Thanks to a friend, here are a couple of articles from behind the Times Select Wall (of Shame) by John Biguenet...well, except for the photographs, because once again Blogger's photo posting is acting like John Prescott's assessment of Bush's Middle East "policy"...maybe if Blogger can get their, ahem, crap together, I'll have something of my own to post in a bit...
Aug. 13, 2006
Fourteen Pounds
New Orleans used to describe itself in tourist brochures as “America’s European Masterpiece.” But that is certainly not how Europeans view the city now. While I was in Paris, directing a writing workshop in July, I opened Le Figaro one morning and found a travel article titled “The Exoticism of Misery” about tours to the most wretched places on earth. Highest on the list of such destinations, just after Chernobyl and the poverty-stricken favelas of Rio de Janeiro, was “La Nouvelle-Orléans.”
Though it came as a shock to see my hometown included among centers of human suffering, the article was quite right: New Orleans is a wreck adrift in dangerous waters, and its demoralized citizens have given up scanning the horizon for rescuers.
I returned home last week to local headlines that describe a city in grave condition. The Times-Picayune reported that in July, almost the same number of people had been murdered as the city’s monthly homicide average in the 3 1/2 years before the flood, even though the population is now at least 60 percent smaller. The next morning, a front-page story described an 80-percent reduction in day-care centers in New Orleans, from 266 to 52, and how that has hurt working parents. I also learned that, in the Mid-City neighborhood, only 130 of 600 businesses are back in operation nearly a year after the flooding. Then there was news that the number of psychiatrists in this very stressful city had fallen from 196 to a mere 22, despite the fact that nearly half the people interviewed in a post-flood mental-health survey, according to the newspaper article, “probably needed psychiatric help.” Fewer than one in 50 people were getting that help. And, oh yes, still another article revealed that the corpse of yet one more victim of the flooding had been found in a ruined house.
In the past few days, I have read that city gas lines are still clogged by floodwater, that applicants for home-repair government grants may have to wait until March 2007 to meet with a counselor for even a preliminary application review, and that according to a U.S. Postal Service report, the city’s population is now 171,000, down from nearly half a million before the flood.
How have our political leaders responded to the continuing crisis? Mayor Ray Nagin has been forced by withering public criticism to abandon his plans to host a comedy festival, fireworks display and masquerade gala to celebrate the first anniversary of the hurricane and ensuing flood that killed more than 1,300 New Orleanians and devastated 80 percent of the city. And the U.S. House of Representatives has declined to endorse a bipartisan resolution commemorating the anniversary of the disaster. House Republicans objected to a line in the resolution that “reaffirms . . . the commitment to rebuilding the Gulf Coast region and improving the quality of life for all of its residents.”
What is the quality of life for residents here? It varies widely, from the unscathed French Quarter, Garden District and University section to the ravaged neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview and New Orleans East, where families live in trailers in their driveways — to say nothing of the great diaspora of 300,000 New Orleanians making new lives elsewhere. My wife, Marsha, and I moved back into our flooded house on the lakefront in June just before leaving for Europe. Our lease had run out on the Uptown shotgun apartment we had rented since October, and we wanted to avoid another year of both rent and mortgage payments. Though the walls had been Sheetrocked and the electrical wiring had been redone, our downstairs was still weeks away from being usable. So like most of those who have returned to their damaged homes, we started “living upstairs.” We slept there and ate store-bought meals. But because our house had been broken into and our garage had been burglarized twice since the flood, we kept most of the things we had salvaged in a storage locker near the airport.
Returning home last week to a city where neighbors have had to put up handmade street signs and mark dangerous potholes with makeshift warnings; where tens of thousands of abandoned houses, their windows and doors agape, rot in the summer heat; and where armed soldiers in flak jackets patrol in Humvees, we found our kitchen nearly finished and much of the interior painting completed. There’s still more carpentry and electrical work to be done, and we’ve just learned that if we want cable TV and Internet service, the house will need to be rewired. But we’re reoccupying more and more of our home each day.
About a third of our neighbors have returned to our block. Others, though, aren’t coming back. From a downstairs window, I can see the empty lots of two demolished houses; more are scheduled to be torn down. It feels desolate, especially at night.
Yet our neighborhood is the most heavily populated in the area.
The city itself remains in jeopardy. Three times in the past week, our street flooded during afternoon rains. In the 30 years we’ve lived here, it’s flooded no more than 10 times, including all previous hurricanes. The culprit is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Determined not to be blamed if the city floods again, the Corps has been sealing off the drainage canals for which it built a system of grossly defective levees. The levees are unlikely to crumble again as they did a year ago, but by sealing the canals, the Corps has reduced the city’s ability to pump out rainwater. The pumping capacity at the 17th Street canal, for example, is down from 10,200 cubic feet per second to no more than 1,400, an 86-percent reduction. Now a summer shower floods the streets from curb to curb.
What has been the cost of living through all this? At my annual physical, my doctor marveled that I had lost 14 pounds since my check-up last year. For most Americans, that would be very good news indeed. But I haven’t been dieting. I suppose gutting a house in hundred-degree heat while wearing protective gear to avoid exposure to mold and toxic sludge is a weight-loss regimen of sorts. And if every single night for months on end, you wake at 2 or 3 a.m. — anxious over yet another problem that will entail an endless struggle with FEMA or an insurance company — and lie restless until dawn, that lack of sleep will cost you more pounds of flesh. Simply driving across town, passing block after block after block of rotting houses and shops in neighborhoods that just 12 months ago were thriving takes something out of you, too. So there are reasons, I suppose, why the clothes we’ve salvaged hang baggy on us, why there’s something haggard in our look as we try to rebuild America’s European masterpiece.
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Aug. 20, 2006
You're Probably Wrong
Most of what you think you know about what happened in New Orleans a year ago is probably wrong. People distinguish between a pre-Katrina and a post-Katrina city, for example. But such a distinction suggests New Orleans was the victim of a natural disaster. It wasn’t.
Hurricane Katrina ravaged Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes in Louisiana and most of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but it spared New Orleans the brunt of its force. Veering east over the Louisiana-Mississippi state line, the storm lashed the city with only its weak side. Hours after the hurricane had passed, the Web site of my neighborhood property owners’ association posted a report relayed by cell phone from a man who had ridden out the storm in his house, one street away from mine. He assured those of us who had left that, except for a few fallen tree limbs, there was no major damage.
By the next morning, floodwater was pouring into the city from breaches in defective levees, inundating 80 percent of New Orleans. When the water finally found its level, in some places more than 10 feet deep, an area seven times the size of Manhattan had been destroyed. By the end of that first week, roughly 1,300 New Orleanians had drowned or died of dehydration and exposure. Katrina wasn’t what killed all those people and devastated a celebrated city; it was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. As the Corps itself admits in its own draft final report on the disaster, “foundation failures occurred prior to water levels reaching the design levels of protection, causing breaching and subsequent massive flooding and extensive losses.”
You may also think that poor, black New Orleanians constituted the majority of victims killed by the Corps’ incompetence. In fact, white and black, rich and poor, New Orleanians shared equally in the suffering and death. The last published tally I saw showed that whites and blacks died in roughly the same proportion. If that is accurate, given that the population of the city in the last census was only 28-percent white, white New Orleanians died in proportionately higher numbers.
Another misconception that has persisted is the notion that many who died in the Lower Ninth Ward were stranded there because they had no means of transportation with which to evacuate. In fact, one of the most striking features I noted when I first toured the staggering devastation of that neighborhood after the flooding was how many cars and trucks had been submerged there. From the obituaries the Times-Picayune has published over the last year, it is clear that many New Orleanians who died had chosen to stay because, having survived previous hurricanes, they believed the Corps of Engineers’ assurances that the levees could protect them against a Category 3 hurricane. Though some people who died did not have transportation, many had cars and trucks available to them.
As survivors gathered in the Superdome and the Convention Center waiting for days for the Bush administration to send federal assistance to the area, the media offered sensationalized accounts of chaotic conditions there, with murders and rapes reportedly widespread. In fact, only one violent death, a suicide, was ever confirmed to have occurred in those facilities during that terrible first week after the levees collapsed. According to those who were there, despite utterly wretched circumstances — thousands of people with no working toilets, in excruciating heat — people comported themselves with patience, with generosity toward those with even less, and with as much dignity as they could manage.
After the flooding, New Orleanians were roundly criticized by Congressional leaders for choosing to live in an area below sea level. In fact, only parts of New Orleans are below sea level. My house, for example, is a foot above sea level, and it still received four feet of floodwater. We were hardly as foolish as Americans living in earthquake zones like San Francisco and Anchorage are. After all, we had assurances from the Corps of Engineers that we would be safe in a hurricane of Katrina’s strength. If we were foolish, it was in believing our government.
So there’s a great deal about what happened in New Orleans that is widely misunderstood. On the other hand, what you think you know about FEMA is probably right. A few months ago at a neighborhood property owners association meeting, called to discuss the future of our area, a doctor who lives near me described how he had used his small fishing boat to rescue those stranded during the flooding. One evening, he found a group of people huddled on a rooftop, and he started ferrying them to dry ground. On the way back for a second load, he passed a boat with men wearing FEMA T-shirts. He shouted for them to follow him to pick up the remaining family members. The men refused, explaining that it was after 5 p.m. and they weren’t authorized for overtime.
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