Sunday, August 27, 2006
One year on: Katrina's legacy
BBC NEWS
By Stephen Sackur
Big Easy Blues - The Rebuilding Of New Orleans, BBC Radio 4
New Orleans sells itself to the world as the Big Easy. But one year after Hurricane Katrina there's nothing easy about life in New Orleans.
The hurricane swept past the city in a matter of hours, but New Orleanians will be living with its legacy for years to come.
True, the photogenic French Quarter and the grand homes of the white establishment in the Garden District have regained much of their former charm but don't be fooled - even on Bourbon Street amid the jazz clubs and storestouting souvenir kitsch there is a pervasive sense of desolation.
And elsewhere in the city, away from the expensive real estate on the higher ground, the physical recovery from the catastrophic flooding has barely begun.
More than 1,000 people lost their lives to Katrina - the floodwaters left the city uninhabitable.
A year on and still New Orleans is eerily empty. Of a pre-Katrina population of half-a-million fewer than 200,000 have returned.
Ken Wilkens, social worker by day and a rapper known as Snoop by night, is one New Orleanian who made it back. In May he took me on a drive down Interstate10, into the Ninth Ward, the heart of the city's black community.
"Katrina still has a smell," he said and he was right.
Sickly sweet, fetid fumes were still coming up from the residue of filth left behind when the floodwaters receded.
"There's no sign of life in a neighbourhood that used to be thriving," Snoop reflected. "We're in an American city and there's just miles and miles ofdevastation."
'Culture change'
On my most recent visit to New Orleans, just a week ago, the housing situation was little better. Snoop had finally moved himself out of his run-down hotel room into a small apartment, but most of his friends are still stuck in farawaycities, exiled from their pre-Katrina lives.
"If you don't get these people back then you gonna kill the whole spirit of New Orleans," Snoop told me, "because that's where the food, the music, thelanguage comes from - that's the flavour in the gumbo."
But there are powerful forces in New Orleans who are not interested in restoring the city to the way it was before.
Boysie Bollinger, doyen of the white business elite, is one of them.
Over the past few months I've watched Boysie revive the fortunes of his shipbuilding business, battered by Katrina, but now back at full capacity.
He lost most of his African-American workforce when Katrina destroyed their homes - he has replaced many of them with Mexicans. He is thinking about hiringFilipinos and Romanians too.
Boysie wasn't enamoured with the way New Orleans was going before Katrina - he points to the drugs, the crime, the endemic poverty in some of the AfricanAmerican neighbourhoods. He talks about the "cleansing" effect of Katrina.
"You're going to see a culture change," he told me, with the confidence of a man used to getting his own way. "A lot more Latin people here as permanentresidents, people who want to come and create new communities."
It is a message which sounds like a veiled threat to many African-Americans, but Boysie doesn't care.
"We want people who are willing to work. It's not directed at blacks, or at whites, just anyone who fits the description," he adds.
Boysie is a good friend of George W Bush. He is a key player on the Bring New Orleans Back Commission and a host of other influential bodies. When it comes to finalising the plan for the rebuilding of New Orleans it is likely to havethe Bollinger stamp of approval.
Psychological frailty
For now though, there is no comprehensive re-building plan.
Most of the billions of dollars of federal money already poured into New Orleans have gone into emergency repairs to the network of levees. New floodgates have been fitted on key drainage canals, but even the spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, Major Ed Bayouth, acknowledged that the leveeshave received nothing more than a "temporary repair".
Will New Orleans be protected from the next big hurricane? Major Ed says he "doesn't feel there's a risk" of catastrophic flooding, but most residentssimply don't believe him.
Which is the main reason why, on this first anniversary of Katrina, the most striking thing about New Orleans isn't the physical mess the city is in, butthe psychological frailty of its remaining inhabitants.
Most aren't ready to invest materially or emotionally in the re-building process until this hurricane season is past. That means another couple ofmonths of nervous watching and waiting.
Denice Ross wants to believe her city has a future but some days she wakes up and she's really not sure.
"New Orleans is broken," she tells me. "If a small storm comes by the power goes out. We had to leave our office a few weeks ago because there wasn't enough water to flush the toilets. We're living on the edge - there's nocushion, no buffer left."
Denice is pregnant with her second child. She is praying she'll be able to raise her family in the city she loves.
As for Snoop, he says he feels "lost" in his own city. "I'd give anything to go back to normal, but it'll never be the same."
New Orleans is a city where the heart has always ruled the head. Good times today have always outweighed worries about tomorrow. But maybe that's notsustainable anymore.
Scientists say the city is steadily sinking into the mud of the Mississippi Delta, making it even more vulnerable to the next super-storm, or the one after. And given the failure of the politicians - city, state and federal - torise to the challenge of Katrina, next time there may be no coming back.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/5281396.stm
Published: 2006/08/24 11:49:01 GMT
© BBC MMVI
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Help is on its way Nawlins
Sunday, August 20, 2006
The City That Care Forgot: Spike Lee and the ‘New’ New Orleans Blues
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060819_spike_lee_and_new_new_orleans/
Posted on Aug 19, 2006
By Sheerly Avni
President Bush can kiss my ass
The government can kiss my ass
St. Bernard Parish can kiss my ass
There’s not much ass left, but still enough to kiss.
-- Cheryl Livaudais
Resident, St. Bernard Parish
In one of several remarkable scenes from Spike Lee’s new four-hour documentary, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem for New Orleans in Four Acts,” a young man who sat out the flood in the hot and stenching Superdome surprises us with a recollection of grace. During a particularly desperate moment in the sewer—no water, no food, no help in sight—someone took charge. “There was this brother named Radio,” he tells us, “…and he started clapping it up, like in a basketball game…. It was a big, big spirit; people just started singing praises.”
Our storyteller continues in voiceover as the camera cuts to archived footage from the Superdome—a line of men and women dancing and singing, sweat visible through dirty T-shirts. “It was a proud moment for us. We marched around the ’dome, and that time I felt back to the Movement, the civil rights movement, when it was real powerful.”
This appeal to “the Movement” is fitting. The poorest people in one of the poorest major cities in the United States are now even poorer than they were before, and the fact that most of them are black is no coincidence. Lee’s team devotes a great deal of time and craft to the argument that the devastation resulted from an event in political history—not an event in weather. The film, which was shown for an emotional audience in New Orleans on Wednesday night and will air in two parts on HBO next week, is at once a heartbroken hymn to a ravaged city, a comprehensive chronicle of the financial and geographical impact of the hurricane itself, and—most important—an essential new chapter in the unfinished story of the struggle for civil rights in America.
To write that chapter, Lee asked for and was granted four hours of airtime—twice the amount HBO had originally allotted for the documentary. Lee and a small crew visited New Orleans nine times and interviewed more than 80 people, including climatologists, politicians, engineers and on-site journalists, all of whom provide informative, though sometimes conflicting, accounts of many different facets of the hurricane. The story that emerges is one of colossal and criminal government failure on local, state and federal levels. Its many narrators cast an equally scornful eye on President Bush, FEMA, the insurance companies, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the oil business.
One might expect that all this anger would amount to a tiresome polemic, especially at such a long running time, and moreover because Lee himself has never been known as a subtle filmmaker. At his best, however, he is a gifted one, with an exceptional sense of craft. Even his worst films have always showcased his inventive and remarkable ear for the profane poetry of American speech. Here Lee wisely turns that ear to the voices of the ravaged city as they spin colorful and dramatic accounts of their experiences before, during and after the storm: the salty and delightful Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a wife and mother who compares the storm to the 50-foot woman of B-movies ripping the skin off her home, and then delights us with an account of her near throw-down with a cold U.S. servicewoman; Gina Montana, who describes the agony of seeing people “treated like cattle,” and reminds us that before it was called The Big Easy, New Orleans was known as The Town That Care Forgot; and finally, Fred Johnson, obscene and on-point, with a snorted dismissal of George Bush and his advisers: “These fools, they don’t even know four dogs got four assholes!”
The interviews with the displaced victims of the storm, both black and white, are the most gripping, but Lee also provides political and historical context. He devotes a good deal of space to the testimony of local leaders, including Mayor Ray Nagin and then-Police Chief Eddie Compass—also giving airtime to those who would criticize their actions: Compass for spreading hysteria with his unsubstantiated claims of rapes and murder in the Superdome and subsequent star turn on the talk-show circuit; and Nagin for consulting with the business community about a mandatory evacuation of the city.
Lee does not neglect the landmark moments in Katrina’s media coverage, from Soledad O’Brien’s surreal interrogation with an apparently brain-dead Mike Brown, to the tape of Bush being warned about the possibility of levees breaking, to Barbara Bush’s infamous assurance in Houston that since many of the victims were “underprivileged anyway,” displacement was “working out well for them” (to which the indomitable Montana LeBlanc responds by offering Mrs. Bush her cellphone number and saying, “You tell her to call me and say that shit.”) Nor does he neglect Kanye West’s impromptu televised announcement that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” along with caustic reminders that Bush was not the only object of scorn: Michael Eric Dyson, professor and author of “Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster,” reminds us that Condoleezza Rice’s preoccupations during the period of peak suffering included shoe-shopping, theater and a game of tennis with Monica Seles—“Blahniks, Broadway and balls are more important than black people who look like her—for this woman from Birmingham?”
But the real question is, what’s next? In Act IV, an Army engineer promises to bring the levees back to pre-Katrina security levels before the next hurricane season. The promise, made several months ago, has not been kept—and even if it had been, it would be completely nonsensical to restore security levels that have proved so fatally deficient. The wetlands, in the words of one expert, are strangled “like a hand cut off by a rubber band,” and have been eroded to the point of similar impotence. New Orleans itself was already one of the most dangerous cities in the nation in terms of crime, and it’s seen a spike in violent crime in recent months. Worse still, more than 200,000 of its residents are still scattered across 46 states. Their bitter longing for home is understandable and legitimate, but the recent and documented worldwide rise in hurricane severity makes it highly unlikely that bringing people home would be doing them a service. Indeed, Mike Tidwell, author of the recently published “The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities,” calls Bush’s exhortations to return to New Orleans an “act of mass homicide.”
The victims want to rebuild, and it is easy to see why. Much of the film’s third act is devoted to the city’s musical history. Some of the same people we’ve already watched curse and weep through stories of loss now become cheerful, as they speak of their hometown’s heritage. We learn that it was a place where slaves where permitted to play music on Sundays, where, because of a peculiarly French relationship to human bondage, “you could buy black people, but marry ’em too,” and where one could be a slave and still go to the opera. One wishes that this portion of the documentary would go on forever, as Lee samples liberally from decades of music and street scenes: Mardi Gras, Indian dances, drum circles and, of course, funeral marches. The jazz funeral is a particular child of this city; it begins with sorrowful hymns, a “giving way to grief,” but traditionally ends on a note of celebration. “The idea,” we are told, “is that ‘Yeah, I’m sad you’re gone, but it was sure was nice to know you.’”
America has not known New Orleans well enough. If we did, we’d have done more to save and protect her. “When the Levees Broke” is a jazz funeral, a chorus of voices, some angry, some informed, some specialized, all trying to make sense of a death, not just of one of our loveliest cities but of an illusion: the illusion that our government cares about its citizens.
Looking for culprits at the scene of a crime named Katrina
8/19/2006, 9:32 p.m. CT
By ALLEN G. BREED
The Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In many ways, New Orleans is a huge crime scene, with bodies
and victims and fingerprints — many, many sets of fingerprints.
But who did it?
Who is responsible for this mess, for a barely functioning city with large
swaths still uninhabited — or uninhabitable — a year after Hurricane Katrina?
An anonymous critic, posting his verdict at the edge of the French Quarter,
blames the Army Corps of Engineers and its failure to build levees that could
keep the floodwaters out: "Hold the Corps Accountable," demands the sign.
Others curse the Federal Emergency Management Agency — for its failure to
rescue New Orleans as the waters rose, or in the months after. In ravaged
Lakeview, a makeshift gallows bears a sign that reads: "Last Resort Shelter.
Reserved for Looters/FEMA Reps/Adjusters."
But the roll of those accused of failing New Orleans is a long one: State and
local officials who had no good plan for the disaster, and now preside over a
languid recovery. A president who at first seemed remote from the cataclysm,
and then made promises that have not been fully realized.
So many did not live up their responsibilities, says G. Paul Kemp, a Louisiana
State University engineer and member of Team Louisiana, a group of forensic
engineers examining how the flooding occurred. Every time anyone points that
out, "people say, `Oh, we don't want to play the blame game. We've got to get
things moving.'"
But things are moving agonizingly slow. Piles of debris and wrecked cars are
everywhere, and astonishingly, searchers were still finding bodies in ruined
homes just weeks ago.
Harried recovery officials say it's only been a year. How much can you expect?
But to Lakeview resident Pascal Warner — who walks through clouds of mosquitoes
attracted by a neighbor's fetid, sludge-covered swimming pool still filled with
stagnant Katrina floodwater — a year seems like a pretty long time.
"I wouldn't want to spend a year in jail," the retired stagehand says. "Would
you?"
___
Why did New Orleans go under?
You could blame the French, for locating the city in the middle of a swamp. You
could blame generations of local and federal leaders whose decisions to channel
and tame the Mississippi starved the delta of silt and caused the land to sink.
You could fault the shipping interests who lobbied for the river outlet that
gave Katrina's storm surge a clear path to the city's front door.
Or, like Warner and others, you could blame the Corps of Engineers and the
levees they were charged with building and maintaining.
"It wasn't Mother Nature," says Warner, whose home was about a dozen blocks
from a break in the 17th Street Canal levee. "If it wouldn't have been for the
break in the levee, we could have come home the next day and cleaned up the
yard ... and gone right on living."
Forensic engineers have since uncovered design and construction flaws that some
say border on criminal negligence.
Investigators say many levee sections along the city's drainage canals were
built of weak, unstable soils, which apparently were scoured away by the water
pressing in from Lake Pontchartrain. Metal sheet pilings that anchor the cement
floodwalls atop the earthen structures were driven much shallower into the
ground than the Corps believed.
Dan Hitchings, who is overseeing the flood-control repairs as director of the
Corps' Task Force Hope, says the question of liability for damage from the
collapsed floodwalls is still open. But the Corps must accept responsibility
"for sections of this project that failed before we had intended it to."
"It's not anything that anyone in the Corps of Engineers feels good about,
believe me."
But the tide unleashed by the levees did not have to reach a city that was
unprepared.
"Louisiana had been on notice of its vulnerability to catastrophic hurricanes
for decades, but over the long term had never fully upgraded its emergency
response systems to the level necessary to protect its citizens from those
events," according to a report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee.
FEMA, too, was "unprepared for a catastrophic event" on this scale, the
committee said.
And the suffering that resulted is unforgettable.
As President Bush slapped FEMA chief Michael Brown on the back — praising him
for "a heck of a job" — people lay dying in the heat and filth outside the New
Orleans convention center. The sick and elderly sweltered in crippled hospitals
while ice- and water-laden tractor-trailers circled the country, awaiting
orders of where to go.
Brown resigned in disgrace. But Kemp notes that, to a large extent, "We're
still dealing with the same people who gave us Katrina."
"I guess probably in the old Stalinist regime, everybody would have been sacked
and sent to Siberia," Kemp says. "But we don't do that."
And so thousands of people in and around the city are still awaiting delivery
of government trailers, or for workers to install services at mobile homes
already in place.
Karen Eugene applied to FEMA in March for an all-electric handicapped trailer
after her doctor put her on 24-hour oxygen and told her she could no longer
live in the propane-fueled travel trailer she'd been provided. The agency
called her just this past week to say her new home was ready.
"I'm not saying I want to be first ... but I mean you work it to where this
lady's medical condition is putting her in a different bracket than all these
other people," says Eugene, 50, who has diabetes, arthritis, congestive heart
failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. "I was told by maybe five,
six different people in two weeks, `You'll have your trailer.' I'll go back in
two weeks, and that person I talked to no longer works with FEMA. ...
"I can't run around with FEMA no longer."
When FEMA isn't moving too slowly, it is criticized for moving too fast. The
agency rushed to get $2,000 debit cards into the hands of evacuees in the
storm's immediate aftermath, only to be accused in a government audit of giving
as much as $1.4 billion to people who spent their disaster relief on champagne,
sports tickets, pornography — even a sex-change operation.
Other government audits found that the government wasted millions of dollars in
the contracts it issued in the days after the hurricane struck.
Wrangling among Mayor Ray Nagin and members of the City Council over which
areas of the city should be given resources to rebuild has stalled the adoption
of a unified redevelopment plan, leaving homeowners in many wrecked
neighborhoods in limbo, unable to plan for the future.
When the Broadmoor Improvement Association recently released its 319-page
neighborhood redevelopment plan, revitalization committee co-chairman Hal Roark
said most of the work was "definitely happening in spite of the government.
It's individuals taking their destiny into their own hands, and neighborhoods."
Standing in the space between his mold-infested Lower Ninth Ward duplex and the
government trailer where he now lives, TV repairman Arnold Lewis speaks
enviously of other neighborhoods that enjoy decent water pressure and
city-sponsored wireless Internet service.
"There's something to be desired as far as the pace of recovery down here,"
Lewis, 46, says as water leaks out onto the ground from a nearby line break.
"There's no phone service here. There's no cable service down here, and there's
no gas."
Patricia Jones says it's no wonder the companies that provide services have
been unwilling to reinvest in the Lower Ninth.
With about half the neighborhood still under a "look and leave" policy,
residents have been unable to return and do basic salvage work on their houses,
says Jones, who represents the Lower Ninth in the Neighborhood Empowerment
Network Association. It seems to her that the neighborhood has been just about
written off.
"It's kind of looked at as yesteryear's space," she says. "People just happen
to live over there. That's not the main part of the city, so we're not really
worried about it."
But services are little better in other, less-destitute sections of the city.
The city is losing about 70 million gallons of water a day to leaks, almost as
much water as is making it to homes. Water pressure is so bad in parts of the
city that officials have helicopters on standby to haul lake water to douse
fires.
Before Katrina, garbage was collected twice a week. Now, the trucks come
weekly, if that.
The pungent smell of moldy, rotting garbage wafts through the front door of the
house Robert Devine is rehabilitating for his brother-in-law in the largely
middle class, mixed-race neighborhood of Gentilly. He says the pile across the
street — 4 feet high and 12 feet long — had been there for about a month.
"Sometimes they'll pick it up, sometimes they won't," says Devine, adjusting a
cap bearing the slogan "Git R Done." "But they want you to pay for it at the
end of the month."
The mayor says his city has had all it could to stave off bankruptcy. At a
recent neighborhood meeting in Broadmoor, he made several sarcastic jabs at
Washington for not providing more help.
"The only thing we've got as a city to continue to operate is a $150 million
loan from the federal government," said Nagin. "They normally give other cities
grants, but we got a loan. We're special."
Reed Kroloff, who resigned in disgust as head of the urban planning committee
for the city's Bring New Orleans Back initiative, says inefficiency, political
jockeying and downright incompetence on many fronts have delayed the recovery
process by a year or more.
"This has been a process where everyone, almost every agency involved has to
accept part of the blame," says Kroloff, dean of Tulane University's
architecture school. "There's been a failure in leadership at all levels here."
The people in charge say whatever happened, happened. They say they're moving
forward.
FEMA has provided housing assistance to more than 900,000 people across the
region, more than 300 times its normal yearly workload. The agency has overseen
the removal of 45 million cubic yards of debris from the state — enough to fill
10 Superdomes, or enough trucks to stretch end to end across the country four
times.
Judy Martinez, who oversees debris removal and other public assistance projects
in Louisiana for FEMA, says those numbers are "nothing to sneeze at."
"I think that we're moving full steam ahead," she says. "We're working six days
a week, 10, 12 hours a day ... and we have been doing this since day one."
Gil Jamieson, FEMA's deputy director of Gulf Coast recovery, says he's attended
town and neighborhood meetings where the agency gets blamed for leaking water
pipes or stinking sewer lines — things for which it cannot possibly be
responsible. If one of FEMA's new roles is as a target at which people can vent
their frustrations, he says, so be it.
"FEMA did get off to a slow start down here, so it's not surprising that
there's some fundamental mistrust," he says. "I'm not on a crusade to tell them
that we're not responsible for it. Our actions will show our commitment to this
problem."
There are other signs of progress. At the Superdome, symbol of some of the
deepest suffering in the days after Katrina, workers recently finished
restoring the stadium's gleaming-white 9.7-acre roof. And at the restored
convention center, which had become festering cattle car of despair, the only
smell of urine is in the bathrooms.
But the people of New Orleans have seen far too much bungling to be entirely
hopeful.
While he has been working to restore his 1920s-era home in Broadmoor,
out-of-work mechanical engineer Matt McBride has been keeping a wary eye on the
flood gates the Corps has been installing on the outfall canals.
The canals were built to drain rainwater out of the city and into Lake
Pontchartrain. But while the gates should keep storm surge out, the Corps has
not installed enough pumps to empty the city in a major rainfall. At the 17th
Street Canal gate, there is currently only 10 percent of pre-storm pumping
capacity.
The Corps acknowledges that there is decreased pumping capacity and says it is
working as fast as it can to improve it.
But based on his own examinations of the Corps' paperwork, and visits to the
stations, McBride considers 60 percent of the city's pumping capacity
unreliable. He says delays in finishing paperwork, failure to bid out work that
was already funded, and the refusal to even acknowledge that some pumps need
repair have set the city up for major flooding in a tropical storm, never mind
another Katrina.
"For them to have abandoned the city like this is unconscionable, immoral and
reprehensible — and possibly criminal, frankly," says McBride, who now regrets
the money he's spent restoring his home. "It's a death trap."
Others say all the investment in New Orleans will be for naught if more is not
done — and quickly — to restore the city's natural defenses.
In a single day, New Orleans lost wetlands that were expected to last another
50 years. Despite studies that show that every three to four miles of wetland
that a storm surge crosses reduces its elevation by one foot, Congress has yet
to earmark a single dollar for wetlands restoration, complains environmental
advocate David Helvarg.
"The lessons that seem to be learned are how to do better evacuations, not how
to prevent the need for the evacuations," says Helvarg, president of the Blue
Frontier Campaign.
"The floods ain't going away. They're just going to intensify. But the present
policy seems to be designed to create a Third World in this country ... that's
never fully able to recover from the last series of storms before the new ones
come in."
All together, the refrain is clear: The culprits who brought New Orleans to
this sorry state are still not doing enough to reclaim its future.
Kroloff, the dean of Tulane's architecture school, thinks the federal
government could easily have doubled or tripled the amount already committed to
New Orleans. And he doesn't buy the excuse that the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan or other national priorities should prevent it.
"The rebuilding of this place neither taxes the imagination nor the resources
of this country in any way," he says. The amount sent to the city so far is
"ludicrous when you think of the relative value of this area to the rest of the
country."
Kroloff says every day he wakes up in New Orleans, he is both grateful "and
utterly frustrated." He considers New Orleans one of the half dozen truly great
American cities, and it pains him to think that it might be allowed to just
slip away.
"Cities come and cities go, there is no doubt about it," he says. "History
demonstrates that over and over again. Amazing cities of the past that had huge
influence over the way we live don't exist any more. Ultimately, that could be
the fate the befalls New Orleans.
"But it's not necessary now."
___
EDITOR'S NOTE: National Writer Martha Mendoza and New Orleans staffer Mary
Foster contributed to this report.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Recovery remains slow year after Katrina
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI Associated Press Writer
Carolyn Parker talks with friends and family from the back porch of her home in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in this July 21, 2006, file photo. "This house is my soul," explains Parker, who violated a "look and Leave" policy to move back into her broken home last winter.
They said she was too frail. That the mold growing on the warped walls of her flooded house would make her ill. That she shouldn't bother since her mottled, mud-filled home would likely be bulldozed anyway. But Willie Lee Barnes, who recently turned 94, didn't listen.
Standing outside her flooded house in the Louisiana sun, she clasped her rosary in her frail hands and prayed. "Lord," she said, "I'm not asking that you climb the mountain for me. I'm only asking that you give me the strength to do it myself."
Strapping on a dust mask, she grabbed a shovel and with all her force, began pounding the deformed walls of her living room until they came off, falling to the floor like the rinds of a desiccated orange. She filled buckets with the broken drywall, which her son ferried outside. Bucket by bucket and week after passing week, she kept at it, resting occasionally on a stool, the only piece of furniture in her house to survive the flooding. Flanked by a worn statue of the Virgin Mary, hers is now one of the few houses that's been gutted in the city's most destroyed neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward.
Ask her to explain how a nonagenarian succeeded in doing what thousands of younger families have failed to do, Miss Barnes offers an analogy: "I'm like bad grass. Because it never dies. You gotta pull it up and even though you do, it still grows back. I don't care how hard something looks, I'm still going to try."
In a city that still lies largely in ruin, life is pushing through like 'bad grass,' forcing its way through cracks in the pavement. One year after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, the city is fighting to come back.
In each instance, it's the perseverance of one person, or family, that led to one house, one tiny patch of New Orleans becoming whole again.
Those who choose to return do so in spite of the city's broken infrastructure, which a year later remains in tatters: Nearly 60 percent of homes and business are still not receiving electricity or heating gas. Only three out of nine New Orleans hospitals have reopened. Only 56 of 128 public schools will enroll students this fall.
The city itself still has no master plan.
Those attempting to rebuild their homes have yet to be told how high they will have to raise them. And it's still unclear if the city's patched levees will hold back future floods.
Still, even in the worst-hit neighborhoods, where homes were ripped from their foundations and spit into the street, and where mattresses still lie impaled in the branches of trees, the rebirth is taking place.
On one street, one house may be gutted, while scores of others are untouched.
Some are adorned with wooden crosses, a crude memorial to the dead.
Like pioneers that have survived a winter in an unforgiving wilderness, those that have returned to live here proudly proclaim their existence.
"I'm back. R U?" asks a sign in the window of a flooded pickup truck at a house slowly being repaired.
Down the block, past the flooded Victorian shotguns, another sign stands outside a gutted home. "I'm Coming Home," it says - except "Coming" has been struck out with a bold, red line.
"This house is my soul," explains Carolyn Parker, who says she violated a "look and leave" policy to move back into her broken home last winter. It has neither electricity nor running water, so each morning, until a government-issued trailer arrived last month, she walked to a nearby fire hydrant and screwed it open with a wrench. The water gushed out and she filled two buckets. Then, she carried them back, using them to bathe.
In neighborhoods that took a lesser hit, like Broadmoor, the pockets of health are deeper. Houses were not ripped off their slabs and so will not need to be bulldozed.
On a street that one year ago lay 7 feet under water, a young woman crosses the grassy median, pushing her 2-year-old daughter in a red stroller. On the same median come dusk, couples go jogging, sweating in the setting Louisiana sun, passing the same finished and unfinished houses as life moves on.
But what is visible from the street in the Lower Ninth Ward is sometimes hidden here: Behind their freshly painted doors, many families are still living in wounded homes.
"There are two types of people: Those that came back, and those that came back, threw up their hands and gave up," says one Broadmoor resident, a 68-year-old man named Del who lives by himself in a lofty, two-story house, which from the outside appears repaired.
He'd give only his first name because he's embarrassed of his living arrangements. To survive the oven-like heat - electricity is still out - he moves around his house naked, carrying a battery-operated fan from room to room.
Adapting has taken numerous forms. With large swaths of the city still without heating gas, many families are able to bathe only in cold water. But with electricity it's possible microwave bowls of water to scalding, then mix that with tap water in the bathtub.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, in multi-story houses have moved into their dry upstairs.
Julie Quinn is one such homeowner. The state senator's colonnaded mansion is in one of the city's posh suburbs that flooded, and although the second- and third-stories are intact, the kitchen has yet to be repaired.
"I've become the queen of the Crockpot and toaster oven," Quinn jokes.
Throughout the city, institutions have learned to adapt, too.
For more than 150 years, those who attended Sunday Mass at the Church of the Annunciation heard the scripture read in Elizabethan English. Now, the traditional Anglican church's priest reads the ancient scripture, still dotted with 'Thees' and 'Thous,' inside a doublewide trailer, parked in the flooded Broadmoor neighborhood. Because there is no air conditioning, the clergy shed their ornate wool cassocks.
Still, the Episcopal bishop came carrying a tall, hooked staff and wearing green-and-gold vestments to bless the trailer.
"We do the best we can. But there's only so much pomp and circumstance you can have inside a doublewide," said the Rev. Milton Gibson, the church's deacon.
Even though life is pushing through, it's come at a cost.
Dentists are reporting that an alarming number of patients are arriving for checkups with chipped or grooved teeth, a result of grinding at night.
Funeral home directors say they're seeing a disproportionate number of suicides, a rate that health officials estimate could be as much as three times higher than pre-Katrina.
Even in the unharmed French Quarter, where jazz tumbles into the street from ornate, cast-iron balconies, residents speak of a lingering depression.
"I can't even remember how many going-away parties I've been to in the last few weeks. Every night I lay in bed, thinking, 'Should I stay or should I go?'" says Maggie Beal, the manager of a store selling 19th century French antiques.
All day, she says, she waits for tourists to walk in, but there are few. And the ones who are in town rarely are interested in the expensive armoires and Louis XV furnishings.
Yet even in the Quarter, the day-to-day struggle has created a society of intense, highly committed, pro-city New Orleanians. Many have proudly hoisted City of New Orleans flags outside their 19th century shotguns. Bumper stickers proclaim "Proud to swim home" and "I love New Orleans."
Even in a restroom at The Spotted Cat, a hipster bar just outside the Quarter, hope shines through graffiti: "Stay strong New Orleans. You are beautiful," someone wrote with a black-felt pen on the door.
Throughout the city, those who stayed, who didn't throw up their hands, are trying the best they can to make meaning out of the destruction.
When Miss Barnes first returned to her flooded bedroom, she hoped to find a crucifix studded with diamonds that for years she'd worn around her neck. She couldn't find it.
Yet she was able to salvage one item: A present given to her years ago, still inside its gift box. It's a porcelain angel, holding a battery-operated lantern.
Although the waters rose to the house's cypress beams, the box must have bobbed on the surface and not gone under, because when she unwrapped it and switched it on, the lantern lit up - a soft, fuzzy yellow.
Holding the angel in her hands and straining to make out its inscription, she reads aloud: "You are the Lord. Keep my light burning and turn the darkness into light."
©2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
