Its most enthusiastic applause came when local residents interviewed for the film gave voice to the conspiracy theorists’ hobbyhorse: that the levees had been blown up deliberately.

Elsewhere in Louisiana, Mr. Bush is not blamed and remains highly popular among whites, a leading Republican pollster said. “They’re not going to hold Bush responsible for New Orleans because they didn’t like it to start with,” said the pollster, Bernie Pinsonat of Baton Rouge, adding, “How would we expect them to recover when they haven’t been able to take care of themselves?”

Underscoring the point, Mr. Bush got a locally well-publicized lift last week from a St. Bernard Parish citizen who had traveled to Washington in a replica Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer to meet him, and who turned out to be an ardent supporter of the president.

Going up against the Bush officials are about 20 Democratic members of Congress, including Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, as well as Mr. Reid. The representatives will go on the now-obligatory bus tour of New Orleans and participate in the ecumenical prayer service on Tuesday at the New Orleans Convention Center.

There is the politics of commemorating the storm’s wreckage, and then there is the wreckage itself. By week’s end the Washington visitors will have cleared out, and the ruined neighborhoods will remain. Fears here that the region’s lingering woes will be forgotten, never far from the surface, will be as sharp as ever.

On Thursday, Mr. Reid’s motorcade breezed through the ruins of Chalmette, a suburb just east of the Lower Ninth Ward that was completely inundated by Hurricane Katrina. Much of it looks as if the storm hit last week, with blocks of ghostly, vacant houses and empty shopping strips; less than a third of the surrounding parish’s prestorm population of 75,000 has returned.

With brisk efficiency Mr. Reid, accompanied by Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, strode through Andrew Jackson Elementary School, one of only two schools open in the parish. Virtually all the students had lost their homes and spent the preceding school year somewhere else. The parking lot is crammed with narrow trailers that serve as living quarters for the teachers.

That unmistakable evidence notwithstanding, Mr. Reid called out to Christine Elliers’s fifth-grade class, “Does anyone live in these little trailers?” The response was immediate and unanimous. “We all do!” the class shouted back.

A further initiation into the realities of present-day South Louisiana awaited. “Do we like them?” the teacher called out. “No!” the students shouted back. “Do we have to put up with them?” Ms. Elliers asked. “Yeah!” the students shouted.

Local officials were thin on the ground in this conservative parish to hear Mr. Reid say later, outside the grocery store: “What is needed in New Orleans is public works projects. For as much money as we spend in one week in Iraq, we could create 150,000 jobs.”

Lynn Dean, the chairman of the St. Bernard Parish Council, a veteran local Republican, listened skeptically. “Typical partisan talk,” Mr. Dean said. “The federal government has put billions of dollars down here already. A lot of the money has been wasted.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

    Anniversary Brings Out the Politics of Commemoration, NYT, 28.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/us/nationalspecial/28anniversary.html

ON THEIR OWN

In the absence of clear direction, New Orleanians are rebuilding a patchwork city.

Sunday, August 27, 2006
The Times Picayune
By Gordon Russell
Staff writer

From the concrete porch of her 7th Ward shotgun -- cracked now, thanks to Katrina's filthy floodwaters -- Alice Soublet has an unobstructed view of New Orleans' future.

Or, more accurately, its possible futures.

"That one's been fixed up, this one . . . the one down there," Soublet said, ticking them off as she looked down Republic Street at the properties being actively revived.

Most of the doubles across the street are gutted and tidy. The debris has been cleared, and at least three homes on Soublet's block, between Abundance and Treasure streets near Interstate 610, are renovated and occupied. Five trailers, three of them next to her house -- which has been cleaned but not fully repaired, because of a dispute between Soublet and her insurer -- offer further evidence of Republic Street's resurgence.

But the house two doors down from Soublet's could portend a grimmer future. With a fallen tree atop the carport, a moldering van beneath it, and a jungle of weeds in the front yard, the property could serve as a monument to Katrina's devastation. Save for towering weeds, it looks much the way it did when the floodwaters subsided 11 months ago. There's a similar eyesore catty-corner to Soublet's place, although the weeds were trimmed last week, much to her relief.

This corner of the 7th Ward neatly captures the state of the city's recovery a year after floodwaters laid waste to it: It's a patchwork quilt. Whether the rehabilitation gains steam, or blight and abandonment spread and conspire to threaten the neighborhood's future stability, remains an open question.

Count Soublet among the hopeful: "My street, it's looking pretty good, considering the rest of the city," she said. "I think it's going to come back."

Her optimism is tempered by realism, though. She added, "It's going to take a long time -- seven or eight years -- 'til it's complete."


Wait and see

Across the city, the buzz of saws and the whine of sanders can be heard almost everywhere, from upper middle class Lakeview to the ravaged Lower 9th Ward.

By June 29, more than 56,000 property owners had taken out some sort of permit from City Hall, more than one permit for every three structures in the city. (Overall, more than 80,000 permits have been granted.) Given that the West Bank and a sizable slice of the east bank did not flood, the activity suggests that about half the owners of flooded properties have signaled an intent to do something with them.

Having a permit, of course, is not the same as acting on it. Untold thousands of homeowners snared permits before they were ready to start work for any number of reasons -- because they didn't know how long City Hall would give them out for free, because they wanted to be grandfathered in before new elevation standards were adopted to reduce the threat of flood damage, because they were afraid inaction would be used as an excuse for officials to seize their homes.

Clearly, some people are opting for a wait-and-see approach. Sean Reilly, a member of Gov. Kathleen Blanco's Louisiana Recovery Authority, said local banks have reported that up to $10 billion in insurance proceeds remains unspent. Banker Joe Canizaro said he believes the real number may be only half that large, but it's still a staggering amount.

Still, plenty of homeowners have begun work in earnest. The sights and sounds of progress are everywhere: piles of construction debris, fleets of contractors' pickup trucks, lawn signs advertising an electrician or a landscaper or a homeowner's intention to come home.

It's difficult, however, to say where the action is liveliest. Every block, every home has its own narrative. And while some neighborhoods have clearly started to come back more quickly than others -- Broadmoor, Mid-City and Pontchartrain Park come to mind -- it's very difficult to generalize about broad swaths of terrain.

A neighborhood's progress depends on how its residents respond to a huge array of factors. But in the first year, a couple of variables stand out.

As many predicted, recovery has been strongest in areas adjacent to those that didn't flood, for obvious reasons: Flooding was apt to be less devastating in such areas, and the proximity to shops and vital services has helped speed rebuilding.

The other major factor is money. In general, wealthier sections are more apt to show progress. Again, that's no surprise: Wealthier people are more likely to be insured, and those who were underinsured have the resources or creditworthiness to make up the difference.

While plenty of public money has been aimed at the city's recovery, money from the state's $7.5 billion "Road Home" program has yet to reach the streets. As that money begins flowing in coming weeks, observers expect another jolt to the recovery, as those who lacked the means to begin repairs start to catch up with their neighbors.

In the end, working-class homeowners may be the most likely to rebuild, demographer Greg Rigamer believes, because their homes may be the only asset of value they own. The wealthy, Rigamer noted, "can avoid adversity. They have options."


A smaller footprint

Even with the huge infusion of federal aid on the way, it's unthinkable that all parts of the city will thrive, most observers agree.

At the neighborhood level, that will have unpleasant consequences.

Shortly after the storm, experts warned strenuously that in the absence of a carefully planned and controlled revival, New Orleans would succumb to the "jack-o'-lantern effect" -- a gap-toothed revival in which renovated homes were interspersed with blighted and abandoned structures that eventually would bring down the neighborhood.

The nonprofit Urban Land Institute recommended starting the rebuilding process in the city's more flood-resistant core and spreading out only as the city regained the population density and economic vitality to make those areas viable. The land-use panel of the mayor's Bring New Orleans Back Commission called for a moratorium on building permits while severely flooded neighborhoods were assessed.

Both ideas -- which came to be known as "shrinking the footprint" -- were controversial, and Nagin rejected both, trumpeting his belief that property rights are sacrosanct.

A few months later, the long-anticipated announcement of new elevation guidelines by FEMA likewise disappointed homeowners and experts who though they might offer guidance on how and where to rebuild.

The new FEMA rules did not bar development in any district of the city, and left intact the elevations set in 1984. And even those 22-year-old requirements have been easy to duck, given the Nagin administration's willingness to revise household damage assessments to below the 50 percent level, at which compliance with the revised maps becomes mandatory.

Nagin's laissez-faire approach, so far at least, has resulted in something resembling the dreaded jack-o'-lantern effect. While two planning processes are now belatedly under way -- one engineered by the City Council and the second by the LRA -- many homeowners have jumped the gun and are rebuilding before the blueprints have been completed, rendering them at least partially moot.

Many observers believe the mayor -- who faced a difficult re-election as he was being asked to make politically delicate decisions -- shied away from making the tough calls the situation called for, a critical mistake that could scar the city for years to come.

John McIlwaine, senior fellow for housing at the ULI, said recently that the future of some New Orleans neighborhoods can be seen in the empty, blighted acres of some of America's most depopulated cities.

"I can take you through parts of North Philadelphia or Detroit or Baltimore and show you what it will look like," he said.

Reed Kroloff, dean of Tulane University's architecture school and one of two people who were to have overseen the aborted BNOB-backed planning process, says the city's current status reflects "a complete failure of leadership at almost every level."

"Some of it was through wanton neglect, some through honest error, some through distraction . . . you name it, we suffered it. And here we are a year later and very little has happened in terms of planning."


'A bunch of bull'

Such critiques irk Nagin, who rattles off a laundry list of planning efforts that are either complete or under way. The idea that a lack of planning has stymied the recovery is "a bunch of bull," he said.

Nagin's point is that the failure to disburse a dime of the federal housing money has nothing to do with the fits and starts of the planning effort to date.

But the problem, according to those on the other side of the fence, is not that a lack of planning has slowed the pace of aid. Rather, it has forced homeowners to make up their minds about what to do without any clear direction from the government. And while "planning" has occurred, none of yet has any force of law.

Reilly of the LRA believes the punting by City Hall and FEMA makes the ongoing planning process that much more critical.

"If the city isn't going to inform decisions through its permitting, and FEMA is not going to inform decisions through elevation requirements, then the planning process has to do it," he said. "Those other mechanisms have fallen by the wayside.

"I'm very fearful of the jack-o'-lantern effect," Reilly said. "My worst fear is for the homeowner to take his nest egg, invest it back into the home, and two years from now, look to the right and to the left and see vacant lots."

Nagin's critics would have preferred to see the process work in reverse, with the government telling people where it planned to invest its resources -- on parks, schools, roads, utilities and the like -- before they made decisions on where to rebuild.

Reilly said he, like Nagin, believes in the marketplace.

"But the market needs information," he said. "Otherwise the market won't work."

Kroloff made a similar point.

"The mayor keeps saying he wants the market to determine things," Kroloff said. "But there's not a single market in this country in which there's no intervention. It's called taxes. Sometimes it's a tax, sometimes it's a tax break. But we do not live in a free market.

"I encourage the mayor to stand up and say something other than, 'Let the market decide.' That's planning not to plan. Let the mayor say, 'Here's some guidance.' Why let this happen randomly? Why not encourage it to happen intelligently?"


Between the canals

Nagin believes his approach is working exactly as intended.

"The market is reacting properly," he said. "If you get the information out there, the marketplace is going to make a good decision."

While some might say there's little information out there on which to base a decision, Nagin said he has offered guidance to renovators -- though it may have struck some homeowners as frustratingly vague.

On a number of occasions, he has said that public investment will follow resettlement -- but, of course, would-be resettlers don't yet know how many people their neighborhoods will attract.

Also, during the campaign season, Nagin offered general warnings to those who would rebuild in parts of the Lower 9th Ward and low-lying sections of eastern New Orleans. He didn't specify which areas he meant, but said he thought some neighborhoods in those areas would struggle to recover.

He has since become somewhat blunter, although not necessarily more specific.

"New Orleans east is showing some signs (of recovery), but it's so vast, it's going to hit the wall," he said. "There's just such a big footprint. I don't think they're going to get the clustering they need. So I think you're going to have little pockets in the east.

"I've been saying this publicly, and people are starting to hear it: low-lying areas of New Orleans east, stay away from. Lower 9th Ward. I said it in Houston; people are starting to hear it. That's what I'm telling people (in the Lower 9). Move closer to the river. That stuff from Claiborne to the lake -- we can't touch that."

Moreover, Nagin now says that the city's investments will be concentrated in the area between the 17th Street Canal and the Industrial Canal, which he expects to make a full recovery.

"We're going to focus most of the resources in here," he said.


There's still time

One advantage to Nagin's approach is that the planning process going on now can make use of the decisions people have already made, rather than attempting to anticipate them.

But there are a couple of major downsides. One is that the process is bound to create a class of losers. Those who pour their money and energy into a neighborhood that ultimately founders may well feel cheated.

"There are people who are going to regret the investments they make, because there's nothing coming behind them," said Canizaro, the banker who led Nagin's land-use panel. "I think you can already see it as you ride around."

Nagin said he believes those who decide at some point in the future that they made the wrong decision will be able to opt for a government buyout.

The other drawback of the laissez-faire approach, Kroloff and Canizaro say, is that the opportunity for big thinking -- rezoning, major new parks, transit corridors -- has largely passed, because so much rebuilding has already begun. But both say there is still time for the planning process to have a positive effect on the city's future direction.

Already, planning groups are armed with data about what their neighbors are doing. As tens of thousands of New Orleanians make their way through the LRA's homeowner-aid program, their intentions will be fed to planners immediately, Reilly said, helping to round out the picture.

While those developments will certainly help bring neighborhood futures into focus, there's growing evidence that the city's longer-term future -- and the future of any given neighborhood -- will rest more on its ability to attract new residents than on its efforts to bring back the old ones.

The prototypical yardstick used to measure New Orleans' recovery is population, which various estimates and surveys put at around 225,000, about half its pre-Katrina size. But a plateau appears to have been reached.

A recent analysis of postal change-of-address forms showed a huge dropoff in the number of New Orleanians returning home in the second quarter of the year.

Paul Lambert, who has overseen the planning process set in motion by the City Council, took noted of low turnout at two recent out-of-town planning events -- one in Baton Rouge, one in Atlanta.

Lambert has also been looking over the results of recent polling by Xavier University sociologist Silas Lee, which showed that a significant number of those from flooded areas don't plan to come back. Other recent polls have found similar entrenchment among the displaced.

Taking it all in, Lambert has begun to wonder whether the goals of the planning process need to be recalibrated.

"I started to think in terms of, 'Have people already made their decisions? Is this as much about attracting new families as in getting residents to return?' " Lambert said. "Maybe they've made up their minds that they are in fact going to sell their homes and have settled somewhere else."

Lambert noted that the focus -- on his part, and on the part of most who have attended meetings -- is still on bringing back the displaced. But there's a growing realization that "not everyone is coming back, and therefore we need strategies to be able to attract new families in."

Shreveport demographer Elliott Stonecipher has been saying the same thing. He believes one of the reasons New Orleans has historically struggled is because the city is trapped in its traditions. Few may leave, but fewer still immigrate into the city.

Katrina changed the former, of course, but Stonecipher believes too much attention is still paid to the restoration of the pre-storm city. Some people won't come back, he said. And others who did come back will move on, thanks to the city's radical makeover.

That's OK, in his view. While some rocky years may lie ahead, Stonecipher thinks that if the city can make inroads attacking its intractable problems -- crime, corruption, poor schools, a lack of good jobs -- New Orleans' mystique and its well-known pleasures will take care of the rest.

Those aren't trifling. For Soublet, the city's charms made her decision an easy one.

"I know a lot of people don't want to come back," she said. "Myself, I love it here. I wouldn't even think of living anywhere else. Even if it is messed up."

    In the absence of clear direction, New Orleanians are rebuilding a patchwork city, The Times Picayune, 27.8.2006, http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1156665883265020.xml&coll=1&thispage=1

After Long Stress, Newsman in New Orleans Unravels

August 10, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 9 — On the morning after Hurricane Katrina, when members of The Times-Picayune’s staff found themselves marooned in its flooded building here, John McCusker refused to join most of his colleagues in relocating to a remote newsroom in Baton Rouge.

After the building was evacuated, Mr. McCusker, a photographer for the paper, swam through muck while managing to keep his equipment dry and, from a kayak, captured some of the most harrowing images of the storm’s immediate aftermath.

Then, for months, he lived the misery he had been photographing, having lost his possessions, his family’s home and his entire neighborhood to the hurricane. On Tuesday, nearly a year after the storm, he seemed to snap.

In an episode that began as a traffic stop for erratic driving, the authorities say, Mr. McCusker was halted once, pinned a police officer between cars by backing up, then fled and drove into several cars and construction signs in the Uptown neighborhood before being stopped again and finally subdued with a Taser gun. In both stops, the police say, he begged officers to shoot him, telling them he did not have enough insurance money to rebuild his home in the Gentilly neighborhood and wanted to die.

“He was demanding it; he kept saying, ‘Just kill me, just kill me,’ ” said James Arey, commander of the negotiation team of the Police Department’s special operations division, who responded to the scene.

“He never stopped saying that, and made every attempt to hurt the police officers with his automobile because that’s the only weapon he had,” Mr. Arey said. “Our officers are well trained to recognize crises and attempts at ‘suicide by cop,’ and that’s what this was.”

As of Wednesday night, Mr. McCusker, a veteran member of the Times-Picayune staff and son of an old New Orleans family, was in a jail cell under a doctor’s care, having been charged with reckless operation of a vehicle and hit-and-run driving, among other things.

The public unraveling of such a well-known local photographer shined light again on the troubled state of mental health in New Orleans, where the struggle to return to normalcy has produced an epidemic of post-traumatic stress and depression and where psychiatric help is extremely limited.

The state has estimated that the city has lost more than half its psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and other mental health workers, many of whom relocated after the storm. There are only three acute-care hospitals open in the city now, fewer than 65 beds for adult psychiatric patients, and no psychiatric crisis intervention unit that might have accepted Mr. McCusker after his arrest. Mr. Arey, a friend of his, said it was better for him to be in a jail cell rather than neglected in an overcrowded emergency room where officers could have taken him.

“We have known patients who’ve sat in emergency rooms for days,” Mr. Arey said. “I’m not exaggerating, literally days. We didn’t want him to sit for days. We had grave concerns about his safety, and I thought he might be safer in jail under suicide protection.”

Terry Baquet, the Page 1 editor of The Times-Picayune, which returned to its building not long after the storm, tried to get to the scene of the chase to speak with Mr. McCusker. They are friends, and before the hurricane their children attended the same Catholic elementary school.

“I saw him in the back of a police car driving off,” Mr. Baquet said. “It was just sad seeing him like that. I’d like to see him doing well again.”

When asked about sadness at the newspaper, which won two Pulitzer Prizes this year for its Hurricane Katrina coverage, he added: “I don’t think you can tell, and it’s fair to say everyone’s affected. We live with Katrina every day.”

In an interview with The American Journalism Review published this month, Mr. McCusker said he had recently taken a leave of absence from the paper to concentrate on dealing with the raw emotions left by the storm. He said he went to therapy three times a week and spent a great deal of time sleeping off exhaustion.

“You have to understand the depth of the horror that the city was,” he said.

    After Long Stress, Newsman in New Orleans Unravels, NYT, 10.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/us/10orleans.html

Critic’s Notebook

In New Orleans, Each Resident Is Master of Plan to Rebuild

August 8, 2006
The New York Times
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 3 — Rebuilding a city, it seems, is too important a task to be left to professional planners. At least that’s the message behind a decision to place one of the most daunting urban reconstruction projects in American history in the hands of local residents.

Ever since a botched attempt to develop a comprehensive plan for New Orleans fell apart last winter, city and state officials have been straining to avoid the sticky racial and social questions that are central to any effort to rebuild and recover after Hurricane Katrina.

Their solution, hammered out in July, was to turn the planning process over to a local charity, the Greater New Orleans Foundation. On Aug. 1 the foundation opened a series of public meetings in which groups representing more than 70 neighborhoods would begin selecting the planners to help determine everything from where to place houses to the width of sidewalks.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin has referred to the process as “democracy in action.” And, superficially, it sounds like one of the most stirring grass-roots planning movements imaginable, one that would help preserve the rich heterogeneity that gives the city its vibrant urban character.

Yet this freewheeling approach has shifted attention from the critical and more daunting challenge of reimagining the city’s infrastructure, from levees to freeways to its ecological footprint. It is the failure of that infrastructure, after all, that exposed the inequities that have been eating away at New Orleans for decades.

How and whether these problems are resolved will tell us whether our country is capable of assuring the future of American cities.

Armed with a $3.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Greater New Orleans Foundation has chosen 15 planning teams who will develop designs for the various neighborhoods. The groups of neighborhood residents, many of them still displaced, met directly with the teams for five hours last Tuesday to get a sense of which ones they may want to work with. (Not surprisingly, the more affluent neighborhoods have been the best organized.)

Eventually the proposals will be woven into a single citywide master plan. What is stunning is the lack of comprehensive guidelines. Basic zoning requirements remain exactly the same as before the storm. In the areas of the city that experienced the worst flooding, the required elevation above sea level for each building follows guidelines set in the mid-1980’s. Proposals to shrink the city’s footprint to bring it into line with ecological realities — global warming, the rising sea level, the need to restore wetlands — were dropped months ago because it implied the elimination of some poor neighborhoods, a politically fraught issue. In the face of all of this, the city’s planning department has been reduced from 24 people to 9 since the storm.

Many residents who have returned have simply taken matters into their own hands. In the Holy Cross area, one of the few sections of the Ninth Ward that was not washed away by the storm, a handful of residents are fashioning street signs by hand because the city has yet to replace any. Across the city, in Lakeview, a group of homeowners have been seeking corporate sponsors and even selling T-shirts to raise money to rebuild a fire station, since they discovered that they cannot take out fire insurance without one.

Steven Bingler, the architect in charge of the planning process, sees this as a genuinely democratic phenomenon. “The planner’s responsibility is not to make the decision,” he said, but “to empower people to make decisions for themselves and their own communities.”

In practice, this could mean that some neighborhoods come back to life as mere hamlets, Mr. Bingler said, in which they may receive a narrower range of services, dispensing with, say, 24-hour fire protection or cable television service. This idiosyncratic approach allows the government to circumvent the racial issues that torpedoed earlier planning proposals, in particular a legitimate suspicion among low-income black residents that any large-scale planning effort would be used to marginalize them.

Encouraging individuals to rebuild on their own terms, house by house, brick by brick, is certainly preferable to embracing the formulaic developer-driven subdivisions that were eating away at the city’s character even before Katrina struck. The process could also prove educational for thousands of people. One of the most refreshing moments recently was seeing community activists interviewing potential planners, who typically meet with government officials behind closed doors. Such a give-and-take could yield a well-informed population, elevating the public debate about architecture and planning issues.

The first problem with this fantasy is the quality of the education. Although the 15 planning teams include committed designers, from local architects like Wayne Troyer and Robert Tannen to Andrés Duany of Miami and Frederic Schwartz of New York, the majority are known for the kind of cookie-cutter visions that have been sapping the vitality of American cities for decades.

More to the point, the teams do not represent a cross-section of current architectural and planning debates. They create the illusion of choice where there is none, denying residents an opportunity to engage the full range of ideas that could spark a new vision for the future of New Orleans.

Worst of all, by planning ad hoc, the city is forfeiting a chance to consider how infrastructure could be used to bind communities — rich and poor, black and white — into a collective whole. It allows residents to retreat back into their old ways and ignore uncomfortable social truths.

Part of this mentality is related to the anti-big-government campaigns that gained momentum in the Reagan era, leaving ever more infrastructure, from parks to phone systems to schools, in the hands of private corporations. But the aversion to broad planning is also based on a neo-liberal belief that it is impossible to build any large-scale urban project without destroying the fine-grained fabric of city neighborhoods.

Both views assume that the humble neighborhood block and the scale of public infrastructure are in direct opposition to each other.

But urban-planning strategies need not be viewed as acts of wanton brutality. The architects Reed Kroloff and Ray Manning, for example, have suggested that tax breaks and equity swaps could be used to encourage homeowners to resettle in denser urban neighborhoods like Tremé, on relatively high ground. Once blighted and crime-ridden, such areas had already begun attracting new residents before the storm because of the quality of their housing stock.

Mr. Kroloff, the dean of the Tulane University School of Architecture, has also raised the intriguing possibility of dismantling a portion of the freeway that now separates part of Tremé from the French Quarter, stitching the two neighborhoods back together and partly righting a wrong from the 1950’s, when the highway’s construction wiped away one of the city’s thriving black commercial strips.

By incorporating a more surgical approach to rebuilding, planners could not only challenge the dangerous cliché that a healthy community and large-scale intervention are at odds, but also help rebuild the fragile trust that was shattered when the levees collapsed.

Of course such progress is only possible in a world where government does not abdicate its responsibility to provide all of its citizens with a measure of protection. The Federal Emergency Management Agency packed up and left long ago. The federal government has yet to significantly raise the level of levee protection. Nor has it committed the money needed to rebuild the coastal wetlands and barrier islands that could absorb the impact of another storm.

As it stands now, the planning process is a cause for both hope and rage. It awakens us to the reality of what Americans are capable of and what our government is not.

    In New Orleans, Each Resident Is Master of Plan to Rebuild, NYT, 8.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/arts/design/08buil.html

New Orleans Moves to Repair Its Legal System

August 8, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 7 — After months of chaos in the criminal justice system here, Mayor C. Ray Nagin announced the first steps Monday to replace the city’s missing prosecutors, public defenders and police officers, along with its ruined courtrooms.

A neighboring parish is lending prosecutors to New Orleans to help its overburdened district attorney’s office deal with a significant backlog of cases, Mr. Nagin said. Pro bono assistance for poor defendants is on the way from the State Bar Association, which is also paying for a new system to coordinate and track cases. Courtrooms and jail cells are being rebuilt and brought into service.

And, Mr. Nagin said, the city has established a system for contacting and issuing subpoenas to New Orleans police officers who have been scattered across the country since Hurricane Katrina. The displaced officers have been desperately needed to testify in scores of criminal cases that have been unable to proceed for a lack of witnesses.

The limited progress report comes as Mr. Nagin and other municipal officials have been under increasing pressure from agitated residents, local judges and national legal experts decrying the city’s broken legal system.

Just last week, judges here ruled that the mechanism to pay for the indigent defender system was unconstitutional and sent an emergency request for money to the Justice Department. Louisiana is the only state to rely mainly on local court fees, mostly surcharges on traffic tickets, to finance its public defenders, and that system is basically broke.

One of the judges, Arthur L. Hunter Jr., has threatened to begin releasing hundreds of defendants who have not had access to lawyers back onto the streets as of Aug. 29, the date Hurricane Katrina made landfall last year.

“If we are still part of the United States and if the Constitution still means something,” Judge Hunter wrote in an emergency order last month, “then why is the criminal justice system 11 months after Hurricane Katrina still in shambles?”

With crime rising and the legal system perceived as an ineffective deterrent, many in the city have said that New Orleans cannot recover without immediate change.

“A city that’s perceived as unsafe will not recover,” an editorial in The Times-Picayune said Monday, “whether the threat is levees that can’t hold back floods or a justice system that can’t keep criminals at bay.”

At a morning news conference, Mr. Nagin said the city “recognized the need for an immediate effort” and promised that officials “will not surrender one more inch of our city to the criminals.”

He and others stopped short, however, of saying that these changes would accomplish an immediate reduction in the rate of serious crime, stressing that the city was just beginning to tackle the enormous issue.

“The people of New Orleans don’t need pie-in-the-sky rhetoric,” said Richard Ieyoub, the coordinator of the mayor’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee and a former state attorney general. Mr. Ieyoub quoted Winston Churchill in saying that despite the new strategies, the city had “not even achieved the end of the beginning.”

Mr. Ieyoub and others acknowledged that there was much work to be done in re-establishing an effective system that could inspire respect from the people of New Orleans. Even before the storm, the city had one of the most broken criminal justice systems in the country and frequently led the nation in the number of murders.

So far this year — even with a much smaller population — New Orleans has had 83 murders, some of them multiple homicides. Since the storm, however, there has been only one murder trial, and that was for a killing before the hurricane.

Over the weekend, Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, asked the Justice Department to send extra resources to the New Orleans metropolitan area to help address mounting crime.

“There is also emerging evidence that gangs are aware of the criminal justice system’s difficulties, and they intend to maximize their window of opportunity,” Ms. Landrieu said in a statement. “What is called for is a sustained and unprecedented effort to destroy this violent criminal element before it takes root and spreads.”

After a rash of violence early in the summer, the city asked the state to send National Guard troops and state police officers to help the local police through September. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco recently extended the amount of time the troops will stay in the city, and she has not set an exit date.

Many here remain concerned about long-term repair to the criminal justice system, and there was criticism today that the mayor’s new procedures were simply temporary measures that would not fix the causes of the dysfunction.

“It’s not simply a case of volunteers coming in and dealing with the backlog of cases,” said David Carroll, the director of research and evaluations at the National Legal Aid and Defender Association in Washington. “Katrina was not the cause of the indigent defender crisis. It was a catalyst that accelerated the longstanding deficiencies.”

But, Mr. Carroll said of the city’s new plans, “it certainly is a step in the right direction after months and months of inaction.”

    New Orleans Moves to Repair Its Legal System, NYT, 8.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/us/08orleans.html?hp&ex=1155096000&en=c98f82d42c65696d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Drug Problems Escalate After Hurricane Katrina

August 5, 2006
the New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW

SLIDELL, La. — It was just before dawn when the pickup truck arrived at the two-story house in this middle-class suburb, which was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. But unlike most of the trucks here now, it was not carrying construction supplies.

Federal agents, who were hiding in the bushes, say the truck was bringing 50 kilograms of cocaine, worth $5 million, from Houston to the murderous streets of nearby New Orleans. They also say that the shipment, seized on May 18, was at least five times as large as the typical drug delivery before the storm.

The drug trade in New Orleans is flourishing again, after its dealers, who evacuated to the regional drug hub of Houston, forged closer ties to major suppliers from the Mexican and Colombian cartels. They have since brought back drugs to New Orleans in far larger shipments than before, as the seized truck illustrates, essentially creating violent distribution gangs now spread over a much bigger area.

As a result, law enforcement officials in New Orleans and Houston are struggling to keep up with the changes as the region’s drug trade merges to a greater extent than ever before, adding to the murder rates in both cities.

As the drug-dealing returns, its effects are proving deadly for New Orleans, where the police say that fights over turf for distributing the drugs are the main reason for a spike in killings that threatens the city’s recovery. Even though its population is less than half of what it was before the storm, New Orleans recorded 22 homicides in July, the same number that it averaged each month in the three years before the hurricane.

Several poor neighborhoods in Houston, which has long been the main supply hub for drugs flowing across the southwest border, have been reeling as well. According to the Houston Police Department, Hurricane Katrina evacuees have been the suspects or victims in 44 homicides there, including many tied to gang-related drug dealing. And 14 percent of Houston’s felony narcotics arrests in the first six months of this year involved people displaced by the storm.

Sgt. Brian Harris, a Houston police homicide investigator, said that one evacuee, Ivory Harris, whose street name is B Stupid, was a suspect in three killings in Houston before he was arrested in March with a cache of drugs near New Orleans, where he was also wanted on murder charges. Sergeant Harris said several others, including two juveniles, once linked to a New Orleans gang called the Seventh Ward Hardheads, had been tied to 4 homicides and 28 other crimes in Houston.

Some of the crimes involved New Orleans gang members fighting one another over drugs and women during New Orleans music nights at Houston nightclubs, Sergeant Harris said, adding that he and other Houston officers were initially shocked by how many witnesses refused to cooperate.

New Orleans police officials have long complained that fears among witnesses about retaliation have hampered their ability to stop the drug trade. But to the Houston police, persuading witnesses to talk “was like trying to educate foreigners in the ways of the United States,” Sergeant Harris said.

Still, the Houston police have made enough arrests for word to get around that it is much harder to get out of jail there than it is in New Orleans, where murder suspects in the city’s weak court system have often been released after 60 days when no witnesses spoke up.

So some of the drug dealers have returned to New Orleans along with their customers, while others are now commuting between the two cities, law enforcement officials say.

Federal agents and the police in both cities have stepped up cooperation in tracking these movements, and they are pushing for more intelligence about the changes.

One of their biggest priorities is to try to choke off the supply of cocaine and heroin moving from Houston to New Orleans, usually in concealed compartments in vehicles zipping down Interstate 10.

Law enforcement officials say the vehicles — now often pickup trucks that can blend in with the post-storm construction traffic — are typically escorted by cars with heavily armed lookouts. Investigators say they suspect that a Houston man, who has been charged with killing a suburban New Orleans police captain in June, was one such lookout.

The cocaine truck seized here in May, which involved a mix of New Orleans evacuees and Mexican-Americans from Houston, is “a really good example” of the changes, said William J. Renton Jr., the special agent in charge of the New Orleans office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

Before the storm, he said, “Whenever we’d seize drugs destined for the greater New Orleans area, it was mostly 5 and 10 kilograms.” But since then, he added, “even guys who may not have been the biggest dope peddlers in the city went to Houston and met people who were involved in supplying, and new or deeper relationships developed.”

Over all, the volume of drugs headed for New Orleans has probably not declined as sharply as the city’s population, law enforcement authorities say, given the need to replenish stockpiles that were destroyed when the safe houses were ruined in the floods.

“There was probably a lot of dope washed out into Lake Pontchartrain during the flood,” said James D. Craig, the D.E.A.’s special agent in charge in Houston.

And because the New Orleans dealers would still be on the hook for the cost of those drugs, “some of them are in debt” to the Houston suppliers, he said. “And some of them are probably trying to make the money back by saying, ‘O.K., let me sell more dope.’ “

Mr. Craig said the seizure of the 50 kilograms in Slidell illustrates how displaced New Orleans residents have teamed up with people in Houston to put together bigger deals.

Federal authorities said they believed the shipment originated at the Houston home of Joseph H. Aguirre, 40, a Mexican-American with a record of arrests for marijuana possession.

When the agents raided the house in Slidell, they also seized 3,500 Ecstasy tablets, 5 pounds of high-potency marijuana and $60,000 in cash. And they arrested six people, including three men who had moved from New Orleans to Texas after the storm and who are believed to have driven the truck from Houston.

Records show that one of those men, and the house’s owner, who was also arrested, had both been previously convicted on drug distribution charges. In Houston, Mr. Aguirre pleaded guilty last month to state charges involving cocaine and other drugs found in his apartment. The authorities say his connection to the Slidell shipment remains under investigation.

James Bernazzani, the F.B.I.’s special agent in charge in New Orleans, said Asian gang members from Canada had also recently begun distributing large quantities of drugs in the eastern part of the city, though the authorities had been beating them back.

But there has been little relief from the drug wars in the poor neighborhoods in central New Orleans, where the bulk of the homicides has occurred. And even if some of the local dealers are turning to new suppliers in Houston, the police say, they have no intention of giving up any of their own turf to newcomers.

James F. Scott, a deputy New Orleans police superintendent, said a lone Hispanic man had recently showed up on a Central City street corner to sell drugs. His body was later found there, with four bullet holes in his back and four in his chest.

    Drug Problems Escalate After Hurricane Katrina, NYT, 5.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/05/us/05drugs.html?hp&ex=1154836800&en=123a893c9bc17b61&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Arrest of Nurses and Doctor Puts Attorney General in Louisiana on Defensive

August 1, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW

NEW ORLEANS, July 31 — During his 30 years as the sheriff here, Charles C. Foti Jr. was known for treating thousands of elderly people to free Thanksgiving dinners, complete with jazz and blues bands. And when he was sworn in as the state’s attorney general in 2004, he made cracking down on the abuse of the elderly one of his top priorities.

His support for the state’s older residents helped make him one of Louisiana’s most popular politicians. But now it has led Mr. Foti, a normally cautious lawyer, into a firestorm, as many people question his decision to order the arrests of a doctor and two nurses, whom he accused of killing four hospital patients with drug injections in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina.

Angry doctors say Mr. Foti’s accusations have trampled delicate issues about end-of-life care and have made the doctor, Anna M. Pou, a scapegoat for the delays in evacuating a flooded hospital.

More than 200 local residents and evacuees have rallied to her defense on a community Web site, calling her a hero for working through the storm and accusing Mr. Foti of grandstanding. Even some of his former law enforcement colleagues criticize Mr. Foti’s handling of the case and question whether his accusations will hold up.

The vehemence of the criticism has been striking, as the case has quickly become a flashpoint for the sense of abandonment and rage that many people here still feel for being left to navigate the storm’s dire aftermath as best they could. And even some who have long been fans of Mr. Foti argue that whatever the doctor and the nurses did, it should not be viewed as criminal given how horrific the situation was.

But Mr. Foti, 68, is standing firm that the case is about murder, not mercy killing or accidental overdoses. “Everybody is entitled to whatever opinion they have,” he said in an interview in his characteristically gruff style. “I have to be guided by what my duty is.”

He added, “End-of-life issues are very sensitive, especially if you are the person whose end of life we are talking about.”

Mr. Foti arrested Dr. Pou, 50, a respected medical school professor, and the nurses, Lori L. Budo and Cheri A. Landry, on July 17. Their lawyers have said they did nothing wrong. He has turned the case over to the Orleans Parish district attorney, who will present it to a grand jury before deciding whether to bring charges.

But Mr. Foti’s assertion — that Dr. Pou and the nurses deliberately killed people who they thought were too weak to evacuate — has also prompted a national debate over euthanasia and how far doctors can go in what seem like the most hopeless situations. And it has led to new questions here about the witnesses Mr. Foti relied on and whether he really got to the bottom of what happened.

Even Harry Connick Sr., the former Orleans Parish district attorney, criticized his friend’s choice of words right after the arrests, when Mr. Foti accused Dr. Pou and the nurses of acting as if they “were God” in deciding which patients should live. Mr. Connick said that kind of statement could prejudice the case and was “not in keeping” with the guidelines that normally limit how much prosecutors say.

Some of the greatest outrage has been expressed in the long scroll of posts on nola.com, the Web site of The Times-Picayune, where sentiment has run overwhelmingly against Mr. Foti’s decision to arrest the women.

Describing Dr. Pou and the nurses as courageous to keep treating patients for days at the battered Memorial Medical Center, where there was no electricity, temperatures were over 100 degrees and food and medical supplies were running low, a local resident, Brandon Robb, wrote: “Does Mr. Foti truly believe that these women risked their own lives to stay behind so that they could murder people? How absurd.”

Kathleen Dupuy wrote, “If Charles Foti wants to blame someone, he should blame himself.” When the hospital was in desperate need of evacuation, she added, “where was the help from the government and the hospital administrators?”

Mr. Foti, whose father was a dentist and whose brother is a cancer surgeon, said he and his investigators had been fair. He added, “There’s no one that takes any pleasure in this.”

According to an affidavit released by Mr. Foti’s office, the arrests grew out of accusations by four supervisors for LifeCare Hospitals that ran an acute-care ward in the hospital. As hopes for a full rescue seemed to fade on the third day after the storm, three of the LifeCare employees say that Dr. Pou told them she was going to inject a “lethal dose” into patients who seemed unlikely to survive, the affidavit states.

According to the affidavit, the witnesses said Dr. Pou and the two nurses then filled syringes and went into patients’ rooms. Mr. Foti said toxicology tests suggested that all four patients were given lethal amounts of morphine. His spokeswoman, Kris Wartelle, said tests also found high morphine levels in 10 or 12 other bodies.

But John E. DiGiulio, a lawyer for one of the nurses, said it was a “big P.R. stunt” for Mr. Foti to arrest the three women before the case had been reviewed by a grand jury.

Some experts say the toxicology tests may not be completely reliable given how badly the bodies were decomposed. And the defense lawyers say the LifeCare employees had little direct knowledge of what happened inside the patients’ rooms.

Some defense lawyers said they would question the credibility of LifeCare and its employees. The company has acknowledged that 24 of its 55 patients died, and that its top administrator and medical director were not at the hospital during these days.

And while Mr. Foti’s affidavit says that LifeCare’s employees refused to help Dr. Pou give the injections, it does not indicate that they did much to stop her before evacuating.

Mr. Foti’s office convicted a nurse in northern Louisiana last year for cruelty to the elderly in the death of a patient, and he has brought negligent homicide charges against the owners of a nursing home where 34 people drowned during Hurricane Katrina. But in at least one other instance, involving a triage nurse in Shreveport, his case collapsed as soon as a grand jury became involved.

“The grand jurors asked very good questions,” said the nurse, Sheila Lockwood, adding that her experience made her skeptical of the current case.

    Arrest of Nurses and Doctor Puts Attorney General in Louisiana on Defensive, NYT, 1.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/us/01patients.html

Despite a City’s Hopes, an Uneven Repopulation

July 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS — In McKendall Estates, a prosperous but flooded neighborhood on the east side of the city, the end of the school year meant a summer of frenetic rebuilding.

A new whirlpool bathtub just arrived at Barbara Jenkins’s house, and beveled mirrors have been installed on her dining room walls. Ms. Jenkins’s neighbors are busy watering their flowers, painting the trim on their houses and accepting deliveries of new appliances. Some houses are so immaculate, with shiny new windows and lush landscaping, that it is hard to imagine the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina 10 months ago.

But much closer to downtown, in the Broadmoor area, Lydia and Charles Wiley are among the few pioneers on their block of South Miro Street. As soon as schools closed for the summer in New York City, where the Wileys had stayed since the hurricane, they brought their three children back to New Orleans. They now live in a trailer outside the home they are repairing.

“A lot of the kids in the neighborhood aren’t back, and I don’t think they’ll be back,” said Ms. Wiley, a sales clerk. “Long term, I think it will pick up. At least, I hope.”

Across New Orleans this summer, hundreds of former residents have returned with their children to jump-start the city’s recovery, despite great uncertainty about the future. Yet the renaissance is uneven from neighborhood to neighborhood, even from block to block. The summer that was supposed to be a bellwether for recovery has led to only patches of hope, raising just as many doubts.

Inconsistency is the norm. Just short distances from Ms. Jenkins’s well-populated New Orleans East subdivision are stretches of city that look abandoned. And the Wileys’ area, Broadmoor, despite the quiet of their block, is home to some of the most organized and active residents in the city. All these variables make it hard to typecast any single neighborhood as alive or dead.

“You’ve got variations not only across blocks but within blocks,” said John J. Beggs, a sociologist at Louisiana State University who was part of a team that surveyed neighborhoods this summer for the Army Corps of Engineers. “There’s just tremendous variation in terms of what has and hasn’t happened.”

Since the hurricane, the city has granted more than 28,000 building permits for residential and commercial construction projects that are estimated to be worth more than $1.8 billion. More than 60 percent of those permits have been issued since March, in anticipation of a summer spent working on repairs.

Yet it is hard to know how many people have returned to act upon those permits. It is clear that many have not, despite the city’s estimation that its population is 225,000 — about half its prehurricane size.

But there is hope, city officials say, that construction will become more evenly spread throughout the city based on the addresses for which permits have been requested.

“Even though it’s spotty, from the trends that we’re seeing it’s not as jack-o’-lantern as one would think,” said Greg Meffert, the city’s chief information officer. “We’re seeing neighborhoods organically wanting to come back. If you see our data, you know that certain neighborhoods are coming back in more whole of a way than we originally thought.”

Mr. Meffert pointed to Lakeview, Mid-City and Gentilly as neighborhoods where there is more building than was predicted.

“We’ve seen a large spike, more than anticipated,” he said.

In some ways, the calculus of rebuilding is simple: People who had flood insurance or savings are the best positioned to recover quickly.

But many people who have resources are still waiting, uncertain whether the levees will hold this hurricane season or which schools will reopen. Some homeowners are still anticipating the arrival of billions of dollars in federal aid, which is expected to begin flowing in late August or early September.

Uninsured, small-scale landlords are also waiting for help, and their languishing properties are contributing to pockets of emptiness in almost every part of town, experts say. A shortage of affordable housing and workers is compounding the problem.

“A lot of folks are saying, ‘I don’t need to be back there right now — it’s too depressing, ambiguous and uncertain,’ ” said Jeanne Nathan, a neighborhood development and marketing consultant. “A lot of people are waiting to see what happens this hurricane season. Yet those who are back are fired up like never before.”

There may be no clearer indication that the people of this city have taken the recovery into their own hands than the homemade street signs in the Claiborne-University area. Along Nashville Avenue, the signs, made mostly from scraps of wood and debris, announce Rocheblave, Tonti, Galvez and Miro Streets with the decorative flair of flowers and stars. Such homemade signs can be found all around the city.

Residents said they were tired of waiting for the city to reinstall the signs, and tired of feeling that their addresses did not matter. Contractors were getting lost. Deliveries were not being made.

“No one pursued City Hall after a certain amount of time, so we decided to be creative,” said Nicole Dufour, a member of the Claiborne-University Neighborhood Association. “We don’t know when we’ll have real signs, so people are banding together and taking things into their own hands.”

They are also planting trees in public spaces and cleaning their neighbors’ yards.

“If you want people to populate the city and help make a new New Orleans, you’ve got to help yourself,” said Kenyatta Hills, who recently returned from Atlanta. “If the place looks like Katrina just hit it, who’s going to want to come back home?”

Ms. Hills, a 22-year-old blackjack dealer, used one of her first paychecks this summer to buy garden tools to tame the overgrown yards on her street in the Mid-City section.

“My mind-frame was: ‘You were born and raised in New Orleans. Don’t let this happen. Get to work,’ ” she said.

But getting to work is not as simple as it used to be.

After Ms. Hills and her husband, Jerrone Smith, found jobs, they searched for a reasonably priced apartment for weeks before ending up in half of a duplex renting for $950 — and that did not include a refrigerator, a stove or air-conditioning.

“Those were considered ‘luxury items,’ ” Mr. Smith said.

The piles of garbage on the street were so high that the couple wondered when they would ever see the city’s sanitation trucks. They still wonder about missing neighbors.

“If you had to come home to this, would you?” Ms. Hills asked. “It’s not exactly welcoming and clean.”

Some people are enduring extraordinary living situations to return to their old jobs and begin rebuilding.

Victoria Vu and her four children are living in the cramped office space of a laundry that the family owns and operates in Mid-City.

“I can’t afford the rent around here — it’s gone up almost double,” said Ms. Vu, who lived in a three-bedroom house in Broadmoor before the hurricane. Earlier this year, when she was uncertain whether to return to her deserted neighborhood, Ms. Vu turned down a government-issued trailer. She said she had been unable to secure one since.

“We’re doing the best we can,” she said. “This is my business, and we have to make a living. We’re O.K., and we’ll fix the house soon.”

    Despite a City’s Hopes, an Uneven Repopulation, NYT, 30.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/us/30return.html

Gone with the wind

Since hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans almost a year ago, the population has halved.
Amid the debris and regret, Gary Younge finds a city losing its soul

Saturday July 29, 2006
Guardian
Gary Younge

The Selmer Mark VI saxophone is the Cadillac of horns, Ernest "Doc" Watson explains. "It's the reflex of it," he says, "the way the keys bounce back and wait for your fingers to give you this big round sound. From the time I started out, I always wanted one." So, when hurricane Katrina came barrelling through the Gulf Coast last year, before he left town Doc put his Selmer on the highest shelf of the tallest closet in his home in the Upper Ninth ward.

This particular saxophone had sentimental as well as musical value: in 1965, some of his colleagues at the Tulane medical centre in New Orleans had a whip-round and told him to buy whatever he most needed to replace what hurricane Betsy had destroyed earlier that year. Doc was a lab technician by day and a jazz saxophonist by night, bringing in a much-needed second income for his growing family. So he bought himself the Selmer Mark VI.

In the Lower Ninth ward, some drowned in their attics while trying to escape Betsy, but Watson was relatively lucky. The water rose only as high as the door knob. Forty years, several children and grandchildren later, he was still living in the same house when Katrina approached. "I wasn't going to go," says Watson, 74, "but I had my oldest daughter and her children staying with me at the time. I left my horn up there where I thought no water could touch it. My ceiling's nine feet from the floor and my house was raised two feet from the ground, so I figured it would be safe."

Watson went to Houston, guessing he'd be back home in a few days. He guessed wrong. It was months before he was even able to visit his home - he found his whole neighbourhood destroyed. One of the two cars in his driveway stood on top of the other. Lake Pontchartrain had filled his house to the rafters with filthy water and toxic waste. "Everything had floated and then just fell where it was," he says. "The refrigerators full of rotting meat, the furniture, clothes ... everything."

His wife, Annabelle, had come back to see if she could recover some of her favourite coats. She couldn't. Doc came for his Selmer Mark VI. He got it. "I had to fight my way through everything, but I wasn't going until I found it. It had been washed through. It was wet and it had mildew on it," he says, clutching an instrument that looks as though it's pocked with green liver spots. "The pads were gone but I think I can get it fixed."

Doc has a head of white hair and a salt-and-pepper moustache that is more salt than pepper. When he talks about the state in which he found his house and all that Katrina took from him, his voice halts and tears take over. "When it gets real quiet and I get to thinking about it, it's depressing," he says. "I'm longing to be back and play my music. If I can get the money together to build the house and they get the levees fixed, I'd be willing to take a chance on that." Until then, which could be never, he's stuck in Houston.

It is difficult to imagine New Orleans - the city that bore Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Fats Domino, Jelly Roll Morton and the Marsalis brothers, among others - without musicians such as Doc. Yet within weeks of Katrina, property developers, politicians, town planners and government officials were doing just that, actively imagining the city without the neighbourhoods that have made jazz what it is. Mass buyouts in areas like the Ninth ward were mooted. The idea was not to move the city's evacuees to a safer place in the city, but to remove them altogether. Blueprints without black people - elaborated by the wealthy to exclude the poor.

"Within the general pattern of flood risk, water flows away from money," writes geography professor Craig Colten in his book, An Unnatural Metropolis. "That is, away from the property of those who can afford to live in less floodprone areas and those with the influence to secure adequate publicly financed water-removal services ... With greater means and power the white population occupied the better-drained sections [of New Orleans], while blacks typically inhabited the swampy 'rear' districts."

It's the inhabitants of these swampy "rear" districts that continue to give jazz its life force. Here, second lining, where a jazz band accompanies a wedding or funeral procession through the street, is still common. The city used to boast around 3,200 musicians, and around 10 times that number - just under one in 10 of the pre-Katrina population - made their living as a result of music.

"New Orleans is nothing without jazz," says Marcus Hubbard, the 28-year-old trumpeter with the Soul Rebels, who has now moved to Houston. "It's the soul of the city. If you take that away, it's just an area with nice buildings. The food is good, but that goes with the jazz, not the other way around."

Most of the Soul Rebels lived in New Orleans east and have known each other since school. Now three are in Houston, two are in Baton Rouge and one is back in New Orleans. "We got into it by watching a lot of people older than us," says Hubbard. "But now we're all over the country, so it's hard to see where the next generation of Soul Rebels is going to come from."

"Jazz was not a phenomenon that started in one place," says Dan Morgenstern, of the Institute of Jazz at Rutgers University, "but New Orleans is the place where it first flourished. You can't dispute that. It's a culturally unique place in the United States because it comprises so many elements. The French and the Spanish regimes were here and it is a port city. There are influences from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. It was a special blend."

By the 1930s the city and the music were so inextricably interlinked that they had both become metaphors for subversion to its devotees and its detractors. "New Orleans became a multiple myth and symbol," wrote historian Eric Hobsbawm. "Anti-commercial, anti-racist, proletarian-populist, New Deal radical, or just anti-respectable and anti-parental, depending on taste."

And so it was that as a young white woman growing up in Natchez, Mississippi, Bethany Bultman recalls seeing a sign in the late 1950s put up by the Ku-Klux Klan stating: Coloured Music Corrupts White Youth. "I thought, if it's that good, I want some of it," Bultman says. She moved to New Orleans.

Years later, when her husband became involved in creating a clinic in the late 1990s to provide health care and outreach facilities to the city's musicians, Bultman decided to get involved. "I'm a cultural historian," she says, "and I decided I no longer wanted to write about some sad-arse guy who was dying of something that could have been prevented. I wanted to do something about it."

There was plenty to do. Around 90% of the musicians the clinic served lived below the federal poverty line; few had their own health insurance. Across the board, Louisiana has the highest poverty rate of any state in the union and vies with its neighbour, Mississippi, for the title of most unhealthy. One in four of the state's adults is clinically obese, smokes and has no medical insurance. Break these statistics down by race and you have to leave not just the state but the western world for a comparable plight. Rates of black infant mortality in Louisiana are on a par with those in Sri Lanka; black male life expectancy is the same as Kyrgyzstan's.

Before the storm, musicians were prone to some occupational hazards - glaucoma in horn players, polyps in singers, deafness in general - as well as all the other illnesses suffered by the rest of Louisiana. Since Katrina, the emphasis of the musicians' needs, and therefore the clinic's priorities, has changed. The outreach work has become crucial, trying to find people housing and rebuild their lives. Wardell Quezergue, the "Creole Beethoven" who wrote Mr Big Stuff and the Creole Mass, seems to have lost all of his sheet music in the storm. Quezergue is blind and the clinic managed to get him assisted housing at the Chateau de Notre Dame in New Orleans.

Allergies have become more common as a result of the pollution caused by Katrina, but the principal change has been the rise of mental health problems. "On some level everyone here is depressed," says James Morris, the clinic's social worker. "They don't live in their houses. They're not sure where they are going to be living. They've lost their communities. They're surrounded by destruction."

Since the storm, the suicide rate in the city has quadrupled. Meanwhile, the state has lost more than half of its mental health workers; according to the Louisiana Hospital Association, the city has only around 60 hospital beds for psychiatric patients.

"They keep saying, 'Come back,' " says Bultman, "but there's nothing for people to come back to. No schools for their kids. No public hospitals. Nothing."

So they stay away. Before the storm, New Orleans had a population of 484,000 - last month it was estimated to be from 190,000 to 230,000. A report by Brown University in January revealed that as many as 80% of the black population may never return. Census bureau estimates released last month indicate those most likely to return are white, wealthier and older. Before the storm, two-thirds of New Orleans city was African-American; now it is less than a half. "As a practical matter, these poor folks don't have the resources to go back to our city, just like they didn't have the resources to get out of our city," wealthy New Orleans property developer Joseph Canizaro told the Associated Press. "So we won't get all those folks back. That's just a fact."

In truth, it is more a self-fulfilling prophecy. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin says that everybody who wants to come back and rebuild the city has the right to do so. But so long as there are no basic services, not even housing, this remains a hollow invitation - and the business model of a smaller, richer, whiter city, which Nagin rejected, endures by a combination of default and design. "The continuing question about the hurricane is this: whose city will be rebuilt?" asked the author of the Brown report.

On a tour of hurricane relief shelters in Houston shortly after Katrina, president George Bush's mother, Barbara, said, "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this [and here she chuckled], this is working very well for them."

Six months later, the statistics suggested otherwise. According to a Zogby poll in April, 93% of those who resettled in Houston are black and 82% are women. More than half were families with children, earned less than $15,000 (£8,100) a year and had no car. Sixty-nine per cent had jobs before Katrina; 85% didn't have jobs seven months later.

On the third floor of Houston's Herman Memorial Hospital, Barbara Frazier keeps on praying for divine intervention. Kerwin, her 33-year-old son who played tuba for New Birth brass band, had no medical insurance and has had a massive stroke that has left him almost completely paralysed. The doctors do not hold out much hope. But Barbara, who left New Orleans for Dallas with just a scrapbook of photos, birth certificates and a Bible, keeps going over their heads to a higher authority. "I'm willing to run this race as far as God wants me to," she says. She sits in his room, taking every flicker of Kerwin's eye and twitch of his hand as a sign of hope, and tries to sing him out of his coma.

Kerwin's stroke is directly related to Katrina, says Bultman, who's been trying to help the family. "This is a result of the terrible stress that people are under. They not only have to keep playing, but they have to go back and forth between where they live and where they work." As for Barbara's uphill struggle to care for Kerwin, "If she were back at home, her church would be there for her", Bultman says. "People would be bringing her food. People would be trying to get him into a home. This is what displacement is all about. We're like a culture in exile."

In room 210 of the Hilton Hotel on the University of Houston campus, pastor Robert Blake leads a church in exile. In New Orleans east, the New Home ministry stood on 10 acres of land on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain and had a membership of around 4,000. Now Blake tends to a flock of 400 in the Hilton's Waldorf Astoria ballroom.

"This has brought about a whole new approach to ministry that I was never prepared for in the seminary," he says. "In New Orleans the community was already there. In Houston we have to try and recreate it. In New Orleans I could preach the word, but here people need much more than that. They need one-on-one time. They need reassurance. It's psychologically wrenching to lose the people that you know, the community that you know, the life that you know." Blake believes the vast majority of his congregation will end up staying in Houston. They have found jobs, their children are in school.

A gospel vocalist starts off the service with some rousing songs. "If you feel the need to dance in the aisles, then you get your praise on and dance," he says. Soon the 200 congregants are on their feet, swaying as though a soul concert just broke out.

"How y'all doing?" comes the call from the makeshift pulpit.

"On top and going higher," comes the response.

But Blake says many of his parishioners often feel low. "One young man told me recently that he has lost his faith," says Black. "People ask the question why? And that question is asked of God."

Blake has set up a political and social activism ministry to tackle issues arising from Katrina. "Politics failed us at a local, state and federal level," he says. "That failure in New Orleans was due largely to the fact that our constituency was ignorant of what our elected officials should have been doing and what we had to do to make sure it got done."

New Orleans went through two hurricanes in 2004. The first, hurricane Pam, packed winds of 120mph and dumped up to 20 inches of rain on some parts of south-east Louisiana in July. On the Saffir-Simpson scale, which ranks hurricanes from a category 1 (no real damage to building structures) to category 5 (complete building failures with small utility buildings blown over or away), Pam was a 3. A million residents were evacuated in time. But around 300,000 - mostly the poor without transportation - were stranded and half a million buildings were destroyed. The levees held but the water rose over them and filled the city. The death toll was more than 60,000 and the dead floated out of their coffins.

The second, hurricane Ivan, had already devastated 85% of the Caribbean island of Grenada before it reached the Gulf of Mexico. The city was ready with 10,000 bodybags, but many in New Orleans stayed put. "We don't run from hurricanes - we drink them," read one sign daubed on plywood, referring to a popular cocktail. What threatened to be a category 4 was downgraded to a category 1 and did little damage. No bodybags were needed.

Hurricane Pam was literally a dry run - a simulated exercise, based on computer models, involving 270 officials and demonstrating what could happen if the city were struck by a category 3 hurricane. Hurricane Ivan was the real thing.

"I'm not really sure that people took the Pam exercise seriously," says Kate Streva, a research associate at Louisiana State University who participated in the simulation. "A lot of them thought this is a worst-case scenario, not a likely scenario. There have been so many misses and false evacuations, and so many close calls, that people think it's a false alarm." The latest figure for the death toll from hurricane Katrina is 1,836, most of them in Louisiana, and there are upwards of 400 more missing.

New Orleanians have always had an ambivalent relationship to their environment. Sitting mostly below sea level, cradled to the south by the curve of the Mississippi river on its final dash into the Gulf of Mexico and to the north by Lake Pontchartrain, it has always been vulnerable to whatever nature threw its way. Dipping like a bowl between the lake and river, only the levees - raised mounds of earth and concrete - keep it from filling up.

Renowned geographer Lewis Pierce described it as "an impossible but inevitable city". Inevitable because it stands at the foot of the Mississippi, giving access to the Gulf of Mexico - a crucial location for trade in cotton, slaves and alcohol even before the discovery of oil off its shores. This is why Louisiana was so coveted by the French, Spanish and US, which in turn explains why New Orleans remains one of the nation's most distinctive cities: a Catholic town in the Protestant south, a haven for hedonism in the Bible belt, the home of Creole cuisine in the mecca of soul food.

Impossible because of the precariousness of its location, which made early white settlers think it was uninhabitable. In 1708, French explorer Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville wrote home to say, "I do not see how settlers can be placed on this river." In southern Louisiana, town names such as Alluvial City, Port Sulphur and Venice bear testament to the constant battle with the elements in an area where every 13 seconds soil erosion devours land the size of a tennis court. These wetlands provided a buffer between rising water levels and the city. The more they disappeared, the more likely it would be that areas of New Orleans would disappear with them.

In October 2001, Scientific American magazine described New Orleans as a "disaster waiting to happen" and warned, "Only massive re-engineering of south-eastern Louisiana can save the city." The next year, the Times-Picayune published a five-part series called Washing Away, which predicted, "Thousands will drown while trapped in homes or cars by rising water. Others will be washed away or crushed by debris. Survivors will end up trapped on roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by water, with no means of escape and little food or fresh water, perhaps for several days."

So, neither the hurricane nor the devastation it could wreak were a surprise. To live in New Orleans, as in San Francisco, meant to live with not just the possibility, but the probability of environmental disaster. There was, however, one crucial difference - unlike earthquakes, there is an annual season for hurricanes and both the approximate time and place of a storm's arrival is known several days beforehand.

What was stunning in New Orleans was the lack of preparation, the full extent of which would not be apparent for months. Two days before the storm, a regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) wrote to the national head, Michael Brown, laying out a situation that was "past critical", and warning of a lack of food and water and that patients would die "within hours". Brown emailed back to say, "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"

In 2000, city officials produced a 14-page booklet, City Of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, laying out guidelines for evacuation. No further study on the practicalities was carried out and, when the time came, mayor Ray Nagin (who was re-elected in May), reluctant to issue a mandatory evacuation order in case businesses sued him for loss of trade, ignored the guidelines.

During a video briefing the night before the storm struck, Max Mayfield, head of the national hurricane centre, told George Bush, "I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that's obviously a very, very grave concern." Bush said he appreciated "so very much the warnings that Max and his team have given". Four days later, the president, who had slashed funding to repair the levees just months earlier, told reporters, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

There were any number of reasons why people did not leave the city beforehand. More than one in four New Orleanians did not have a car. Many of those who did, did not have the money to pay for hotels. Some of the old, disabled and insane, and those who cared for them, weighed the stress and cost of evacuation against the threat of the storm and decided to risk it. Some certainly thought they could ride it out. But in general not only were the poorest neighbourhoods most vulnerable to flooding, but those who lived in them simply could not afford to leave.

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the reality of the third-world conditions in which many in the world's wealthiest nation live was literally washed up for the world to see.

As tens of thousands of people converged on the convention centre, Fema's Michael Brown said, "We're seeing people that we didn't know exist." Rarely a truer word had been spoken. Indeed, these were people the nation's establishment had long tried to forget. New Orleanians who want the city to return to the state it was in before the hurricane are hard to come by. Before Katrina, you were 10 times more likely to be murdered and three times more likely to be robbed in New Orleans than in the rest of the US. It was a city renowned for corruption, where child poverty rates stood at 40% and levels of illiteracy were not far behind.

To be in the Crescent City that week after Katrina was like seeing what Haiti would look like with skyscrapers. By the end of the week, people were climbing into helicopters with no idea where they were heading but just pleased to be getting out. Many remain wherever they were dropped off.

Everybody has a story from those few days. Steve Pistorius was on tour in Japan when the storm struck and thought, because the hurricane had veered east, that the city and his nine cats and dogs had been spared. "I was getting on the plane when I saw Ray Nagin on CNN saying the 17th Street levees had been breached and the city will be flooded with 15 feet of water. I just started crying." Antoinette K-doe had hunkered down in the Mother-In-Law lounge, the club in Treme where her late husband would play and she would cook gumbo, red beans and smothered okra. When young hoodlums came to loot the lounge for booze, Antoinette held up her sawn-off shotgun and gave them a warning: "I don't think you want to come to the Mother-In-Law lounge. Not now, not ever." They didn't need to be told twice.

"Uncle" Lionel Batiste, the drummer with the Treme Brass Band, sat on his porch, watched the water rise and bought some Jack Daniel's from a looter. "I had no idea the water was coming that high," says Lionel. "But it stopped and then started going down pretty fast."

Fats Domino stayed in his yellow mansion in the Lower Ninth ward with five of his children and their families because his wife was sick. As the flood waters washed away his trophies, he got his family into the attic. Assuming that they had perished, someone scrawled "RIP Fats" on the side of the house, sparking rumours that he had died. In fact, a helicopter came and ferried him away in his blue striped silk shirt. He was taken to the Superdome. Confused and disoriented, when he arrived he thought he was going to perform.

During those chaotic days, New Orleans was on the world's screens and the nation's conscience. The watchdog that was once the American media regained its teeth and started snarling at incompetent public officials. For a month or so the nation remained outraged, and then gradually began to lose interest and focus.

In the meantime, people got on with their lives as best they could. Pistorius, who is still missing one of his cats and one of his dogs, went to North Carolina before finding a new apartment in the city. He fears for "one of the few cities where musicians could really make a living". "One of these days the benefit concerts are going to run out, and then what?"

K-doe returned from North Carolina in a second-hand hearse and set about trying to revive the Mother-in-Law lounge, which was flooded. She got her gas service resumed only recently.

After stints in Arkansas and Mississippi, Lionel got rehoused in New Orleans and is back playing with the Treme Brass Band.

In May, Fats Domino, whose home is being renovated, was scheduled to close the city's jazz festival, but he pulled out at the last minute because he was ill.

Within six weeks, those dry areas of the city had returned to a peculiar kind of normal - although, driving through the central business district, you had to swerve to avoid the fallen trees and power lines. Elsewhere, the brown flood marks and the rescuers' spray-painted signs telling the date the rescuers arrived and the number of dead began to look like permanent features. The streets were lined with discarded fridges.

One of my wife's relatives lay rotting in the very bed where rescuers found her dead, and left her, six weeks earlier: so common was the story, the local media barely paid attention. It felt like the capital city of a failed state. Hotels charged top dollar for limited service and were filled with relief workers; a huge state presence, but little in the way of law enforcement.

By Mardi Gras in late February, the city was keen to announce its return. "Welcome Mardi Gras Revelers", read a banner outside Rubenstein's department store on Canal Street. "New Orleans' business is tourism and we are ready to get back to business." But the city was anything but ready. Only a third of the restaurants had opened and few hotel rooms were usable and available.

Each time you came back after Mardi Gras, the T-shirts in the French quarter would reflect some new target, wavering between prescient, puerile and priapic. They started out with bawdy single-entendres such as "Katrina gave me a blow job I'll never forget." But soon they were poking fun at Fema, which stood for Fix Everything My Ass. After Mayor Nagin pledged that New Orleans would once again be Chocolate City (a majority black town), he was portrayed as Willy Wonka with the words "Willy Nagin's Chocolate Factory; semi-sweet and a little nutty." As the public opinion against the war grew, so did the number of T-shirts calling to "Make levees, not war".

The huge demand for labour to rebuild the city sparked the second major demographic shift in the city. Alongside the exodus of African-Americans came the influx of Latinos. The city's Hispanic population ballooned from 3% to more than 20% in the months after the storm. Every morning at Lee Circle, hundreds of day labourers gathered under the watchful eye of the Confederate general and waited for work. Every night thousands slept in a tent city in City Park, Scout Island, with a handful of standpipes and toilets between them. Before the hurricane, Ernesto Schweikert, the Honduran voice of the local Hispanic radio station, Radio Tropical, used to field 200 calls a day. Now he gets 2,500. There are long queues at the Western Union stations with people sending money home. In a city once famous for Creole and jambalaya, tamales and Spanish are now common fare. By May, the T-shirts in the French quarter had a new meaning for Fema: "Find Every Mexican Available."

Were it not for the T-shirts, areas such as the French quarter, the Garden district and elsewhere uptown seem almost normal today. The fallen trees have been cleared, the graffiti threatening to shoot looters scrubbed off. On a Sunday morning at the Boulangerie on Magazine street - referred to mockingly as the "aisle of denial" - white and wealthy patrons enjoy croissants and creamy lattes. You could almost believe that Katrina, like Pam, was just a scare story to knock the city into shape.

But if there has been one thing more amazing than how New Orleans has changed since Katrina, it is how much it has stayed the same - and how little the clean-up has achieved. The hurricane season has already begun, and it's an open question whether the city is any better prepared this year than it was last. Driving through the Lower Ninth after her return from North Carolina, Antoinette K-doe kept stopping the car and staring at the post-apocalyptic sight of the neighbourhood where she grew up. It looked as if Katrina had arrived just a week ago: whole houses had been washed off their moorings and into the road; cars had been washed into the houses; trees had been blown on to cars. And there they were still. "We're the richest country in the world," K-doe said. "I don't understand how we can't fix this up." In March alone, nine bodies and a skull were found among the city's rubble. It was only earlier this month that they finally resumed mail service to the handful of Lower Ninth residents who have returned. But the postman keeps finding addresses without houses and houses without doors.

During Jazzfest, the city's annual jazz festival, Craig Kline stood outside Doc Watson's home in a hard hat, big boots and a gas mask. Kline grew up listening to Doc play with the Olympia band and is now a trombonist. As part of the Arabie Wrecking Krewe, a group of musicians who have banded together to renovate other musicians' homes, he was helping to clear Doc's house. In the front garden lay a few shards of the Doc's life. Mardi Gras beads, a camera, a few pictures, a dainty, decorative umbrella used for second lining and a cap that says Preservation Hall Jazz Band. From one of the Krewe's stereos a blues singer crooned, "You don't know how I feel."

"It could be 10 years before this neighbourhood ever comes back," Kline said, "but I think it will come back. If they fix the levees we can take care of the rest. This is still the best place in the world to be a musician, and New Orleans needs the music. We'll get this city back together one note at a time."

    Gone with the wind, G, 29.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,,1831459,00.html

In Mississippi, Katrina recovery gaining steam

Updated 7/25/2006 2:35 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Larry Copeland

GULFPORT, Miss. — Bill and Nanka Caraway, fresh from a two-week escape to Florida, are trying to readjust to their post-Hurricane Katrina lives here: Cramped inside a government trailer. Doing laundry in a little shed outside. Fretting over the still-vacant apartment building next door. Coping with the destruction that remains all around them.

"It was nice to be able to see something that's not totally devastated," says Bill Caraway, 68. "The pace of the recovery is disappointing, to tell you the truth."

Katrina destroyed the home his family had owned since 1918, and 11 months later, they're waiting for a government check to help them rebuild. They're in the same situation as nearly everyone else on the coast: waiting, waiting, waiting.

Yet amid primitive living conditions, promising signs of Mississippi's comeback are emerging. Federal money to help homeowners rebuild is pouring in, bridges are being replaced and hotel casinos reopened. Schools are ready for children to return.

"We're turning the corner," says Darryl Madden, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). "We're going to see a tremendous amount of reconstruction."

It's a difficult climb.

Here and throughout much of the rest of coastal Mississippi, the towering debris piles left by Katrina are gone. Trailers dot empty lots where houses once stood. Stubborn grass and tall weeds are overgrowing driveways and concrete housing slabs, as if the earth itself is rising up to reclaim the coast. These are the scars from a 35-foot storm surge that washed up to three-fourths of a mile inland.

More than 101,000 Mississippians still live in government trailers, according to FEMA and the governor's office.

Those who have returned to where their houses once stood often find they're the only family on the block. They cook outside on charcoal. Many continue to fight with insurance companies over whether damage was caused by high winds or flooding. Standard policies don't cover flood damage. The first of several "wind vs. water" lawsuits was tried last week in Gulfport. The judge's ruling is expected within a few weeks.

Many other obstacles also are in play: uncertainty over new building codes requiring that homes be built stronger and higher, concerns about whether people can afford insurance, skyrocketing costs of building materials and severe labor shortages.

The Chevron station and the Waffles Restaurant at the Waveland exit on Interstate 10 remain closed, although there's one sign of the push toward normalcy: Highway billboards are back, visually blaring ads luring people to Gulf Coast casinos. "Get Ready to Have Fun Again!" one says.

But people in Gulfport, Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Biloxi and Ocean Springs don't seem quite ready to have fun again. There's still too much hard work to be done.

Outpacing Louisiana

As maddeningly slow as the recovery seems to trailer-bound Mississippians, it's moving faster than in New Orleans — much faster.

"The morale is higher in Mississippi about the future than in Louisiana," says Douglas Brinkley, history professor at Tulane University and author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, published in May. "There's a can-do spirit in Mississippi that transcends what you'll find in New Orleans."

Mississippi was luckier than Louisiana in the nature of storm damage and the effectiveness of its political response, according to Brinkley and Loren Scott, a consultant and professor emeritus at Louisiana State University who is studying the region's economic recovery.

"In Mississippi, you had the mother of all storm surges that came in and went," Scott says. "In New Orleans, there was standing water for as long as four weeks. That slowed their recovery tremendously."

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former head of the Republican National Committee, and the state's two GOP senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, were more effective than Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Sen. Mary Landrieu, both Democrats, and Republican Sen. David Vitter in leveraging federal recovery aid from a Republican White House and Congress, Brinkley and Scott say.

Mississippi's Legislature also moved quickly to allow casinos — the coast's economic lifeblood — to move from barges onto land, a key to quick rebuilding.

New Orleans was slower to devise a recovery plan, its economy is rebounding less rapidly, a much higher percentage of hospitals and schools remain closed, and disputes over where to put storm debris is slowing its removal, they say.

Then there's the difference in sheer magnitude of destruction: More than three times as many homes were rendered uninhabitable in Louisiana than in Mississippi, Scott says.

If the recovery seems slow here, perhaps it is because so many people haven't returned to their homes. Katrina destroyed 68,000 houses and damaged another 55,000 in coastal Mississippi, according to the Harrison County Development Authority.

Rebirth on the way

The halting effort got a big boost last week when thousands of checks from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began reaching homeowners like the Caraways.

Congress approved the grants — up to $150,000 apiece — to help homeowners in Louisiana and Mississippi rebuild. In Mississippi, 16,500 have applied for part of the state's $3 billion share of grants.

Mississippi sits on the brink of a boom, says Gavin Smith, director of Barbour's Office of Recovery & Renewal. "Banks are flush with cash," he says. "We have about $15 billion in disaster assistance funding (including the $3 billion), most of which is going to help rebuild housing. The time is right for builders and others to come in and help us start the large-scale rebuilding."

Other signs the rebirth in Mississippi is gaining momentum:

•Schools in coastal counties, which sustained $700 million in damage, idling 80,000 children, had 90% of their pre-Katrina enrollment by the end of the 2005-06 school year.

•About 98% of storm debris on land has been cleared.

•The state is encouraging local governments and citizens to rebuild in accordance with flood elevation maps created after Katrina.

•The state has awarded $600 million in contracts to replace or repair bridges on U.S. 90 over St. Louis and Biloxi bays. Motorists now must drive up to 20 miles out of the way on other routes.

•6,800 of 17,500 pre-Katrina hotel rooms are open, and occupancy averages 80%-90%.

•Most golf courses have reopened, vital to an industry worth $100 million a year to the coast.

•Airline bookings at the Gulfport-Biloxi airport next month are 14% above last August, pre-Katrina.

There is no shortage of investors eager to help rebuild Mississippi's Gulf Coast, says Stephen Richer, executive director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau. "People from all over the United States and even internationally are looking to make investments, either in casinos, hotels ... retail, golf courses, marinas or restaurants."

Richer anticipates $30 billion in investment to rebuild Mississippi's coast: $10 billion from government for roads, bridges, water and sewage treatment plants and airport and convention center expansions; and $20 billion in public-private investment for repairing and rebuilding homes, casinos, restaurants and other businesses.

The casino industry is rebounding strongly, Richer says. Five casinos have reopened, putting about 6,000 people back to work. Several others are expected to open by Sept. 1, bringing that number to 10,000. The coast had 12 casinos before Katrina. Richer expects there to be 20 by 2010.

The road ahead, however, isn't easy: The unemployment rate in the Gulfport-Biloxi area is more than double the level when Katrina hit — 12.9% in May vs. 6.1% last August, according to the Mississippi Department of Employment Security. And, as Barbour noted recently, Mississippi has never built more than 2,800 homes in a single year. The state now will try to build more than 60,000 in five years.

'Get something done'

Downtown Gulfport is a work in progress. In a couple of storm-damaged office buildings in the 2400 block of 14th Street, workers hammer and drill and stack rubbish in piles for removal. Many other buildings on the street are empty.

"On this block alone, there's probably going to be 60% of the buildings fully leveled," says Ernest Ulrich, 40, owner of Port City Café on 14th Street.

The afternoon before Katrina hit, Ulrich and his son Anthony bolted plywood over the restaurant's windows. Their foresight — and the buffering effect of a building across the street — helped make Ulrich a downtown post-Katrina pioneer.

The café got only 6 inches of water. The Ulriches immediately began cleanup and repairs. Then he went to Mississippi Power. "I said, 'We're working to open up and feed workers. You've got to get me some power.' "

The company did just that. He reopened within 10 days, preparing 1,500 meals a day for Mississippi Power workers. The restaurant is one of the few places to eat in this part of downtown. He says business is up 60% since the hurricane.

Ulrich tapped his savings after the storm to buy a new fryer and other necessities for reopening. He says other business owners should do the same. "The mood right now, I think everybody's tired of the wait-and-see approach," Ulrich says. "They want something to happen to get something done. There's not a whole lot happening, and here it is, we're coming up on a year."

A few blocks away, some homes are being built or renovated on historic Second Street, but many people feel abandoned, almost as if their lives stopped when the skies cleared last August. In front of a vacant Second Street apartment building lie a rotting blue sofa cushion, two sun-warped 33 rpm records and a pile of coiled wiring.

About 35 miles to the west in Waveland, Hugh Hetrick is used to roughing it. The retired teacher's front porch is a little canopy that shades his kitchen: four chairs, a barbecue grill, a miniature refrigerator and a portable cook top outside his trailer.

"Life for us really isn't as bad as it is for some folks," says Hetrick, 66. "The problem comes when you want to get anything done. It's hard to get anything done."

Since September, Hetrick and his wife, Ethel, a psychologist, have lived in their trailer next to where their new home is slowly taking shape. They moved here from Texas to supervise construction six days before Hurricane Katrina pulverized the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29.

Work on the house has been slow going. "Our builder has difficulty in getting labor," Hetrick says.

Katrina knocked down the U.S. 90 bridge from Bay St. Louis to Pass Christian. The crossing is still closed, but cranes and other construction equipment crowd parts of the span across St. Louis Bay. The muted roar of heavy machinery breaks the afternoon quiet.

A quarter-mile from the bridge, Blanche Comiskey pulls weeds at the homesite she and her late husband bought in 1970. They vacationed here for decades. "Nature demolished it," says Comiskey, whose primary residence in New Orleans was spared. "It was our home away from home. All the grandchildren loved it as much as the children."

Many older residents of New Orleans kept summer homes here. Now, Comiskey says, she worries whether "the younger generation" will rebuild, given the difficulty in getting insurance and new building regulations requiring homes to be elevated, on stilts in some cases, an expensive proposition. She's not sure what her family will do.

"We have to decide how and when to rebuild and if it can be insured," Comiskey says. "We will probably wait until the (current) hurricane season is over."

Either way, she expects to be back next summer. "Bay St. Louis will rebuild," Comiskey says. "There's no doubt about that. It's going to rebuild even better and nicer than it was. And I hope I'm here a few more years to enjoy it."

    In Mississippi, Katrina recovery gaining steam, NYT, 25.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-24-miss-rebuilds_x.htm

U.S. Government Plans Overhaul in Disaster Aid

July 24, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, July 23 — The Department of Homeland Security, responding to months of criticism and ridicule, is revamping several of its core disaster relief programs, enacting changes that will include sharply cutting emergency cash assistance for victims of major disasters, and more carefully controlling access to free hotel rooms.

Immediate emergency aid would not exceed $500 under the new rules, instead of the $2,000 per family previously allowed. And it would be handed out only after identities and addresses were checked. Such precautions were not taken consistently last year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, an oversight auditors said led to fraud and abuse of up to $1.4 billion.

Separately, federal officials are working with Louisiana leaders to complete an evacuation plan for the southeastern part of the state that would involve a level of federal deployment greater than previously provided in advance of a hurricane or natural disaster. The goal is to help provide emergency transportation for as many as 96,000 people who do not have vehicles.

“There were an awful lot of lessons we learned last year,” said David Garratt, a deputy director at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in an interview on Friday. The agency operates under the auspices of the Homeland Security Department.

The aid-program changes, which take effect immediately, are outlined in a letter being sent to governors and state emergency managers just as the peak of the annual hurricane season approaches.

Details of the proposed evacuation plan for Louisiana were laid out in a separate letter sent last week by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana.

“Because of the extensive devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the persisting vulnerabilities throughout southeastern Louisiana, the federal government stands ready to meet your requests,” Mr. Chertoff’s letter said.

The changes in the evacuation, disaster response and recovery strategies are to be formally announced Monday, but hints of several of the measures began to surface in Washington late last week, drawing some cautious words of praise.

“These sound like positive changes,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “We need more details to know if it will work.”

But some housing advocates and emergency management officials questioned whether the revised system would be too inflexible to get aid quickly to victims.

Requiring families to register with FEMA before moving into hotels from makeshift shelters could create a hardship, said Shanna L. Smith, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, based in Washington.

“It sounds like we are trusting the government too much to be able to put something in place that quickly,” she said. “Certainly there are some people who may have lied about being from the disaster zone. But to punish a large group of people for the behavior of a few seems quite harsh to me.”

An estimated 800,000 of the 1.2 million people who fled southeastern Louisiana last year — before and after Hurricane Katrina — have returned. Of that population, federal officials estimate nearly 96,000 may not be able to evacuate on their own should another storm strike.

In his letter to Governor Blanco, Mr. Chertoff said the federal government was prepared to move as many as 80,000 people by bus from collection points to inland shelters.

Separately, the federal government says it is prepared to move as many as 46,000 people by air and 15,000 by train, the letter says.

To make the plan work, the federal government must have a list of collection points and an accurate count of how many patients at nursing homes and hospitals might need transportation or require care in special medical shelters, Mr. Chertoff’s letter said. It asks the state to turn over such a tally by Wednesday.

Unlike the new evacuation strategy for Louisiana, the changes being proposed for other Homeland Security Department programs will apply to disasters or emergencies nationwide, officials said. The revised programs will come in the form of what officials will call a new set of “recovery strategies” that govern emergency shelters, temporary housing and debris removal.

Under the plan, the factors that initiate immediate cash assistance will not change. It will be offered if an event forces a huge and probably long-term relocation of people. But the process that governs how the money is distributed will change.

Most important, officials said, emergency cash assistance will be granted only after FEMA officials have used computer records to ensure applicants are not repeatedly signing up for aid, or using false Social Security numbers or fabricated addresses. The aid will be provided only after an affected state signs off on the program and agrees to cover 25 percent of the benefit.

And immediate, unrestricted assistance will be limited to $500 rather than $2,000. Registration with FEMA, which includes identity verification, will also be required before someone is allowed to check into a federally financed hotel room, another step that was not taken last year.

Without similar protections in place last summer, Congressional auditors have estimated, $600 million to $1.4 billion of the $5.4 billion in assistance given to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita may have been based on fraudulent, inaccurate or improper claims, and an unknown number of hotel rooms were provided to people who were not hurricane victims.

Mark C. Smith, a spokesman for Louisiana’s emergency management agency, said the $500 cap might save money, but it could also leave some victims with serious needs.

“Five hundred dollars is really not a lot of money, especially if it is for a family,” he said.

Aaron T. Walker, a FEMA spokesman, said that agency officials, in extraordinary situations, would be allowed to approve additional $500 emergency assistance grants, and families would continue to be eligible for other longer-term federal and FEMA aid.

For temporary housing, direct payments will be made to landlords. This step is meant to address a major criticism raised by housing advocates and municipal officials last year: that FEMA’s confusing and often changing rules delayed victims’ moves into apartments.

After Hurricane Katrina, FEMA sent out $786-per-month rent checks to hundreds of thousands of families. But in cities like Houston, where tens of thousands of evacuees assembled, some families spent the money on other needs; others had a hard time finding an apartment, or finding a landlord willing to rent to them without federal assurances.

Mr. Garratt, the FEMA official, said the agency would work with local and state officials in advance to identify available apartments or homes, and then offer to pay the rent directly. That would eliminate the need for a financially complicated system like the one ultimately set up in Houston, where the city paid rent for 34,000 families and then sought reimbursement from the federal government.

“This should be a far more organized and disciplined way of handling this,” Mr. Garratt said.

Assuming FEMA has the capacity to manage the program — which Mr. Garratt said he was convinced that it does — Jim Arbury, a senior vice president at the National Multi Housing Council, a trade group in Washington, said the new approach would be a major improvement.

“It makes so much more sense,” he said.

But it will also mean tighter control over who can move into a federally financed apartment, and when they must move out. Advocates for victims of Hurricane Katrina have argued that the government has already been too strict on both issues.

The changes include a revised debris removal policy. Local and state governments will be encouraged to arrange debris removal contracts in advance, with FEMA setting up a registry of companies to do the job.

The old system sometimes created a financial incentive to turn the work over to the federal government, particularly to the Army Corps of Engineers.

Kay Kell, the city manager in Pascagoula, Miss., which dropped its local contractor after Hurricane Katrina, said she welcomed the change.

“We were intimidated, threatened,” she said. “And it turned out that using the Army Corps was more expensive, and it took longer.”

    U.S. Government Plans Overhaul in Disaster Aid, NYT, 24.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/washington/24fema.html?hp&ex=1153800000&en=3c70052bdad717b5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

New Orleans, Getting Less Power, May Pay More

July 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, July 21 — To the list of daily aggravations in the new New Orleans, add one that augments the heat, spoils the food and drains the cash register: power failures.

The wind blows and a neighborhood’s power goes out. Or it rains and the power goes out somewhere else. Thunder crashes distantly and out goes the power.

Ten months after Hurricane Katrina, the city still does not have a reliable electrical system. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of repairs are still needed on a system devastated by flooding, the local utility is in bankruptcy and less than half the system’s prestorm customers have returned. Of those who have, many have endured hot and sleepless nights with no air-conditioning.

“How do you expect the city to recover when you don’t have a reliable source of electrical power?” asked Robert Harmon, an engineering consultant in the Bywater neighborhood.

So much for the injury; now comes the insult. Entergy New Orleans, the power company here, wants to increase its rates 25 percent to help pay for part of what it says is $718 million in storm losses and revenue shortfalls. That would increase the average household bill by $45 a month.

“Higher rates is a very serious issue,” said Mark Drennen, president of Greater New Orleans Inc., a regional economic development agency. “We are struggling to recover. This is one more obstacle to economic recovery.”

The combination of bigger bills and spotty service is not a promising formula, many residents agree, for a city in which rents are now high, where finding groceries can be an adventure and where moving companies are reporting a small boom — outbound.

Last year, the Bush administration rejected a taxpayer bailout of Entergy, and now the utility is hoping the state will give it a sprinkling of the $10 billion in federal housing aid planned for New Orleans. The state has not agreed to that request, however, and if assistance does not come, customers may be forced to foot the bill.

For several months after Hurricane Katrina, much of New Orleans was dark; by the end of 2005 most of the city was lit again. But a tiny section of the Lower Ninth Ward, near the levee breach, remains unserved — an indication of the system’s continuing fragility.

Because of unrepaired damage from the storm, a power company spokeswoman said, the utility does not have the same ability to track power failures — how many there have been and who has been affected — as it did before.


In a city where so many are poor, utility issues — like the dreaded monthly power bill — have long been a political flashpoint. Air-conditioning is needed six months out of the year, bills run into the hundreds of dollars even in modest houses, and political reputations have been made by taking on the power company. Before the storm, one of the city’s few public advocacy groups, and an effective one at that, was organized around battling Entergy and its predecessor, New Orleans Public Service.

But high bills or no, at least the power used to stay on.

“Aggravating? Yes, of course, in the middle of the summertime, you know good and well it’s aggravating,” said Joe Shaheen, who lives in Bywater, which has been hit particularly hard by blackouts recently. His windows are sealed shut; burglars and other criminals are a problem on these blocks.

If you see people sitting out on their steps, the power is out, residents here say. In Bywater, they call it returning to the dark ages.

Not all areas of the city are similarly afflicted. But in Bywater, an old collection of pastel shotgun houses and cottages by the river that was not flooded by the hurricane, the people are weary of it.

When does it go out? “Every time the wind blows wrong,” said Ricky Stephens, a contractor on Piety Street, disgusted. “It’s just amazing.” With temperatures staying in the 80’s after dark, the nights can be long.

“I had to go somewhere else to sleep,” said Nicole Guinchard, a waitress who works a 60-hour week on two jobs. “It was a hotbox in here,” she said outside her house on Dauphine Street.

“The deal was, at first, it was every time it rained. Lately, it’s been for no reason at all,” said Linda Morreale, an owner of a neighborhood tavern, Bud Rip’s. Ms. Morreale has seen her customers slowly drift away: “Everybody sits around until they get kind of uncomfortable.”

There is sudden darkness, then the creeping invasion of the humidity outside.

Mr. Stephens, the contractor, detailed the stages: “You get hot. Your kids get irritable. They drive you crazy. It’s a whole big ordeal.” Not to mention, he said, the extra $400 he has had to spend to replace groceries lost to the failures.

“Every couple of days, the lights be going off,” said Samuel Breaux, a warehouseman in a neighborhood sewing factory. The big building goes dark, and the women stop sewing. “You can’t do too much of nothing when the power’s out.”

Entergy executives say the problem is a complicated mix of uncertainty over how many people to serve, power lines that remain down, and connections that are no longer as reliable. Before the storm, when the electricity blinked out for a moment — as it did even in normal times, during New Orleans’s frequent summer storms — the utility could immediately switch to alternate lines. That option is far less available now.

“We don’t have the same number of power lines,” said Rod West, an Entergy manager. Most of the 22 substations were flooded; Entergy estimates it will need $267 million just to fix the remaining damage.

For now, knowledgeable outsiders sound more disturbed than the Entergy executives do.

“A lot of the system is really jury-rigged right now,” said Clint Vince, a Washington lawyer who has long served as consultant on energy to the New Orleans City Council. “So it doesn’t have anywhere near the reliability it had pre-Katrina. A lot of the distribution facilities are damaged. We’ve looked at their system pretty carefully and we are very alarmed by the state of it.”

Entergy is struggling along, for now, on a $200 million line of credit provided by its parent company, Entergy Inc. Local politicians are promising to scrutinize the requested rate increase carefully.

And Bywater is enduring this newest challenge, mostly with resignation. “We’re blessed, compared to the people in St. Bernard,” said James L. Spence Sr., another resident, referring to the parish just east of New Orleans, which has not begun to recover.

Still, “people can only sit in the heat for so long,” said Ms. Morreale, quickly shifting to bigger difficulties — her new life in a trailer in Arabi across the parish line, for instance. “My whole life right now is unfair,” she said.

    New Orleans, Getting Less Power, May Pay More, NYT, 22.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/us/22blackout.html?hp&ex=1153627200&en=8a87925fa68ece5f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Investors Lead Home Sale Boom in New Orleans

July 9, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, July 8 — In a market spurred by speculators and bargain hunters, an extraordinarily large number of houses in the flood-ravaged metropolitan area here are being sold, according to real estate analysts, who say volume and sales prices exceed levels before Hurricane Katrina.

The higher prices are largely due to an increase in value in suburban areas, many of which were not heavily flooded, or in dry areas of New Orleans. But flooded houses in the city are being bought as well, often at deep discounts of as much as $50 a square foot less than they would have sold for before the hurricane.

"We have a stronger housing market than before," said Wade R. Ragas, professor emeritus of finance at the University of New Orleans and the president of a local consulting firm, Real Property Associates.

"There is renovation activity in every ZIP code of Orleans Parish," Dr. Ragas added, "but the strongest buying activity is, in general, closest to where it did not flood or where there was under two feet of water."

Across the nine-parish region that includes New Orleans, 7,506 single-family homes were sold between January and the end of last month, compared with 6,449 in the same period last year, according to statistics from the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors and the Gulf South Real Estate Information Network. The average price so far this year is $221,244, compared with $193,097 in the same period last year.

The interest in buying, selling and renovating has been a bright spot since the last months of 2005, and has confounded some people who thought the flooding would cripple the housing market for years. But it is just one of many counterintuitive contrasts that are defining the area and making easy predictions unreliable.

Before the storm, Jennifer and Rodney Greenup lived in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, in a 1950's-era, 2,600-square-foot house with a red tile roof that they bought nine years ago for $108,000. It was appraised for nearly $240,000 before Hurricane Katrina.

But after the storm, when the levees broke, Gentilly was inundated, and the house sat in deep, murky water for weeks.

It sold after just two weeks on the market in February for $110,000. The house had been gutted and still lacks walls, floors, appliances and other standard fixtures.

"We didn't think we'd be able to get anything remotely normal when we decided to sell it," said Ms. Greenup, a pharmacist. "We just wanted to do all right and would have been happy to get 80 grand."

The buyer was a firefighter who said he had admired the house for years and planned to fix it up and live in it.

Kim and Reginald Glass are among the local investors betting on flood-ruined areas like Gentilly, which was a solidly middle-class neighborhood north of downtown toward Lake Pontchartrain. They have bought eight damaged houses for prices from $50,000 to $112,000, which Ms. Glass says probably represents about half the houses' market value before the storm.

"We had too much invested in New Orleans to walk away," said Ms. Glass, a lawyer who grew up in Gentilly. "We needed to figure out a way to stay here and make a living. So we decided to purchase properties in Gentilly. We looked to purchase any property that had potential, in hope of being able to renovate and rent. I think we're going to try the rental market, because there are so many people looking to come back."

The home the Glass family lived in had flood damage, and a house they were building on the lakeshore suffered wind damage. Undaunted, they returned to the city as early as possible, in October, and got to work.

"The biggest problem has been getting things like cabinets and appliances in," Ms. Glass said. "It's been quite an experience. But we knew that we were coming back to fight."

For-sale signs are everywhere, even in neighborhoods that feel dead. Some flood-ruined areas are still foul-smelling and dirty, while other neighborhoods are vibrant and clean. Some areas still have looting and other crimes, while many neighborhoods are generally safe, and tourists roam the French Quarter with drinks in hand.

Though billions of dollars in federal housing aid will begin pouring into the city this fall, there is no clear vision for renovating vast parts of the area, and some experts say speculators are taking a significant risk. In addition, there has been a 20 percent increase in the cost of construction materials, and the city continues to have a shortage of workers, experts say.

"We don't know how things will pan out," said Ivan J. Miestchovich Jr., director of the Real Estate Market Data Center and the Center for Economic Development, both at the University of New Orleans. "There's a readjustment period right now. I think there's still a big question mark."

Amy Liu, deputy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, which is studying the post-storm recovery, said she was stunned by the number of houses on the market, but like Dr. Miestchovich was not sure what to make of it.

"What it means to us is that people are finally making decisions," Ms. Liu said. "If people are choosing to leave, that could be a bad thing. But if inventory is moving, then that's a good thing. To us, this is part of the natural churning that has to happen."

If much of the movement is being driven by speculators, that is not necessarily bad either, Ms. Liu said.

"If there are folks who are not financially able to clean up their homes," she said, "it is much better to have someone buy it than have it be abandoned and foreclosed."

Some sectors of the economy, of course, depend on optimism to survive, particularly real estate. Dee Luscy, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors, said she thought the fear about the future was beginning to lift around the region.

"I think in the beginning people were afraid," Ms. Luscy said. "A lot of people thought, 'We'll never be able to give this stuff away.' Now we're seeing that things are selling. I think people are over the initial shock and are starting to feel O.K. about going on with life. What happened was like death. You go through stages of grief."

Vicki Shreves sold her gutted, 1,600-square-foot house in the Uptown section of New Orleans without putting up a for-sale sign. A friend of the family visited the house, on a street that had eight feet of water, "and wanted to know if we wanted to sell it," Ms. Shreves said. "It just seemed like such an easy thing, we said fine."

To Ms. Shreves, an accountant, the thought of rebuilding was depressing, and mold was a concern. But she had not decided to sell when she and her husband got the offer, which was close to $100 a square foot.

Before the storm, she said, she probably could have sold the house for $330,000. "When the storm came and obliterated it," she said, "we were happy to get $150,000."

"We got a check right there and closed the sale," she added.

Beth Amadon bought a flooded house in a neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain for about 50 percent of its prestorm value of more than $600,000. Ms. Amadon knows what the houses are worth because she put in an offer on a different house in the same neighborhood just days before Hurricane Katrina.

"After the storm we couldn't get back to the city, so we agreed to walk away from that sale," she said. "That's how we ended up buying a different house."

In addition, Ms. Amadon sold several distressed properties that she and her husband, a real estate developer, had owned in the Tremé area near the French Quarter for about 20 percent more than they would have expected before the hurricane. The buyer was a resident who said he intended to rent the houses.

"People seem anxious to buy historically relevant houses close to the French Quarter," Ms. Amadon said. "It's been an interesting year."

Joan Farabaugh, a real estate agent in New Orleans, said she had earned as much income in the past six months as she did in all of last year.

"And I have as much business with nonflooded as flooded" houses, Ms. Farabaugh said. "Most of my sales are people who are locals, buying and fixing up."

She said she believed that her clients had faith in the future.

"They feel that what happened was unusual, and they don't feel that this will happen again," she said of the levee breaches and catastrophic flooding. "They feel they will be fine."

    Investors Lead Home Sale Boom in New Orleans, NYT, 9.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/us/09orleans.html?hp&ex=1152417600&en=c87641ac61f830d8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

New Orleans Sets a Way to Plan Its Rebuilding

July 6, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, July 5 — Mayor C. Ray Nagin and other municipal officials announced a long-awaited framework Wednesday for planning the rebuilding of ruined neighborhoods, nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina and after months of indecision about how various parts of the city should work together toward recovery.

Under what is being called the Unified New Orleans Neighborhood Plan, Mr. Nagin, the City Council and community leaders have agreed to back a single comprehensive land-use planning process, which will coordinate the recovery of more than 70 distinct neighborhoods. Some of those neighborhoods are already far along in their efforts, while others, particularly in low-income areas, have yet to begin.

"So many people have taken the initiative to get started already," Mr. Nagin said. "It's democracy in action, just as it should be. Now it's time to get everyone up to the same place and pull all of the pieces together so we can keep the recovery and rebuilding process going in the right direction."

The plan, being financed largely by a $3.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, is expected to bring order to an effort that was beginning to grow unruly and uneven without strong central advice or control. It will provide professional planning assistance to each flooded neighborhood from teams of consultants who are to be selected from a pool of nationwide applicants over the next several weeks. In addition, one firm will be chosen as the primary citywide planner and will have the overarching responsibility to create a seamless master plan.

The lack of any recovery plan, even after Congress's approval of billions of dollars for rebuilding, had begun to frustrate many here, who were languishing without information about what the new city might look like or how to proceed with their individual rebuilding decisions.

    New Orleans Sets a Way to Plan Its Rebuilding, NYT, 6.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/us/06plan.html

With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to Inmates

July 5, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

LAKE PROVIDENCE, La. — At barbecues, ballgames and funerals, cotton gins, service stations, the First Baptist Church, the pepper-sauce factory and the local private school — the men in orange are everywhere.

Many people here in East Carroll Parish, as Louisiana counties are known, say they could not get by without their inmates, who make up more than 10 percent of its population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap, sometimes free, always compliant, ever-ready and disposable.

You just call up the sheriff, and presto, inmates are headed your way. "They bring me warm bodies, 10 warm bodies in the morning," said Grady Brown, owner of the Panola Pepper Corporation. "They do anything you ask them to do."

It is an ideal arrangement, many in this farming parish say.

"You call them up, they drop them off, and they pick them up in the afternoon," said Paul Chapple, owner of a service station.

National prison experts say that only Louisiana allows citizens to use inmate labor on such a widespread scale, under the supervision of local sheriffs. The state has the nation's highest incarceration rate, and East Carroll Parish, a forlorn jurisdiction of 8,700 people along the Mississippi River in the remote northeastern corner of Louisiana, has one of the highest rates in the state.

As a result, it is here that the nation's culture of incarceration achieves a kind of ultimate synthesis with the local economy. The prison system converts a substantial segment of the population into a commodity that is in desperately short supply — cheap labor — and local-jail inmates are integrated into every aspect of economic and social life.

The practice is both an odd vestige of the abusive convict-lease system that began in the South around Reconstruction, and an outgrowth of Louisiana's penchant for stuffing state inmates into parish jails — far more than in any other state. Nowhere else would sheriffs have so many inmates readily at hand, creating a potent political tool come election time, and one that keeps them popular in between.

Sometimes the men get paid — minimum wage, for instance, working for Mr. Brown. But by the time the sheriff takes his cut, which includes board, travel expenses and clothes, they wind up with considerably less than half of that, inmates say.

The rules are loose and give the sheriffs broad discretion. State law dictates only which inmates may go out into the world (mostly those nearing the end of their sentences) and how much the authorities get to keep of an inmate's wages, rather than the type of work he can perform. There is little in the state rules to limit the potential for a sheriff to use his inmate flock to curry favor or to reap personal benefit.

"If you talk to people around here, it is jokingly referred to as rent-a-convict," said Michael Brewer, a lawyer and former public defender in Alexandria, in central Louisiana. "There's something offensive about that. It's almost like a form of slavery."

That is not a view often expressed in East Carroll Parish.

"I've been at cocktail parties where people laugh about it," said Jacques Roy, another Alexandria lawyer. "People in Alexandria clamor for it. It's cheaper. I've always envisioned it as a who-you-know kind of thing."

The prisoners are not compelled to work, but several interviewed here said they welcomed the chance to get out of the crowded jail, at least during the day. Still, Mr. Brewer said, "if one of them were to refuse, you can imagine the repercussions."

Nearly half of Louisiana's prisoners are housed in small parish jails, a policy that saves the state from building new prisons and is lucrative for sheriffs, handsomely compensated for the privilege.

"They're making a ton of money," said Burk Foster, former criminal-justice professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and author of the recent textbook "Corrections." The sheriffs are paid $22.39 per prisoner per day for accommodating their charges in facilities of often rudimentary construction.

The accommodations here appear to be made of no more than corrugated metal. "Hey man, we're sleeping on the floor," an inmate called out from behind the fence at the parish jail last week, before a visitor was shooed away by an angry guard.

Exactly how much the sheriffs pocket, however, is unclear.

"Sheriffs deliberately obscure from the public how much money they're making," said Mr. Foster, a leading expert on Louisiana prisons.

A spokeswoman for the state corrections department said she could not respond to the idea that sheriffs profited from housing state inmates.

The sheriff here, Mark Shumate, did not reply to phone calls and messages, but one of his investigators, Brandon Wiltcher, had an explanation for the popularity and pervasiveness of inmate labor here.

"It's just such a shortage of people who will work, or that can work," Mr. Wiltcher said.

This parish, the poorest in Louisiana, lost 20 percent of its free population from 1980 to 2000. The inmate population, however, grew.

Mr. Shumate is a very big man in these precincts of lush green corn, cotton and soybean fields that stretch into a horizon shimmering in the heat. Residents say his inmates cook hamburgers for community get-togethers; they are in the concession stand at children's baseball games; they dig graves, mow roadsides and roof churches.

"They are a constant fixture and presence, at each of these community events," said Danny Terral, who works in his family's farm-supply business. "I daresay I haven't been at a community event where it's not been, those orange shirts."

They build dugouts and tend the athletic fields — free — at Briarfield Academy, a private school here. "They did an excellent job," said the school's principal, Morris Richardson, adding, "We try to provide their lunch for them."

Mr. Wiltcher, of the sheriff's office, said there was nothing wrong with helping out the private school without charge.

"It's not only used at this private school, it's used parishwide," he said of inmate labor. "Since it's used for everyone who needs it, I don't see where there would be a problem with it."

The churches, too, are grateful beneficiaries. "They sent me prisoners for a month" for menial chores at the First Baptist Church, said Reynold Minsky, also chairman of the local levee board. "All completely free," Mr. Minsky added. "It's a real good deal. Everybody is tickled."

Many here view the inmates essentially as commodities, who can be returned behind bars after the agricultural season is over, and the need for labor is reduced.

"Good thing about it, wintertime, you can lock them up — put them in cold storage," said Billy Travis, a farmer and police juror, as county commissioners here are known. "I call it deep freeze."

Right on the main road into town, at the base of the levee, up from the Economy Inn and the Scott Tractor Company, the quasi-employment agency behind concertina wire is neither out of sight nor out of mind. At midday, passing motorists can spot its residents, out for a brief exercise spell. "They got D.O.C. mixed in with parish prisoners," another inmate complained, referring to the State Department of Corrections inmates who mingle freely with those who have committed lesser local crimes.

At Lake Providence Country Club one afternoon last week, during a Rotary Club meeting, the talk was of organizing a midsummer fish fry. "I imagine the sheriff can do that," one man called out. "I hear the sheriff does a really good job," another said.

Outside the worn little town, a succession of empty storefronts and others headed that way, inmates can be spotted clearing up the remains of a ruined church off a hot country road, while a deputy lounges in the shade; picking up trash; and clearing undergrowth from roadsides with heavy equipment.

Up the road, toward the Arkansas line, a half-dozen or so are at work in the stifling production-line room of the small pepper-sauce plant, sweating alongside the free laborers. Another is fixing up a house next door that Mr. Brown bought to rent out.

The factory owner sings his praises, calling him reliable, trustworthy, honest. The inmate, Roy Hebert — he says he is in for forgery — beams. "Mr. Brown, he takes care of me," Mr. Hebert said.

    With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to Inmates, NYT, 5.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05prisoners.html?hp&ex=1152158400&en=f70b12f4db047912&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Katrina shocks New Orleans visitors 10 months on

Sun Jul 2, 2006 1:37 PM ET
Reuters
By Peter Henderson

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Bill Friend thought he was ready to go home again. He had read the newspapers, watched TV and talked with friends about the devastation wreaked on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.

Still, he was shocked.

"You go down street after street after street and see nothing -- wreckage," said Friend, 80, who grew up in New Orleans and now lives in the Washington area. "The overall impression of it is how much of it there is."

Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, flooding 80 percent of the city and killing more than 1,500 from Louisiana in one of the worst natural disasters the country has seen. So far, only about half the population has returned and vast stretches of the city are nearly deserted and still full of debris.

"Ten months later, you come away with the impression that the cleanup is only beginning," said Friend's wife, Louise. "Oh my goodness, where does anyone start?"

For visitors new to New Orleans, the storm appears to have just passed.

Residents see changes every day -- a store opens, stoplights work at an intersection with temporary stop signs, a government trailer shows up in the front yard of a damaged home in a sign that it will be reclaimed and rebuilt.

But visitors see other things -- such as the word "Baghdad" scrawled in black spray paint across a broken house in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where it has been for months.

There is the roughly 6-foot-high (2-meter) dirty bathtub ring around miles of houses in areas flooded for weeks.

And many houses remain barely standing, twisted by the force of the storm in areas where Katrina broke through levees and saturated the city with putrid water.

"The devastation, the totality and the enormity of it is just so heartbreaking. If this were hit in a carpet-bombing of a war you couldn't have more devastation," U.S. Sen. George Allen of Virginia said during a visit just over a week ago.

BEYOND THE FRENCH QUARTER

Many believe they have seen great progress when they arrive, since the tourist centers of the airport, the French Quarter and the Garden District of old mansions survived relatively well. The most historic sections of the city are on the highest ground.

Walter Dupart, 53, remembers when his son's father-in-law arrived. "He said, man, looks like New Orleans is coming back, and I kind of chuckled," Dupart said.

So they got in the car and began what has become the city's unofficial tour, viewing the Lower Ninth Ward, where a barge floated through a canal breach and houses still lie smashed.

The tour continued through St. Bernard Parish, which includes more than 10 miles of shopping malls, restaurants and houses, almost every one a deserted hulk that was flooded.

Up toward Lake Pontchartrain, where other levees breached, gutted houses await repair next to wrecks moved off their foundations. An ancient oak tree sprawled onto one yard and house does not appear to have been touched by cleanup crews.

Dupart, who lives in the once-flooded Gentilly neighborhood, remembers the reaction of his friend, a soldier on leave from Iraq. "'The only way I can describe it is this is like the war zone I just left,'" the visitor had said.

Some are puzzled, angry or indignant at the lack of progress. Insurance money has begun flowing but direct aid to homeowners is not expected before the fall, and views of government's leadership vary sharply among residents.

Thailand-based relief worker Tom Kerr recalled tsunami devastation in Aceh, Indonesia, when he saw the Ninth Ward. "It looked a lot like Aceh when we visited six months after the storm," he said, asking why the United States had not done more.

"Most of the area could be improved very quickly, but it is deserted," said Somsook Boonyabancha, a colleague who is director of the Thai relief group. "If I was the government, I couldn't sleep at night."

    Katrina shocks New Orleans visitors 10 months on, R, 2.7.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-07-02T173735Z_01_N01367694_RTRUKOC_0_US-WEATHER-HURRICANES-VISITORS.xml

In Battered Parish, Officials Bear the Brunt of Neighbors' Anguish

NYT        30.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/us/30road.html

The Road Back

In Battered Parish,

Officials Bear the Brunt of Neighbors' Anguish

June 30, 2006
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

CAMERON, La., June 28 — They convened a meeting here the other night in just about the only building still intact. They recited the Lord's Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the elected officials of Cameron Parish tried again to govern in the protracted wake of chaos.

Six part-time members of the Cameron Parish Police Jury, a sort of county legislature, sat in a semi-circle in the dank Cameron Courthouse, where a calendar in the deserted basement is paused at September. One member is a farmer, another a carpenter. A third maintains portable toilets. Three wore baseball caps; all wore that look of forever-lost sleep.

Just outside the courthouse, flatness and emptiness: stores gone, subdivisions gone, people gone. Inside, a brief talk about taxes provided a nostalgic whiff of the comfortably mundane — until the discussion turned again to removing more storm debris, demolishing more buildings and trying to recover from the time-stopping September visit of Hurricane Rita.

In an audience dappled with the red shirts of the Army Corps of Engineers and the blue shirts of FEMA, a woman called out that her elderly momma still needed help with debris removal. Another woman, begging for help with the mosquitoes that envelop the parish, seemed to direct all of Cameron's pain and frustration toward the elected and appointed officials assembled before her:

"By God," she said, her voice shaking, "you better answer me."

And what could those officials do but nod and say they would take care of it?

James Doxey, the police juror representing Cameron town, would take care of it, and so would Tina Horn, the parish administrator, and so would Clifton Hebert, the emergency operations officer. Their own homes were washed away, too, but they would take care of it.

Pain and frustration are as common here as the mosquitoes that beat against cars like raindrops. Hurricane Rita — not Hurricane Katrina, but her less famous sister — all but ruined Cameron Parish, where about 10,000 people lived amid pasture and marshland in southwestern Louisiana 40 miles south of U.S. 90.

This place prides itself on its role in providing oil and seafood to the rest of the country, on its Gulf Coast wildlife, on its Cajun self-reliance. Still, nine months of cleaning up, of fighting insurance companies and of deciphering federal regulations — of wondering who will come back — have taken a toll on the people and those who serve them.

Along with Brown's grocery store, the Fiesta Lounge, the Family Dollar store and hundreds of other businesses and homes, the Police Jury's office was crushed by the hurricane. So, for a while, its members held raucous public meetings in an auditorium farther north in the parish.

"We knew that people needed to vent," Ms. Horn said. "We pretty much had to sit back and let them scream and holler and compare."

So much had happened, and was still happening, that people directed their anger not at the anonymous officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but at the parish's jurors and administrators: the people they pray with, go duck hunting with and share cheers with at South Cameron High School football games (Go Tarpons!).

They also share the same default reference, Hurricane Audrey in 1957, which killed 400 people here. So ingrained is that disaster in Cameron consciousness that local government offices were closed on Tuesday for Hurricane Audrey Day.

It is because of Hurricane Audrey that some residents have yet to forgive parish officials for initially refusing to lift an evacuation order for southern Cameron, a decision based on the damaged roads, scattered debris and, yes, the unnerving sight of 350 disturbed graves.

"All we heard was, 'That's not the way we did it after Hurricane Audrey,' " Mr. Hebert recalled.

One person later told Mr. Doxey that he was going to start a petition to have him removed from office. Mr. Doxey's response was, "Where do I sign?"

Months passed; things got done.

Now, if you wander the too-quiet roads of Cameron Parish, invariably you will come upon a "Rita Dump Site," where tons of debris are being sorted or buried amid the buzz of ferocious insects.

Things are still getting done, because there is an endless list of things. Cameron is years and years removed from being anywhere close to what it was. In fact, it may never be what it was.

Several months ago, a state consultant suggested that all the people of lower Cameron Parish be relocated north; to many people, he might as well as have suggested that they stop breathing. Though the idea went flat, it touched a nerve, because more and more people are moving to the northern part of the parish.

For Charles Precht, a police juror from Grand Lake in the north, the overarching question for Cameron is, "How do you rebuild a parish not knowing how a population is going to return?"

The question lingers unanswered in the muggy air. Meanwhile, there are things to do. Mr. Hebert, 44, still living in a trailer, focuses his attention on the damaged parish buildings that still need to come down and the pieces of homes still stacked at roadside. It looks as though this poor parish will soon be bearing the cost of some of the cleanup.

Ms. Horn, 47, still living in an apartment outside the parish, spends long hours making sure that every parish entity — from the hospital, blown away, to the library, also blown away — details the extent of its losses so that she can apply for every kind of assistance available, federal and state, public and private.

And Mr. Doxey, 46, still living in a trailer, collects complaints about cluttered drainage ditches, mediates disputes between homeowners and FEMA officials and listens to people, like the old man who lost everything and now spends his days circling his property on a tractor.

"He goes round and round," Mr. Doxey said. "He don't know what to do."

    In Battered Parish, Officials Bear the Brunt of Neighbors' Anguish, NYT, 30.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/us/30road.html

Venerable Church Burns in New Orleans

June 28, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, June 27 — Newly burned-out lots pockmark the city, evidence of a fearsome new challenge as firefighters here say they are confronting a tough post-Hurricane Katrina landscape of abandoned buildings, water mains cracked by the storm and fire engines with smaller crews.

Historic structures are burning to the ground — the latest was the Coliseum Place Baptist Church, a venerable red brick church that until Friday had towered over Coliseum Square in the Lower Garden District since 1855. Preservationists here described the loss as heartbreaking; it followed a February fire that destroyed a cherished World War I-era theater in the same square.

The newest threat to New Orleans is a direct outcropping of the storm, in many respects. Vagrants, squatting in empty buildings, lighting candles and cooking without electricity, are setting fires, the authorities say. Pipes broken during Hurricane Katrina have been leaking 85 million gallons of water a day. Manpower in the Fire Department is down by a third, on a good day. And inadequate flood insurance has been an inducement to arson, officials say.

"We have more fires, burning hotter and burning faster, and we have reduced water pressure," said Capt. Nick Felton, president of the New Orleans Firefighters Association, Local 632. "We've got a recipe for disaster. We've really got our back against the wall."

Staircases leading to nowhere amid charred, twisted building fragments can be found here and there on desolate lots in the Uptown neighborhood. In the Lower Garden District, one of the city's oldest, leafiest neighborhoods, at least six significant structures have been lost to fire since the hurricane. In May, two 100-year-old wooden wharves on the Mississippi River burned, sending a column of smoke high above the Central Business District.

The Fire Department's spokesman, Chief Norman Woodridge, agreed that the volume and size of fires appeared to have increased.

"We've got many large fires," Chief Woodridge said. "We're going out two, three, four times a week. That's unusual." Meanwhile, the department worries that it will soon lose two firefighting helicopters, on temporary loan from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Water pressure is down to 20 pounds per square inch, from 90, in some areas because of the leaks, Captain Felton said. It is yet another legacy of the storm: trees, blown down by Hurricane Katrina, uprooted water mains, cracking them.

Adding to the fire problems, a drought described by climatologists as severe has settled over the region, drying up vegetation. Fires, more common in winter here, are particularly unwelcome with the mercury stuck in the mid-90's. Working conditions are as bad as they have ever been, firefighters say.

"It's very hot and it's very tiring," said one firefighter, Pekitha West. "Very stressful. We're at more fires, by us having to cross over districts."

A vacant apartment complex, struck by lightning, burned to the ground in eastern New Orleans earlier this month. Firefighters had battled more than two dozen large blazes previously in June.

In many ways, Hurricane Katrina created an ideal landscape for unchecked blazes. Gutted structures, stripped of sheetrock, leave room and air for fire to spread, Captain Felton said. Rising rents mean people are crowding into closer quarters. And armies of demolition workers are breaking into empty houses to sleep on undamaged second floors.

The result: "We're makin' a whole lot of fires," Captain Felton said, using a local idiom that translates roughly as "the firefighters are busy."

The blaze at the Coliseum Place Baptist Church, the oldest Baptist church in New Orleans, was a heavy psychological blow to the struggling city. The deep red of its Gothic brick tower made an arresting counterpoint to the pastel Greek Revival houses and dark green foliage on the square. The austere church was said to have sheltered troops on both sides during the Civil War.

The cause of the fire was under investigation. The building had been vacant for quite some time, and largely unused; residents reported chasing off vagrants. The remnants of its congregation had previously sought to tear it down, but the Historic District Landmarks Commission had refused the request.

Friday, in front of the smoldering ruins — the spire was intact, though badly damaged — distraught residents milled about the square, trying to head off the wrecking crew. An engineer brought in by local residents said parts of the church could be saved. But the report was to no avail; demolition went ahead after a nearly daylong standoff.

"I've got a role here, to protect the public," said the city's director of safety and permits, Mike Centineo. Patricia Gay of the Preservation Resource Center called it "a terrible architectural and historical loss," a sentiment echoed by other preservationists.

The square's residents, meanwhile, spoke as if their neighborhood's heart had been ripped out. "No tourists are going to want to come here if we lose all of our historic buildings," said Rene Padilla, who lived next door to the church.

    Venerable Church Burns in New Orleans, NYT, 28.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/us/28fires.html

Tax Revenues Are a Windfall for Louisiana

June 26, 2006
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

BATON ROUGE, La. — State officials assumed that Louisiana's tax base had been battered by last year's hurricanes, but the latest figures show that the opposite occurred: more tax dollars than ever are pouring into the state's coffers as the budget year draws to an end.

The state predicted that tax collections would plunge by almost $900 million this year, and it slashed spending to match. Instead, a record $9.2 billion is on track to be collected by the time the budget year ends on June 30, and at least some of that tax flow looks as if it is likely to continue.

Part of the upswing has come from gamblers dropping more dollars at casinos and video poker machines. Another part has come from higher oil and gas prices, which not only increase the state's taxes and royalties, but also increase profits in the petrochemical industry, which is a vital part of the Louisiana economy.

But the biggest surge by far has been in sales taxes, as hurricane victims have used federal aid, insurance proceeds and their savings to replace items as disparate as socks and S.U.V.'s. Officials forecast that the state will end up with almost $500 million more in sales tax revenue than they expected before the storms hit.

"I'm amazed people replaced as much of their stuff as fast as they did without a 'my home' to go to," said Greg Albrecht, chief economist for the Louisiana Legislature.

In New Orleans, sales tax collections in the first quarter were at only 76 percent of last year's level, but that represents a substantial improvement over the end of 2005, said Reginald Zeno, the city's finance director.

"It's a lot more robust than we had imagined," Mr. Zeno said.

Before last year's hurricane's officials expected tax revenues for the current year to be $9 billion.

State officials are not sure how much of the tax boom will continue, or for how long, so they are using the money to help cover one-time costs rather than for regular operating expenses, said Jerry Luke LeBlanc, the commissioner of administration.

Though Louisiana still has many obvious needs, like towing the hulks of hundreds of cars from under the highway overpasses in New Orleans, state officials are not devoting the unexpected tax revenue to those projects, arguing that they will ultimately be covered by the federal government. But the state is spending money to help solve less evident problems in areas like health care and economic development.

A raise has been approved for teachers and other school workers, but Mr. LeBlanc said it would be covered by recurring revenue. The Legislature agreed with Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's plan to set aside about $150 million to pay for hurricane evacuations and even more to help pay bills that are coming due from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which requires states to pick up some of the cost of disaster recovery.

The governor, a Democrat, warned legislators not to go on a spending spree, and for the most part they complied. Political analysts noted, however, that the traditional battle over the budget was muted this year, partly because enough money was available to pay for at least some of the members' pet projects.

In fact, the tax boom comes at a rather awkward time for the state, which is getting billions of dollars of aid from Washington to finance its program to help homeowners.

"We're extremely relieved," Mr. LeBlanc said. "But our challenges far outstrip the revenue we have coming in."

Some parts of the state have not experienced a post-hurricane boom, and some of those with tax windfalls also face increasing costs for schools, sewers and other services.

Big spikes in sales tax revenue have occurred in places where many storm evacuees have settled, including St. Tammany Parish, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.

In Baton Rouge, which officials believe may still have 100,000 more residents than it did a year ago, tax revenue was up more than 22 percent in the first quarter of this year, said Walter G. Monsour, the city's chief administrative officer.

At stores, every day is like Christmas Eve, Mr. Monsour said. "Retailers are doing wonderful, restaurants are doing wonderful, car dealers are doing wonderful," he said.

But no one knows how long the boom will continue, he added, so the city will use the excess money for one-time improvements like putting video cameras in police cars.

In the meantime, however, Baton Rouge is struggling to cope with a decade's worth of population growth that occurred in two weeks, as anyone who has tried to drive at rush hour here knows all too well.

Government officials in the most devastated areas could only wish for problems like that. In St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans, less than a third of the population has returned, and there is still nowhere to buy groceries.

Big problems also remain in New Orleans, as well as huge unknowns. The city has had to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars and plans to borrow more from a new state program that will help local governments and agencies cover the payments on their debts.

And as in other areas hit by the hurricanes, no one knows what is going to happen to property tax collections, which are under way and which Mr. Zeno said were the second-largest source of city revenue after sales taxes.

Assessed property values have dropped about 20 percent, he said, and the city is assuming it will collect about 60 percent of what is owed. "But we're anxious to see the actual numbers," he said.

On the state level, income tax collections are a big question; many residents have been out of work for months, and much of the cleanup has been done by out-of-staters, for cash. Louisiana gets about a quarter of its tax revenue from personal income tax payments, which have been postponed for hurricane victims.

Based on indicators like the amount being withheld from payrolls, budget forecasters say the state's budget assumes that income tax payments will fall by almost $400 million, or 16 percent, and rebound just a little next year.

One of those forecasters, James A. Richardson, a professor of economics at Louisiana State University, said one of the biggest surprises had been how strong gambling revenue had been. At riverboat casinos, state data show, there have been fewer gamblers, but they have lost far more money ($22 million more in April this year than in the previous April).

Some Louisianans may have pumped their federal aid into video poker machines and slots. But Professor Richardson said he thought much of the gambling was done by out-of-state workers who flocked to the Gulf Coast after the hurricanes.

"You couldn't go to a restaurant without running into an insurance adjuster," he said, "and there were not many things for them to do in their spare time."

That seems unlikely to continue for long, though, and he worries about a short-term slump in the economy this year.

"There will be a two- or three- or four-month interlude when there are not very many people," Dr. Richardson said, when FEMA employees and some construction workers start to leave, tourists shun steamy New Orleans and spending by residents slows.

"At some point, they'll stop buying refrigerators," he said.

But longer term, Dr. Richardson and other experts said, the prospects are bright for the economy, and therefore for tax collections.

Timothy P. Ryan, an economist and chancellor of the University of New Orleans, calculates that more than $61 billion of disaster-related money will surge through the state from homeowners and business insurance, federal programs and the housing assistance program. The proportion of that money that will go to building will equal more than 28 years of normal construction spending.

    Tax Revenues Are a Windfall for Louisiana, NYT, 26.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/us/26louisiana.html

Relocation Leads to a Parish Business Boom

June 26, 2006
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

MANDEVILLE, La. — It can be quite a feat to find a parking space these days at American Factory Direct, a furniture store here brimming with merchandise like $8.99 mini-lampshades with beaded gold fringe and $2,900 dining room sets with bronze medallions and bird's-eye maple inlays.

"A lot of people are buying a whole houseful," said Billie Comeaux, who owns the store with her husband, Bob.

Since the hurricanes, in fact, people have bought so much furniture that the Comeauxs have quintupled the space in their warehouses, doubled the size of their staff (to 130) and started "burnout sessions" for overstressed employees.

All over St. Tammany Parish, the mostly white, well-to-do county across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, businesses are booming, building contractors are busy and sales tax collections are soaring.

"We had 48,000 families that needed new refrigerators," said Kevin Davis, the parish president, whose offices are in this city in the center of the parish. He said he expected sales tax revenue, normally about $24 million a year, to top $40 million this year.

The source is not just longtime residents repairing their houses. Newcomers have flocked to St. Tammany, too, many from St. Bernard Parish to the south, where almost every house took in floodwater.

One sign of the population shift: The Archdiocese of New Orleans is moving a Roman Catholic high school that used to be in St. Bernard to St. Tammany, is opening another school and has even established a new parish in Covington; later this year, parishioners will worship in a building that used to house Mr. Fish Pets and Supplies.

"You follow the people," said the Rev. William Maestri, chief spokesman for the archdiocese, noting that these newcomers did not seem temporary. "They're building and buying, not renting."

St. Bernard Parish, which was damaged far more heavily in the storm, is, like St. Tammany, mostly white, but not nearly as wealthy. One Catholic church in the parish has reopened — out of nine. Residents have been slow to return, partly because there is little in the way of medical care or shopping (the Walgreens has reopened, but not the Super Wal-Mart).

Sales taxes are running about the same as last year, in part because taxes on new cars are paid where the vehicles are registered, not where they are bought, said David E. Peralta, the chief administrative officer for the parish. "I don't want you to think we are back and running and making more money than ever before," Mr. Peralta said.

That much is clear just from a trip down Judge Perez Drive, which is lined with heaps of rubbish, blown-out signs, white travel trailers and, on the side streets, condemned houses.

Behind the parish office building, where waterlogged papers ooze out of filing cabinets on the sidewalk, Henry Rodriguez, the parish president known to everyone as Junior, is still living and working out of a double-wide trailer. Sitting at his kitchen-table-cum-desk, Mr. Rodriguez said that about 20,000 residents, out of 67,000, had returned. And he expects many more to come back when they figure out how expensive housing is in St. Tammany.

On the other hand, one of his biggest worries stems from the thousands of ruined houses that have not been touched, and which he fears have been abandoned by people who are taking their insurance money elsewhere.

"I figure they don't give a damn," he said of these homeowners. "They're walking off and saying, 'It's yours.' "

    Relocation Leads to a Parish Business Boom, NYT, 26.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/us/26boom.html

A Legacy of the Storm: Depression and Suicide

June 21, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, June 20 — Sgt. Ben Glaudi, the commander of the Police Department's Mobile Crisis Unit here, spends much of each workday on this city's flood-ravaged streets trying to persuade people not to kill themselves.

Last Tuesday in the French Quarter, Sergeant Glaudi's small staff was challenged by a man who strode straight into the roaring currents of the Mississippi River, hoping to drown. As the water threatened to suck him under, the man used the last of his strength to fight the rescuers, refusing to be saved.

"He said he'd lost everything and didn't want to live anymore," Sergeant Glaudi said.

The man was counseled by the crisis unit after being pulled from the river against his will. Others have not been so lucky.

"These things come at me fast and furious," Sergeant Glaudi said. "People are just not able to handle the situation here."

New Orleans is experiencing what appears to be a near epidemic of depression and post-traumatic stress disorders, one that mental health experts say is of an intensity rarely seen in this country. It is contributing to a suicide rate that state and local officials describe as close to triple what it was before Hurricane Katrina struck and the levees broke 10 months ago.

Compounding the challenge, the local mental health system has suffered a near total collapse, heaping a great deal of the work to be done with emotionally disturbed residents onto the Police Department and people like Sergeant Glaudi, who has sharp crisis management skills but no medical background. He says his unit handles 150 to 180 such distress calls a month.

Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, the deputy New Orleans coroner dealing with psychiatric cases, said the suicide rate in the city was less than nine a year per 100,000 residents before the storm and increased to an annualized rate of more than 26 per 100,000 in the four months afterward, to the end of 2005.

While there have been 12 deaths officially classified as suicides so far this year, Dr. Rouse and Dr. Kathleen Crapanzano, director of the Louisiana Office of Mental Health, said the real number was almost certainly far higher, with many self-inflicted deaths remaining officially unclassified or wrongly described as accidents.

Charles G. Curie, the administrator of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said the scope of the disaster that the hurricane inflicted had been "unprecedented," and added, "We've had great concerns about the level of substance abuse and mental health needs being at levels we had not seen before."

This is a city where thousands of people are living amid ruins that stretch for miles on end, where the vibrancy of life can be found only along the slivers of land next to the Mississippi. Garbage is piled up, the crime rate has soared, and as of Tuesday the National Guard and the state police were back in the city, patrolling streets that the Police Department has admitted it cannot handle on its own. The reminders of death are everywhere, and the emotional toll is now becoming clear.

Gina Barbe rode out the storm at her mother's house near Lake Pontchartrain, and says she has been crying almost every day since.

"I thought I could weather the storm, and I did — it's the aftermath that's killing me," said Ms. Barbe, who worked in tourism sales before the disaster. "When I'm driving through the city, I have to pull to the side of the street and sob. I can't drive around this city without crying."

Many people who are not at serious risk of suicide are nonetheless seeing their lives eroded by low-grade but persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness and stress-related illnesses, doctors and researchers say. All this goes beyond the effects of 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, Mr. Curie said. Beyond those of Hurricanes Andrew, Hugo and Ivan.

"We've been engaged much longer and with much more intensity in this disaster than in previous disasters," he said.

At the end of each day, Sergeant Glaudi returns to his own wrecked neighborhood and sleeps in a government-issued trailer outside what used to be home.

"You ride around and all you see is debris, debris, debris," he said.

And that is a major part of the problem, experts agree: the people of New Orleans are traumatized again every time they look around.

"This is a trauma that didn't last 24 hours, then go away," said Dr. Crapanzano, the Louisiana mental health official. "It goes on and on."

"If I could do anything," said Dr. Howard J. Osofsky, the chairman of the psychiatry department at Louisiana State University, "it would be to have a quicker pace of recovery for the community at large. The mental health needs are related to this."

The state estimates that the city has lost more than half its psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and other mental health workers, many of whom relocated after the storm. And according to the Louisiana Hospital Association, there are little more than 60 hospital beds for psychiatric patients in the seven hospitals that remain open here.

Because of a lack of mental heath clinics and related services, severely disturbed patients end up in hospital emergency rooms, where they often languish. Many poorer patients were dependent on a large public institution, Charity Hospital, but it has been closed since the storm despite the protests of many medical professionals who say the building is in good condition. Big Charity, as the locals called it, had room for 100 psychiatric patients and could have used more capacity.

"When you don't have a place to send that wandering schizophrenic directing traffic, guess what? Law enforcement is going to wind up taking care of that," said Dr. Rouse, the deputy coroner. "When the Police Department is forced to do the job of the mental health system, it's a lose-lose situation for everyone."

"When the family comes to see me at the coroner's office," he added, "it's a defeat. The state has a moral obligation to reinstitute this care."

Sergeant Glaudi and others said some people struggling with emotional issues had no prior history of mental illness or depression.

The symptoms cut across economic and racial lines; life in New Orleans is difficult and inconvenient for everyone.

Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans, conducted a recent study with researchers from Louisiana State to see how people were coping with everyday life in the city and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Ms. Howell managed a similar survey in 2003.

"The symptoms of depression have, at minimum, doubled since Katrina," she said. "These are classic post-trauma symptoms. People can't sleep, they're irritable, feeling that everything's an effort and sad."

The new survey was conducted in March and April, and canvassed 470 respondents who were living in houses or apartments. Since they were not living in government-issued trailers, it is likely that they were among the more fortunate.

Jennifer Lindsley, a gallery owner, also feels the sting of missing her friends.

"When you can't get ahold of people you used to know, it leaves you feeling kind of empty," Ms. Lindsley said. "When you try to explain it to people in other cities, they say: 'The whole world is over it, so you've got to get over it. Sorry that happened, but too bad. Move on.' "

Some people have decided to leave solely because of the mood of the city.

"I'm really aware of the air of mild depression that pervades this entire area," said Gayle Falgoust, a retired teacher. "I'm leaving after this month. I worry about living with this level of depression all the time. I worry that it might affect my health. I know the move will improve my mood."

    A Legacy of the Storm: Depression and Suicide, NYT, 21.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/21/us/21depress.html?ex=1155355200&en=06db95b187208342&ei=5070

Crime Rising, New Orleans Asks for National Guard

June 20, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, June 19 — In a blunt admission that the city could no longer control its growing crime problem, Mayor C. Ray Nagin asked the state on Monday to send National Guard troops to help patrol the streets of New Orleans.

Hours later, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 100 troops, joined by 60 state police, would be in place as early as Tuesday morning. More are likely to arrive later in the week.

The mayor's plea for help came after five teenagers were shot to death with semiautomatic weapons in the Central City neighborhood while sitting in a sport-utility vehicle Saturday morning. It was the deadliest single shooting attack in the city in 11 years, raising to 53 the number of homicides this year.

In recent weeks, as crime increased and the Police Department struggled to return to its strength from before Hurricane Katrina, many politicians, editorialists and citizens have asked for outside help, a move Mayor Nagin appeared to acknowledge Monday was necessary as he asked for 300 Guard troops.

"We vow to do whatever it takes in the short and long term to make this a safer city," he said, adding at another point during the day, "This is our line in the sand."

The city's Police Department has seemed ineffective at curbing a rise in drug-related violence and looting — which is isolated, for the most part, to poor neighborhoods and sparsely populated areas — even though there are almost as many officers on the force now as there were before Hurricane Katrina, and the city's population of 220,000 is less than half its former size.

Still, the department has not bounced back from the storm. It has suffered sharp budget cuts, is low on supplies like ammunition and continues to wrestle with its tarnished reputation. The police lost control of the city when the levees broke after Hurricane Katrina, and while many officers managed to perform their duties under extraordinary circumstances, more than 200 simply walked away. Others were accused of participating in the mayhem.

Warren J. Riley, the police chief, said he requested additional law enforcement help months ago in anticipation of a summertime population increase, and said the announcement after a weekend of high crime was simply a coincidence.

Chief Riley insisted during a news conference that his force was capable of controlling crime, and that the request did not undermine him or the Police Department. But his inconsistent remarks during the day reflected the difficulty his department has had in recent months.

"With the appropriate resources we will have this city under control," he said, just moments after stating, "This is not a situation where anything is out of control."

The Guard will focus on patrolling the neighborhoods that were most damaged in the flood and that are still largely uninhabited, Chief Riley said. That move would free as many as 300 police officers, who had been patrolling for looters, to concentrate on crime in the heavily populated areas of the city.

He said there would be no National Guard presence in downtown New Orleans, the French Quarter or any other heavily populated area.

Residents in parts of the city with the heaviest damage, like Lakeview and New Orleans East, where the looting of flooded homes has been especially acute, have been asking city officials for more protection for months.

That desire has also been reflected by talk radio hosts and columnists in the local papers.

"Madame Governor, Mr. Mayor, esteemed Legislature and City Council: Get us some protection and get it now," wrote one of the city's most popular columnists, Chris Rose of The Times-Picayune, in a recent column. "Get us some security. Get us the National Guard."

Residents say they have found it difficult to rebuild because supplies and new appliances are stolen as quickly as they are delivered to unoccupied houses in largely vacant neighborhoods.

"It's past time for the Guard to be here," said Larry Dupont, an electrician who lived in Gentilly before the flood destroyed his neighborhood. "I'm fed up with all that New Orleans is not doing to help its people."

Still, others said they resented the militarization of the city, and did not have fond memories of the National Guard's time here immediately after the hurricane.

"When they were here before, it didn't exactly give me a sense of safety," said Kalli Forster, the manager of a boutique in the Uptown section. "It made me feel like I was in a war zone."

Others said the move had sent a frightening message.

"It's basically saying that the people in charge here aren't in control," said Dawn Larsen, a waitress in Uptown.

The five young men who were killed before dawn on Saturday were ages 16 to 19, and, said Chief Riley, three of the five had criminal backgrounds. The three were involved in a drive-by shooting in another part of the city on May 1, the chief said. They were charged with aggravated assault and the possession of a weapon, but the victim and witnesses refused to cooperate and press charges, so they were freed.

The teenagers were gunned down just outside the Central Business District, in an area well known locally as a haven for drug-related activity.

The police were looking for suspects Monday evening.

    Crime Rising, New Orleans Asks for National Guard, NYT, 20.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/us/20orleans.html?hp&ex=1150862400&en=f189407770f79132&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Road Back

In Louisiana, a Sinking Island Wars With Water and the Government

June 19, 2006
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La., June 15 — All trees and farmland, the tribal chief said. With hard acres of green where cattle grazed, adults trapped game, and boys and girls of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe ran without even dampening their feet. You should have seen it.

But you can hardly imagine it, much less see it, because where gardens sprouted and children sprinted just 30 years ago, there is now a grass skirt of mushy marshland, and beyond, the rippling open waters that lead to the Gulf of Mexico.

"Water," the tribe's conflicted chief, Albert Naquin, said. "All water."

Think of a ship with expansive decks and a close-knit crew. Now think of that ship surrendering slowly to the ocean, leaving its crew clinging to an ever-sinking bow. The ship is this island, here at the bayou bottom of Louisiana, about 30 miles south of U.S. Highway 90. And its crew members are the island's inhabitants, the small band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha, related to the Choctaws and part of a larger confederation of Muskogees.

For natural and manufactured reasons, 30 square miles of South Louisiana wetlands vanish every year into the Gulf. People here say they lose a football field every 20 minutes, every half-hour, every hour — the estimates vary, but the panic is constant, partly because wetlands and barrier islands act as hurricane buffers for the vulnerable mainland.

The unnerving sense of "look away, lose an inch" is especially keen here on the very poor, very mucky and thoroughly exposed Isle de Jean Charles, which almost dutifully received six feet of water during Hurricane Rita last September. But the advancing waters rubbing away a culture have a partner, tribal members say: the government.

To reach the island, you take a narrow road that was raised several years ago but which has sunk so much since that cars seem to skim the lapping waters. As you drive, you leave behind the initial stage of a 72-mile levee system called the Morganza to the Gulf of Mexico Hurricane Protection Project.

The operative word here: behind.

This $887 million project of the Army Corps of Engineers, long-planned and still awaiting full Congressional authorization, is designed to stem the wetlands' erosion in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes caused by natural subsidence, the rerouting of the Mississippi River and, some say, global warming.

"The system will provide hurricane protection to over 90 percent of the residents," said Jerome Zeringue, the director of the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District. "There are a few people left out, unfortunately."

Most of those few left out are the Biloxi-Chitimacha on Isle de Jean Charles.

"We did originally try to put them in there," Mr. Zeringue said. "The problem is, based on the cost-benefit ratio, it would cost too much to include that sliver of land. For the cost, you could buy the island and all the residents tenfold."

In effect, the government had to ask itself: is it worth $100 million or more to protect a shrinking spit of an island, its only road, its modest homes, some of them little more than shacks, and its 250 residents, whose families have lived here for generations? Its conclusion: no.

"Even in a high tide, with strong southeast winds, these people have water in their yards," Mr. Zeringue said. He emphasized that the decision was not made lightly.

A few years ago, the island's residents rejected a proposal to be relocated somewhere within the Morganza skirt. Since then, water and mortality have continued to creep, leaving some of the younger members to question the point of it all.

Not that many of them trust the government. Residents float conspiracies about greedy land speculators and oil interests craving the liquid gold that may lie beneath. Their distrust runs deep in the softening soil; they don't have to think too far back to remember a time when they could neither pray nor learn beside white people.

Mr. Naquin, the tribal chief, solid as a piling, rode down that only island road, where the local surnames of Naquin, Billiot and Dardar date to the mid-1800's; where patchwork wooden walkways twist over an ever-widening bayou; and where some abandoned houses look as if they had exploded.

Do not immediately blame last year's Hurricane Rita for the damage; it might have been Hurricane Lili, in 2002, or Tropical Storm Bill, in 2003. But each storm accelerates the inevitable fate.

Several children frolicked in the bayou muck outside a small house, while their grandfather, Philip Brunet, watched in the melting heat. At 61, he has "caught" two heart attacks, as he put it, ending his career as a welder and signaling that the time had come to leave where he has lived all his life.

"We're moving, me and my wife," Mr. Brunet told his old friend, the chief. "We're going to take off when the hurricanes come and go someplace high. No more mud to clean."

The chief said goodbye — "I love y'all," Mr. Brunet called after him, in affecting Cajun English — and moved down the road. He passed the old cemetery, spongy and unused since the 1940's; the mounds of empty Milwaukee's Best beer cans that glitter outside a tilting shack; and the sinking property of his older sister, Denecia Billiot, and her husband, Wenceslaus.

The Billiots raised seven children, all of whom have moved off the island. Now they live alone in a house placed on stilts after Lili. When they look out their back window, they see deep blue water where corn grew and their children played.

They sit on the porch, Mr. Billiot wearing a red Army cap that hints of his South Pacific tour during World War II, Mrs. Billiot killing sand flies with a pink swatter. "I'm not going nowhere," she said. "I was born here. I got 81 already." Years on the island, that is.

The chief passed other houses, naming residents both here and gone: shrimpers and welders and riggers and loafers. He pointed out where Lover's Lane used to be, where a dance hall used to beckon, where groves of trees used to flourish before the salt water withered them dry.

Even the chief doesn't live on Isle de Jean Charles anymore. The only road leading to the island kept flooding, he said, and he could not afford to lose his off-island job in the petroleum industry. He moved 30 years ago from an island house that still stands, an empty hull, vacant since Hurricane Lili.

He came to the end of the island road, to the spot where he and his many siblings grew up, including Gustave, who died in a tugboat accident; Simon, who died in the Vietnam War; and Deme, the tribal chief before him, and now an elder.

Mr. Naquin is nearly 60, and his tribal burdens line his face.

He fears that if he sues the federal government for leaving the island outside the levees, he will jeopardize his tribe's application for federal recognition. He fears that if he does nothing, his tribe may not survive the next colossal hurricane.

Even his preferred option — the government builds homes on the mainland for tribal members, but allows members to move off the island when they feel ready — could mean the loss of connection to the land, the loss of cultural ways, the loss of continuity.

"It is terrible for me," the chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha said, as another sun set on the encroaching waters. "I thought I could change the world, but the world is changing me."

    In Louisiana, a Sinking Island Wars With Water and the Government, NYT, 19.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/us/19road.html

In New Orleans,

Money Is Ready but a Plan Isn't

June 18, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, June 17 — Billions of federal dollars are about to start flowing into this city after President Bush on Thursday signed the emergency relief bill the region has long awaited. But, with the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching, local officials have yet to come up with a redevelopment plan showing what kind of city will emerge from the storm's ruins.

No neighborhoods have been ruled out for rebuilding, no matter how damaged or dangerous. No decisions have been made on what kind of housing, if any, will replace the mold-ridden empty hulks that stretch endlessly in many areas. No one really knows exactly how the $10.4 billion in federal housing aid will be spent, and guidance for residents in vulnerable areas has been minimal.

A month into his second term, Mayor C. Ray Nagin has said little about his vision for a profoundly different city. In an interview on Friday, he said it would be six months before a "master planning document" was issued to address questions like which areas should be rebuilt, although he suggested that thousands of residents were making that decision on their own.

Caution should be the watchword, Mr. Nagin said, months after the apparent demise of a planning committee he set up. "New Orleans is a very historic city," he said. "We can't come out and just do something quickly."

But a close collaborator of Mr. Nagin acknowledged that the process has lagged. "Let's just admit something straight out: we're late," said David Voelker, a board member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

Mr. Voelker, who is in charge of the state authority's efforts to coordinate with neighborhood planning, sounded uncertain even about the nature of the master plan.

"I don't know what this master plan is going to say, because I'm not a master planner," Mr. Voelker said.

The lack of a redevelopment plan and the state of the city's ruined neighborhoods have some worried that the city government has lapsed into the pattern of inactivity for which Mr. Nagin was criticized before last month's election.

"The city desperately needs leadership on planning and housing issues," an editorial in The Times-Picayune said last week. "Without strong guidance from City Hall, crucial decisions about the future of New Orleans will be made by default. Or they won't be made at all."

In occasional public appearances, the mayor has voiced characteristic optimism. "Today is another great day in the city of New Orleans," he said Wednesday after the A.F.L.-C.I.O. announced a $700 million housing and economic development grant. He called the grant "an incredible tipping point," but offered no specifics about which neighborhoods he was committed to rebuilding.

The mayor's flurry of appearances before the election has been sharply curtailed. Streets remain abandoned, sometimes for miles, and blocks are carpeted with trash.

"We do need to have a clear vision from the mayor," said Oliver Thomas, the president of the New Orleans City Council. "Tell us what you're for, or not for. We don't know exactly what neighborhoods he's committed to, kind of committed to, and not committed to."

Mr. Thomas added, "We don't know specifically what the roles of the neighborhoods are going to be in the new New Orleans. Can people build anywhere? Can they live anywhere? Are they going to be funded? We don't know that."

In the absence of a redevelopment vision from the city, residents are pushing ahead on their own, a process likely to be accelerated late this summer when washed-out homeowners begin receiving checks from the federal housing money appropriated by Congress. Whether homeowners who are rebuilding in ruined areas will remain isolated pioneers or will receive city services is still unclear.

A few badly damaged neighborhoods have undertaken their own planning efforts. "The initiatives for planning and rebuilding are coming from the neighborhoods themselves," said Pam Dashiell, a member of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, in the city's Ninth Ward.

The Broadmoor district, with a mix of incomes and races, has plans for converting abandoned dwellings to community use and wants to provide housing incentives for police officers and firefighters.

But few neighborhoods are as far along, and none of the efforts are being centrally coordinated.

During the recent election campaign, Mr. Nagin and most of his rivals carefully avoided pronouncements on the fate of specific neighborhoods, tiptoeing through a volatile issue that had many residents on edge. But now, critics say, the mayor does not have politics to use as an excuse.

"The election is over, and it's time for governing," said State Representative Karen Carter, Democrat of New Orleans. "He's the mayor, and he has to show that level of leadership and engagement."

Within a week of his re-election on May 20, Mr. Nagin announced that two ex-rivals from the campaign — both lawyers, one a Republican and the other a Democrat — would be aiding him in urgent planning for the city's future. In 100 days, there would be a plan, it was announced.

Since then nothing has been heard from either lawyer. One was traveling outside the country this week, and the other did not return calls.

In the interview on Friday, Mr. Nagin indicated that the entire city west of the Industrial Canal would be rebuilt, a more optimistic projection than some urban planners had given.

As for areas east of the canal, the mayor said that the prosperous New Orleans East area would probably come back and that the flattened homes of the Lower Ninth Ward would probably be replaced by what he called "multilevel living facilities," presumably apartment buildings.

Success, he said, is more likely to be defined by what residents do than what the editorial board of The Times-Picayune says. The city's current population of 220,000 is ahead of most projections, he said, and was made possible by his administration's willingness to provide building permits to almost all who asked, in any neighborhood.

"I think that most citizens can make intelligent decisions," Mr. Nagin said. "This city will be rebuilt. Most areas will come back. There are people who are rebuilding."

Mr. Nagin appears to be counting on a strategy that involves large-scale economic development projects, like one unveiled two weeks ago that called for demolishing a decrepit downtown shopping center and the city's frayed municipal complex and replacing them with a National Jazz Center set in a 20-acre park. Such development promises, largely unfulfilled, were a feature of Mr. Nagin's first term in office.

As for the planning body created after the hurricane, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, little has been heard of it for months. The commission's tough plan, unveiled in January and now apparently dead, called for a four-month building moratorium in the hardest-hit neighborhoods while they proved their "viability." Ultimately a new public agency would have been empowered to seize land in areas that failed the challenge, and the city's footprint was to shrink.

Mr. Nagin, in the face of a public outcry, almost immediately rejected the plan.

Ray Manning, a local architect who played a key role in early planning efforts after the storm and who was a co-chairman of the mayor's neighborhood planning committee, said this week that he had withdrawn from the process.

"I said I would not speak about this issue any longer," he said.

At a conference at Tulane University this month, Mr. Manning had harsh criticism for the lack of guidance from City Hall.

For his part, the mayor in a brief appearance before reporters this week said of the neighborhood planning process, "That's just about completed."

Naming Mr. Thomas, the City Council president, as a collaborator, Mr. Nagin said, "There's a structure we'll be announcing in the next day or so, and we'll move that forward." But Mr. Thomas responded: "I don't know what the structure is. We've talked about some possibilities, but nothing definitively."

Now, 10 weeks before the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, some residents are losing patience.

"We are entitled to hear something now," said LaToya Cantrell, head of the Broadmoor Improvement Association. "We've been waiting. It's nine months out. We need to know what's going on. We need to know what the process is. The center of my community has yet to return, and this is nine months out. This is ridiculous. This is frustrating."

    In New Orleans, Money Is Ready but a Plan Isn't, NYT, 18.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/us/nationalspecial/18orleans.html

Phoenix Journal

In the Trail of the Storm:

Little Is Left but Stillness

June 15, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

PHOENIX, La. — Lower Plaquemines Parish, the long marshy finger of Louisiana sticking into the Gulf of Mexico, has become a silent, melancholy monument to Hurricane Katrina, like one of the smattering of European villages preserved for memory's sake since World War II.

The people — shrimpers, oystermen, workers for offshore oil fields — are resilient. But resiliency has its limits in a place that reverted late last summer to its diluvian origins. Here, where the hurricane first struck the American mainland, the 120-mile-an-hour winds pushed the Breton Sound back over the earth.

Once a thriving peninsula dotted with historic fishing and oil villages, this land where the Mississippi River comes to its end, 60 miles and more below New Orleans, is now virtually deserted. Only 2,000 or so people roam this part of the parish, about four per square mile, less than a seventh of the previous population. Of 1,300 registered shrimpers in the parish, perhaps 50 are now working, officials say.

Brave talk about rebounding is muted. Isolated residents, encountered at long intervals, gesture toward the still landscape and wonder whether the old towns will ever come back. Compounding the uncertainty, the federal government has looked at the costs of fixing the levees here — $1.6 billion to protect all of the prestorm population of 14,000 — and said no, not now.

"It ain't going to come back tomorrow, pardner," said Peter Tinson, a 74-year-old church caretaker in Pointe a la Hache, the parish seat. "It's going to be a long, long time. That's for sure."

The old brick St. Thomas Church, looming behind him, was one of the few intact buildings, though all its windows were blown out.

The rubble goes on for mile after numbing mile. Amid it, small hopeful gestures sustain the hardy who remain: a solitary young couple walk arm in arm at sunset between debris piles; a hopelessly rusted pickup truck is scrawled with the words "don't move," next to a trailer that begs, "Bulldoze please"; a cafe is newly reopened in the hamlet of Venice, at road's end.

Rhonda Latham, for one, was in her golf cart, delicately picking up bits of garbage from the road's median with a mechanical trash picker-upper. "I'm just keeping my little spot in the world clean," Ms. Latham said brightly, undeterred by the job's scale and the swarms of deerflies.

Her husband, Max, pastor of the Community Prayer Center in the town of Buras, where the hurricane sent water all the way up to the ceiling, has lost all 14 of the congregation's families to the diaspora, and most are not coming back.

"It's just a tough situation," Mr. Latham said, "for even the toughest people."

Across the Mississippi, at Davant, more gestures: Calvin Griffin had placed two little plaster lions at the entrance to his new trailer, and his wife, Edna Mae, had ringed them with potted geraniums.

Hurricane Katrina covered Mr. Griffin's house with water and moved his mother's two miles up the road. "It's been hard, man," he said. "You've got to be strong, real strong. I lost everything, man." An addled neighbor in a nearby trailer shouted profanities into the silence.

1The road down to Venice was once crowded with the traffic of offshore oil workers going to the helicopters that took them to their rigs. Now it is empty on a midweek afternoon. "The people don't want to come back here, because they don't know what they are going to do for a home," said René Cross, a local builder.

The land here rose up out of water a mere 600-odd years ago, and its remoteness has always made Plaquemines seem untamed.

"Geographically, socially and politically, the parish has little in common with the rest of the territorial United States," James Conway wrote 30 years ago in his biography of Leander H. Perez, the political boss who ruled here for decades, grew rich from oil leases and achieved national notoriety as an unrelenting segregationist.

Today, in its emptiness, a state of primal nature seems to have returned to Plaquemines. In the little communities along the river, the sound of insects and the singing of birds are loud at midday. A green vine twists around an upright vacuum cleaner that has wound up in a ditch along with an armchair.

Locals gather and eat a nonpoisonous variety of nightshade, a weedlike plant abundant in the soggy soil since the storm. Some of it was growing by Raymond Barthelemy's front steps here in Phoenix, all that remained of his house. With the nearest groceries often more than an hour away, including a laborious ferry trip across the river, nightshade is both a necessity and convenience food.

"You cook it just like mustard greens," Mr. Barthelemy said appreciatively, grimacing at his recollection of the peppery flavor.

The few who have returned seem astonished by the stillness. "It would be packed right now, if it were ... before," said Mr. Barthelemy's wife, Gloria. Around her were the ruined steeple of Phoenix's church, all that remained of it; a scattering of trailers; and ghostly, sagging houses, spilling out their contents.

Mr. Griffin, down in Davant, missed the children.

"Oh yeah, man, they were riding bicycles, scooters, whatever," he said. "It's so quiet around here now."

Mr. Tinson, of Pointe a la Hache, had a long memory. "If either Chalin or Judge Perez were living, this place would have been cleaned up already," he said, referring to the old boss and his son. "They put their foot down, action happened."

    In the Trail of the Storm: Little Is Left but Stillness, NYT, 15.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/us/15parish.html

5,000 Public Housing Units in New Orleans Are to Be Razed

June 15, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, June 14 — Federal housing officials announced on Wednesday that more than 5,000 public housing apartments for the poor were to be demolished here and replaced by developments for residents with a wider range of incomes.

The announcement, made by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso R. Jackson, provoked strong criticism from low-income tenants and their advocates, several of whom noted that thousands of public housing apartments had been closed since Hurricane Katrina. But local officials have for months said they do not want a return to the intense concentrations of poverty in the old projects, where crime and squalor were pervasive.

Acknowledging the immediate need for housing here, Mr. Jackson also said 1,000 apartments in several public housing complexes that were only lightly damaged in the storm would be opened over the next 60 days. Federal housing officials also said they had raised by 35 percent the value of disaster-housing vouchers for displaced residents who wanted to rent market-rate apartments, because the city's housing shortage had caused rents to increase.

The demolition, which is scheduled to begin over the next several months, would be the largest of its kind in the city's history and would erase the sprawling low-rises of the St. Bernard, C. J. Peete, B. W. Cooper and Lafitte housing developments. The four developments were damaged in Hurricane Katrina to varying degrees and have been off-limits — along with most of the city's public housing — to residents ever since.

The four developments represent more than half of all traditional public housing in the city, where only 1,097 units have been opened since the storm. Before the hurricane, the city had close to 8,000 units, although not all were habitable.

"Hurricane Katrina put a spotlight on the condition of public housing in New Orleans," Mr. Jackson said in a teleconference with reporters in Washington. "I'm here to tell you we can do better."

His announcement appeared to heighten the fears of many displaced tenants that they would be pushed out in favor of higher-income families.

"Right now, we feel it's not the time to start huge building projects because there are lots of people who are displaced as we speak and need a place to stay," said Lynette Bickham, who was evacuated from the St. Bernard project. "We're going to continue to fight for our homes."

This month, former residents began demanding the right to return, setting up a tent city outside the St. Bernard project, the largest of the developments. Local and federal officials refused to open the developments, saying they were unsafe.

Mr. Jackson outlined the first official plans for the projects since the storm, and they were incomplete. He did not specify how many units in the new developments would be set aside for public housing or whether there would be units for all the low-income residents who had such housing before the storm. Planning for the new developments, which are to be financed by bonds, tax credits and federal housing money, has not begun, he said.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin responded to Mr. Jackson's announcement enthusiastically.

The proposed demolitions have renewed a debate about the future of the city's enormous poor population, most of which remains displaced.

"I think the people who've been planning the recovery process never wanted poor people to return to the city in the first place," said Lance Hill, the director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. "And they haven't made it easy."

    5,000 Public Housing Units in New Orleans Are to Be Razed, NYT, 15.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/us/15housing.html

Police Struggles in New Orleans Raise Old Fears

June 13, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW

NEW ORLEANS, June 9 — Within the Police Department here, the SWAT team is known as The Final Option. Before Hurricane Katrina, it was assigned to the city's worst crimes, and as residents return, it is once again kicking in the doors at the worst drug dens and engaging in shootouts with violent offenders.

But the team is also running dangerously low on firepower. Flooding ruined 300 of its guns, its bullet-resistant shields and the bulk of its ammunition, none of which have been replaced more than nine months after the hurricane. The 40-man team has had to borrow body armor from suburban forces, and the Police Department is lining up corporate sponsors to contribute more.

"I tell you what: we're hurting," said the team's commander, Capt. Jeffrey Winn.

The SWAT unit's difficulties reflect how far from normal many police operations remain here, as residents return and another hurricane season begins. Like the rest of the city, the police force is still struggling to recover from the calamity of Hurricane Katrina, which knocked out its headquarters, overwhelmed its ability to maintain control and prompted desertions that tarnished the force's reputation.

Now, as the department tries to fight its way back, sharp budget cuts — and a recent spike in drug-related killings in the city — are adding to fears that years of overhauls and modernization may be undone, and that New Orleans could return to its former notoriety as one of the nation's murder capitals.

There is also concern that the department's own notoriety could resurface. For some residents, the sense that the city is on edge and the department's future uncertain has brought echoes of the days when the local police were considered among the least competent and most racist and brutal in the nation.

"Given where they are mentally and emotionally, we've gotten more citizen complaints about the way the police are treating people than we have in a long time," said Oliver M. Thomas Jr., the City Council president. "Over the last two years, they'd been getting better and more professional. But I've been hearing lots of complaints about verbal abuse."

The blunt-talking new police superintendent, Warren J. Riley, insists he will not let the drug dealers and "gutter punks" take over again. Mr. Riley says many officers have not gotten the credit they deserve for "standing tall" during the storm, and he is determined to restore discipline and a sense of professionalism among the others. He has also formed an intelligence unit to track the most ruthless crime suspects and built strong ties with federal authorities to help catch them. But in other areas, problems abound.

More than 200 officers deserted during the storm and were fired or suspended. Many veteran officers retired, and some of the youngest officers quit and left town. As a result, the size of the force has dropped to about 1,400 officers on the street now, from nearly 1,700 before the hurricane. Recruiting replacements is difficult, partly because it is hard for candidates to find affordable housing, Mr. Riley said.

Because of the deterioration of the city's finances, he said, the department's budget has been slashed by 19 percent, from $124 million in 2005 to $100 million this year. It has received federal or state aid to replace many of the 300 patrol cars lost to flooding, buy new uniforms and restore its communications system. But it is awaiting federal assistance to replace other gear, like the SWAT team's weapons.

With the police headquarters still shuttered, Mr. Riley and his top commanders are working out of trailers. And while forensic experts are making progress in restoring many of the items from the flooded police evidence room, newly gathered evidence is being stored in rental trucks parked at what was once a motor-vehicle inspection station.

The storm has also left a lingering emotional toll. More than 80 percent of the officers lost their homes, and some have had to double up with other officers or move to distant suburbs to find housing they can afford on their salaries of $35,000 to $50,000. Many who were heroes in the storm, plucking victims out of the floodwaters, are also resentful that their actions were overshadowed by those who abandoned their posts.

And with many residents here under stress, the police say they are also receiving more back talk from people stopped for even minor violations. "Since the storm, you have a lot of displaced anger among many people, and it seems that police officers always get the brunt of that displaced anger," said Capt. Kevin B. Anderson, the police commander in the French Quarter.

But in the end, nearly everyone here realizes that what defines the Police Department is how well it handles crime, particularly in terms of the murder rate. Before the storm, the city averaged 250 to 300 murders a year, always placing it at, or near, the top spot in the nation on a per-capita basis. So far this year, there have been 45 murders — most of them in the last two months — compared with 114 at this time in 2005, when the city's population was at least twice what it is now.

Superintendent Riley — who was promoted from the department's No. 2 job after his more flamboyant predecessor, Edwin P. Compass III, resigned after criticism over the police response to the hurricane — appeared on radio talk shows recently to outline his crime-fighting plans. They include repeated raids in the poorer neighborhoods that have been resettled, where he said drug dealers who had lived in different parts of the city were converging and killing one another over turf.

The superintendent also urged residents to band together to demand a toughening of the city's criminal justice system, where jury trials resumed only recently. Drug dealers who evacuated to Houston are returning home because it is much easier here to avoid jail, Mr. Riley said, through the "revolving door" of the New Orleans court system.

The courts have long been criticized as relying on plea bargains and setting lenient bail. And since the hurricane, the public defender system has been so short of money and staffing that one judge, Arthur L. Hunter Jr., recently moved to let some people already in custody back onto the streets.

Mr. Riley said, for instance, that police officers were in a shootout last month with one man who had been roaming a deserted neighborhood while wearing an ankle bracelet. He was supposed to be under house arrest while awaiting trial on a burglary charge, but the authorities had apparently not responded to the bracelet monitoring system.

"Obviously, the murder risk factors are coming back," said Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the University of New Orleans, "and this creates incredible challenges." Whether a growing nervousness about the murder rate gives way again to a feeling of being under siege could end up determining if many people return home and tourists start coming back.

Captain Anderson, the French Quarter commander, said there had been only two murders there this year, along with several stabbings among construction workers carousing on Bourbon Street. He also said the SWAT team had been called in for undercover patrols after groups of youths had accosted people.

James F. Scott, the deputy police superintendent, said the department's intelligence bureau had focused on 112 drug dealers and murder suspects, and 30 had since been captured. Mr. Scott said some drug dealers who evacuated to Houston were killed in turf wars with gangs there, while others were now moving back and forth between the two cities, almost like commuters.

He added that federal prosecutors here were now bringing charges in smaller drug-sale and gun-possession cases to help get criminals off the street. "Since the storm, that is one of the most positive things that has happened to the Police Department," Mr. Scott said.

The department has also worked with the Louisiana National Guard to avoid a repeat of last year's disastrous storm response. Superintendent Riley said 3,000 troops could be in the city ahead of a storm, with high-water trucks and satellite communications gear positioned to assist each police district. There will also be more boats on hand for search-and-rescue operations.

Barring another disaster, Mr. Riley said, "Katrina has given us an opportunity to refocus our educational system, our economic system and our law-enforcement efforts, and change the culture of this city."

"If we're able to change it," he said, "that would give us a silver lining."

    Police Struggles in New Orleans Raise Old Fears, NYT, 13.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/us/13orleans.html?hp&ex=1150257600&en=d7421d88b140346d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

   100-Ton Symbols of a Recovery Still Suspended        NYT        9.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/us/09highway.html?hp&ex=
1149912000&en=92459c7f1617f5f9&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Road Back

100-Ton Symbols of a Recovery Still Suspended

June 9, 2006
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala., June 7 — To understand a little about this small crustacean of a city nine months after Hurricane Katrina, you have to accept a counterintuitive concept: Boats in the trees.

About two dozen shrimp vessels, some of them 80 feet long and weighing more than 100 tons, list in suspended state amid scrub oak and pine, many yards from the bayou where they belong. Removed from the blue and shoved into the green, their white masts and rigging rise like bleached treetops in a forest.

Here is the Gold Star, rooted in the sand and brush like a huge and dangerous jungle gym. Here is the Peaceful Lady, its charts neatly rolled up inside, its bow planting a hard kiss on a pine. Here is the Mee Mee M, the bottle of soy sauce in its cabin just one of the hints that many of these stranded boats are owned by Vietnamese immigrants.

The only things darting beside the exposed hulls are yellow flies — and shrimp season started Wednesday.

Trying to comprehend the reasons boats still nestle in trees so long after the storm can hurt the brain: the owners never acquired or could not afford insurance; the federal government saw no compelling need to remove them; there are protected wetlands to worry about, and even an Indian burial ground.

If Katrina ever slips momentarily from one's mind here — if — the plain sight of these boats in the woods snuffs the daydreaming. The slow, complicated efforts to extricate the hurricane-stranded vessels mirror the slow, complicated efforts to extricate this hurricane-damaged city of 2,100 from that one day last August.

"It gets mind-boggling," said Debbie Jones, 47, who after the hurricane wound up as the city's long-term recovery coordinator. "I go home at night trying to figure out how we're going to do this."

And she was just talking about the boats in the trees.

To get to Bayou La Batre, you turn off U.S. 90 at the Citgo station, where a huge plastic chicken rests in the bed of an El Camino, and follow a road that runs like a stream to the all-important bayou. Shrimp and oysters have long defined the city. But then you pass evidence of Katrina's temporary redefinition.

The guarded encampment of trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Zirlott Park, where children should be playing baseball. The mud-colored tent shading mounds of donated clothing, where, at night, people shine the headlights of cars on the piles as they pick through. The many out-of-state volunteers, including those young Mennonite women along the roadside, playing a game of evening volleyball in their plain dresses and prayer coverings.

These are snapshots from a city where, before the storm, 30 percent of the residents were living in poverty, and rising fuel costs and competition from imports were already squeezing its seafood industry. Life wasn't easy here, before.

But Bayou La Batre is demonstrating its grit to all "farmers," as locals refer to anyone who lives inland. Some boat-building continues. Fishing vessels pull in and push out. Heavily damaged St. Margaret's Roman Catholic Church held a rededication ceremony Sunday morning, and an embroidery class Monday evening. And yet, boats in trees.

Katrina actually stranded several dozen boats, but most of them were insured, which meant their owners were able to pay for their retrieval within a few months. The uninsured vessels are victims of bureaucracy and, simply, the way things are.

A county health officer had the boats declared a public hazard, which prompted the Coast Guard to remove the fuel and batteries, which prompted FEMA to say it no longer had reason to spend public money on retrieving private property, which prompted the state and the city to submit an application to the Clinton-Bush Katrina Fund, a private charity organized by two former presidents.

Finally, two months ago, the city received $1.6 million from the fund to get those boats out of the trees and back into the water. But it seems that no hurricane-related problem is ever easily resolved.

The Army Corps of Engineers, not keen on the idea of dragging tons of steel across protected wetlands, is encouraging salvage crews to take the long way around, along timber cuts, and not straight to the water. And in the case of a few boats some 800 yards into the woods, like the Gulf Star, the shortest path to the bayou might mean disturbing an Indian burial ground.

The Gulf Star's owner, Jimmy Nguyen, 36, was reached by telephone on a relative's boat in Mississippi Sound, but he emphasized that he would rather be shrimping out of Bayou La Batre on his own boat, bequeathed to him by a brother. "Most definitely," he said.

"Your boat looks good, if that helps," Ms. Jones told him, leaning into a cellphone set on speaker mode. "It hasn't been vandalized. For the other boats, I can't say."

Mr. Nguyen's thank you came drifting back.

Linked in misery to Mr. Nguyen is Buddy Johnson, 66, the owner of B&B Boat Builders, on the bayou. Katrina took temporary custody of several of his boats, including two shrimp boats he had just bought to refurbish and resell, but which now lay deep in marsh grass, against a pine thicket.

A large man, white, friendly and exceedingly candid, he distinguished himself from everyone else encountered in Bayou La Batre by peppering his observations with slurs about blacks, Catholics and, especially, the Vietnamese. Mr. Johnson, it seems, has a thing about the Vietnamese.

As he stood at the bayou's edge, some Vietnamese fishermen puttered past, and he said a bad word. Then he returned his gaze to those stranded vessels, a sight that vexed him, a sight that spoke of Katrina's sweeping democracy.

    100-Ton Symbols of a Recovery Still Suspended, NYT, 9.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/us/09highway.html?hp&ex=1149912000&en=92459c7f1617f5f9&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Study Sees Increase in Illegal Hispanic Workers in New Orleans

June 8, 2006
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

About a quarter of the construction workers rebuilding New Orleans are illegal immigrants, who are getting lower pay, less medical care and less safety equipment than legal workers, according to a new study by professors at Tulane University and the University of California, Berkeley.

These workers reported making an average of $6.50 an hour less than legal workers and had more trouble collecting their wages, the study said. While few workers reported run-ins with the police, it said, their employers sometimes threatened to have them deported if they complained about missing pay or dangerous working conditions.

The study, which included more than 200 interviews at work sites, is an effort to document working conditions and to measure the influx of Hispanic workers into the city, where they have traditionally been only a small fraction of the population.

The study found that about 45 percent of the reconstruction workers are Hispanic, and at least two-thirds of them arrived after Hurricane Katrina struck the city.

"It's a big change, a really big change," said Phuong N. Pham, an assistant professor of international development at Tulane and an author of the study.

The number of new Latino workers, which Professor Pham put at 10,000 to 14,000, has probably doubled the percentage of Latinos in the city, to perhaps 8 percent, and that does not include any family members who may have come with the workers.

The population change is obvious to anyone who has watched buildings being gutted or roofs repaired in the city in recent months, but it has proved hard to measure.

For example, a new study by the federal Census Bureau shows little change in the number of Hispanic residents of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina; the study says Hispanics make up about 6 percent of the metropolitan region's population. The Census study found that the Hispanic population along the Gulf Coast increased in the four months after the hurricanes, to 17.2 percent from 15.8 percent, which works out to an increase of about 89,000, but almost all the increase occurred in Texas.

But Karen W. Paterson, the Louisiana state demographer, said the Census study's methodology just could not capture the new Hispanic population that is obviously in Louisiana, particularly in New Orleans. One reason, Ms. Paterson explained, is that even though some Census data was collected after the storm, the study focused on a sample of housing that was developed long before.

"We certainly see a lot of Hispanic workers," she said, "but they are probably not living in traditional household units."

The new presence of Latinos has been a sore subject in New Orleans. Last fall, Mayor C. Ray Nagin publicly suggested that the city was in danger of being overrun by Mexican workers, although during his recent re-election campaign he said he welcomed all workers who were willing to help rebuild the city.

Many of the new workers do come from Mexico, the study found, but not directly; among those without legal authorization to work, 87 percent were already in the United States before Hurricane Katrina, the study found. The small existing Hispanic population was mainly from Honduras originally.

Few of the illegal workers said they planned to stay in New Orleans permanently, telling researchers that they would stay as long as there is work. That could be a long time, given how much construction work there is in the city, and the prospect of more as federal money for rebuilding begins to flow in earnest.

"It leaves open the possibility that they will be here for 10 years, though it's not clear it will be the same workers in 10 years," said Laurel E. Fletcher, an author of the study and a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley.

The report recommends that even workers without documents should be allowed to work legally in disaster zones, and should receive the same protections as American workers.

"It's inconsistent with American values, to say, 'You're here working six days a week, nine and a half hours a day, and you don't have any rights,' " Professor Fletcher said.

    Study Sees Increase in Illegal Hispanic Workers in New Orleans, NYT, 8.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/us/nationalspecial/08workers.html

Clamoring to Come Home to New Orleans Projects

June 6, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, June 5 — Hundreds of displaced residents of public housing have for several days been returning here for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.

They are armed with little more than cleaning supplies and frustration, in an effort to force the city to reopen their storm-damaged apartments.

The city, saying the projects are not ready, has refused.

Outside the largest complex, the St. Bernard Housing Development in the Seventh Ward, tenant groups have organized evacuees into a tent city called Survivors Village. At the C. J. Peete Development in Central City, older residents, mostly women, broke into their old apartments and carted away plastic bags of refuse and ruined furniture.

At the Florida housing complex in the Ninth Ward, residents slipped through fences topped with razor wire to reach their old units. They piled up heaps of debris that lined Bartholomew Street in the shadow of Interstate 10.

In bone-baking heat under a cloudless sky, evacuees traveling from Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Houston and elsewhere fumed at the city and federal housing officials who have opened fewer than 1,000 of more than 8,000 public housing units in a city suffering from a housing crisis and a shortage of workers.

The residents promised on Sunday to gut and rebuild their own units, and they said they planned to be back permanently — with or without the city's permission — as soon as their work was done.

"They're not giving us any help, and we're tired of waiting," a resident, Nickole Banks, said of the Housing Authority. "People want to come home."

Damage to the projects ranged from very little to severe. The Housing Authority says that as many as 90 percent of the apartments are unsafe and uninhabitable and that time-consuming environmental evaluations remain unfinished. To the residents, these are excuses. They fear that city officials are really trying to redevelop the projects to bring in other residents with more money.

That is a move that some city and federal officials say would be desirable. Private developers have openly discussed the possibility of rebuilding some projects to house a much wider range of tenants.

Because private homeowners are being encouraged to return to the same areas, the public housing question has become part of a larger debate about the future of the city's poor population. Does New Orleans intend to make itself a home for them again?

After the storm, many of the most important institutions and services for the poor broke down and were never repaired. Charity Hospital, a historic institution for the poor, remains closed.

The public defender system has been unable to provide lawyers to poor defendants, and public transportation is essentially broke and is providing far fewer rides.

"They're trying to steal New Orleans from us," Phyllis Jenkins, who has been living in Fort Worth, said Sunday outside what used to be her home in the sprawling St. Bernard development. "Well, I will not be displaced anymore. I'll take my home any way they give it to me. It's been 10 months. They've got to know we're serious. We're going to stand here until they let us in our homes."

Local officials have been clear that they do not want to return to the way things were before the storm, when 10 traditional public housing developments concentrated low-income residents in some of the worst conditions in the city, leading to intense crime and drug use.

"We don't need to recreate pockets of poverty," the president of the City Council, Oliver M. Thomas Jr., said. "They don't work. We want more mixed-income, working communities. I think that's really the only way."

Some officials have made remarkably unveiled comments suggesting that the storm did the city a favor in terms sweeping away the poor.

Representative Richard H. Baker, a Republican from Baton Rouge, said just after the hurricane: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it. But God did."

A spokesman for the Housing Authority, Adonis Exposé, said the authority was encouraging private and public partnerships to redevelop the projects, a move that began in limited form before the hurricane.

"We find it has worked out, and we're looking into doing it at a lot of other sites," Mr. Exposé said.

Before the storm, 2,000 public housing units had been demolished to make way for newer, better complexes. That stoked fears among residents of public housing that they were being scattered to nowhere in particular.

That turned out to be the case in the redevelopment of the St. Thomas Project, the largest and most controversial to date. It is now a mixed-income development called River Garden, with a small fraction of the original public housing tenants.

Residents who have been protesting fear more of the same could be in store for them. Some of the poor and their advocates see the lack of action as a delay tactic to diminish the chances that many would return.

The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which took control of the bankrupt local housing authority years ago, says it is continuing to assess the storm damage to the buildings.

"I wish I could say everything's great, come on home," an assistant secretary, Orlando J. Cabrera, said in an interview. "But it's not great. We've got entire parts of the city that have very few services, that have questionable ability in terms of infrastructure. We have to ask the hard question: 'What would these folks do? Can we put people in there?' "

Mr. Cabrera said considerable federal money was available to allow private builders to redevelop public housing in such situations. The Housing Authority has begun to apply for those funds.

Developers have been seeking permission to rebuild the crown jewel of the projects, the Iberville Housing Development, on a coveted location next to the French Quarter. It is a gem of Depression-era buildings, a sturdy assemblage of small-scale town houses with wrought-iron balconies that overlook courtyards and oak trees. The project, barely damaged by the hurricane, continues to house hundreds of families.

Michael Valentino, the managing partner of a hotel group here, and some tenants have proposed knocking down walls to make the apartments bigger, adding public art and fountains, and bringing in some tenants who would pay market-rate rent.

So far, no deal has been made.

"The magic of Iberville is that the architecture is magnificent; it could be beautiful and vibrant again," Mr. Valentino said about the development, which replaced the Storyville red-light district in an early example of slum clearance. "It's a linchpin piece of the redevelopment of Canal Street and the Quarter."

Mr. Valentino and other developers have the support of some tenants like Kim Paul, president of the residents' council. But they have also drawn the ire of another group, Hands Off Iberville, made up of housing advocates and tenants.

Even though she wants to help remake Iberville into something it never was, Ms. Paul complained about how slowly housing officials were letting residents return to the development, the least damaged in the city. She is in the unusual position of standing up for tenants and developers at the same time.

"I can show you that the apartments don't have mold or mildew," she said Sunday as she joined the other protesters at St. Bernard who were eating jambalaya out of plastic cups. "Before we do anything, we're trying to get all the pre-Katrina residents home."

Passers-by on St. Bernard Avenue, a main thoroughfare, generally supported the peaceful protest outside the fenced-in project. A woman from the Uptown section, Cliffie Pettigrew, stopped her truck and said, "I don't know if you folks are supposed to be here or not, but I want to help because I remember how sad I was when I couldn't get home."

"What ya'll need?" she asked.

"Everything," they answered.

    Clamoring to Come Home to New Orleans Projects, NYT, 6.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/us/nationalspecial/06housing.html?hp&ex=1149652800&en=be9c879107f52d30&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Angry New Orleanians start public housing cleanup

Sat Jun 3, 2006 7:03 PM ET
Reuters
By Peter Henderson

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Angry New Orleans public-housing residents on Saturday took charge of the recovery and cleanup of homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina and vandals, blaming the government for failing to act.

Acting without the approval of housing authorities, some residents took their first look at their homes since fleeing Katrina nine months ago. Many found criminals had done as much damage as the storm.

At three-year-old pastel-colored townhouses where families fled flooding by jumping from upper-story windows into boats, and at older brick units left last year by parents and children wading a mile to evacuation buses, residents and helpers began pitching lifetimes of memories into the trash.

Federal housing authorities who manage New Orleans units say 64 percent of the city's public housing base has mold and must be inspected. Former tenants are offered vouchers to pay rent elsewhere temporarily.

But many residents said have they found it difficult to find decent places to stay in the torn-up city.

Moreover, they say the time since Hurricane Katrina hit last August 29, flooding about 80 percent of the city, is more than enough for inspection and cleanup to have started.

Silvia James, 37, walked into a three-bedroom apartment she last saw when she and one of her sons waded away. Water had reached part way up the steps of the CJ Peete complex, and the storm damaged the roof and blew in some windows.

The exterior of the James apartment was generally intact, but inside furniture was strewn all about, and a television and bedroom set were gone. Other residents said thieves had stolen the complex's copper plumbing pipes.

"We could have been back here in October or November," James said, blaming the delay for the thefts. "People taken the little valuables we do have," she said. "I'm not willing to wait no more."

LOW-END HOUSING SHORTAGE ACUTE

Residents of other complexes which were flooded said upper floors could be inhabited and lower floors could be gutted and fixed, just as private homeowners are doing.

Housing police watched the activity at the Peete complex and others without interfering. Housing and Urban Development spokeswoman Donna White said by phone that residents were being allowed to go into units but not to stay. She added that the agency was committed to letting residents return when it was safe and had set up the voucher program for the mean time.

The agency has set aside $154 million for rebuilding public housing in the city. About 5,000 families had lived in New Orleans units before Katrina and about 1,000 have returned.

Louisiana State University real estate professor Kelley Pace said that sum should be enough to do at least half, and potentially all, the rebuilding. Major complexes could not be just "thrown up," he added, but also pointed out the housing shortage was most acute at the low end.

Some residents say they feel they are being kept out by officials who want to build more expensive housing or by those who blame public housing for crime. With about half the population before the storm, the city has seen 44 murders so far this year, versus 109 last year, police say, but many residents have a growing sense of increasing crime.

Organizer and complex manager Cynthia Wiggins said the situation proved her groups were not to blame. "Public housing is closed. Last week we had five murders. The drug dealers lived in other parts," she said.

But the housing problem is going to get worse, with families returning to New Orleans now that school has ended.

"We are not going to sit on the sidelines," she said.

    Angry New Orleanians start public housing cleanup, R, 3.6.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-06-03T230257Z_01_N03245743_RTRUKOC_0_US-WEATHER-HURRICANES-HOUSING.xml