New Orleans: three reports

Business Owners Start to Return to New Orleans

William Yardley

New York Times 18 September 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 17 - Business owners slowly returned to parts of this storm-struck region early Saturday, prying back plywood and stepping over ruined steeples on the first day of a staggered re-entry program scheduled to move ZIP code by ZIP code, parish by parish, through neighborhoods least damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Carol Winn Crawford, pastor of 130-year-old Rayne Memorial United Methodist Church on St. Charles Avenue in the Uptown neighborhood, stood in the sanctuary where roof slates now rest in the pews. Outside, the brick steeple was reduced to rubble on the lawn.
"Not this Sunday," Ms. Crawford said, referring to when she planned to resume services, "but the next."
After passing through armed checkpoints, many business owners across the city and residents in nearby were seeing their businesses and homes for the first time since evacuating before the storm hit, on Aug. 29, and eventually flooded 80 percent of the city.
They arrived in a city with little electricity and mostly undrinkable water, where soldiers did jumping jacks on Napoleon Avenue as a red sun rose. Mayor C. Ray Nagin has ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew indefinitely. About 1,000 workers from the Entergy Corporation hovered around damaged utility poles.
President Bush, after facing sharp criticism for the federal response to the storm, vowed in his Saturday radio address to begin "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen."
Some businesses vowed to reopen almost immediately. Others said they would need time to make repairs, from either storm damage or vandalism and looting. Most were on higher ground in a city where much of the land is below sea level, and several said they were relieved the damage was limited, all things considered. And for some people who never left the city, the return of the business owners meant more than just a neighborly reunion.
"I've got like two gallons of water left, so I hope people come back soon and open something up," said Bill Roach, 48, standing outside his second-floor room in an apartment house near the corner of Magazine and Jena Streets in the Uptown area.
Mr. Roach, noting the light traffic coming up Magazine, said he was expecting more of a morning rush into town.
"I'm surprised they're not lining the streets right now," he said.
Business owners are being allowed to return this weekend to four areas: Uptown, the French Quarter, the central business district and, across the Mississippi River, the neighborhood of Algiers. Residents are expected to be able to return to the same four areas on a staggered basis over the next week, beginning with Algiers on Monday and ending with the French Quarter the following Monday. The re-opening could ultimately bring as many as 200,000 people back to the city, whose population was about 445,000 before the storm.
On Friday, the city released re-entry guidelines it planned to distribute at two primary entry points, the intersection of Interstate 10 East at the Pontchartrain Expressway and the West Bank Expressway into Algiers.
Among the warnings:
¶"You are entering at your own risk. The City of New Orleans remains a hazardous site, and ongoing health and safety issues are being assessed."
¶"You may not be outside between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m., either in a vehicle or on foot. This will be strictly enforced. Keep personal identification with you at all times."
¶"Police and fire services are limited. The 911 system is not fully functional at this time."
¶"The traffic lights are out throughout the city. You are required to observe a citywide speed limit of 35 m.p.h., regardless of the posted limit, and treat all intersections as four-way stops."
Mayor Nagin has said he has been criticized for not re-opening parts of the city sooner. Others say it remains far from ready for residents.
William Lehman, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said on Friday that his agency was not opposed to the staggered re-entry. But, he said, the agency was "concerned about what'll happen when people start using the facilities here, not so much the buildings as the water. We're hearing concerns about the integrity of the pipes
In Algiers on Saturday morning, Serge and Mai Chatain found their business intact after driving all night from Houston to check on it. They own a nail salon, Anna's Nails, off of Gen. Charles de Gaulle Highway.
"We open the door, and the phone rings," Mr. Chatain said. They agreed to meet the caller, a drugstore owner who had come in Saturday to check on his business, at 4 p.m.
"They have horrible nails," Mrs. Chatain said.
Not everyone could get back to business so quickly.
Liem Vu, the owner of Newton's Discount Market in Algiers, found his store broken into and the shelves bare. Anything portable was stolen.
"Even the meat slicer, the microwave, the TV for the security camera," Mr. Vu said.
He said he did not necessarily blame whoever had taken his merchandise.
"No power, no alarm, no police and for four or five days, people had no food," he said.
President Bush on Saturday reiterated promises he made in a televised address in front of St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter on Thursday, including plans to create a Gulf Opportunity Zone that would offer "tax relief and other incentives for job-creating investment," and a "new urban homesteading act, which would identify property in the region owned by the federal government, and provide lots to low-income citizens free of charge, through a lottery."
"As we rebuild homes and businesses we will renew our promise to be the land of equality and decency," he said. "And one day Americans will look back at the response to Hurricane Katrina and say that our country grew not only in prosperity, but also in character and justice."
Areas outside of New Orleans also began re-opening on Saturday.
In St. Bernard Parish, where the floodwaters had risen to 20 feet and the Murphy Oil refinery had spilled thousands of barrels, parts of the Arabi and Chalmette neighborhoods were opened at dawn for residents to take stock of their ruined homes. But as the sun rose over State Highway 46, the main road through the parish, the only cars passing the National Guard checkpoints were military convoys and unmarked police cars with flashing lights.
Down an unmarked side street birds were calling and dogs roamed. Shotgun houses sat on stilts. A television set dangled five feet from the ground, suspended by a plug still attached on the other side of the wall.
East of the Violet Canal, on the low-lying side of the railroad tracks along the Mississippi River, three young men in a green truck towing a trailer parked next to 2005 Riverbend Drive. They were helping people retrieve whatever they could for friends and family scattered around the country.
One of the three men helping, Darryn Melerine, wanted to find his father's school rings from their house on Riverbend Drive.
"Watch out for the snakes," Mr. Melerine said. Then he waded into the house. He looked in the living room, then the bedroom. Finally finding the rings amid a mattress and an upended dresser with a broken mirror, Mr. Melerine cupped them and said, "This is what I came for."
Then he walked back over the wooden pilings and downed branches in the yard and got into the truck and drove off toward Violet, where the main road was covered in mud.
Back in New Orleans, Pepper Usner, who owns Pepper's Restaurant on a corner of Magazine Street near popular Mardi Gras parade routes, said she spent the 19 days after the storm in the city. Ms. Usner was pleased the owner of the framing shop next door had returned on Saturday, but what she really wanted was power.
"I'm ready for electricity," she said, pointing at electrical meters outside the building. "I've got five tons of air-conditioners. I'm going turn every single one of them on and watch these meters. The faster they spin, the better."
Michael Brick and Michael Luo contributed reporting for this article.

Returning to Neighborhoods That Are No Longer Home

Michael Brick

New York Times 18 September 2005

ST. BERNARD PARISH, La., Sept. 17 - At dawn the auburn sun on St. Bernard Highway told the soldiers to open the road so that certain travelers might pass. The soldiers had blocked the way with freight cars and M-16's. They were wearing surgical masks.
Past the roadblock, the La Loutre, Terre Aux Boufs and Sauvage bayou channels had formed marshlands where men once fought the Battle of New Orleans. Plantations had come and gone, and refineries, too. The floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina had risen 20 feet, killed 100 people here, ruptured a tank and spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil on the streets.
On Saturday morning, some of the tens of thousands of scattered sons and daughters of the parish, across the Mississippi River east of New Orleans, were allowed to return to their ruined homes to gather belongings and see the damage. They were told to bring rubber boots and no children.
Such demand for this privilege was expected that visits were to take place in seven cycles, the last beginning on Sept. 29. Admission to St. Bernard Parish on Saturday required proof of residence in the neighborhoods of Arabi and Chalmette, but the lure of home had been misgauged.
The sun rose higher and turned yellow, and no lines formed. Inside the roadblock, a weather-beaten sign said, "Think Positive, St. Bernard." The highway was mostly empty save for military convoys. There was a dead horse by the road, and some cows were grazing.
Down an unmarked side street, dogs roamed. A television dangled five feet above the ground outside a shotgun house, suspended by a plug attached on the other side of the wall. A truck upended in the water had a bumper sticker with a message about drugs.
On the low-lying side of the railroad tracks along the Mississippi River, east of the Violet River in the area that no one is allowed to enter until the end of the month, a green truck towing a small metal trailer stopped next to 2005 Riverbend Drive.
Three riders emerged; the youngest, Christopher Lynch, 19. A Confederate flag was tattooed on his arm. He had dressed for the trip in camouflage waders and a T-shirt with a picture of a fish. The men had set out from a kind stranger's home in Auburndale, Fla., and drove through the night to get here on Saturday morning. There was nowhere to sleep in New Orleans, anyway. Mr. Lynch said most of his friends would wait until the official openings of their neighborhoods, if they came back at all.
"You almost have to, unless you can sneak by the system," Mr. Lynch said. "Business stickers, police pass, something."
One of his traveling companions was David Roberts, who has a lawn-mowing business, a job with Sara Lee and part-time work with the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Department.
"I got a lot of bills," Mr. Roberts said. He was wearing a T-shirt that said "Dump Her."
The third man was Darryn Melerine, whose parents owned the house on Riverbend Drive. This was the first of several stops the men planned to make, gathering possessions for friends and family members around the country.
It was early still, and their tasks were many. A lawyer named Bruce Betzer wanted anything they could salvage from his house in Meraux. Mr. Melerine wanted to see his own home. The first job was getting some rings that belonged to Mr. Melerine's parents from the house on Riverbend Drive.
"Watch out for the snakes," Mr. Melerine said. The men looked into the house. Some big black dogs lumbered into the yard, panting, and stopped and stared. The dogs stared some more and then turned and ran off. The men waded into the house. Mr. Melerine looked in the living room, then the bedroom. He pushed a mattress aside and raised an upended dresser, then opened a drawer.
"There it is," Mr. Melerine said, cupping the rings. "This is what I came for."
The men walked back over the wooden pilings and downed branches in the yard and got into the truck and drove toward Violet. Mr. Melerine's house was not far from his father's.
They drove past the Dollar Mart and the bakery that sold King Cakes. They stopped at Tony Ryan's house to get his electric saw, but the mud in his house was too thick. They abandoned the saw and drove on, past a Mitsubishi Eclipse on the roof of a house with white columns. They changed lanes when they passed downed power lines, and they crossed the median when the mud got thick.
They drove to a housing development in Meraux. One house had a sign that said it was the home of a Holy Cross Tiger. They turned onto Florida Avenue, where the street was a line of roofs pounded down onto exposed beams with strips of brick in places.
At 4237 Florida Avenue, Mr. Roberts got out and took pictures of Mr. Betzer's toilet sitting there on Mr. Betzer's foundation. The rest of the house was gone. Mr. Roberts made a sucking sound with his teeth.
The men set up a stepladder for no good reason, then found a piggybank that said "College Fund" and a couple of family pictures. They walked past Mr. Betzer's daughter's baby doll and Mr. Betzer's Hungry Jack maple syrup and got back in the truck.
A quarter-mile up a street called St. Marie, a house was blocking the road. Mr. Melerine got out of the truck and went into his own house, where he retrieved photo albums, the national championship trophy he had won as a member of the New Orleans Hit Men flag football team, a filthy teddy bear and the wedding dress worn by his wife, Ashley Melerine, a cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints. He collected these things in the trailer, then thought better of it and threw the bear and the trophy back into the mud, along with his empty Gatorade bottle.
The men made a three-point turn in front of the house blocking the road, then set off for Mr. Roberts's place, three blocks from the breached Murphy Oil refinery. They drove through the dark oily mud past volcanic landscapes of caked and brittle soil, past statues of the Virgin Mary and past sand dumped from trucks, past refinery fires and past a metal barricade marked by the sheriff's office, to a place where the mud stood three feet in the street.
"Whoo," Mr. Roberts said. "Yeah, there ain't no way to get to my house."
The truck stopped at a street corner, and Mr. Roberts said he was glad he had come.
"You don't know until you come here," he said, "that you never want to come back."
Mr. Melerine said his wife would be happy to get her wedding dress.
"If she can just see it," he said. "She'll probably end up throwing it away."
Then a soldier in Army fatigues walked up and said the street was contaminated. There were two helicopters in the sky. The soldier said to get in the truck and drive back up St. Bernard Highway. He did not make it sound like a choice.

FEMA, Slow to the Rescue, Now Stumbles in Aid Effort

Jennifer Steinhauer and Eric Lipton

New York Times 17 September 2005

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept 16 - Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina cut its devastating path, FEMA - the same federal agency that botched the rescue mission - is faltering in its effort to aid hundreds of thousands of storm victims, local officials, evacuees and top federal relief officials say. The federal aid hot line mentioned by President Bush in his address to the nation on Thursday cannot handle the flood of calls, leaving thousands of people unable to get through for help, day after day.
Federal officials are often unable to give local governments permission to proceed with fundamental tasks to get their towns running again. Most areas in the region still lack federal help centers, the one-stop shopping sites for residents in need of aid for their homes or families. Officials say that they are uncertain whether they can meet the president's goal of providing housing for 100,000 people who are now in shelters by the middle of next month.
While the agency has redoubled its efforts to get food, money and temporary shelter to the storm victims, serious problems remain throughout the affected region. Visits to several towns in Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as interviews with dozens of local and federal officials, provide a portrait of a fragmented and dysfunctional system.
The top two federal relief officials in charge of the effort both acknowledged in interviews late this week that they too have listened to the frustrated voices of local officials and citizens alike, and find their complaints valid.
"It is not happening fast enough, effective enough and it is not impacting the people at the bottom as quickly as it should," said Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, standing along the waterfront in New Orleans on Friday. "I have heard frustrations."
Admiral Allen, who was put in charge of the federal government's emergency operations along the Gulf Coast a week ago Friday, said entrenched bureaucracies hampered attempts to accelerate his top priorities: aid to residents, providing housing and clearing the vast swaths of wreckage from homes and trees damaged by the storm.
Working from Baton Rouge, William Lokey, FEMA's coordinating officer for the three-state region, echoed Admiral Allen's criticisms. "It is not going as fast as I would like, and yes, I do not have the resources I would like," he said on Thursday. "I am going as fast as I can to get them."
The problems clearly stem largely from the sheer enormousness of the disaster. But the lack of investment in emergency preparedness, poor coordination across a sprawling federal bureaucracy and a massive failure of local communication systems - all of which hurt the initial rescue efforts - are now also impeding the recovery.
FEMA, Mr. Lokey said, is an agency with limited federal money that must quickly expand its operational capacity only after a major disaster strikes. It has not won a large chunk of the new federal homeland security dollars, that have been dedicated to terrorism.
"If the billions of dollars that have been spent on chemical, nuclear and biological response, if some of that had come over here, we would have done better," he said. "But after 9/11, the public priority was terrorism."
The Katrina troubles underscore serious questions about the federal government's ability to handle similar disasters in the future.
"I don't think federal bureaucracy can handle the next disaster," said Toye Taylor, the president of Washington Parish, one of the hardest hit areas in Louisiana, who met with Mr. Bush this week.
"I expressed to the president that it would take a new partnership between the military and private sector," Mr. Taylor said. "Because there will be another one and I don't think the federal government is going to be able to help." Indeed, Mr. Bush said in his address to the nation from New Orleans on Thursday night that the military would play a new role in federal disaster relief.
The struggle to return parishes, towns and individual lives to some semblance of working order is visible throughout the region.
The president of St. Tammany Parish, Kevin Davis, is praying that it does not rain in his sweltering corner of Louisiana, because three weeks after the storm severely damaged his drainage system, FEMA has yet to give him approval to even start the repairs.
Up north in the poor parish of Washington, residents are sleeping in houses that were chopped in half by oak trees. The promised wave of government inspectors have not shown up to assist them.
James McGehee, the mayor of Bogalusa, a small Louisiana city near the Mississippi border, could barely contain his rage in an interview on Thursday.
"Today is 18 days past the storm, and FEMA has not even put a location for people who are displaced," he said. "They are walking around the damn streets. The system's broke."
Some critical aspects of the federal response to the storm are moving significantly faster than expected. The Army Corps of Engineers, which initially predicted that pumping out New Orleans would take up to three months, now predicts that the enormous task will be wrapped up by Oct. 2.
FEMA and its partners have delivered as of Friday morning more than 177 million tons of ice, 63 million liters of water and 26 million ready-to-eat meals throughout Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
More than $1.25 billion of federal disaster aid has also been distributed directly to many of the just over one million victims in the three-state region that registered for aid. Just in Louisiana, another $100 million in disaster food stamp benefits have been distributed.
"The commitment is an aggressive one," said Ann Silverberg Williamson, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Social Services, which is working with federal officials on several of these efforts.
In many affected areas, Americans continue to live in conditions unthinkable in most of the industrialized world, like the rural unincorporated areas in Washington and surrounding parishes, where the uprooted trunks of 20-ton trees have left dinosaur foot-size crevices in roads, and homes are still surrounded by a maze of twisting branches.
In Tangipahoa Parish, the parish president, Gordon Burgess, said he called FEMA officials daily to ask when they would arrive to assist residents with housing. Mr. Burgess said the federal workers say, " 'I'll get to you next week,' and then the next week and then you'd never hear from them again."
Indeed, almost every local leader interviewed - even those sympathetic to FEMA's plight - complained that they could not get FEMA to approve their contracts with workers, tell them when they would be opening help centers or answer basic questions. Often, they say, the FEMA worker on the ground, eager to help, has to go up the chain of command before taking action, which can take days.
"People on the ground are wonderful but the problem is getting the 'yes,' " said Mr. Davis of St Tammany parish, who has a contractor ready to clean his drainage system of the same trees FEMA allowed him to take off his streets, and to repair parts of the sewage system.
"I'm saying, 'Wait a minute, you pick up debris on the road but not the drainage?' If it rains, I've got real problems. I just need someone to tell me make the public bids and I could rebuild our parish in no time."
Perhaps the greatest frustration expressed by state and local officials - as well as by some federal officials - is the pace of finding or setting up temporary housing to move people out of emergency shelters and the slow opening of specialized recovery centers.
The Bush administration had set Oct. 1 as the deadline for moving those 100,000 people in shelters out of these often overcrowded and uncomfortable facilities and into temporary homes. The goal is to install tens of thousands of mobile homes and trailers, so people are not only out of the shelters, but they can move back closer to their homes. But progress on the installation of these new homes is off to a slow start.
"That is not going to happen," Mr. Lokey said Thursday afternoon of the Oct. 1 goal. "It is just too big." By Thursday night, in his speech to the nation, Mr. Bush had revised the deadline to Oct. 15, which Mr. Lokey said would still be hard to meet.
Tempers are already flaring among many of the thousands of people displaced by the storm who have had a hard time getting through to FEMA on the telephone or finding centers where FEMA representatives can answer questions about various federal assistance programs. Only 8 of 40 promised sites have opened in Louisiana.
"I still do not have a firm date as to when they will put a site," said Mr. Taylor of Washington parish. Baton Rouge, which has received a huge influx of evacuees, did not get such a center until this Thursday. Evacuees and local officials also complain that FEMA's request for them to register on line or via phone is unrealistic, given that as of Wednesday 310,000 households in Louisiana were still without telephone service and 283,231 were still awaiting power, or nearly 30 percent of the state's households. And the phone lines are almost always jammed anyway. As such, those with cars drive miles to operating help centers in other counties, where the lines are sprawling. Confusion is rampant.
"FEMA don't communicate with you very well," said Tommy Nelson, as he cleaned out the home of his girlfriend's mother in Waveland, a Gulf Coast town now more of a memory than a place. "You got to learn things second-hand. We just happened to be in a post office line and we just happened to learn you got to register down here for a trailer. I was talking to a FEMA representative about trailers yesterday and she didn't have a clue." The best way to reach FEMA is about 2 a.m., various evacuees said.
Meanwhile, truck drivers carrying tens of thousands of tons of ice and driving water have been sent on a cross-country tour, from city to city, only then to be told to wait for up to a week in a parking lot in Memphis, with their engines, as well as their tabs as drivers running.
"It is a sad experience," said Frank Link,, who was sent from to Missouri, then to Mississippi, then to Alabama and then to Tennessee - all with the same load of 41,580 pounds of ice that he had loaded in Chicago. "I went down there to help. All I did was get the runaround from FEMA."
But the disaster has also exposed several serious flaws that hampered FEMA's response. Communication systems, especially in rural areas, were crippled and have still failed to return, making it impossible for residents as well as local officials to reach the federal government.
Further, many of the residents affected had few resources and limited power to begin with. Isolation proved to be a liability. Those who had leaders with access to television cameras and a little political influence have begun to make out better than those without.
Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, assailed the federal government on national television the first days after the storm. Today he boasts that FEMA has moved "at lightning speed" to get his parish housing, paychecks for workers, and carries in his tote bag a personal letter from the president.
Admiral Allen, whose jurisdiction spreads across the Gulf Coast region, said he recognized that he had a brief window in which to turn things around for the hundreds of thousands of affected residents. "There should be a low tolerance for a learning curve on my part," Admiral Allen said. "It is not weeks. It is days. And if it is not days, it is hours."