Rootsie

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Dreams are emerging of a 'new' New Orleans By Richard Willing, USA TODAY
Wed Sep 14, 7:01 AM ET
 


Three days after the New Orleans flood walls broke on Aug. 29, a visit to his hometown left Harry Connick Jr. feeling desperate.


"It is hard to sit in silence, to watch one's youth wash away," the singer and piano player wrote on his Web site. "I can only dream that one day she will recapture her glory."


On a follow-up visit a week later, Connick saw things that raised his hopes. Floodwaters were receding, violence was being contained, and at least one bar had reopened on Bourbon Street, where the 37-year-old Connick cut his musical teeth. "Man," Connick wrote, "if this isn't a sign of New Orleans coming back to its former state!"


Maybe. As the shock of one of America's worst natural disaster wears off and floodwaters are pumped out of New Orleans, public figures from local performers to President Bush are beginning to speak of reviving the 287-year-old city as if such a thing is inevitable.


They are contemplating what urban planner Robert Lang of Virginia Tech says has "never been done before in America": Using what could be hundreds of billions of public and private dollars to rebuild a modern city on a scale far beyond what happened in San Francisco after its 1906 earthquake, or in Chicago after its 1871 fire.


But what kind of city will rise from the receding waters, and when, and how?


Rebuilding is a complex issue, layered with racially sensitive questions about how to revamp the city while luring back the blue-collar and low-income residents - most of them black - who made up the bulk of the roughly half-million evacuees from the area who now are scattered across America. At stake is how much of New Orleans' identity - its unique combination of grit and refinement, bawdiness and charm - will be washed away for good.


Politicians, urban planners, business leaders and local residents with different views of a "new" New Orleans already are campaigning for their competing visions.


U.S. Rep. William Jefferson (news, bio, voting record), D-La., whose New Orleans home was flooded, would focus on creating a city where tax credits, housing subsidies and jobs programs would be used to encourage the return of its working class.


U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal, R-La., whose home in nearby Kenner also was damaged, would appoint a rebuilding czar and dust off plans to diversify the city's industrial base and modernize its hospitals and public housing.


Scientists such as John Rennie, editor of Scientific American, are talking about a safer and perhaps smaller city in which wetlands would be expanded to protect against storms.


Singer Art Neville of the Neville Brothers is calling for a "Newer Orleans" - a city re-populated by returning evacuees and protected by a new set of the "best levees ever built."


And Dane Ciolino, a criminal defense lawyer and a law professor at the University of New Orleans, wants a rebuilt city that excludes the "looters and the shooters" but that remains racially and economically diverse. He fears that restoring only the upper-income residential areas such as the Garden District and the tourist sites of the French Quarter - the areas in New Orleans least damaged by the flooding - would turn the city into an "adult Disneyland with cocktails."


"It's too much to say that (rebuilding) is the storm's silver lining, but there's no denying that it's given us an opportunity no one's ever had before," says Jindal, whose district includes part of New Orleans and its suburbs. "Now the challenge is to bring everyone together, to get the best thinking and planning and ideas out there, and to get together and do it right. ... That hasn't been done before, either."


Whatever shape the rebuilding of New Orleans takes, rebuilding the city's psyche will be a key issue.


"I have great faith" in the ability of New Orleanians to rebound, Neville says. "But morale has taken a real blow. The people are down, man."


Several factors unique to the New Orleans disaster make it less likely that people will want to return to a rebuilt city, some analysts say.


"We've never seen scattering (of disaster victims) on this scale before," says Robert Fishman, an urban historian at the University of Michigan. Evacuees "have been relocated to any number of places, and told they'll be staying there for a long time. If it's months or years before people can get back in there, how many are going to want to go?"

Hurricane recovery specialist Michael Lindell says the images of widespread lawlessness and the suffering of many evacuated residents could have a profound impact on rebuilding efforts.

"If folks don't think government and their fellow citizens are up to the task, they may not feel that they are, either," says Lindell, senior scholar at the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. "What's civic morale going to be like, long term? I don't think we can say yet. We haven't ever seen anything like this."

The initial cleanup

With about 40% of New Orleans still underwater, it's unclear how long even the initial cleanup of the city will take.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it hopes to pump all the floodwater out of New Orleans by Oct. 8. Electric power and drinking water still must be restored. Des Moines, with a population of 350,000, took nearly three weeks to flush its water lines and repair broken mains after a flood crippled its water system in 1993.

Meanwhile, the water that has accumulated on New Orleans' streets poses health risks to recovery workers and residents. Besides leaves and dirt, it now carries backed-up sewage, feces and bacteria from decomposing bodies, as well as toxic chemicals from small businesses such as dry cleaners whose storage tanks flooded.

Tests by the federal Environmental Protection Agency indicated that bacteria are present in floodwaters at 10 times the acceptable level. That means workers wading in the water are at a high risk for health problems, says John Pardue, a professor of environmental engineering at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Even when it dries, the polluted stew will coat streets, parks and yards with a film of toxic chemicals and sewage. Cleansing the land of contamination could take months, maybe years.

"Are the schoolyards and people's yards going to be so contaminated that we're going to have to scrape them up? That's the big unknown right now," Pardue says. "It's not a very rosy picture, I'm afraid."

After electricity, water and basic services are restored, homes and businesses will have to be rehabilitated or demolished and rebuilt before city residents can return home. Given the extent of water damage, many buildings likely will be beyond salvaging, Lindell says.

"The issue is not just structural damage that water is going to do to wood and Sheetrock, but the likelihood of mold," he says. "That's going to make some places that appear to be relatively undamaged turn out to be health hazards that have got to be gotten rid of."

Pete Carkhuff, sales executive for National Property Damage Experts in West Berlin, N.J., says that "you're probably talking about bulldozing entire blocks, maybe whole neighborhoods."

A smaller, safer city?

Once cleanup is completed and basic services are restored, New Orleans will face some difficult choices. Among them: Whether the city and its surrounding area should be made smaller, but safer, by restoring wetlands that have disappeared during the past several decades.

Even when the flood barriers are repaired, the city will remain substantially below sea level, making more flooding likely. And New Orleans is often wet, with an annual average of 64.16 inches of rain from 1971 to 2000, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Only Mobile, Ala., with an average of 66.29 inches, was wetter among major cities in the continental USA.

New Orleans has had more than 20 major floods since 1978, up from just two in the previous 50 years.

Any rebuilding plan, specialists say, should take New Orleans' topography and frequent rains into account. "You can bring the city back without making it any safer," Rennie says. "You want to avoid that."

The problem, Rennie says, is the gradual disappearance of barrier islands and wetlands between the city and the Gulf of Mexico, a process hastened by development in New Orleans and its suburbs. Building flood barriers to keep water away from homes and businesses, Rennie says, ultimately destroys surrounding wetlands and puts development at risk.

"The natural pattern of flooding supplies nutrients and sediment to wetlands areas, keeping them as kind of a buffer and a natural absorber when a really big storm hits," says Rennie, who published a report in October 2001 that said New Orleans was due to face major flooding from a hurricane.

The answer, he says, is to buttress the flood barriers needed to protect central New Orleans, then eliminate or downsize barriers and canals that sustain development on the city's fringes and in its suburbs. That would allow wetlands to resume their natural role of taking the brunt of smaller storms and protecting the city from catastrophe.

"We're talking about a smaller city, but a safer and hopefully more sustainable one," Rennie says. "The alternative is to continue as we are, losing 60 acres (of wetlands) a day. By 2090, New Orleans would be exposed to the open sea, with no protection at all."

The insurance industry could help direct New Orleans' reconstruction by declining to insure homes or businesses rebuilt in high-risk areas, or by making hurricane insurance easier to acquire if rebuilders agree to make new structures safer.

After Florida was struck by four big hurricanes last year, insurers played a "consultative role" in the rebuilding, says Robert Hartwig, chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute, a group funded by companies, trade associations and agents.

Industry representatives advised governments how to strengthen building codes, set up emergency cash pools and identify the riskiest areas in which to rebuild.

"We don't want to promote 'serial rebuilding,' " Hartwig says. "The industry does weigh in in post-disaster debates."

So, too, may Uncle Sam. Private insurers write most policies that cover hurricane damage, but the U.S. government is the principal insurer against flood loss through its National Flood Insurance Program. But the NFIP, Hartwig says, has become increasingly reluctant to insure replacement dwellings in high-risk areas.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., has said that the federal government "ought to take a second look" at supporting the rebuilding of a city that will remain at risk for hurricanes.

Hastert's office later said that he wasn't advocating abandoning New Orleans, but rather taking risks into account before deciding what to rebuild.

Federal flood insurance will pay up to $250,000 to repair or replace a dwelling and up to $100,000 for lost or damaged contents.

But only about one-third of New Orleans homeowners appear to have taken out flood policies, Hartwig says, apparently trusting that "federal disaster efforts" will bail them out. Given the extent of the damage, and attitudes such as Hastert's, that may not be possible this time.

A tourist mecca

New Orleans also will have to decide how to rebuild its tourism industry.

The city's Convention & Visitors Bureau has opened an office in Baton Rouge, where New Orleans business owners have discussed plans to reopen attractions in the French Quarter and other relatively unscathed parts of the city's restaurant and entertainment district, perhaps by the end of the year.

But even by then, says urban historian Joel Kotkin, tens of thousands of tourists and conventioneers will have been redirected to other destinations. Rather than spending time and money to woo all of them back, Kotkin says, the city could consider trying to attract new industries that could complement a downscaled version of the tourism industry.

That's a tall order: Tourism in New Orleans has employed 80,000 people and each year has attracted 10 million visitors who have spent nearly $5 billion, the Convention & Visitors Bureau says.

"There's always going to be a Mardi Gras - at least, a lot of Americans hope there will always be," says Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History. "But that doesn't mean that has to be the only reason for your economic existence."

New Orleans, he notes, has been a center for government, agricultural trade, banking and transportation at various times since it was founded as a French colony.

"Some of those industries have gone away, but some have migrated to other more energetic places," Kotkin says. "Look at Houston. It was nothing at the start of the 20th century, (but) now it has the port business and the energy industry that used to belong to New Orleans."

History seems to support that point. Major cities - Kobe, Japan, in 1995, San Francisco and Chicago - have suffered huge damage from earthquakes and/or fires and have rebounded smartly.

San Francisco's experience from 1906, detailed in A Crack At The Edge Of The World, by Simon Winchester, appears to parallel many aspects of the New Orleans disaster: extensive destruction, loss of life, looting and the permanent relocation of some residents to nearby places such as Oakland. In the aftermath, San Francisco's economy shifted from manufacturing to finance, law and tourism, a mix that sustains the city to this day.

"As long as they've been around, cities have been flooded, burned, shaken by earthquakes or otherwise destroyed," says Thomas Campanella, a professor of urban planning at the University of North Carolina and co-editor of The Resilient City, a 2005 book that examined the revival of a dozen once-devastated cities. What ensures a city's recovery, he says, is the "extent to which (its) social and cultural fabric persists."

He cites the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, after which "New York City took on a small-town feel" as strangers took in stranded travelers and helped families search for loved ones.

"The extent to which citizens can really come together and help each other will go a long way toward determining how resilient New Orleans will be," he says. New Yorkers, he says, essentially told themselves, "Hey, we can come out of this better than ever."

Whether New Orleanians will adopt that approach remains to be seen.

Winchester says the slow-building nature of the disaster - leaking barriers that led the city to flood over several days - could harm the civic psyche.

"This isn't (like San Francisco's disaster), a boom followed rapidly by a fire before you can even think about it," he says. "This (was) water creeping up, inch by inch, day by day. It sounds maddening."

Not coming back

Shalom Matthews knows what he means.

The 30-year-old hotel auditor says she had never ventured beyond the New Orleans city limits before she and her sister were evacuated to Baton Rouge. Four terrifying nights at the New Orleans convention center were enough to persuade her to leave the city for good, she says.

"I don't know where we'll end up, but we're gonna get out of Louisiana," Matthews says. "We'll never look back."

But other New Orleans residents such as Eric Morgan seem eager to join in its rebuilding. Lounging on the balcony of a home in the city's Lower Garden District last week, Morgan, 46, said he wasn't going anywhere, despite the mayor's order for residents to evacuate.

Morgan, a construction worker, said he had a working generator and enough food and water to last about two months.

"The police came by to ask if we were all right. We're doing fine," he said, nodding to a friend. "We're gonna get (the city) back."

Contributing: Kevin Johnson in New Orleans, Traci Watson in Washington, D.C., and Peter Eisler in McLean, Va.




Copyright © 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.


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This reminds me of Barbara Bush's idiotic statement last week about how this will all work out well for 'them.'  It's fixing to work out well for some, but certainly not 'them.'
I heard some official on NPR this morning say that the 'new' New Orleans "will certainly have a different racial composition."
And then the story went on to talk about plans to make it into a high-tech film and media mecca, with lots of "young, fun people" moving into the area.
A generation of vipers...doesn't the book say that someplace?