History > 2006 > USA > Louisiana > Mississippi

Rebuilding (III)

Adam Zyglis

Buffalo, NY, The Buffalo News        Cagle

2.9.2006

http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/zyglis.asp

Louisiana voters

approve flood-protection reform

Sat Sep 30, 2006 11:33 PM ET
Reuters

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Louisiana residents on Saturday approved an amendment to the state constitution to overhaul flood and hurricane protection efforts in the region still struggling to rebuild from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

With votes counted in 58 percent of 3,960 precincts, Louisianians were set to approve 12 of 13 amendments, including a broad measure to consolidate management of a network of levees that protect the state's coastline.

More than 50 levee breaks are blamed for the devastating flooding after Katrina that left 80 percent of New Orleans' neighborhoods underwater for weeks. More than 130,000 homes were destroyed. A year later, rebuilding is moving forward in some neighborhoods while barely evident in others.

The city's population is about half the 450,000 before the storm.

"Flood protection is the No. 1 issue for anyone who wants to come back," said Ruthie Frierson, chairman of Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, a grass-roots group pushing for more responsible government as the city rebuilds.

"The levees were a man-made disaster. The fractured board system was part of it," said Frierson, a native of New Orleans.

The levee reform amendment merges several existing levee boards in southeastern Louisiana into two boards, one for the east bank of the Mississippi River and one for the west bank. All levee boards in the state will be overseen by a new authority created by the Legislature.

New board members, to be appointed by the governor, will be required to have experience in business, engineering, hydrology, geology or environmental science, ending years of inexperienced, local political appointments.

Passage of levee reform will send "a huge signal to the rest of the country that we are taking responsibility for the rebuilding of the city and are demanding good government," Frierson said.

The federal government has earmarked $1.6 billion to repair the levees and another $3 billion for long-term fortification. Maintenance of the levees is the responsibility of the levee districts.

South Louisiana is home to the nation's largest series of ports and serves as a primary gateway for oil and natural gas produced in the Gulf of Mexico and for crude imports.

Voters appeared set to approve 12 amendments on the ballot, including a measure to set aside increased revenue the state hopes to get from royalties on offshore oil and gas production. The state wants to use the money to restore the coastline by rebuilding wetland areas to serve as natural hurricane protection areas.

The amendment passed even though Congress recessed on Friday without resolving differences in the federal legislation needed to bring additional royalties to Louisiana.

Saturday's election was the first statewide election since Hurricane Katrina.

    Louisiana voters approve flood-protection reform, R, 30.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-10-01T033325Z_01_N30285744_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-LEVEES-ELECTION.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

New Orleans nursing homeowners indicted

Updated 9/20/2006 10:58 PM ET
USA Today
By Laura Parker and Anne Rochell Konigsmark

NEW ORLEANS — A grand jury on Wednesday indicted the owners of a nursing home near New Orleans where 35 people drowned during Hurricane Katrina, according to court documents.

These are the first indictments arising from suspicious deaths during Katrina, which flooded much of the New Orleans area, including all of St. Bernard Parish, where St. Rita's Nursing Home was located.

The grand jury, the first seated in St. Bernard Parish since Katrina devastated the community a year ago, indicted Salvador and Mabel Mangano on charges of negligent homicide and cruelty to the infirm, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.

Mike Fink, of Niceville, Fla., whose mother, Trishka Stevens, survived the flooding of St. Rita's, applauded the indictment.

"Those people had responsibilities, and people died, so they should be held responsible," he said.

Lawyers in the case would not comment because of a gag order. Jim Cobb, the Manganos' attorney, said he will seek permission from the court to talk about the case publicly.

"If they were able to obtain information about an indictment, we should be able to respond and that's what we will seek," Cobb said.

The Manganos, arrested two weeks after the deaths, remain free on bond.

Mabel Mangano, reached at her home in Baton Rouge, said she was "disappointed" by the indictment. She declined further comment because of the gag order.

The indictments stem from a broad investigation into more than 200 deaths at hospitals and nursing homes after Katrina's floodwaters stranded thousands and knocked out power. In July, Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti arrested two nurses and a doctor, alleging they murdered at least four patients at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans by injecting with them with narcotics. A grand jury has not yet heard that case.

Prosecutors have said the Manganos were negligent for ignoring evacuation orders. The St. Rita's residents died after water poured into the nursing home, trapping many frail and immobile patients in their beds.

Relatives said they thought the Manganos should have been indicted.

"At this point, I believe it was the right thing to do," said Joe Gallodoro, an insurance broker and former St. Bernard fire official whose father, Tufanio, drowned in his bed. "It's in the hands of the judicial system, and I have to let them handle it."

Mike Fink agreed. "It seems like they should have got those people evacuated or had enough help there to keep them alive," he said.

Thirty-five lawsuits have been filed against the Manganos by relatives of those who died or who were injured at St. Rita's.

On Aug. 29, the Manganos filed a lawsuit against federal, state and local officials, including Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. The lawsuit says those officials failed to evacuate St. Rita's residents as Katrina approached. And it contends that inadequate levees allowed 13 feet of water to fill St. Rita's, a 20-year-old facility that had never flooded.

At a court hearing on Monday, Cobb asked that the attorney general be disqualified from prosecuting the case because he is a defendant in the Mangano lawsuit.

Contributing: Parker reported from Washington;

Konigsmark from New Orleans;

William M. Welch from Los Angeles

    New Orleans nursing homeowners indicted, UT, 20.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-20-nursing-home-deaths_x.htm

Renewal Money for New Orleans

Bypasses Renters

September 17, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY and GARY RIVLIN

NEW ORLEANS — As billions in housing aid begins to flow here in the next few weeks, most of it will go to homeowners, who have been appointed by city officials as the true architects of this city’s recovery, despite the fact that roughly half the city’s residents rented housing before Hurricane Katrina.

The renters of New Orleans, it seems, are on their own.

Rents are skyrocketing across the city, up an average of 39 percent since Hurricane Katrina. The city has announced that it plans to refurbish only a small fraction of its traditional public housing units. Some neighborhoods are campaigning to tear down sturdy apartment buildings and build parks in their place. Though some aid has been set aside for landlords, many lower-income residents who say they are unable to return have been priced out.

“I want to come back, but who’s going to help me build my life?” asked Lionel Smith, 46, a longtime resident of the Lower Ninth Ward and a driving school instructor whose apartment building was destroyed by the floodwaters. “There’s this plan in place to take care of homeowners, but I’ve heard nothing about helping renters. Where are we supposed to live? Will they help rebuild apartment buildings?”

From a renter’s point of view, New Orleans has become off-limits to all but prosperous tenants, as rents have increased significantly in the pockets of the city that did not flood. Before the storm, the fair market rent for a two-bedroom unit in the city was $676; it is now $940, according to the Brookings Institution.

Before the hurricane, it would not have been unusual to find a two-story, three-bedroom house in Gentilly, a solidly middle-class neighborhood, renting for less than $1,000 a month. Today, that area, north of downtown toward Lake Pontchartrain, does not exist as a functioning neighborhood.

By contrast these days, $1,000 might get a tenant half a refurbished duplex on a trash-strewn street in Mid-City — an area that also flooded, but not to the same extent — and it would most likely be offered without major appliances or air-conditioning.

Henry Jones, a New Orleans East homeowner, said that roughly half the owners in his subdivision, Wimbledon, were coming back, which he contrasted with the lack of activity he has observed in neighborhoods like Central City and Mid-City, where there are far more rental units than single-family homes.

“You drive around those neighborhoods and you pretty much see nothing going on,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s depressing.”

Those communities that were home to the greatest concentration of rental properties are also those areas that still lie in ruins 12 months after the storm. The longer properties languish, rotting in the humid heat, the harder they are to restore to habitable conditions. With no concrete plan in place to help landlords, a large part of the rental stock has been festering for a year now, preventing residents from returning and depleting the work force.

“I’ll confess to being frustrated,” said Norman C. Francis, the chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the agency distributing federal aid, and the president of Xavier University here. “Most of the people who need to come back aren’t homeowners at this point but renters.”

State officials acknowledged that renters were not their first priority.

“We wanted to get the homeowner assistance plan off and running, because it affects more people,” said Walter Leger, the chairman of the authority’s housing committee.

The lack of affordable rental housing is yet another factor making it more difficult for low-income residents to return. The city has also lost its extensive health care system for the poor; its school system is only partially functioning; and there is little public transportation.

In some areas, in fact, homeowners are trying to use the recovery process to rid their neighborhoods of long-standing apartment buildings that were damaged during the storm. Building parks in the place of apartments that neighbors said lowered property values is “killing two birds with one stone,” said Joseph St. Martin, an architect hired by homeowner groups in New Orleans East to work on the community development plan the city has asked every neighborhood to devise.

Unlike some other urban areas, New Orleans’s rental market was dominated by small-scale local landlords before the storm. Many say they lack the resources needed to resuscitate their properties, especially when so many of them are struggling to repair their own homes.

The Louisiana Recovery Authority has set aside $859 million to help landlords (compared with $7.5 billion that has been set aside for homeowners). The goal, officials said, is to start distributing that money in the next month or so, but they acknowledge they are still working out the details of the plan.

Officials estimate that at least 30,000 units will be improved through this program, which is expected to offer no-interest 10-year mortgages of up to $75,000 a unit to landlords who agree to rent at or below the market rate. No direct subsidies to tenants are being planned.

State officials said they would offer a combination of low-income housing tax credits and financial grants to entice larger developers to build mixed-income rental properties. In New Orleans, most large-scale developments — those with more than 200 apartments — were in the eastern part of the city. Nearly all those developments are still damaged and vacant; some are for sale, while others have been torn down.

“The impact on the renters is that the cost of renting has increased,” Mr. Leger said. “So our theory is if we can bring the cost of renting back down, we can put people back in the position they were in prestorm.”

Critics of the proposed plan say 30,000 units is not nearly enough to make a big difference in New Orleans. The Brookings Institution estimates that more than 48,000 rental units were destroyed or heavily damaged in the flood, or about 40 percent of the original stock of apartments and rental houses.

William Quigley, director of the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University here, said the number could even be higher, and that many of the units were occupied by low- and middle-income families.

“The state has misleadingly named its programs as ‘The Road Home Housing Programs’ despite the fact that the planned expenditures will not provide a realistic road home for most of the people with low and moderate incomes,” Dr. Quigley wrote recently in a complaint to federal housing officials.

A lack of information even 12 months after the hurricane has caused confusion and frustration.

“There is no real identifiable plan that anyone can point to that would enable people to say, ‘I can rely on this,’ ” said Jerome Anderson, an assistant dean at Tulane Law School who owns five units around the city. The storm destroyed Mr. Anderson’s home and all his rental properties, putting tremendous financial pressure on his resources to rebuild. His situation is typical among local landlords.

Mr. Anderson said he was constantly hearing from prospective tenants wanting to know when he might have apartments available for rent. “Anyone who owns property is probably being bombarded with questions as to when will their properties be available for rental,” he said. “There’s a lot of vacant property that’s not available, and that is affecting the recovery, in that people don’t have places to live.”

Ted Quant, director of the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University, owned a home in Gentilly and two rental units in New Orleans East. He is part of a new group, the African American Landlords Association, made up primarily of property owners who lost both a home and rental units. This loosely knit group is pushing for both information and assistance.

“It seems that the people who were here and didn’t flood are saying to the people who flooded, ‘We don’t need you, stay out of town,’ ” Mr. Quant said. “My tenants came back and recovered what wasn’t looted. They were asking when they could come back for good. I had to tell them I didn’t know.”

    Renewal Money for New Orleans Bypasses Renters, NYT, 17.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/us/nationalspecial/17rent.html

Guard to stay in New Orleans through '06

Posted 9/17/2006 1:23 AM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — National Guard troops and state police will patrol the city through December, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Saturday at a summit of law enforcement officials and crime experts called to address a spate of killings marring the recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
"Crime has no role in recovery," Blanco said. "It limits our ability to recover."

Police are on pace to recover as many illegal firearms this year as they did in the two previous years — even though half as many people live in the city now, said Robert Browning, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

But in a positive sign, court and prison repairs should be done next month, an official said, which means the city's crippled criminal justice system will be able to process its influx of suspects more efficiently.

The summit opened hours after an early morning killing brought the city's homicide count for the year to 100.

New Orleans, with a pre-Katrina population of 455,000, had virtually no crime in the months after the storm hit on Aug. 29, 2005, when the city was largely empty.

That changed as the evacuees started returning. In April murders began occurring regularly, sometimes in groups. The current population is uncertain, though various estimates put it at 200,000 to 250,000.

Guard members and state police were sent to New Orleans shortly after what police called one of the city's worst acts of violence in 10 years: the fatal shooting of five teenagers in mid-June.

Over Labor Day weekend, four people died in 13 shootings in the New Orleans area.

The Guard members and state troopers have helped bolster a police department whose membership fell after the storm by more than 200 to about 1,420. Blanco said the cost to the state will be about $14 million.

On Saturday, the governor called the use of troops and state police a stopgap measure to help safeguard the city while other means to deal with crime are developed.

The summit shows the city will no longer tolerate crime, Mayor Ray Nagin said.

"Any crime committed with a gun should be charged at the highest possible count, attempted murder at a minimum," Nagin said. "And all those crimes must be expedited, put to the front of the line and prosecuted."

The city also needs to crack down on illegal firearms, Browning said. In 2004 and '05, police recovered about 1,800 illegal firearms per year, he said.

"So far they this year they have recovered 1,300," Browning said. "Which is on track to remove the same number with half the population."

Also Saturday, former state Attorney General Richard Ieyoub, head of a commission Nagin set up to examine criminal justice, said renovations of the criminal court and parish prison should be completed next month.

Twelve criminal court judges are now sharing seven courtrooms, and so only seven can hear cases at any time. And each can handle no more than six cases a day because the sheriff's department can't transport and provide security for more.

"Once we have the building back, all of us can hold court every day," Judge Calvin Johnson said.

    Guard to stay in New Orleans through '06, UT, 17.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-17-new-orleans-crime_x.htm

New Orleans mayor radiates optimism among the ruins

Mon Sep 4, 2006 8:08 AM ET
Reuters
By Peter Henderson

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Standing in the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin envisions for the crowd a city rebuilt from Hurricane Katrina with new houses standing high above the reach of killer storms and grinding poverty.

He speaks at the dedication of a monument to those lost in the storm and to one side, a vacant field sits, cleared of houses destroyed when a floodwall collapsed.

On the other side twisted homes line the streets a year after Katrina deluged 80 percent of the city.

"Build your mansion," he urges the audience, many of them former homeowners of modest means who have not received any federal housing aid.

"Let the first floor be for parking and storage. And on the second and third floor, put your Jacuzzi and your master bedroom," he says. Even with federal aid, few in the audience will be able to build a big home, much less a mansion, but the audience hoots approval at the thought.

"You going to get your money," Nagin promises.

A controversial figure who came to national attention as he sought to shepherd the city through Katrina, Nagin has been sharply criticized for his handling of the crisis and its aftermath, which exposed the city's poverty and racial divisions. He was late to order the city's evacuation and rebuilding has been slow.

But he has been lionized by others for his dogged pressure on the state and federal governments to respond. Supporters even applaud his profanity-laced interviews given during the height of the crisis in which he demanded more help.

BASEBALL, TELEVISION

Nagin's life story is that of a local boy done good. Nagin's father worked as a janitor at City Hall, and the future mayor made went to college in Alabama on a baseball scholarship. He returned to New Orleans as a local cable television executive and became interested in politics.

The first time he was elected mayor his victory was a surprise. In May residents chose him for a second term over a wide field of contenders despite harsh criticism of his performance during the storm.

Katrina killed some 1,500 people on the U.S. Gulf Coast, and New Orleans' population is only now about half of the pre-storm 450,000. Although the historic French Quarter has rebounded, large swathes of the city, the birthplace of jazz and famous for its nightlife, remain in ruins.

Since the storm, Nagin, 50, has consistently thrown blame at the upper levels of government, and many residents see his agitation, speaking truth to power, as the main reason New Orleans gets anything.

"The president wasn't doing anything until this man go up to him," Ninth Ward resident Agnes Ferrell said recently. "He trying to work for us."

Nagin, originally elected as a businessman who would end cronyism in city hall, has become more of a populist, promising to let the people decide how to rebuild the city.

His detractors often focus on what has been accomplished in New Orleans so far, and in neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth, it does not look like much.

"Nagin is not a person I like. I'd like nothing better than to get a hold of him," said Vanessa Gueringer Johnson, chair of the Lower Ninth Ward Chapter of activist group ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

LACKING WATER

The Lower Ninth still lacks potable water and other services, and city hall has not become much more efficient despite the mayor's promises, she said. Meanwhile, he has played up his race to black audiences, she said.

"We want somebody competent, no matter what color he is," she said.

The biggest question facing the mayor may be how to rebuild the city. A commission appointed by Nagin recommended planning for a smaller New Orleans. Residents in neighborhoods likely to be closed or turned into parkland protested, and Nagin himself torpedoed the idea, maintaining to this day that neighborhoods should draw up their own blueprints rather than "experts."

"Tell some people who have lived in certain neighborhoods for over a hundred years that they can't go back? I'm just not doing that. I don't think that's necessary, and I don't think that's wise," he told Reuters in a recent interview.

Neighborhoods will put together their own plans, which will be stitched together into a master plan for the city by the end of the year, he says, saying critics need to be fair about the pace of recovery and comparing New Orleans' progress to New York after the September 11 attacks.

Yet even some supporters want faster movement.

City Councilwoman Stacy Head recently called him "the best person for the job" and said he was absolutely honest. But she said he should have appointed a "recovery czar" who could cut through red tape and make apolitical decisions to move the recovery process forward.

University of New Orleans political scientist Susan Howell argues that Nagin has backtracked in the face of opposition, such as by rejecting the recommendations of his committee, and avoided making hard decisions.

"Now we are saying yes to everybody, which is the lowest common denominator of planning, which is no plan," she said.

Howell fears that rather than a tight but smaller rebuilt community, New Orleans will be a large ghost town since there will not be enough people to move into empty houses. "There is going to be a tremendous amount of blight" if the population does not rebound, she said.

Back in the Lower Ninth, Nagin radiates optimism, whether or not it is justified.

"This is the plan: We are going to rebuild this city," he says. "We going to need every inch of this city."

    New Orleans mayor radiates optimism among the ruins, R, 4.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-09-04T120811Z_01_N0110040_RTRUKOC_0_US-WEATHER-HURRICANES-NAGIN.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

A Bank Survives Katrina. Now, the Hard Part.

September 3, 2006
The New York Times
By GARY RIVLIN

New Orleans

TO reach the executive suite of the Liberty Bank and Trust Company here, you first have to navigate a stretch of town that still lacks street signs. Finding an entrance to the bank’s headquarters is another challenge. You have to circle behind the building, a six-story glass box that is still missing several windows, and — as if there to work on the plumbing — walk up a set of corrugated steel steps sandwiched between a Dumpster and an oversized air-conditioning unit.

After traversing a bare room that smells of mildew and walking past three disabled elevators, you trudge up five more flights of steel stairs to reach the office of Alden J. McDonald Jr., the chief executive of this institution, which was the country’s third-largest black-owned bank until Hurricane Katrina and floodwaters roared through New Orleans one year ago.

Mr. McDonald and his staff count themselves among the fortunate, despite the general state of disrepair inside and outside their building. While their neighborhood wants for many basic amenities, including mail delivery and phone service, their company is one of the few enterprises back in business in the vast northeastern quadrant of New Orleans. And in a city where an estimated two in three businesses remain shuttered, Liberty is not only open but also turning a profit.

Floodwaters still covered much of New Orleans last September when Mr. McDonald first agreed to allow a reporter to chronicle his efforts and those of his staff to resuscitate their battered bank. Working out of a beachhead that Mr. McDonald established in Baton Rouge just after the storm, Liberty seemed on the edge of ruin. Its long-term survival seemed in doubt.

Liberty’s most impressive accomplishment, like that of New Orleans itself, may simply be that it has regained some semblance of its old self in only 12 months. But Liberty is also like New Orleans and its ravaged economy in another crucial way: its recovery has a long way to go.

Liberty faces enormous hurdles, chief among them the lingering doubts about the viability of large stretches of the drowned-out, predominantly black eastern half of the city, where Liberty’s customers were concentrated and which is still largely in ruin. Liberty’s success in helping black professionals and others settle the east established a large African-American homeownership class for the first time in the city’s history. But that legacy, combined with the bank’s backing of the city’s small but growing ranks of black entrepreneurs, prompts concern among experts contemplating how well Liberty will fare if its carefully cultivated customers never return. Liberty’s very success, it seems, presents the bank with its greatest challenge.

HURRICANE Katrina delivered body blows to virtually every business along the Gulf Coast, but few were more devastated than Liberty. One year after the storm, only half of the bank’s eight New Orleans branches are open, and one of those has limited hours. Flooding badly damaged five branches and looters stole $700,000 from several branches, according to Mr. McDonald. Floodwaters overwhelmed a one-story operations center, which housed its paper records, and putrid water sat for weeks on the ground floor of its headquarters in New Orleans East, destroying the building’s electrical system and elevators. Wind damage and rain destroyed sections of the building’s top floors.

Insurance will offset some of those losses, but there is no compensating Liberty for the miseries visited upon its customers. Jobs disappeared as businesses closed and flooding destroyed or badly damaged the homes of roughly three-quarters of Liberty’s customers — and of most of the bank’s staff, including Mr. McDonald.

By some measurements, Liberty is doing astonishingly well. After posting losses of $3.4 million in 2005, its worst performance since opening its doors 34 years ago, Liberty reported a $2 million profit in the first half of 2006. “We’re feeling very hopeful about the future,” Mr. McDonald said recently. Even so, Liberty has already slipped to fifth in a ranking of the country’s largest black-owned banks, according to Creative Investment Research, a firm that tracks minority-owned financial institutions.

“Liberty seems to have done a remarkable job in a trying situation, certainly better than I ever thought possible,” said William Michael Cunningham, an African-American who runs Creative Investment Research in Minneapolis. “But my concern is with the health of the bank two years, three years out, especially with so many questions around the rebuilding.”

Will New Orleans truly come back, or is it destined to stand as a paler, less diverse version of its former self? There may be no better stand-in for addressing that question than this homegrown bank that, until Katrina, sparkled as a success tale, a black-owned institution in a predominantly African-American city that offered crucial service to sections of town historically underserved by mainstream banks.

Alden McDonald awoke early on the Sunday before Katrina hit New Orleans last year. He planned to check on Liberty’s various properties, ensuring that they had been properly secured, and then to join his wife inside the concrete fortress of the Hyatt hotel in the central business district, to ride out the storm. But Mr. McDonald, a native New Orleanian, changed his mind about staying as he toured the city. Listening to his car radio, he began to appreciate the might of Katrina. He phoned his wife, who checked them out of the Hyatt one hour after checking them in. The pair decided to retreat to the home of good friends in Atlanta.

Then Mr. McDonald, like much of the world, hunkered down helplessly as he watched television coverage of his flooded city and tried hard to think about something other than retiring. “My entire operation was under water,” Mr. McDonald, 63, said. “Which meant I had to go back and rebuild everything. I had to rebuild all systems. I had to rebuild all files. I didn’t know how many of my customers would stay with me.”

He also did not know the fate of tens of millions of dollars that Liberty had lent to homeowners and entrepreneurs in the part of the city that locals referred to simply as “the east.”

“The only thing I could think of is, ‘All of these people lost their real estate, which I had as collateral,’ ” Mr. McDonald said. “I knew I had insurance on a lot of it, but I still didn’t know how much at the time.” Sitting in his friend’s home, he wondered if his bank’s days as an independent institution were over.

This bout of pessimism lasted two or three days, Mr. McDonald said, and over the coming months he was careful never to betray even a hint of doubt about the bank’s future. He had been Liberty’s chief executive since its founding in 1972, when its sole facility was a trailer in a sketchy part of town. He knew about hard times. After a few days in Atlanta, he started working on a survival plan that would quickly bring him to Baton Rouge.

“There were a lot of people depending on me to make this thing come back,” he said. “My staff. The community.”

Liberty had three outposts in Baton Rouge, 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, and two in Jackson, Miss., 160 miles due north. Those branches would prove crucial in the coming months, providing both ballast in unstable times and a base from which to operate. For the next six months, one of the Baton Rouge branches, a homely, spacious brick building missing a corner of its corrugated tin roof, served as the command post for Mr. McDonald and about 20 employees. Two of them, seated on beat-up borrowed chairs behind a pair of folding tables, served as Liberty’s loan department. Four tables pushed together in the middle of a room accommodated a makeshift call center — after BellSouth installed extra phone lines, nine days after the hurricane.

Even after the bank set up a dozen phone lines to field calls, customers preferred driving to Baton Rouge from as far away as Houston and northern Louisiana, in order to meet in person with a bank employee. “Basically it’s everyone’s job to deal with customers right now,” Mr. McDonald said at the time, “including mine.”

Customer service was one major concern right after the storm; reconnecting the bank to the global A.T.M. system was another. Unlike larger banks, which had operation centers around the country, and smaller ones, which tended to outsource data processing, Liberty housed its central computers in New Orleans, which was without electricity or working telephone lines in Katrina’s aftermath.

Mr. McDonald had prepared for the hurricane the same way he prepared for past storms, by creating several backup copies of the bank’s computer records. Two employees got copies and Mr. McDonald sent two more via FedEx to a Pennsylvania company that handles the bank’s computer operations during emergencies. But Mr. McDonald did not hear from either employee for more than a week after the storm, and Katrina interrupted FedEx’s service for days.

With customers scattered around the nation and desperate for cash, Mr. McDonald faced a tough choice: to lock out customers from A.T.M.’s and branches in the midst of the crisis and risk being cast as a Scrooge, or to allow them to withdraw cash and risk being ripped off because he temporarily had no way to determine how much money customers actually had in their accounts. Mr. McDonald chose the second option, permitting anyone with a Liberty account to withdraw up to $100, and then up to $500, per day. In the end, that cost the bank hundreds of thousands of dollars in overdrafts during the 10 days that Liberty’s records were off the A.T.M. network.

Mr. McDonald’s next big worry was cash flow. The same floods that destroyed homes also wiped out jobs. That meant Liberty needed to brace for a steep drop in deposits and mortgage payments. Liberty, like many other area banks, gave both homeowners and its small-business customers until Jan. 1 to resume monthly loan payments — depriving the bank of its two largest revenue streams for four months while it racked up a number of extraordinary expenses.

EMERGENCY computer services were costing the bank more than $50,000 a month, so Mr. McDonald ordered a new computer system, despite its $500,000 price. He spent thousands of dollars dispatching boats to eastern New Orleans to assess damage and to retrieve computers and furniture for Liberty’s temporary home in Baton Rouge. Once the floodwaters receded, he brought in emergency generators to keep air blowing through his headquarters to fight mold; filling the generators’ fuel tanks cost $1,500 a week. Apartments in Baton Rouge for displaced employees cost thousands of dollars a month.

“I hate losing money,” Mr. McDonald said in early October, six weeks after the storm. “But everywhere I look I’m losing money.” He had packed only a few short-sleeved shirts and one pair of slacks when he left New Orleans, thinking that he was leaving for a few days. Yet four weeks passed before he was finally able to take a day to relax in Baton Rouge and buy new clothes. “Thank goodness I thought to bring four pair of underwear with me,” he joked.

A courtly man with a shock of wavy white hair and a bushy white mustache, Mr. McDonald is more animated than one might expect of a bank president. He laughs often, and, to underscore a point, will let his mouth hang slack-jawed. It would be a month after Katrina before he visited his home for the first time in New Orleans East — a journey he took, he said, because “my wife was bugging me to get stuff out of the house.”

Amid muck and mold, he found little to salvage in his home.

At the end of each day, usually around 7 p.m., Mr. McDonald convened a small group in his office for what he called “my daily crisis management meeting.” Early on, the gatherings served as forums for sharing bad news. The new computer had arrived (cheers) but parts were missing (groans). New parts had arrived (huzzahs) but not crucial software components (more groans). Tasks that people thought might take a week or two, such as reviving the bank’s Web site, ended up requiring a month or more.

The daily financial updates were still more depressing. Before the storm, Liberty generated $150,000 a month in loan fees, but those funds largely evaporated in the first weeks after the storm because the bank was writing virtually no loans. The bank normally collected $70,000 in monthly charges from checking accounts — but Liberty temporarily suspended this fee for most of its customers.

These grim financial realities invariably caused people to ask Mr. McDonald how Liberty could survive. The bank had roughly $40 million in securities, an ample cushion against insolvency if Mr. McDonald could stabilize its finances. But the clock was ticking, and to raise much-needed cash, Liberty sold a portion of its securities at a $1 million loss.

“’These are nervous times for the bank,” said Norman C. Francis, Liberty’s chairman, five weeks after Katrina.

MR. McDONALD was largely alone in those first months after the storm. The bank’s chief operating officer had resigned earlier that year to take a job in Detroit and Mr. McDonald had let his chief financial officer go shortly after the storm.

Monthly board meetings continued, but directors had their own distractions. All but one had lost a home in the storm, and all had other responsibilities that needed attention. “All of us had a lot going on,” said Mr. Francis, the president of Xavier University, a historically black college in New Orleans that had been flooded. That was especially true for Mr. McDonald, who was appointed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin to the 17-member commission created last September to devise a blueprint for rebuilding New Orleans.

“Anything we do to get people back in town helps my bank,” Mr. McDonald said at the time.

If the first two months after the storm were about bailing water to keep a sinking bank afloat, the next six months were about reigniting Liberty’s financial engines. Mortgage payments would restart after the first of the year, and the bank could once again count on a steady stream of fee income. But every week brought more closing of accounts by longtime customers, often because there were no Liberty branches near their new homes.

The top priority during this second phase was to analyze the bank’s loan portfolio and to gauge the likelihood of loan defaults. That meant figuring out who had adequate homeowner insurance and who did not. Those without flood insurance were likely to default on their loans and leave Liberty with largely worthless collateral: flood- and hurricane-ravaged homes and businesses. Analyzing potential defaults would have been fairly routine if the bank had access to its paper records, but the floods had destroyed those. So Mr. McDonald assigned a small team of people to track down individual borrowers.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how many hundreds of hours we spent on that piece,” he said. (In time, though, he will know the precise costs: he has asked his new chief financial officer to tally the figure so he can submit it with insurance claims.)

IN October, Mr. McDonald opened a pair of branches in neighborhoods that were beginning to repopulate: the Garden District and the West Bank. Almost immediately, lines began to form as customers were eager to get on with their lives. By November, the precipitous drop in Liberty’s deposits had stopped.

“People were increasing their balances rather than decreasing their balances,” Mr. McDonald said. It was then, he realized, that his bank might make it.

He might have been confident about the bank’s prospects, but a large portion of his customer base still had no idea when they would move home, if ever. Working with lobbyists in Washington, he tried, unsuccessfully, to have Congress pass a law requiring the federal government to funnel a large portion of Gulf Coast redevelopment funds through smaller community banks like Liberty. He thought, too, about raising his profile nationally and catering to larger corporate depositors, like Aetna and American Express, which he already had as customers.

In the end, “Phase 2,” as Mr. McDonald took to calling it, entailed doing what the bank always did — selling its services to individuals — but doing so with more creative flair.

Earlier this year, Liberty repackaged certificates of deposits as Katrina Investment Deposits, or K.I.D.’s, which were nothing but C.D.’s offered at a below-market interest rate and wrapped in a feel-good package. Countless people had offered to help Liberty, and this was the financial vehicle it created to capitalize on that goodwill.

Though he gave people a choice between interest rates of 2 percent and 2.5 percent, “quite a few people chose 2 percent,” Mr. McDonald said. (That rate was well below the 5 percent or so that a customer could have earned on a regular C.D. last spring.) Over the coming months, Liberty would sell $10 million worth of K.I.D.’s — using the money to jump-start lending, its primary source of profits.

To further bolster his flagging loan business, Mr. McDonald offered 100 percent mortgage financing and set in motion a plan to open loan centers in strip malls in other parts of Louisiana as well as Texas and Mississippi.

“I needed those fees,” he said. “I needed to get my interest income up.” Liberty’s staff was able to qualify enough people to approve $10 million in loans in less than three months. That amount exceeded Mr. McDonald’s expectations, but it was still just a fraction of the $10 million a month that Liberty lent, on average, before Katrina. Today the bank is writing no more than $3 million a month in loans, Mr. McDonald said, and has stopped writing riskier, no-money-down loans.

In time, Mr. McDonald would complain that while he took time every Monday to drive to New Orleans to attend meetings of Mayor Nagin’s commission, the group never discussed the core issue of what to do about the city’s most heavily damaged neighborhoods. To this day the city is without a coherent plan for the east. But his trips gave Mr. McDonald an excuse to drive through neighborhoods to see where people were returning. Those tours persuaded him to open two branches in January in Gentilly, a large, racially mixed area in the center of New Orleans.

Other banks, including Chase and Whitney National Bank, a venerable local institution, have followed him into Gentilly. A visit to all three banks in mid-August found what seemed to be a brisk pace of business. But Mr. McDonald stressed that he was the first to open in Gentilly, and that move inspired envy in at least one rival.

“Right now I wish I had a branch in Gentilly,” said Virgil Robinson Jr., the chief executive of Dryades Savings, a smaller black-owned bank based in New Orleans. An executive at Liberty until leaving in 1994, Mr. Robinson said his former boss had deftly negotiated that delicate balance between reopening a branch too early and waiting too long.

“We want to be back in the area early but not so early that we’re the first one out there,” said Mr. Robinson. “There’s protection in numbers.”

Mr. McDonald proved a trailblazer again in March, when he moved back into his headquarters in the east. When he is too tired to commute back home to Baton Rouge, he sleeps in a borrowed recreational vehicle.

Viewed from the vantage point of the central business district or the French Quarter, the city and its business environment can seem to be in good shape. These areas have been repopulated, and businesses large and small have returned. Most of the city’s hotels are open again, as are most of its major employers and its more popular restaurants and music clubs. Focusing solely on Liberty’s branches in the western, predominantly white half of the city also might suggest that the bank’s operations are more or less back to normal.

But there appears to be relatively little forward motion in the city’s eastern business corridors. In New Orleans East, for instance, home to 90,000 people before Katrina, maybe a half-dozen restaurants have opened. A few car dealerships are back in business, along with several gas stations and a giant Home Depot — and Liberty.

Mr. McDonald had anticipated that Katrina would translate into $10 million to $12 million in losses in the last four months of 2005. It ended up costing him half that much. When Katrina hit, Liberty was on pace to post a $3 million profit for the year. Instead, it lost $3.6 million.

Some bright spots emerged. Only seven borrowers let their flood insurance lapse after taking a loan from Liberty; out of a $150 million loan portfolio, Liberty wrote off only $2 million last year. Most of those bad loans, Mr. McDonald said, were car loans or credit card debt. Like many other banks across the Gulf Coast region, Liberty is now flush with cash as people park large insurance settlements in their accounts while considering their next financial steps.

This year has brought Mr. McDonald and his staff more good news. Based on results from the first half of 2006, he predicted that the bank would earn $4 million for the entire year. “This is going to be the most profitable year in the history of this company,” he said.

Yet Liberty’s buffed-up bottom line can be deceiving. A widespread lack of housing in New Orleans, Mr. McDonald acknowledged, has meant that the bank has fewer employees than it needs. Where he once had 160 employees, he now has 90. The shortage has kept expenses low, bolstering profitability, but the same shortage makes it hard to generate new revenue. Mr. McDonald wishes that he could hire more tellers, branch assistants, and loan officers and open a fifth branch in New Orleans, he said, “except I’d have no one to staff it.”

ONE year ago, Liberty had 35,000 customers. Today it has 20,000 to 25,000, Mr. McDonald said. “I know I have to get an exact count on that,” he added, before letting his voice trail off. His half-staff bank, it seems, has other priorities.

Elevator repairs alone will cost Liberty $350,000, and the bank has lost about $100,000 a month in rental income from tenants who once leased office space in its New Orleans headquarters but now have no immediate plans to move back home.

Water, not wind, did most of the damage to Liberty, and it is still uncertain how much its insurers will cover. Mr. McDonald had business-interruption insurance, for instance, but he said it was not clear, even one year after Katrina, whether insurers would approve flood claims. “Everyone is still struggling with insurance companies,” he said.

There is another question preoccupying anyone with a financial stake in the eastern half of New Orleans: Which parts of the city will come back and which will end up as forlorn, half-occupied neighborhoods without basic services? Mr. Nagin ended up ignoring his own commission’s recommendation that New Orleans devote its limited resources to neighborhoods that can prove that a critical mass of their residents are returning. Instead, the mayor has encouraged people to rebuild anywhere they want in the city.

Mr. McDonald’s best guess is that only half the population of the east will eventually move home — if that. Of the 150 families in his subdivision in New Orleans East, he knows about 10 families that are returning. He even counts himself among the undecided.

From his sixth-floor office, Mr. McDonald has a perfect view of the mall next door. Its huge parking lot is empty, except for piles of debris, and its stores sit as ruined reminders of how much the east has lost and how little it has recovered. Mr. McDonald, meanwhile, intends to try to “go to where my customers are” by opening loan centers in strip malls and in places like Houston and some cities elsewhere in Louisiana and in Mississippi.

“Whenever you have obstacles,” he says, “you always have opportunities.”

    A Bank Survives Katrina. Now, the Hard Part., NYT, 3.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/business/yourmoney/03bank.html

Nagin Regrets Comments About New York

September 1, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:31 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin opened a visit to New York on Friday by expressing regret for having criticized the slow redevelopment at the World Trade Center site, saying he will ''never again refer to that site as a hole.''

Nagin was in town for a two-day pitch to the New York investment community to get business in his hurricane-ravaged city.

While on a stage with the Rev. Al Sharpton and representatives of a New Orleans delegation, Nagin addressed comments he'd made in a recent ''60 Minutes'' broadcast, where he branded ground zero ''a hole in the ground'' to compare it to the slow pace of rebuilding in his city after Hurricane Katrina. Nagin had apologized for the comments quickly afterward.

''I want to say to all New Yorkers that I love New York City and have been here on many occasions,'' Nagin said during a press conference held Friday, less than two weeks before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. ''We as New Orleanians and as New Yorkers understand what tragedy is all about and understand the difficulty of recovering from tragedy.''

He also said he especially regretted the term he'd used to describe ground zero, where more than 2,700 people died after terrorists piloted two commercial flights into the twin towers, causing them to collapse.

''I will never refer to that site as a hole,'' Nagin said. ''It's a a sacred site that's currently in an undeveloped state.''

    Nagin Regrets Comments About New York, NYT, 1.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Nagin-New-York.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

New Orleans Mayor Seeks Support in New York

September 1, 2006
The New York Times
By ANTHONY RAMIREZ and CARLA BARANAUCKAS

Under fire for having referred to ground zero as “a hole in the ground,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans said today that he recognized that the place where nearly 3,000 people died on Sept. 11, 2001, is a “sacred site,” although he stopped short of an explicit apology.

“What I will never do again is refer to the site as ‘a hole in the ground,’ ” Mr. Nagin said in a news conference today in Tribeca. “It’s a sacred site that is presently in an undeveloped state. And I’ll leave it at that.”

Mayor Nagin had apologized earlier for a statement he made on the CBS News program “60 Minutes.” When he was asked why it was taking New Orleans so long to clean up after Hurricane Katrina devastated his city a year ago, the mayor said: “You guys in New York City can’t get a hole in the ground fixed, and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

Today, leading a delegation of New Orleans officials to New York in an effort to promote investment in his city, Mr. Nagin focused on what he said the two cities had in common.

“I want to make sure that everyone in New York understands I love New York City,” he said. “I’ve been here on many occasions. And I think that we as New Orleanians and New Yorkers understand what tragedy is all about and we understand the difficulty in trying to recover from a tragedy.”

Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Wolcott indicated that New York City officials had moved past the controversy. “Mayor, it’s an honor to be here with you and to pledge our support in working with you and your city to make sure that we work together to bring New Orleans back,” Mr. Wolcott said on behalf of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who was attending the funeral of a firefighter.

“We are with you hand in hand as you rebuild New Orleans,” Mr. Wolcott said.

The Rev. Al Sharpton called Mayor Nagin’s remarks “intemperate” but added: “People in New Orleans have gotten over the media calling tax-paying New Orleans citizens refugees. So we’ve all had a lot to get over.”

    New Orleans Mayor Seeks Support in New York, NYT, 1.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/nyregion/01cnd-nagin.html?hp&ex=1157169600&en=81522e55ac416cd8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Football Is a Refuge Where Katrina Lingers

September 1, 2006
The New York Times
By JERE LONGMAN

PORT SULPHUR, La., Aug. 31 — Last year, nothing floated through the goal posts of the ruined high school here but the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina. Now football is again being played in lower Plaquemines Parish, a rudder-like peninsula below New Orleans that steers the Mississippi River to its delta. There is a new school, South Plaquemines High, and a chance for a new start Friday night against Belle Chasse, in upper Plaquemines.

“This is bigger than us,” Roger Halphen, an assistant coach at South Plaquemines, told his players at practice Wednesday, his voice low and wounded. “People want to move back. They say it’s going to take three months for a FEMA trailer. They’re losing hope. I’ve seen them crying. They don’t certify the levees. Businesses don’t open up. We win this game, this is going to give hope to people.

“This is for the hope of south Plaquemines.”

Only four parish residents died in Katrina’s pummeling wind and water, yet almost no structures survived intact in the citrus, fishing, and oil-and-gas communities of lower Plaquemines. Port Sulphur High still stands, but it remains uninhabitable except for the occasional raccoon and skittering armadillo.

Its campus is now the site of South Plaquemines High, which has consolidated wrecked schools from Port Sulphur, Buras and Boothville-Venice. The modular buildings of the new school, like the unsettled lives here, are temporary and vulnerable. Last Friday, classes were canceled when rain seeped into the improvised classrooms, which house 266 students in grades 7 through 12.

Students got to choose the new mascot, and youthful immortality prevailed. Inevitably, they chose Hurricanes.

“Two other choices were Eagles or Gators,” Lance Wallace, a sophomore cornerback, said. “Hurricanes sounded better. We lived through a hurricane.”

Cyril Crutchfield, who coached Port Sulphur to the 2002 small-school state championship and was runner-up in 2001, was a natural choice to become head coach at South Plaquemines. In six seasons, he did no worse than reach the state quarterfinals in Class 1A.

Stubbornly, Crutchfield refused to evacuate ahead of Katrina, sleeping in the Port Sulphur High cafeteria until waves licked at the steps and sprayed against the door. Then he fled to the gym, where water rose above the rims on the backboards.

“God, get me through this one and I’ll never stay again,” he prayed.

The water, brown as the tobacco that Crutchfield chews, was salty from the gulf. Then, as the eye of the storm apparently arrived, the hissing of the 120-mile-an-hour wind, and the 28-foot storm surge, began to subside. As the water receded, Crutchfield and six other men swam out, eventually alighting on the roof of the industrial arts building. Six hours later, they were rescued by boat.

“I thought I was invincible, but I wasn’t,” Crutchfield, 39, said. “I was scared to death.”

A year later, he feels chastened about his mortality but not about his expectations for his team, which now plays in Class 2A.

Warren Mayes, a senior receiver, said, “Anything less than a state championship is unacceptable.”

But the challenge will be great.

Practice is held on a borrowed field 30 miles from the school, the same distance Crutchfield must travel to wash the game uniforms. Sod for the home stadium was installed this week, but it will not be ready for play until mid- to late September. The Hurricanes have no locker room, no place at school yet to shower or even to eat a hot lunch. To get drinking water for practice, someone must make a daily run for ice at a local fishing dock.

When practices extend beyond sundown, some players step off the team bus with their helmets and shoulder pads and disappear into the inky darkness. There are few streetlights to illuminate their scattered government trailers. Others commute 80 miles or more round trip from New Orleans. Everybody lost everything.

New Start, Uncertain Future

Katrina shoved the home of the brothers Jordan and Maverick Ancar into a canal, where it sits like an artificial reef.

“They got alligators watching TV in your house,” Wayne Williamson Jr., a junior receiver, said jokingly to the brothers before a recent practice. “They sitting on the couch, eating chips.”

Everyone laughed, but the season remains as fragile as it is new. The FEMA trailers where many players live are not built to withstand hurricane winds. Last weekend, when Tropical Storm Ernesto was forecast to enter the gulf, another year of football seemed threatened.

Devin Boutwell, a defensive lineman and tight end, cried at the thought of losing his senior season and his chance to receive a major-college scholarship. Other players prayed. Eventually, Ernesto swerved toward Florida.

“I was scared,” Williamson said. “We can’t withstand nothing here. I don’t think they would pay for us again.”

By they, he meant the government. Any approaching storm is sure to stir the same gale-force nervousness. Hurricane season extends for two more months, the length of football’s regular season. No one needs a reminder.

Each afternoon on the way to practice, players have ridden past the detritus of Katrina: Past the parish library with its broken spine and crippled books. Past coffins that popped up like toast and floated away. Past shredded buildings with exposed ribs that suggest this rural community starved as well as drowned.

And, unavoidably, past the earthen levees that hold out the Mississippi on one side of Highway 23 and the marsh and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. Because so few people have returned to lower Plaquemines — an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 of the prestorm population of 14,000 — the federal government will not immediately spend the $1.6 billion needed to buttress the levees.

Without such bolstered protection, people have questions that waver into fears. Should they rebuild? How high? How much will flood and wind insurance cost if they can get it at all? Life here seems stuck in a kind of limbo, not unlike the coffins sheathed in cement vaults that await interment and remain anchored to the ground in the meantime, lest they wander off in the next storm.

The post office, the pharmacy and the bank have yet to reopen here. The grocery store operates out of a double-wide trailer. A boat nests like a bird in a tree, while spray paint on the side of a two-story house pleads, “Rebuildin Do Not Bulldoz.”

But a medical clinic, a natural gas plant, a hardware store and a couple of restaurants are open. St. Patrick’s Catholic Church is back, school is back, and so is football. Hope is budding that a village left crawling by the storm is taking baby steps toward recovery.

“Once you get school back, you get people and businesses coming back,” said Stanley Gaudet, the principal at South Plaquemines High. “Then you can rebuild a community.”

There’s No Place Like Home

The school received a library grant from the Laura Bush Foundation, and on Tuesday, Katrina’s anniversary, Gaudet met President Bush in New Orleans. On Wednesday, an 18-wheeler arrived with new weight-lifting equipment. Football has always been popular here. Now it is a refuge.

“I have a lot of stress, but football makes me happy,” Jordan Ancar, a junior lineman, said.

It is comforting to be back among friends, and oddly liberating, because living amid Katrina’s destruction frees everyone from having to talk about it constantly, said Rory Jones, a senior receiver who evacuated last year to Lafayette, La.

“When you’re an evacuee, everybody always wants to talk about Katrina,” Jones said. “They think you have it easy because everything is free. Or they think you’re from New Orleans and they say, ‘Our school will be better when you leave.’ ”

Once a company town for the now-shuttered Freeport Sulfur Company, Port Sulphur struggled economically long before Katrina struck. According to the 2000 census, about 20 percent of the 3,115 residents in this racially diverse hamlet lived below the poverty level. “It was a dying town,” said Jiff Hingle, the sheriff of Plaquemines Parish.

But to the locals, census figures are merely an official skin that hides a community’s heart and gristle and connective tissue.

“It’s peace of mind,” said Theresita Ancar, the principal at South Plaquemines Elementary School and a cousin to the Ancar brothers. “We marry each other in these little towns, and grandma is five minutes away, and you look after mine and I look after yours. You can leave your doors unlocked. If you do lock them, you don’t need three bolts and a chain.”

Still, Katrina imposed harsh new realities. The halting pace of recovery has spurred Coach Crutchfield to run for a seat on the parish council, the rough equivalent of a county commission. Election Day is Sept. 30. People need to have patience in lower Plaquemines, Crutchfield said, but there is a limit.

He worries that debris removal, while considerable, has begun to stagnate in and around Port Sulphur. In some areas, water comes out of the faucet rust-colored and smelly, he said, while a nearby bayou community still lacks electricity.

“People want to come home,” Crutchfield said. “Dorothy of Kansas said it best. ‘There’s no place like home.’ ”

Scandal After the Storm

It is too soon to know what home will become. Crutchfield believes the future of Port Sulphur and lower Plaquemines will be tied to the future of the levees and perhaps to whether billions are spent to restore Louisiana’s subsiding wetlands.

If the levees do not meet the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s standards for flood protection, Crutchfield said: “We’re not going to get our community back. We’re not going to get economic development.”

For now, he is focused on football. But even football has brought unwelcome distractions. One of his best players, running back James Brown, faces a loss of eligibility in a hurricane-related scandal.

Brown and four other players, including the star quarterback Randall Mackey, left Port Sulphur ahead of Katrina and ended up 300 miles away, winning a Class 4A state championship at Bastrop, La. Unlike Mackey, Brown has returned home, hoping to play his senior season at South Plaquemines, but his future is as cloudy here as the afternoon skies.

The Louisiana High School Athletic Association has stripped Bastrop of the title for improperly recruiting the former Port Sulphur players by picking them up at a hurricane-evacuation center. Those involved are also accused of making false statements. Unless they prevail on appeal, Bastrop will lose its championship, and Brown and Mackey will lose any chance to play this season, according to the association.

Even if rules were technically violated, and some penalty was deserved, Crutchfield said, any player who lost everything in a storm would have been tempted by someone who offered a ride, money, a place to live, a chance to keep playing football. “I might have taken it, too,” he said.

This is not how Crutchfield wanted to start the season, looking back instead of ahead. But the effects of Katrina will linger. There is no way around it. The South Plaquemines cheerleaders, with the school mascot in mind, believe this can even be an advantage. They have a new battle cry: Hurricane season never ends.

    Football Is a Refuge Where Katrina Lingers, NYT, 1.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/sports/othersports/01parish.html?hp&ex=1157169600&en=e2c0f25ec96b438a&ei=5094&partner=homepage