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.
# posted by Cholo @ 9:26 AM
