USA > Histoire > 2006 > Louisiana / Mississippi > Rebuilding (I)

Lee Celano for The New York Times

Photos show the Bartholomews' home after Hurricane Katrina.
More than 87,100 families whose houses were damaged live in lightweight trailers.

Trailers, Vital After Hurricane, Now Pose Own Risks on Gulf        NYT        16.3.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/national/nationalspecial/16trailers.html?hp&ex=
1142571600&en=d0f0bab8f007d825&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Lee Celano for The New York Times

Marie and Mitchell Bartholomew had to abandon a trailer during a recent storm because it was rocking violently.
"It rattles, it rolls," said Mr. Bartholomew. "It is like telling you to get out."

Trailers, Vital After Hurricane, Now Pose Own Risks on Gulf        NYT        16.3.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/national/nationalspecial/16trailers.html?hp&ex=
1142571600&en=d0f0bab8f007d825&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Mrs. Cappiello's husband, Jimmy,
said he saw sheet metal, trash, wood planks and even the carport from a nearby house flying during a recent storm.

Lee Celano for The New York Times

Trailers, Vital After Hurricane, Now Pose Own Risks on Gulf        NYT        16.3.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/national/nationalspecial/16trailers.html?hp&ex=
1142571600&en=d0f0bab8f007d825&ei=5094&partner=homepage

New Orleans levees repaired

Wed May 31, 2006 9:07 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

VIOLET, Louisiana (Reuters) - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has met its goal of fixing battered levees around New Orleans as the new hurricane season starts, but residents still face flood risks, senior officials said on Wednesday.

Standing on a clay and dirt levee in St. Bernard Parish, which was inundated by floodwater after Hurricane Katrina, Maj. Gen. Ronald Johnson said the Corps repaired 169 miles of the 350 mile system by its June 1 target.

"I think New Orleans can be confident in its hurricane protection system because it is better and it is stronger," Johnson said after a helicopter tour.

"We've spiraled in new information as we've learned some things, working with the technical experts to tell us what it is we need to do to build this system using the best materials, science, engineering and construction practices."

But it is not certain it will protect against all storms, officials said. Katrina came ashore as a Category 3 hurricane.

"There will always be a risk," said Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the Corps' director of civil works. "Another Katrina, on a different track, at a different speed, moving slower with more rainfall could do damage."

A series of levee breaches during the August 29 storm flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and left parishes like St. Bernard and lower Plaquemines with virtually no structure undamaged.

These areas still bear the scars, including gutted homes and residents living in government-supplied trailers as well as many damaged businesses that have yet to reopen.

BIG IMPROVEMENTS

Residents and some independent engineers sharply criticized the Corps for faulty design and poor maintenance of levees.

In its first phase of improvements, the Corps spent more than $800 million to repair levees to pre-Katrina strength or better. Billions of dollars of major improvements are also planned over the next six years, although Washington has yet to approve all the money.

"I've always been critical of the Corps, but I have to tell you the Corps has done an excellent job," said St. Bernard Parish President Henry "Junior" Rodriguez.

"I would only hope that one thing doesn't happen -- that you don't restore this levee to the pre-Katrina condition because it's the best levee that's ever been in St. Bernard Parish"

The parish borders New Orleans to the East. Katrina's storm surge swamped towns like Chalmette and Meraux and killed 130 people. The hurricane killed 1,500 in Louisiana.

New Orleans-area residents were rattled this week by reports that a 400 foot (122 meter) stretch of levee near the town of Buras in southern Louisiana slumped. The Corps said the problem was one of weight and insufficient support at ground level, and that it had been fixed.

Temporary floodgates and pumps at mouths of two canals on the north side of New Orleans are also behind schedule, but officials said short-term fixes are in place if needed.

The state of the levees is an overriding worry as the 2006 hurricane season begins and the ravaged New Orleans region struggles to recover.

"One of the big concerns is that there could be a storm that surpasses Katrina in strength," said Sue Sturgis, author of a hurricane preparedness report by non-profit group Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch.

Moreover, big improvements in the defenses will require far more land, she said. "They can't build Category 4 or 5 protection on the footprint that exists."

(Additional reporting by Peter Henderson)

    New Orleans levees repaired, R, 31.5.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-06-01T010541Z_01_N31265778_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-LEVEES.xml

New Orleans mourns Katrina's dead with jazz funeral

Mon May 29, 2006 9:34 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Yvonne Wise recalled many customers of her clothes alteration business as she marched past smashed homes and rusting, overturned cars of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward to the joyous sounds of a brass band.

Moments before, in New Orleans jazz funeral tradition, the Treme Brass Band's renditions were somber as Wise and dozens of others stood where a levee gave way nine months earlier to the day, sending a torrent through the streets of the Lower Ninth.

There, residents of the neighborhood read the names of more than 1,000 Louisianians killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Wise, 58, recognized some of them.

"It went to the heart, you know? To lose that amount of people, and there are still people unaccounted for," she said as the parade wound around the predominantly black and poor community that remains largely a debris field. "I lost a son, not in Katrina but after Katrina. I think he just basically died of heartbreak."

The Memorial Day service and jazz funeral parade was to pay tribute to the more than 1,500 people killed in the disaster, along with U.S. military personnel killed over the years in battle. It was organized by the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association, formed by residents who aim to make sure their community gets rebuilt.

Jazz funerals end on a lively note with the band belting out signature tunes like "When the Saints go Marching In" and "Down by the Riverside." Monday's version was no exception.

'HISTORY'

"That's history, that's home, that's what we do," said Patricia Jones, president of the neighborhood group. The 31-year-old accountant also recognized some of the names read.

Several pastors were on hand to offer encouragement, and to lead a prayer for the newly repaired concrete floodwall three days before the start of the 2006 hurricane season.

Offering optimism is no small feat with destruction, empty homes and now, yards full of weeds, just steps away. Only a small area of the Lower Ninth has running water restored.

"What we should learn from all this is that we need to transcend or rise above what we can see with our own eyes, from our own perspective," the Rev. Oliver Duvernay of Central Missionary Baptist Church told Reuters. "We need to get up a little higher."

Post-Katrina New Orleans is a city of stark contrast. Some neighborhoods are slowly recovering, their streets lined with government-supplied trailers that are temporary homes for families who are renovating.

But not the Lower Ninth. City officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have warned residents here and in New Orleans East their communities face the greatest risk of flooding again in the event of another hurricane this season.

Attendees at the service were told it was not a time to point fingers over the disaster that struck the neighborhood where black families have owned homes for generations.

But residents could not hide their frustration with governments and the Corps, which have been accused by independent engineers of not adequately maintaining flood protection systems.

Across town, about 200 people gathered near the spot where the 17th Street canal breached, sending salty waters of Lake Pontchartrain through the Lakeview neighborhood. Mourners dropped 1,577 carnations into the canal's muddy water, one for each person who died in the storm last year.

A bagpipe played against the thump of a pile driver pounding supports for flood gates at the opening of the canal onto the lake. The gates are designed to stop a storm surge from swamping the canal.

(Additional reporting by Peter Henderson)

    New Orleans mourns Katrina's dead with jazz funeral, R, 29.5.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-05-29T233542Z_01_N29284113_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-MEMORIAL.xml

In Big Uneasy, Exit Planning Is Obsession

May 27, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, May 26 — It begins as a conversation, perhaps over dinner, at the end of the day: Where are you going this year? Then, on to the specifics. Which relative? Which hotel? How many suitcases?

As a symptom of the general uneasiness here, this year's hurricane evacuation talk ranks among the most acute. Within it are the immediate and long-term threats: the unnamed storm everyone may soon have to flee, and the grim likelihood that the next big one could be the knockout punch for this struggling city.

"Everybody I talk to asks, 'What and where is your escape pod?' " said Joseph Maselli Jr., a lawyer downtown. "The talk at lunchtime and in elevators is not, 'What route,' but, 'How soon are you going to leave, what's your plan, where are you going to go?' "

Never has a coming hurricane season generated as much anxiety, many here say. The official start to the season is Thursday but the unofficial worrying has long since begun.

On top of the ever-present reminders of last year's catastrophe — ruined neighborhoods, piles of debris, empty streets — the new threat is proving to be too much for some. Everyone here, it seems, knows someone who is picking up and leaving New Orleans for good.

Many who swear they will not abandon the city have at least set up an alternative home-place somewhere else. Mr. Maselli said he knew "dozens" of people who had already secured a getaway spot — an apartment or a modest second home.

"It's the fear of a second big shoe dropping this quickly," he said. "Everyone says, 'Please, God, don't hit us this year.' "

Mr. Maselli and his wife have been fixing up a family home in Natchez, Miss., up the river, as their hurricane getaway.

The fear may be particularly acute among those relatively unaffected by Hurricane Katrina — people living in the Uptown neighborhood, for instance. Will it be their turn next? Might the Mississippi River levees fail this time?

"Everyone I talk to is filled with a great deal of anxiety," said Anne Milling, who started Women of the Storm, a group that seeks to bring attention to continuing problems from Hurricane Katrina.

"I think it's going to be difficult this year," Mrs. Milling said. "Most all of our friends have made plans. It's remarkable to me: people who have never even thought about it have made plans. I think that now people are looking at a lot of things differently."

At a social gathering this week, "it was discussed tremendously," Mrs. Milling said. "I couldn't get over it. That was the conversation: 'Where are we going to go?' "

Such discussions often end with a vow not to return to the same place as last year, because it was not enough like New Orleans.

A recently completed survey by the University of New Orleans on attitudes after Hurricane Katrina detected unprecedented levels of anxiety about what lies ahead for this city, particularly compared with a similar sampling three years ago.

"I can't tell you how many people are devising an exit strategy," said the director of the survey, Susan Howell, a political scientist. "They don't see a future. Life is too stressful."

Strikingly, Dr. Howell said, the random survey of 470 people in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes, conducted in March and April, was carried out among "people in the best conditions," those with relatively intact dwellings.

Though much of the political talk has focused on how to get people to return to the city, Dr. Howell said she noted a challenge that is perhaps equally serious, and that had gone largely unnoticed: "the steady drip out," particularly of middle-class people who see an economy years away from recovery.

The daily strain of life among the ruins is proving too much for many people.

Jay and Lin Kayser, a doctor and a teacher, respectively, live on one of the few unflooded blocks near Lake Pontchartrain — an island of relative normality. "Between my street and Freret Street," several miles to the south, Dr. Kayser said, "all of that was decimated. And that's our world." He and his wife are leaving New Orleans, after decades here.

"The thought of me being 57, waiting for it to be normal again — it's an emotional thing," Dr. Kayser said. "I just don't want to worry about hurricanes and flooding when I'm 70. I just decided I didn't have it in me to stay."

Another doctor who is departing for good, a resident of unflooded Uptown, spoke of doing volunteer cleanup work in one of the hard-hit areas.

"It was heartbreaking," said the doctor, Sam Money. "It was one of these things where, we live in a nice little cocoon, but so much of the city was devastated."

Still, for everyone leaving, or thinking of doing so, thousands more are preparing to hunker down, or at least get ready for another temporary exile.

At the hurricane-preparation stands of stores like Lowe's, and at sporting goods stores selling canoes, boats and boots, clerks report a steady though unpanicked business, so far.

When the first storms strike the Gulf of Mexico this year, Vera Triplett, a resident of the city's hard-hit Gentilly section, plans to be ready. "Our philosophy is, if we need to go, we go," Ms. Triplett said.

Her plans for evacuating are far more precise, "thought out," than they have ever been, said Ms. Triplett, vice president of her neighborhood's civic association. But planning has not dispelled worry.

"There is an underlying fear and anxiety," she said, "because most of the people around here are die-hard New Orleanians."

Some people plan to leave for the entire hurricane season — an approach that harks back to the 19th century, when yellow fever killed thousands here and many abandoned New Orleans for the months when it was likely to be dangerous.

Ann Strub and her husband, Dick, have bought a house in North Carolina. They are leaving New Orleans on Thursday, and they will not return until hurricane season ends.

"We've got lists of everything were going to take," Mrs. Strub said. "Mainly lots of papers."

A resident of Esplanade Avenue, the grand old Creole boulevard, she came through Hurricane Katrina relatively unscathed, but now, like many others here, she is prepared for the worst.

"If it floods in the French Quarter, we're done for," Mrs. Strub said.

"Our whole world is different," she continued. "We live differently. It's very scary."

    In Big Uneasy, Exit Planning Is Obsession, NYT, 27.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/us/27psyche.html?hp&ex=1148788800&en=db273c3cb80f7d93&ei=5094&partner=homepage


 

    Levees Rebuilt Just in Time, but Doubts Remain        NYT        25.5.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/us/25flood.html?hp&ex=1148616000&en=9fbfe1275d526c4e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Levees Rebuilt Just in Time, but Doubts Remain

May 25, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS, May 22 — In a breathless finale that has been called one of this generation's greatest adventures in civil engineering, the Army Corps of Engineers has all but completed its repairs to this city's ruined levee system.

With just days to go before the beginning of the hurricane season, the corps' $800 million effort has even improved the system in many ways, engineering experts say, with tougher concrete flood walls, brawny new canal gates and more than 150 miles of new or repaired levees.

But even though all sides agree that the corps has largely achieved its goal, independent engineers say it is the goal that is the real problem. New Orleans is still very much at risk, they say, because the level of protection the corps has reached is still not as strong as the city needs.

Many experts view this hurricane season, which begins on June 1, with trepidation, and hope that the system is not put to a test like Hurricane Katrina before further improvements can be made.

"Some of these things were poorly designed and were almost pre-ordained to fail," said Wayne Clough, the head of a National Research Council team that formed at the request of the Department of Defense in order to assess the corps' investigation of the disaster. Parts that did not fail in Hurricane Katrina, he said, could still have been weakened by the stress of last year's storms. "Just because they've been restored to their condition pre-Katrina doesn't mean they are perfectly safe," he said.

Raymond Seed, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of the corps' most consistent critics, said he did not doubt that the system was, to use the mantra of the corps, "better and stronger" in many ways. But, he asked, "Better enough?"

Professor Seed and other experts who have studied the crazy quilt of levees, flood walls, pumps and gates that have been in the process of being built for more than 40 years now say that they were never adequate to protect hundreds of thousands of people in an urban setting and that the levees themselves are now known to be fundamentally flawed.

Corps officials say that repairing the damage of the last storm while preparing for new ones is a challenge that their organization is up to. But Maj. Gen. Don T. Riley, the director of civil works for the corps, said he could not guarantee that the system would not fail again.

"You don't know what kind of storm you'll get," he said in a recent interview, emphasizing the need for good evacuation planning.

Gen. Robert Crear, the head of the Mississippi Valley Division of the corps, said, "We know Katrina was not the worst possible case." What happens from here onward, General Crear said, "is a continuous program to improve" the system over time.

The corps' race to complete the $800 million in projects that it took on after last year's storms has been a 24/7 marathon rich with tension, apprehension, slipping deadlines and quick-and-dirty workarounds. The sheer scope of the work can only be fully appreciated from the air.

Where levees were breached and battered away by Hurricane Katrina's surge and waves, millions of cubic yards of new soil have been put into place along more than half the 350-mile levee system, from the shores of Lake Pontchartrain to the swamps at the southern tip of Louisiana.

Sturdy new gates stand at the mouths of the city's three major drainage canals. Storm-damaged pumps are being renewed, along with New Orleanians' capacity to hope.

In the city's ruined Lower Ninth Ward, 4,000 feet of new levee stands, the old weak I-shaped flood wall replaced with stronger walls that resemble an inverted T. For long stretches of the renewed system, the ground behind the flood walls is now armored with a white span of concrete intended to keep any water that makes it over the top from scouring away the earth.

To the east of the city, at the line of defense facing Lake Borgne, a long fat ribbon of freshly compacted earth, is a levee that will end up being 20 feet high and 11 miles long. Along its seemingly endless stretch of brown soil are yellowish sections, where local soil has been supplemented with tough Mississippi clay.

Along Lake Pontchartrain, at the mouths of the drainage canals that cut deep into New Orleans, enormous new floodgates are nearing completion, intended to keep the storm surge from putting the strain on the faulty flood walls that breached in three places and caused much of the flooding in the central city. That ambitious project has slipped behind schedule. Pumps to drain the canal waters when the gates are closed are late at the 17th Street Canal, and the gates are behind schedule at the London Avenue Canal.

But Col. Lewis F. Setliff III, the commander of the task force that has been rebuilding the system, said he was confident that the projects would be completed within weeks and that until then, an unseasonably early storm surge could be blocked, if necessary, with sheet pilings driven across the canals. Portable diesel-powered pumps would draw water over to the lake side.

It is far from a perfect solution. More powerful, permanent pumping stations are still years away and would have to be approved by Congress. Until then, the level of water in the canals must be kept low, and pumping capacity from the neighborhood pumping stations will have to be reduced — a prospect that greatly raises the risk of street flooding, but avoids catastrophic breaching.

Getting this far required tough talk with the contractors who carry out the corps' plans and 12-hour days at the Federal Reserve Bank Building downtown where Colonel Setliff's task force set up shop.

At the beginning of the work on the western end of the levee, in St. Bernard Parish, the contractor, Granite Construction, fell well behind schedule. The corps had what some workers called a "come-to-Jesus" meeting with Granite about the schedule, and even shook the company by publishing a request for new bids. By some estimates, Granite increased its pace by an estimated 40-fold, and is completing its part of the levee system on schedule.

Some problems remain. The rebuilt eastern wall of the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal, which breached and destroyed the Lower Ninth Ward, is now higher than a long stretch of the old wall on the western side of the canal that did not fail during Hurricane Katrina.

In case of a storm with high waters, the western side would overflow first, sending floodwaters into the city.

The corps has asked Congress to approve financing for new gates that could be closed to block surges in that large canal, also known as the Industrial Canal. But that additional level of protection is years away.

Although the corps will continue to raise and toughen the flood walls after the June 1 deadline, it has begun to study the larger question of how to improve the overall protection level. An interim report will come out next month, but the study will not be completed until December 2007. And any new initiatives would have to be approved by Congress.

It was in 1965, after Hurricane Betsy flooded New Orleans, that Congress first approved the city's hurricane protection system, authorizing a system based on what the corps would call "the most severe storm that is considered reasonably characteristic of a region." The corps built the system to protect against a hurricane with wind speeds of what is now considered a Category 2 storm, or up to 110 miles an hour. In many ways, though, that standard fell far short of the region's most severe storms like Hurricane Camille in 1969 or the storm that devastated Galveston, Tex., in 1900.

Over the years, experts and federal agencies have urged the corps to build to higher standards, but corps officials did not change course. Corps officials say that they build what Congress authorizes them to build and that shifting large projects is difficult once they are under way.

"The impression that we get is that the corps, once it's locked on a track, will not take input from outside groups," said Ivor van Heerden, a founder of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center.

Now, Mr. van Heerden said, "It seems like Louisiana is now having to pay for not getting it right the first time."

He said the system at this point could only fully protect against a Category 2 storm.

The degree of vulnerability was underscored on Monday, when an independent team of researchers led by engineering professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and supported by the National Science Foundation released a report that found the hurricane protection system riddled with errors in design, construction and maintenance — a pattern of inattention to safety that caused the system to crumble in a hurricane that should have, for the most part, caused little more than wind damage and a day or so of street flooding.

"The overall New Orleans flood protection system," Professor Seed said in a briefing last weekend, "must be considered suspect."

    Levees Rebuilt Just in Time, but Doubts Remain, NYT, 25.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/us/25flood.html?hp&ex=1148616000&en=9fbfe1275d526c4e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A storm of trouble

Posted 5/24/2006 12:15 AM ET
USA Today
By Marilyn Adams

MIAMI — As coastal residents nervously await the start of a new hurricane season in June, they're confronting another fright: the exorbitant price and short supply of insurance for wind damage.

Huge losses from Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 have sent the homeowners insurance industry into a panicked retreat from the USA's coastline. In Florida, which was hit by eight major hurricanes in two years, insurers are refusing to renew hundreds of thousands of homeowners policies to reduce exposure to claims.

Residents, many of whom are still patching up last year's hurricane damage, now face breathtaking insurance rate increases.

In Key West, homeowner Teri Johnston's wind storm premium has more than doubled from last year. The cost this year to insure her 1,500-square-foot home against fire, wind and flood: $14,742.

Ida Franklin, 89, has lived in her little North Miami house for 39 years. She's paying $5,100 a year in premiums for homeowners insurance, up $1,000 from last year. Her insurance company paid $10,000 to settle a 2005 hurricane claim. But she had to spend $10,000 of her own money to fix damage that her bare-bones policy didn't cover. Just as worrisome: a critical shortage of contractors and roofing materials. Seven months after Hurricane Wilma ripped off Franklin's roof shingles, work finally began this week.

Franklin, a widow, shares the house and expenses with her daughter and son-in-law, Ellen and Clifford Wurtz. "If my kids hadn't moved in with me, I couldn't afford to stay here," she says.

As rates go higher and coverage is terminated, homeowners with mortgages have no choice but to find coverage at whatever price. Lenders require it.

Several states along the East and Gulf coasts, including Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Massachusetts, offer state-run insurance programs for coastal homeowners who can't get private insurance. Florida's program has grown so big, it's poised to become the largest insurer of homes in the state. But public programs are no bargain; most offer bare-bones coverage at a high price.

Many coastal residents are trading higher deductibles for premiums slightly lower than they'd otherwise be. Homeowners who have paid for their homes don't have to carry wind storm insurance, and some owners are opting to take the risk and do without.

A coastal wave

The insurance upheaval is not limited to Florida or other Southeastern states typically rattled by hurricanes. Alarmed by forecasts of more major hurricanes in coming years, insurance companies are canceling policies and refusing to issue new ones as far north as New York and Massachusetts and as far west as Texas.

Edward Liddy, CEO of Allstate, the USA's second-largest property insurer, says the scope of losses from Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes last year — nearly $58 billion — surprised the insurance industry.

"That told the entire industry that we need to do something differently," he says. Allstate paid $5 billion in claims for 2005 hurricane damage.

Liddy's company recently announced it won't write new policies in metropolitan New York City and won't renew nearly 30,000 policies in that region.

It has been nearly 70 years since a major hurricane struck the New York area. Today, the insured value of coastal real estate in that area is almost as high as that along the entire Florida coast. Allstate is most exposed among the insurers, with a 25% market share in the New York metropolitan area.

Retired New York City police officer Owen Reiter of Staten Island couldn't believe it when he recently got a letter from Allstate.

It said his homeowners policy, in force for 21 years, would not be renewed because of last year's hurricanes in the Southeast. In the letter, Allstate said it believes hurricanes "are possible all along the East Coast in coming years."

When Reiter called another insurance company, he was told his premium would be $975 a year, 80% more than he was paying Allstate. He's still shopping for coverage. "It's unfair," he says.

What's alarming insurance companies such as Allstate is not just the record insurance claims paid, but also the prospect of more frequent and more violent storms. The steamy tropical air and ocean waters that breed hurricanes off the coast of Africa are more conducive to hurricane formation than usual, the National Hurricane Center says. Government hurricane scientists here Monday predicted 2006 will be a "very active" hurricane season, with eight to 10 hurricanes forming in the Atlantic.

The scientists also have said hurricanes could pound the Atlantic and Gulf coasts with more frequency and intensity for a decade or more to come.

Scientists say the water in areas of the Atlantic Ocean where hurricanes form is running 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Also, crisscrossing winds that normally help prevent tropical disturbances from organizing into spiraling hurricanes are absent.

Meanwhile, more Americans now live along the coast than ever before, and the value of their homes has skyrocketed.

Not-so-sunny outlook

No place has been hit harder by the insurance industry's retreat than Florida, which has 2,100 miles of coastline and nearly 18 million residents. This is not Florida's first homeowners insurance crisis. That came after Hurricane Andrew demolished or damaged more than 100,000 homes near Miami in August 1992. Eleven small insurers failed.

But, since 2004, insurers have paid $30 billion in Florida hurricane claims, wiping out years of profits here.

State Farm, the state's largest private property insurer, has requested a 70% average rate increase statewide, and a 95% rate increase for mobile homes. It won't renew 39,000 wind storm insurance policies, and is canceling all its condominium building policies, about 1,500 statewide.

"We're taking these steps so we can stay in Florida," says State Farm spokesman Chris Neal.

Meanwhile, Allstate, in addition to the New York pullback, announced it will not renew 120,000 Florida policies when they come up for renewal later this year. That's on top of 95,000 Florida policies Allstate decided not to renew last year. In Louisiana, many insurers are declining to write new policies in coastal areas south of Interstate 10.

Robert Hunter, insurance director for the Consumer Federation of America and a former insurance regulator, calls the insurers' pullback in Florida and elsewhere "bizarre."

"Insurance companies are supposed to bring stability to a situation, not instability," he says.

He thinks Florida should join other hurricane-prone states such as Louisiana and Texas to form a regional wind storm insurance program to spread the risk.

The scramble by Allstate, State Farm, Nationwide and other companies doesn't mean big insurers are losing money. Despite hurricane-related losses in several states, the property-casualty insurance industry posted a record $43 billion in profits in 2005. But the same year, homeowners insurers paid out $7.3 billion more in claims than they collected in premiums, according to the Insurance Information Institute.

Liddy, of Allstate, says the pullback in homeowners coverage is justified.

"If you look at the East Coast from Maine to Florida, there's a lot of exposure there," he says.

Insurance companies' hurricane losses have reverberated through the reinsurance market, where insurance companies go to insure themselves against huge, unanticipated losses. If insurers can buy reinsurance now, it's at least twice as expensive as a year ago, the Insurance Information Institute says. That's helping drive homeowners' rate increases.

High, higher ...

After years of extraordinary insurance rate increases, Johnston, the Key West homeowner, can't bear the thought of another.

"People think we live in million-dollar mansions," says Johnston, president of a homeowners group pushing for lower rates. "I'm living in a little concrete block house."

Johnston, who still has a mortgage, says her wind policy alone costs $11,856, more than double last year's premium. It's almost four times what she paid in 2004. Her deductible is $18,000, meaning she couldn't file a claim unless wind damage were to exceed that. She has never filed a wind damage claim.

Her wind storm policy is issued by Citizens Property Insurance, Florida's state-run insurer of last resort and the only company writing wind insurance in the Florida Keys.

Because of the retreat by private companies, Citizens is about to become the largest property insurer statewide, surpassing State Farm. Citizens is on the verge of inheriting as many as 300,000 policies from Poe Financial, a Tampa insurer forced this month to liquidate under the weight of last year's claims. If all those go to Citizens, it will swell to 1.1 million policies.

"If Citizens did not exist, there would be chaos here," says its chairman, Bruce Douglas, a Jacksonville businessman.

Citizens has requested a 45% average statewide rate increase for wind storm policies in coastal areas. In some parts of South Florida near Miami and Fort Lauderdale, rates could jump more than 60%. Fearing an unraveling of homeowners' insurance safety net, Gov. Jeb Bush last week signed sweeping insurance reform legislation. The new law allocates $1.2 billion for Citizens and for preparedness programs. Citizens was left with a $1.7 billion deficit after last year's claims.

The new law sets up matching grants to help lure new insurers to Florida. It requires the entire state to meet stronger building codes.

It also provides funds to help homeowners harden their houses against hurricanes with metal shutters over windows, tie-downs for roofs, stronger garage doors and other defenses.

Florida Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, the state's former insurance regulator, advocates a federal catastrophe insurance plan financed by homeowners insurance premiums everywhere.

It would establish a fund to help pay for losses resulting from natural disasters whose damage exceeds a state's financial ability to recover, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards and ice storms.

"This is a national problem," says Gallagher, a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor. "We need national answers."

    A storm of trouble, NYT, 24.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/insurance/2006-05-23-hurricane-insurance-usat_x.htm

Judge Steps In for Poor Inmates Without Justice Since Hurricane

May 23, 2006
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — Hurricane Katrina took his house, his courtroom and, Judge Arthur L. Hunter Jr. says, his faith in the way his city treats poor people facing criminal charges.

Nine months after the storm, more than a thousand jailed defendants have had no access to lawyers, the judge says, because the public defender system is desperately short of money and staffing, without a computer system or files or even a list of clients.

And so Judge Hunter, 46, a former New Orleans police officer, is moving to let some of the defendants without lawyers out of jail. He has suspended prosecutions in most cases involving public defenders. And, alone among a dozen criminal court judges, he has granted a petition to free a prisoner facing serious charges without counsel, and is considering others.

It is, he said in an interview, his duty under the Constitution. "Something needs to be done, it's that simple," he said. "I'm the lightning rod, yes."

The district attorney's office opposes letting defendants back out on the street, saying the court should find them lawyers. But Judge Hunter said he has had little luck finding private firms willing to take on most indigents' cases, and there appears to be no money to pay their expenses.

The public defenders' office, run not by City Hall but by a parish board, is basically broke. Louisiana, alone among the states, relies mainly on local court fees — mostly surcharges on traffic tickets — to finance its public defenders, according to the National Legal Aid and Defender Association.

It is a financing system that Judge Hunter and Calvin Johnson, the chief judge of the criminal court in New Orleans, have recently found to be unconstitutional because it forces poor people to pay for the system. The Louisiana attorney general's office says it plans to appeal those decisions.

In Orleans Parish, the traffic and the tickets both evaporated after Hurricane Katrina. Most of the office's 42 part-time public defenders were laid off. And they were, by many accounts, inadequate to begin with; a new study sponsored by the federal Justice Department says that the office probably needs 70 full-time lawyers, a computer system for case management, support staff and a reliable source of financing.

The study calls for scrapping the current system, which an appeals court decision recently described as "overburdened, underfunded and perhaps unconstitutional." The public defenders' office in New Orleans is slated to receive a $2.8 million federal grant on May 31 — but the study says it needs more than $10 million to get up and running and operate for a year.

The criminal justice system in New Orleans was notoriously troubled long before the storms, and if anything, it is now worse. Officials hope to resume jury trials soon for the first time since Hurricane Katrina, but still do not know if they will have enough courtrooms, jurors or witnesses to proceed.

On a recent Friday morning, in a borrowed courtroom in the Federal Building downtown, Judge Hunter listened to testimony from Ronald Dunn, 43, who was arrested on Aug. 19, 10 days before Hurricane Katrina hit, on a charge of possessing crack cocaine. Like the vast majority of the defendants in criminal court here, he cannot afford to hire a lawyer, and so would normally be represented by a public defender.

Handcuffed, shackled and wearing jailhouse orange, Mr. Dunn told the court that as the water rose, he spent four frightening days without food in the House of Detention, and was then moved from prison to prison, losing touch with his family.

In the nine months since the hurricane, he said, he has never even spoken to a lawyer. "I don't have a lawyer," Mr. Dunn said. "I never been to court." Without a lawyer a defendant cannot even plead guilty.

Pamela R. Metzger, the director of the Criminal Court Clinic at Tulane Law School, has petitioned the court to release Mr. Dunn and more than a dozen other poor prisoners in similar circumstances. Releasing them would not hamper the prosecution, she argued, and would give them an opportunity to try to gather evidence in their own defense. And, she said later, "to be free from imprisonment and punishment without due process of law."

But David S. Pipes, an assistant district attorney, argued against releasing Mr. Dunn, whom he described as a five-time felon. (Court documents show that Mr. Dunn has been arrested 10 times since 1990 and has pleaded guilty to previous drug and theft charges.)

More broadly, Mr. Pipes said: "The proper solution for someone who does not have an attorney is to get them an attorney. Releasing them does not cure anything and does not protect their rights."

Of course, everyone in the courtroom could describe a life turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Pipes is working out of an office in an old nightclub because the district attorney's office flooded. Professor Metzger is commuting to New Orleans from Atlanta.

And Judge Hunter is driving back and forth to Tampa, Fla., where his family fled, or Baton Rouge, where he has bought a house where he plans to live with his wife and teenage son, a cousin and a widowed aunt.

Over the years, the district attorney and others have accused Judge Hunter of being too soft on defendants, and of having too high an acquittal rate in nonjury trials. (He says he is simply fair.) But even longtime critics like the independent Metropolitan Crime Commission say that when it comes to the public defenders' office, he is doing the right thing.

"I don't have any problem with what he's trying to do there," said Rafael C. Goyeneche III, president of the commission. "He's demanding that it function properly."

The battle over indigent defendants is proceeding on several levels. Last month, Judge Hunter granted a petition for release filed by Professor Metzger on behalf of Donald Crockett, a mentally ill man accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm. He has been in jail since October 2003.

The district attorney's office appealed, and an appellate court found that additional procedural steps were required. Though it reversed the judge's decision, the court suggested such releases might be possible once the program completely runs out of money. Professor Metzger said she planned to appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has submitted a budget that would double, to $20 million, the appropriation for defenders around the state, and a legislative task force set up before Hurricane Katrina continues to work on the issue.

The Louisiana State Bar Association has made fixing the public defender system a priority and has paid for both another study and for the salaries of three defenders for a year, said Frank X. Neuner, president of the bar association. In Orleans Parish, the criminal court judges have appointed new directors (including Professor Metzger) to oversee the public defenders' program.

Judge Johnson, who runs the criminal court and is a former public defender himself, has been working to build a consensus for changing the system, something he said he has supported for years. He was the first judge after Hurricane Katrina to order an investigation into whether the public defenders could adequately represent the poor.

But having Judge Hunter halt prosecutions and consider freeing inmates has helped focus attention on the issue, Judge Johnson said.

"You have to have some guy out there rattling the saber, absolutely," Judge Johnson said. "I think the message was loud, clear and necessary."

    Judge Steps In for Poor Inmates Without Justice Since Hurricane, NYT, 23.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/us/23court.html?hp&ex=1148443200&en=cd7bc9da0931fb9d&ei=5094&partner=homepage


 

The Vote in New Orleans        NYT        May 21, 2006

    An Incumbent Proves Resilient in New Orleans        NYT        22.5.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/us/22orleans.html?hp&ex=
1148356800&en=c45d2b5c611430b1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

An Incumbent Proves Resilient in New Orleans

May 22, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

NEW ORLEANS, May 21 — The extraordinary circumstances stacked against Mayor C. Ray Nagin by Hurricane Katrina — a displaced electorate, an emptied city treasury, a punishing leadership test — could not finally trump a constant force of New Orleans politics, the power of incumbency.

By a margin of four percentage points, voters re-elected Mr. Nagin on Saturday to guide the city through the next four years, having rejected the temptation to change leaders in the midst of a crisis.

Mr. Nagin drew the vast majority of the votes of black residents, many of whom said they wanted to retain a black incumbent rather than see City Hall in the hands of a white mayor for the first time since 1978. At the same time, enough voters in the city's whitest precincts decided they were comfortable with the unscripted personality of a mayor who has dominated headlines, nearly tripling his support in those precincts from last month's primary. Those were areas in which Mr. Nagin's challenger, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, needed virtually unanimous support to win.

Anthony Young, a black evacuee living in Jackson, Miss., who returned to the city on Saturday to vote for Mr. Nagin, spoke for many voters in explaining his support.

"He's the only one that stayed through the storm," Mr. Young said. "He's got the experience. He's got a better idea of how to carry people through it."

Pres Kabacoff, a white real estate developer and Landrieu supporter, said that the way Mr. Nagin conducted himself after the primary restored much of his credibility and attracted conservative whites leery of Mr. Landrieu's liberal reputation.

"He showed the style and charisma and sort of the glib way of handling himself that caused those people on the fence to just say, 'I'll stick with him,' " Mr. Kabacoff said.

Despite the advantages of holding office, however, Mr. Nagin was no ordinary incumbent. His off-the-cuff style in the national spotlight earned him blistering criticism and outright mockery. He was far outspent by Mr. Landrieu, whose name recognition rivaled the mayor's. In a crowded primary last month, the mayor failed to win 40 percent of the vote, prompting many people to declare his campaign moribund, if not dead.

The candidates split the absentee vote cast by . thousands of voters displaced from the city by Hurricane Katrina, who were expected to be far more supportive of the mayor.

At a victory news conference on Sunday, Mr. Nagin compared himself to David facing Goliath, saying he had learned that "a well-placed slingshot is very effective." Asked what he would say to those who were surprised at his re-election, he replied, "They don't get the uniqueness of New Orleans, they don't really get what really happened during Katrina — all they saw was those awful images — and they really don't get Ray Nagin." Then he added, "Sometimes I don't get Ray Nagin, so it's all right."

Some political analysts here said the victory was a triumph of political acumen and charisma; others said it came down to simple demographics in a city whose electorate is predominantly black. A preliminary examination of the results showed that the mayor won nearly 80 percent of the black vote, while his white opponent won about the same percentage of the white vote, said Greg Rigamer, an elections analyst who has worked for the Louisiana secretary of state.

"This was a case of, My core constituency is bigger than your core constituency," Mr. Rigamer said.

Still, a crossover vote of more than 20 percent is considered high, said Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans, especially since only 5 percent of whites voted for Mr. Nagin in the primary.

One factor was a series of forums that exposed voters to the contrast in the candidates' personalities. Mr. Landrieu was scripted, careful and short on specifics that might have attracted white voters who were dissatisfied with the mayor's leadership, while Mr. Nagin's knowledge of the intricacies of the rebuilding effort allowed him to speak with authority and in detail.

"But that's not the usual incumbency advantage," Dr. Howell said. "The usual incumbency advantage is money, and that in a crisis you like the way this person is performing."

Mr. Nagin also received the endorsement of the only significant Republican candidate in the primary, Rob Couhig, and of Virginia Boulet, a corporate lawyer who also a candidate. Mr. Couhig and Ms. Boulet are white. "They can't really just deliver their voters, but they can give a cue that Nagin is acceptable to business," Dr. Howell said. Mr. Nagin said Sunday that he intended to give the two candidates a role in his administration.

Voting along racial lines may be a tradition here, but it is not how Mr. Nagin was elected the first time. In 2002, his first step into politics, he was supported by New Orleans businesses and won more than 80 percent of the white vote but only about 40 percent of the black vote. This time around, the trials of Hurricane Katrina, and the criticism heaped upon him by outsiders, garnered sympathy among blacks.

"New Orleans has a pretty significant poor and undereducated population who for a long time dealt with adversity," Mr. Rigamer said. "With respect to his performance, a lot of the people who were most severely affected were a little more tolerant."

Turnout in the run-off was 38 percent of registered voters, an increase of about 5,000 votes over the primary, when 36 percent of registered voters cast ballots.

It was not clear how many evacuees had voted, or how they had split, because many evacuees had returned to the city on Saturday to vote. But the number of absentee ballots cast was up by more than 2,300. (That number includes votes cast early in New Orleans, but does not include evacuees who traveled to New Orleans to vote on Election Day.) The absentee votes split almost 50-50 between the two candidates, with Mr. Nagin leading by less than 200 votes.

It is not clear why the absentee electorate did not follow the larger pattern. But one study of voting in the primary showed that evacuees living closer to New Orleans were more likely to be white, and also more likely to vote. That was in part a matter of access — there were satellite early voting stations throughout Louisiana, but none in Houston or other cities with heavy concentrations of black evacuees.

The business leaders who supported Mr. Nagin's first run for office deserted him this time in part because of what they perceived as his lack of credibility with Baton Rouge and Washington, where officials have enormous influence over the city's efforts to rebuild.

But Mr. Nagin played down concerns that businesses would leave the city because of his re-election, saying many companies had expressed an interest in opportunities .

"Once they get over the shock of me winning this election," he said with a laugh, "I think we're going to be O.K."

    An Incumbent Proves Resilient in New Orleans, NYT, 22.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/us/22orleans.html?hp&ex=1148356800&en=c45d2b5c611430b1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Man in the News

New Start for Familiar Face: Clarence Ray Nagin

May 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, May 21 — As he delivered his victory speech on Saturday night, Mayor C. Ray Nagin was interrupted by an overexuberant supporter.

"Ladies and gentleman, somebody put a muzzle on this brother to my right," Mr. Nagin said coolly, breaking into his own speech. He went right on into a quick litany of thank-yous, wisecracks, self-mocking reproaches and appeals for peace.

Mr. Nagin was as unruffled in his upset victory as he had been facing defeat, better-financed opponents, a cataclysmic flood, the defection of onetime supporters, the partial destruction of his city and skeptical reporters.

"I'm on my boogie board," he said on Sunday after Mass at the historic St. Peter Claver Church in the Tremé neighborhood. "I'm just going to keep on riding."

Mr. Nagin is a mayor who has elevated being cool to a policy as well as a style. He improvises on the stump and — some former staff members say — in his second-floor suite at City Hall as well. Critics say this has served him and his city only intermittently well during his first four years, as some promises failed to materialize, crucial staff members frequently left or were forced out, and the road through Hurricane Katrina and after proved rough.

On Sunday, Mr. Nagin promised a new beginning, a different staff and an economic boom once federal reconstruction money started flowing, perhaps by late summer.

"We now have the economic stimulus that will happen at unprecedented levels in the city, for us to expand the economic pie and for everyone to get a piece of that pie," Mr. Nagin said at a news conference. "This is our shot. This is our time."

Though he did not address during the campaign the central issue of whether some ruined neighborhoods should be abandoned, he hinted on Sunday for the first time that this might happen by default. The difficulties of reconstruction in some areas could make rebuilding an enormous task, he suggested.

"Reality is setting in, in a lot of neighborhoods," Mr. Nagin said. "People are going back and saying 'Wow, that's pretty awesome. I'm not sure whether I can rebuild in this area.' "

For all the post-election exuberance, however, Mr. Nagin's own complicated trajectory — before, during and since the hurricane — offers only ambiguous confirmation of his brighter vision for the city and his administration of it.

On August 28, 2005 — the day before Hurricane Katrina hit — Mr. Nagin's most notable accomplishments to date were to have run an administration largely free of scandal and to have removed politics from municipal contracting.

In a city with a small economy, where the budget had for years represented an irresistible temptation to City Hall's friends, relatives and hangers-on, this was considered no small thing, and Mr. Nagin seemed a safe bet for re-election the next year.

Less passive accomplishments were harder to identify, however. He came into office in 2002 a political unknown, the highly paid head of Cox Cable in New Orleans whose long ascent from humble beginnings in the Sixth Ward had not carried him into the intersecting inner circles of cash and politics in the city.

He was divorced from the alphabet soup of black political organizations that dominated politics for years in this city. And he set himself up as a dragon-slayer, going after what was widely perceived — and partly confirmed by subsequent investigations — as a municipality for sale.

Political professionals at first considered him a longshot, just as they did this year when his post-hurricane gaffes had apparently sunk him low. But Mr. Nagin astonished the professionals and everyone else in 2002 when he came in first. And now he has astonished them again.

Clarence Ray Nagin was born on June 11, 1956, at Charity Hospital, to a father who cut fabric in a clothing factory and a mother who ran a lunch counter. Mr. Nagin attended an integrated high school but went to college at Tuskegee University in Alabama, one of the most venerable of the nation's historically black institutions and one with a distinctive ethic of personal success.

Still today, Mr. Nagin's rhetoric is infused with a worshipful regard for business acumen and the private sector, an attitude that initially endeared him to the white executives who mostly deserted him after Hurricane Katrina.

But some of Mr. Nagin's grand, market-oriented ideas, like selling the airport or developing the riverfront, stalled. A drive to crack down on municipal corruption that was Mr. Nagin's calling-card in 2002 resulted in little more than the arrest of some cab drivers and city employees accused of abusing the permit system for taxis.

His staff choices have generally been reckoned unsuccessful, ranging from a chief administrative officer fired early in his administration, Kimberly Williamson Butler, who wound up in jail this spring after defying state judges, to the police chief, Edwin P. Compass III, who gained international notoriety during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for exaggerating the extent of the city's anarchy. He, too, was let go.

Many of these difficulties, insiders and observers say, stem from a businessman's habit of going it alone and not consulting others. Mr. Nagin seemed to half acknowledge this difficulty at the Sunday news conference, though he minimized it. "It's just my style that gets people to calling me a lone wolf," he said.

Those close to Mr. Nagin, while acknowledging some of his political faults, say that now, with unprecedented offers of help pouring into New Orleans, the mayor has a renewed chance at helping his city.

"Pre-Katrina it was hard to get good people in government service," said John Georges, a longtime friend who runs a food distribution business. "He never really attracted a good team. I think he's got a huge opportunity to bring in the right team. More people than ever are willing to serve."

Still, for all his conciliatory talk on Sunday, Mr. Nagin proved again that he had not lost his ability to throw verbal bombs.

Responding to a provocative suggestion that businessmen might now leave New Orleans because of his re-election, Mr. Nagin showed a rare flash of anger.

"In breaking down the corrupt, bankrupt political system in New Orleans, I had to do it in a systematic way," he said. "The first piece was the political community. The next piece was kind of the religious community. The next piece was the business community. And the business community now has to make a decision, if they want to participate in a new paradigm, a paradigm that says, 'We're not going to be like the New Orleans of old. We're going forward.' "

Mr. Nagin added: "If they opt out of that, where are they going to go? Where are they going to find a New Orleans of 1840?"

    New Start for Familiar Face: Clarence Ray Nagin, NYT, 22.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/us/22nagin.html

Voters Re-elect Nagin as Mayor in New Orleans

May 21, 2006
The New yorkTimes
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, May 20 — C. Ray Nagin, the unpredictable mayor who charted a sometimes erratic course for his city through Hurricane Katrina and after, won a narrow re-election victory here Saturday.

Mr. Nagin, who will now lead the city through four crucial rebuilding years, fended off a strong challenge from Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, the scion of one of Louisiana's leading political families, in a vote that see-sawed all night. With all of the city's 442 precincts reporting, Mr. Nagin had 52 percent of the vote, while Mr. Landrieu received 48 percent.

Mr. Nagin, an African-American, won about 21 percent of the votes of whites, as well as over 80 percent of the black vote, according to a local elections analyst and political consultant, Greg Rigamer. Mr. Landrieu appeared to have lost black votes that he picked up in last month's primary, Mr. Rigamer said in an interview.

In claiming victory before his supporters tonight, Mr. Nagin said it was time to end the arguments over how to rebuild the city and to begin the arduous task. "It's time for this community to start the healing process," Mr. Nagin said, adding that he intended to continue working with his opponent.

Mr. Landrieu, who is white, called on residents in his concession speech to unite behind the mayor in rebuilding a city that has barely begun to recover from the flooding.

"I want to congratulate Mayor Nagin," Mr. Landrieu said. "This was a hard-fought campaign. The people of New Orleans conducted themselves in a dignified and thoughtful way."

Mr. Nagin raised far less money than Mr. Landrieu did and had little of the business and establishment support that helped him take office four years ago. But he appeared to benefit from a surge of votes cast by those displaced from the city by the hurricane, who were encouraged to vote with absentee ballots and at satellite polling stations set up around Louisiana.

Mr. Nagin retained the strong allegiance of black residents here, who are still in the majority, albeit more narrowly than before the hurricane. They did not blame him for missteps during the storm and afterwards, and many said they simply wanted the man who led the city during the last hurricane to continue leading it through future ones.

For months, Mr. Nagin played on that underlying loyalty and remade his political persona, going from a candidate originally favored by whites to one making an overt appeal to black unity and pride.

A speech in January in which he vowed that New Orleans would once again be a "chocolate city" outraged whites, but brought a smile to many black voters.

In addition, conservative whites who have long mistrusted the Landrieu family have consistently found Mr. Nagin's business background —he was a cable television company executive here — appealing.

Other white voters, in interviews, unfavorably contrasted Mr. Landrieu's stiff delivery with the mayor's resonant New Orleans colloquialisms. And during Mr. Nagin's administration, in notable contrast to those of his predecessors, there have been no patronage or other scandals.

In his victory speech, Mr. Nagin pointedly thanked President Bush, of whom he had previously spoken critically.

"To President Bush, yeah, I want to thank you, Mr. President," Mr. Nagin said. "You and I have probably been the most vilified politicians in the country. But I want to thank you for moving that promise in Jackson Square forward. You are delivering on your promise, and I want to thank you for delivering for the citizens of New Orleans."

Mr. Nagin came out on top in an April primary, but opponents collectively received a majority of the votes.

With Mr. Landrieu and Mr. Nagin taking the same muted position on the central issue facing this city — both refused to rule out rebuilding in any area, no matter how badly damaged by flooding — the race was about who was most competent to lead New Orleans out of its current predicament.

Mostly unspoken was the larger reality: that the federal money destined for the city, as much as $10 billion that would perhaps arrive by late summer, would have far more influence on its recovery than the actions of any mayor.

Mr. Landrieu accused Mr. Nagin of botching the recovery. He said he had failed to put into place a rebuilding plan and to get ruined cars, garbage and debris off the streets.

"This race only comes down to leadership, competence and performance," he said Thursday. "The rebuild's got to start sometime, and it's not happening."

Mr. Landrieu repeatedly suggested that the city's finances were in disorder and that New Orleans might need to declare bankruptcy, as some civic groups here have suggested.

Then, earlier this week, Mr. Nagin announced a $150 million loan from a consortium of banks, two French and two American, to keep the city going through next year — a deal that turned out not to have been fully completed.

Throughout the race, Mr. Nagin used his opponent's connections against him, suggesting that the election of Mr. Landrieu would perpetuate a family "dynasty." (Mr. Landrieu's father, Moon Landrieu, was the city's last white mayor, and his sister Mary is the senior United States senator from Louisiana.) He characterized Mr. Landrieu's record as sketchy, after 16 years in the Legislature and two as lieutenant governor.

"I think Mitch is a good guy," Mr. Nagin said Friday. "I love him to death. But he's not really an implementer."

The choice was not clear-cut, though, and residents often expressed confusion over it in the days leading up to the election. Above all, the election sometimes seemed merely a distraction in the context of a city still facing questions over its survival.

Still, as the election neared and increasingly began to seem like a referendum on the city's future, attention began to focus on it.

Saturday was a clear, hot day, and in the areas that did not flood during the hurricane, volunteers stood at street corners waving signs, while flatbed trucks and even a fire engine passed by packed with cheering supporters. In the flooded areas, piles of debris stood outside empty houses still showing last August's water line, and there was little life. The medians of the broad, silent boulevards in Mid-City were crowded with signs for the candidates.

Among voters on Saturday there was unease, dissatisfaction over the recovery, and — for those who had been displaced — a longing to return. Still, African-Americans voters for the most part said they were standing by Mr. Nagin.

"The city is starting to show a little progress, but only a little progress," said Idoshia Gordon, reciting the list of family members — cousins, siblings, aunts — who had lost houses to the hurricane.

Despite these reservations, she said was going to vote for Mr. Nagin. "I want to see him carry it through," she said. "I want him to finish it out."

Many whites were openly angry at the mayor.

"We've got to change the situation," said David Castillo after voting at Jesuit High School in Mid-City, where construction workers were busy on a building that was badly flooded. "It's a bad situation."

Others were more forgiving of the mayor, who voted at the school.

"You did everything you could, my darlin', " said Theresa Graffin, embracing Mr. Nagin, who buttonholed as many people as he could and appeared cool and collected.

Less than half of the city's population of 455,000 has returned, by most counts.

    Voters Re-elect Nagin as Mayor in New Orleans, NYT, 21.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/us/21election.html?hp&ex=1148270400&en=cf4b5960d60f0659&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In the Lower Ninth Ward, a Day of Voting and Reunions

May 21, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAYNA RUDD

NEW ORLEANS, May 20 — Veronica Williams and Michael Vaughn raced across the parking lot of the New Pilgrim Baptist Church on Saturday morning, not to cast ballots in the voting booths inside, but to share a hug long enough to make up for all those missed over the last nine months.

"Seeing you feels like home," said Mr. Vaughn, 50, who was rescued from the roof of his house here after Hurricane Katrina wiped it from its foundation. "You know, I have stopped crying. I can't cry no more. But I'm so glad to see you."

For these childhood friends and hundreds of other former residents of the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, Election Day was like a family reunion, with gospel music blaring in the parking lot as voters lingered to swap stories of the storm.

Ms. Williams, who said she spent 10 weeks in a shelter before settling in with relatives in San Antonio, was the first in line when the polls opened at 6 a.m. for the mayoral runoff race between the incumbent, C. Ray Nagin, and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu.

Ms. Williams had driven 10 hours the day before to vote at New Pilgrim, and after casting her ballot she waited for more than an hour in her black sedan, as though the true purpose of the long trip was outside.

"I knew that I would see him here," Ms. Williams said of Mr. Vaughn. "I didn't know if he was dead or alive. But somehow, I just knew he wasn't."

By breakfast time, the lot was dotted with huddles of long-losts laughing and crying and talking over old times. They reminisced about Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and how their community had stuck together. They shared their individual experiences of Hurricane Katrina, and how their community had fared since.

"We made it then, and we'll make it now," said Leon Vaughn, who is not related to Mr. Vaughn. "We've just got to find everybody so we can build it back up."

They found one another at the church, which recently reopened and on Saturday served as the central polling place for the Lower Ninth, an African-American neighborhood all but vacant after suffering the worst of the disaster. The marquee in front of the large white-brick building read, "The church where the Holy Ghost has his way, We're back!"

Across the street sat a vacant house, all the windows blown out, the front spray-painted TFW, the rescuers' code for Total Family Withdrawal. Paint-stripped cars filled with trash bags lined the street, as they have for months. The only business open nearby, a convenience store four blocks away, was selling two slices of white bread in plastic wrap for 25 cents.

Michael Vaughn, who spent days that "ran into each other" in the Convention Center before evacuating to Texas, said he had yet to find any relatives except his 96-year-old mother. "I need therapy," said Mr. Vaughn, who has returned to New Orleans but not to the Lower Ninth. "I slept next to dead bodies. I heard women getting raped in the night.

"The worse of it was I felt alone," he added. "I didn't have my family to help me through it."

As this group dispersed, laughter leaped from a cluster of three men in their 20's surrounding their former high school guidance counselor, Dorothy Boyd, updating her on the condition of their community.

"I remember when these two boys were little," Ms. Boyd said. "I'm glad to see that they aren't lost."

Brandon Anthony, who left the city a few hours before the storm demolished his home, spoke numbly about what is there now.

"It looks like an open field," he told his buddies. "There might be six houses left, and they are ruined."

Jamar Francoise added: "All we have left is the spirit of this community. All of our material things are gone. But I know now it's not about that, it never was."

In a corner of the parking lot was a white Jeep Cherokee, spilling a soundtrack. "I believe he'll save me," came the gospel lyrics. "I believe he'll heal me, I believe he'll hold me, Oh yes he will."

Carole Pierce, whose mother died on a roof awaiting rescue, was one of dozens of neighborhood residents working inside monitoring the polls.

"People think this is the end for us," she said, her voice a mix of hope and anger. "It's just the beginning."

    In the Lower Ninth Ward, a Day of Voting and Reunions, NYT, 21.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/us/21church.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In New Orleans, Suspense but No Drama as Race Ends

May 20, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, May 19 — At rallies, in grocery store aisles and at church pulpits, the two candidates for mayor sought last-minute votes on Friday, the day before the election, under a blanket of muggy late-spring heat. But with the city's future on the line, the relaxed rhythms of New Orleans made an odd contrast to the tensions of the race.

Over the last weeks, voters have been treated to a series of tepid debates and halfhearted campaign appearances, which, far from defining the path the battered city should take, have only obscured it.

There are leisurely gaps between campaign events, with the two candidates, Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, apparently deciding to forgo traditional stumping. It is also difficult to accomplish, with so many voters still out of town.

Neither of the candidates have publicly confronted the most important issue facing the city: whether damaged neighborhoods, vulnerable to future flooding, can or should be brought back. They acknowledge that their goals are virtually identical, arguing instead over who is more competent to accomplish them.

As a result, voters here appear confused. Some say they still have not made up their minds; others express anger at the pace of change without apparently knowing where such change should lead; and still others doggedly stick with Mr. Nagin, even while acknowledging the battering he has taken from critics who cite his loose rhetoric and erratic management of the recovery.

There is hunger for action, but few could say what it should be.

"Mitch Landrieu, I think he's the better candidate to get things done," said Ashley Hansen, walking her dog in the Uptown section. Though previously a Nagin supporter, she said the mayor had "sort of let me down in some of the things he's said."

There is great suspense over the result, because the large number of evacuees, voting with absentee ballots and at satellite polls, have made surveys unreliable. With more than 12,000 absentee ballots already received and more expected, they may well decide the outcome late Saturday night.

"What people are not understanding are the out-of-town voters, and how significant that could be," Mr. Nagin told reporters outside the Whole Foods market on Magazine Street, where he greeted shoppers.

But the instinct of everyone here — candidates, voters and pundits — is that the contest will be close.

Mr. Nagin, struggling against months of damaging publicity about his handling of the sluggish recovery, constant changes in City Hall policy and uncertainty about the city's financial condition, is seeking a mandate to speak authoritatively for his city against skeptics in Baton Rouge and Washington. Mr. Landrieu, who would become the city's first white mayor in 30 years if he wins, argues that a new voice and a fresh approach are needed to lead the recovery, which has barely begun.

Race, as always, is the city's barely spoken divide. In interviews on Friday, black voters again said they were sticking with Mr. Nagin.

"One thing about that mayor, he stayed here during the hurricane," said Louis Scott, a retired longshoreman near the wharves on Tchoupitoulas Street. "He did everything he could for the people. He stayed, and he's got the experience."

Whites, with some exceptions, said they were fed up with the city's limping reconstruction, and would opt for Mr. Landrieu. Mr. Nagin, for his part, promised voters better days while campaigning in his trademark casual style at the market, cooing at a baby by the poultry counter, hugging sales clerks at the flower stand and urging an outdoor diner to get rich: "Make all you can stand, man," he said.

He received barely 6 percent of whites' votes in the primary, but asserted Friday that they were coming back to his camp. There was some evidence of it.

"He's a true New Orleanian. He shoots from the hip," said Bruce Pennington, who is white, shopping at the market. "He may say some stupid things, but as a New Orleanian, I understand his stupidity."

Mr. Landrieu earnestly pleaded for unity — a nod to the 24 percent of black voters who supported him in the primary — and for change, at a noontime rally for campaign workers and supporters, well-attended by leading local businessmen and political figures, at his headquarters on St. Charles Avenue.

"This great city has one chance," Mr. Landrieu said. "It's going to be coming from all of you, holding hands." The familiar faces in the crowd were testimony to his success in rounding up this city's establishment figures, who have largely deserted Mr. Nagin. Mr. Landrieu has raised nearly $4 million, according to his campaign treasurer. Mr. Nagin is known to have raised far less — his list of contributors is far shorter — though his treasurer did not return calls Friday.

There has been relatively little street-level campaigning. Both candidates are extremely well-known — Mr. Landrieu has been in public life for 18 years here, and his family has played a leading political role for nearly five decades. And many neighborhoods are still uninhabited, so a plethora of televised debates has largely substituted for heavy advertising and pavement-pounding.

"The last thing they need is media attention, because there's been so much already," said Ed Renwick, director of the Institute of Politics at Loyola University. Besides, "people refer to Mitch like he's a member of the family. They never say Landrieu. They know them both so well."

Mr. Landrieu's television advertisements have spotlighted individual residents, in neighborhood settings, complaining about the pace of recovery. The lieutenant governor appears in several spots, in one complaining about the continuing presence of flooded-out, ruined cars under the elevated highways, a ghostly presence that has emerged as a symbol of the city's stagnation.

Mr. Nagin has had far less of a campaign presence, on television or otherwise. On Friday, he exhibited no worry at all about being unseated, which would be a rarity in this city's political history.

Instead, Mr. Nagin, a former cable television executive who entered politics only four years ago, once again displayed some astonishment at his current position.

"This is the biggest reality TV show ever, and I'm right in the middle of it," he said.

    In New Orleans, Suspense but No Drama as Race Ends, NYT, 20.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/us/20elect.html?hp&ex=1148184000&en=fd59a605c9f5239f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

New Orleans' aquarium reflects tourism's woes

Updated 5/19/2006 2:59 AM ET
USA Today
By Elliot Blair Smith

NEW ORLEANS — The penguins survived.

The sharks did not.

For almost nine months, the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas has been closed to the public after Hurricane Katrina swept through this storm-tossed city in August.

The aquarium is New Orleans' crown jewel of visitor attractions along the Mississippi River, where the central business district eases into the French Quarter. It is Louisiana's most popular destination, hosting 730,042 visitors last year, more people than attend Mardi Gras.

But the late-August sun converted the aquarium's glass-canopied interior into a 140-degree tropical inferno. Storm-related power outages starved its giant fish tanks of oxygen.

Days after the storm, rescuers found the aquarium's macaws, parrots, penguins and sea otters panting in stifling heat. Its silver tarpon fish survived by gulping air from the surface of the 132,000-gallon Caribbean Reef tank. But most of its aquatic life, including the sharks, perished. Among the survivors: Spots, the white alligator; King Mydas, the giant green sea turtle; and Patience, the 27-year-old matriarch of a colony of African black-footed penguins.

Today, the non-profit Audubon Nature Institute, which operates the city zoo and aquarium, is under immense financial pressure. The challenges it faces are symptomatic of struggles throughout the state's $9.9 billion hospitality industry, nowhere more than in New Orleans, which historically counted on visitors for $5.5 billion in annual revenue and 85,000 jobs. Tourism is New Orleans' biggest business and the state's second-largest after oil and gas. It generates $600 million a year in state and local taxes.

Angle Davis, Louisiana's secretary of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, estimates the hurricane cost Louisiana $2 billion in visitor spending. Davis says the damage does not end there. In a survey of key visitor markets, her department found that 34% of prospective visitors are less interested in visiting the state than before Katrina; 62% believe the state is less scenic; and only one in five leisure travelers were willing to schedule a trip during hurricane season, which begins June 1.

In uptown New Orleans, where National Guard troops camped after the hurricane, the Audubon Zoo reopened at Thanksgiving. But it loses money, including $3.9 million last year. The aquarium and its Entergy Imax theater downtown typically turn enough profit — $4.9 million in 2005 — to support the city's animal exhibits and its nature center in the eastern part of the city, which was destroyed.

Now, Audubon management must restock aquarium exhibits, rehire staff — after laying off 82% of its 267 workers Oct. 1 — and support debt service on $42 million in general-obligation bonds held by Wall Street investors without the benefit of a single paying customer. It also is hastening to finish $3.5 million in storm-related repairs.

A happy ending?

There might be a happy ending to this story yet. Children's voices are rising again in the French Quarter at a Catholic school whose students visit the aquarium each year.

Before Easter, they raised $600 in a coin-collection drive for the aquarium. Children, parents and teachers around the USA collected thousands of dollars more through bake sales, car washes and concerts. And several leading aquariums contributed their own gifts, including new sharks, stingrays and a school of blue runner.

What's more, penguins do fly. Next week, the Aquarium of the Americas' 19 penguins and two sea otters — rescued days after the storm, hungry and hot, and evacuated to California's Monterey Bay Aquarium for safekeeping — are arriving home on a specially equipped jet, courtesy of FedEx.

The New Orleans aquarium is scheduled to reopen May 26 amid signs that tourists and conventioneers are ready again to look to this city as a destination rather than as a point of escape.

Mardi Gras festivities in February and the Jazz Fest in April surpassed organizers' expectations though not past years' results. In June, the city convention center will host the first major conference since the storm. In September, the Superdome returns to action, hosting an ESPN Monday Night Football game.

"Visitors will come back to New Orleans," says Stephen Perry, chief executive of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. "The real question is, what will be the pace at which people return?" It is a big question. The answer will make all the difference to the local hospitality industry's ability to survive, and lead the state's recovery from Katrina.

The governor-appointed Louisiana Recovery Authority, which is marshalling state comeback efforts, plans to spend about 10% of an expected $332 million in federal economic aid to promote tourism.

Past tourism campaigns returned $16 for each $1 spent, says Davis, the state tourism secretary. The state also is spending about $7 million on a print and TV advertising campaign it calls "Fall in Love with Louisiana All Over Again," featuring endorsements by such celebrities as John Goodman, Wynton Marsalis and Allen Toussaint.

After the storm

New Orleans' central business district looks much as it did before the storm. Banks, brokerages, restaurants and stores bustle during the day. Night life in the French Quarter burns almost till dawn. But Katrina's scars are everywhere:

•Only 41% of New Orleans' world-renowned restaurants are open, according to Tom Weatherly, a spokesman for the Louisiana Restaurant Association.

"It is mostly the independent restaurateurs that have been able to get up and running, and basically the ones that had to. This is their only market," Weatherly says.

•The convention bureau expects to host one-third the number of major shows and only half its normal number of attendees this year, says Fitch Ratings public finance analyst Steve Murray.

•With up to three-quarters of the Big Easy's rooms available, hotel occupancy rates rose as high as 80% in the winter. But government contractors who filled those rooms are getting ready to leave, meaning occupancy rates will fall again.

Historically, business travelers represented only 10% of the city's hospitality business. Since Katrina, they have constituted 90% of the visitor market, according to visitors bureau CEO Perry.

•And though Mardi Gras was hailed widely as a triumph for a city that so recently confronted tragedy, this year's crowds were two-thirds of pre-Katrina levels, reducing direct visitor spending by one-half to $200 million. Many hotels and restaurants have trouble even finding workers.

Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, La., an hour's drive west of New Orleans, was on pace to host a record 250,000 visitors last year but ended up with 181,000, says proprietor Zeb Mayhew Jr. Attendance at the plantation this year is one-quarter of pre-storm levels. "It is definitely survival mode," he says.

Mayhew believes New Orleans is in better shape than most visitors perceive and that the tourism industry is rebounding "slower than it needs to." Says Mayhew: "On the one hand, you can't paint a rosy picture because you really do have problems. On the other, the part of the city that tourists would come to is fine, and something they can enjoy. ... Somehow there's got to be a separation of those two realities."

The reopened aquarium will bring back some of the tourists necessary to support what Perry calls "the working middle-class of New Orleans: the chefs in the restaurants, the doormen at hotels, the jazz musicians, really the entirety of the cultural economy."

But it will be a more embattled aquarium than before. One of the Audubon Nature Institute's chief concerns is how to pay its investor debt, which Fitch Ratings has downgraded to non-investment-grade junk status. A default on its bonds, which the state-chartered New Orleans Board of Liquidation issued on the city's behalf, would badly impair the ability of the city and state to borrow on Wall Street.

Dale Stastny, the institute's chief operating officer, says the aquarium has about $2 million in cash and a $25 million endowment, which it doesn't want to touch, to meet its immediate obligations. It also will receive a share of city property tax receipts, though this year's tax bills haven't been issued.

"All we need before October is a little less than 20% of the normal (property tax) collections to come in, and we'll have enough to cover debt service," Stastny says. He says the aquarium probably will have to restructure its debt to rebuild its cash cushion and make up for what is expected to be a large, ongoing deficit in city tax receipts.

That's where the children are pitching in. In the Vieux Carré, or French Quarter, the Cathedral Academy — which has educated children since 1718 — was the city's first school to reopen, on Oct. 17.

Sister Mary Rose Bingham, the principal, says she did not know how many children to expect. But the school's registered rolls doubled the pre-storm total to 237 students, swelled by the children of law enforcement workers temporarily living aboard a cruise ship on the Mississippi River. At last count, students from 28 schools across the metropolitan area were enrolled at the academy.

Each day, Bingham and the children walk around the French Quarter. She says she has watched the city struggle to regain its footing.

"The adults that live here who are running small businesses and large businesses really need tourists to come back," Bingham says. "I tell my friends and family: If you want to donate, get on a plane and come down to New Orleans and spend money. Because then you're helping not only this school but the hotels, the restaurants and all the tourist attractions."

To aid the aquarium, the school's students from kindergartners to eighth-graders began to bring in coins they collected in jars and plastic bags. Some children donated their money for snacks.

It swiftly added up.

"Everyone can do something, and that's what I wanted our children to know. Even though you might not have a home, or anything, we all can do something," Bingham says. "We were hoping that perhaps some others would hear about what these children had done, and maybe they would help."

Help from kids across USA

Across the USA, children were helping, according to aquarium spokeswoman Melissa Lee:

•In Kansas, Wichita High School East and Robinson Middle School held a concert, raffle and silent auction that raised $5,000 for the aquarium and zoo.

•In Plano, Texas, the parents of 12-year-old Nick Epstein, a penguin lover who died of a stroke, directed gifts to the Dallas World Aquarium, which forwarded the money to New Orleans. Total: $1,753.

•In Culver City, Calif., the second-grade class at Willows Community School created hand-drawn note cards that they sold as gifts, raising $1,600.

•In Montgomery, Ala., 6-year-old twins Wylie and Spangler Edwards had their friends donate to help New Orleans animals and fish life rather than buy them birthday presents. Total donated: $805.

•In Trumbull, Conn., third-graders at the Nichols United Methodist Church school raised $410 with a bake sale and lemonade stand.

And in New Orleans, a dozen young mothers whose children play together donated $400. Leila Garnard, one of the mothers, says, "It just broke my heart" to know that her daughter Whitney "though she's 1 year old — and doesn't know the aquarium or the zoo — she might never get to know it."

With the return to New Orleans of Patience and the aquarium's other temporarily displaced exhibits, the city is getting back a part of its life, as it did when the first children returned in October. Bingham says, "Even old men would come up to us on the sidewalk and say, 'Thank you for bringing the children back. It's been so quiet without them.' "

The penguins add their own waddle and feistiness.

Christina Slager, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's curator, who formerly worked in New Orleans and has known Patience for nearly 20 years, says, "They recognize human beings. They recognize individuals. And they form opinions. They like some of their caregivers. They don't like others so much. I'm sure they will remember the people they are returning to in New Orleans. It will be a nice homecoming."

    New Orleans' aquarium reflects tourism's woes, UT, 19.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/money/2006-05-18-aquarium-usat_x.htm

 

Politics Stalls Plan to Bolster Flood Insurance        NYT        15.5.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/us/15flood.html?hp&ex=
1147752000&en=642a0e94055e1126&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Politics Stalls Plan to Bolster Flood Insurance

May 15, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JOSEPH B. TREASTER

If ever there was a moment for the obscure federal flood insurance program to ride to the rescue, it would seem to have been in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Its premiums were supposed to insure homeowners in flood-prone areas and also protect taxpayers from spending billions to bail out flood victims. But with Hurricane Katrina, the program failed on both counts.

Nearly half the victims did not even have flood insurance. Claims from homeowners who were insured, $25 billion worth, bankrupted the program. And the government has had to commit $15 billion in additional taxpayer money for rebuilding in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Now, an effort to rescue the insurance program that grew in Hurricane Katrina's wake is faltering, too. Though experts foresee a generation of fiercer and more frequent storms, Congress seems unlikely to make more than modest changes when it takes up the program in the coming weeks.

The drive to restructure the perennially underfinanced program has been blocked by real estate interests, who worry that requiring millions more people to buy flood insurance would stifle development, and by lawmakers from areas that rarely flood who see their constituents as supporting those who are frequently flooded, particularly in the South.

"You've got people living in dry areas paying for people who want to keep living in wet ones," said Representative Candice S. Miller, Republican of Michigan. "They're sticking it to us, and I don't like to be stuck."

The inability over decades to work out who pays the bill for flooding is at the heart of the weaknesses in the insurance program so blatantly laid bare by Hurricane Katrina.

A close examination of the program shows how those same lobbying pressures and regional rivalries have helped create an insurance plan that has consistently defied the central rule of how to succeed in the insurance trade: have enough policyholders paying enough in premiums to spread out the risk and build a financial cushion against disaster.

Since its beginning in the late 1960's, the flood program has struggled against a basic handicap: Most people, except those in the clearest path of danger, believe they do not need it.

So, in an effort to make the insurance affordable and attractive to reluctant homeowners, the government has kept premiums artificially low — typically $300 to $400 a year for coverage up to $250,000. At the same time, though, it has limited the size of the program's flood zones — the only areas in which many people are required to buy the policies.

A result, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is an insurance plan in serious danger, groping for a politically palatable way to grow.

Testifying before Congress this year, the flood program's acting director, David I. Maurstad, acknowledged that it faced "numerous challenges on a variety of fronts." But insurance officials also say the program, which takes in only $2.2 billion in fees each year, was never meant to handle a devastating storm like Hurricane Katrina.

Even so, many of the program's critics in Congress and elsewhere argue that it can and should be rebuilt as a stronger hedge against a less-catastrophic run of storms.

"It hasn't come close to its promise of insuring everyone who's in danger of being flooded, reducing the cost of disasters for the federal government or making sure the program ultimately pays its own way," said J. Robert Hunter, who once ran the program and is director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America.

"It's like a trip through the looking glass," he added. "Everything is backwards."

Asking Beneficiaries to Pay

The idea of federal flood insurance began in the early 1950's with President Harry S. Truman, after big floods in his home state, Missouri. Private insurers would not provide the coverage, arguing that only those most likely to be flooded would buy it, and that an avalanche of claims would bring big financial losses.

But what finally brought the idea to fruition nearly two decades later was a desire to do something about the rising cost of federal disaster relief. In particular, Congress felt it was important that the beneficiaries helped pay the bill.

Under the program, the Federal Emergency Management Agency maps areas along coasts, lakes and rivers with significant flood risk — a 1 percent chance of flooding in any year — and tries to sell insurance to people in or near them. Though more than 4.8 million people have the policies, that includes only about half the households in the flood zones.

To attract buyers, the government discounted the premiums, some to a fraction of what a private company would have charged. But initially, no one was required to buy flood insurance, and hardly anyone did.

"People would just say, 'It won't happen to me,' " George K. Bernstein, the program's first administrator, said in an interview.

Gilbert F. White, a retired professor whose research in the mid-1960's laid the foundation for the program, said the government originally considered larger flood zones but pulled back under pressure from homebuilders and real estate developers.

The program also linked the availability of insurance to agreements by local governments to enact new building codes intended to reduce flood damage, mainly by raising houses above expected flood levels. But the real estate interests persuaded many communities to stay out of the program, Mr. Bernstein said.

A Program Overwhelmed

In the summer of 1972, Hurricane Agnes caused $400 million in flood damage along the Eastern Seaboard; only $5 million was covered by insurance. Soon after, Congress made the insurance mandatory for people in the flood zones with federally regulated mortgages.

These measures let the program expand just enough to limp along. Over the years, it paid out almost $15 billion in claims, borrowing from the Treasury in bad years and paying the money back, with interest, in quieter times. But by early last year, the fund had slipped into the red again, drained by $2 billion in claims from the hurricanes in Florida in 2004.

Then came Hurricane Katrina.

Along the Mississippi coast, waves up to 30 feet high surged past the flood-zone boundaries. Federal figures show that two-thirds of the 46,000 flooded homes and apartments in Mississippi were outside the zones. One problem was the flood maps, which had not been updated in more than a decade and no longer reflected the true danger.

In New Orleans, the program stumbled on another assumption: though experts had long warned that a terrible hurricane could top the levees and inundate the low-lying city, that possibility was never factored into the hazard calculations. Instead, the mapmakers focused solely on the impact of heavy rains.

Luckily for New Orleans, which often floods in bad rains, the bulk of the city was in the flood zones. So 65 percent of the 54,000 flooded homeowners had at least some insurance.

But a few areas that flooded badly from the levee breaks, like much of the Lower Ninth Ward, were outside the zones. Relatively few people there, or among the city's large population of renters, had insurance. And many others had only enough to cover their mortgages, leaving little cash to rebuild.

Joy Fortune, a retired bank executive, and her 86-year-old mother, Hazel Castanel, had a $73,000 flood policy on their beige brick home. But after the house sat in six feet of water for two weeks, an adjuster estimated the damage at $124,000, leaving them $51,000 short.

At first, it looked as if they would not be able to rebuild. But then the Bush administration and Congress came up with $15 billion in grants to make up for gaps in insurance. "We want to go back," Ms. Fortune said. "It's my home and it's our life."

Even with the gaps, the program was swamped by $25 billion in claims from Hurricane Katrina and two other hurricanes last fall, and it will need to borrow all that money from the government to pay them. What is more, insurance officials say they doubt they will be able to pay much of it back, leaving taxpayers with the bill just as if there were no insurance program.

It was with that huge bill in mind that two influential congressmen — Michael G. Oxley, an Ohio Republican who heads the Financial Services Committee, and Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat — drafted legislation that would have greatly expanded the flood zones to draw millions more homeowners into the program. The new zones would have encompassed areas considered only one-fifth as susceptible to flooding in any given year.

'A Unique Opportunity'

Flood experts, consumer advocates, environmentalists and some insurance experts welcomed the move. But lobbyists for homebuilders, real estate agents and mortgage lenders cautioned lawmakers that the extra cost of flood insurance could hurt housing sales and slow the economy. The program "may need a tune-up, but I don't think it needs radical change," David L. Pressly Jr., president of the National Association of Home Builders, said in an interview.

In mid-November, a senior Republican on the Financial Services Committee, Richard H. Baker of Louisiana, proposed a compromise — keeping the current flood zones but requiring coverage for everyone in those areas and in areas adjacent to levees, like those that flooded in New Orleans.

But the committee narrowly adopted an amendment from Rep. Gary G. Miller, a Republican and a former homebuilder from California, which mandated a study of the situation while FEMA put together a clearer picture of the expanded zones.

In a recent interview, Mr. Miller said he had no problem with requiring people in areas like New Orleans to buy the insurance, and perhaps having them pay more for it. But expanding the flood zones, he said, amounted to going to people in, say, Los Angeles and telling them: "We need to raise revenue, so we're going to make you buy into a program that you really are never going to need and never benefit from anyway."

The bill, which the House is expected to take up in the next two weeks, now calls for updating the nation's flood maps, increasing premiums, and reducing subsidies on small businesses and second homes. It would also raise the maximum coverage on a house to $337,000 from $250,000. In all, these changes could bring in perhaps $500 million more a year.

Mr. Frank of Massachusetts said there was "not as much improvement as we'd like, but it's the best we're able to get right now." Lobbyists and legislative aides said they expected no major strengthening of the legislation when the Senate takes it up in coming weeks.

Around the country, opposition to expanding the program seems to be growing. In Michigan, Representative Miller said she was so angry about the program's inequities that she was considering urging that the state withdraw from it. People in her rarely flooded district, she said, had paid four times more in premiums than they had received in claims in the past 10 years.

By contrast, even before Hurricane Katrina, homeowners in just three hurricane-prone states — Florida, Louisiana and Texas — had received nearly half the money paid by the program since 1978, federal figures show.

Some experts say the program needs to shift from its "one size fits all" approach, which uses the same standards to set rates and the size of flood zones around the nation, to one that takes into account the degree of risk in each area, much as a private insurance plan would. But program officials say they do not believe they have enough history of claims in many areas to make reliable distinctions.

Robert P. Hartwig, the chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group, said the shock of Hurricane Katrina had provided "a unique opportunity for quantum reform" of the flood program. But he said the steps now being contemplated "will do relatively little to protect people who live in flood zones and to protect taxpayers around the country."

Looming over the debate are the warnings from meteorologists. Christopher W. Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center, says warmer ocean temperatures and less disruptive wind currents could make the next two or three decades much more active for hurricanes.

And scientists at Colorado State University recently predicted that there could be as many as five intense hurricanes this year. The chance of one striking the Gulf Coast is nearly 50 percent.

    Politics Stalls Plan to Bolster Flood Insurance, NYT, 15.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/us/15flood.html?hp&ex=1147752000&en=642a0e94055e1126&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A New Landfill in New Orleans Sets Off a Battle

May 8, 2006
By LESLIE EATON
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS — Block after block, neighborhood after neighborhood, tens of thousands of hurricane-ravaged houses here rot in the sun, still waiting to be gutted or bulldozed. Now officials have decided where several million tons of their remains will be dumped: in man-made pits at the swampy eastern edge of town, out by the coffee-roasting plant and the space-shuttle factory and the big wildlife refuge.

But more than a thousand Vietnamese-American families live less than two miles from the edge of the new landfill. And they are far from pleased at having the moldering remains of a national disaster plunked down nearby, alongside the canal that flooded their neighborhood when Hurricane Katrina surged through last year.

Environmental groups are also angry, accusing local and federal officials of ignoring or circumventing their own regulations, long after the immediate emergency has ended. The same thing happened after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, they warn, and that dump ended up becoming a Superfund site.

The new landfill, known as Chef Menteur after the highway that borders it, sits across a canal from Bayou Sauvage, the largest urban wildlife refuge in the country, with 23,000 acres of marshland, canals and lagoons that are home to herons, egrets, alligators and, in the fall, tens of thousands of migratory ducks.

Nonetheless, the landfill lacks some of the safeguards that existing dumps do, like special clay liners. The government says they are not needed because demolition debris is cleaner than other rubbish.

Residents and environmentalists think otherwise, because after Hurricane Katrina the state expanded the definition of construction and demolition debris to include most of a house's contents, down to the moldy mattresses and soggy sofas.

"It's essentially the guts of your house, all your personal possessions," said Joel Waltzer, a lawyer representing landfill opponents. "Electronics, personal-care products, cleaning solutions, pesticides, fertilizers, bleach."

State officials say that the new landfill is safe and that they are simply moving quickly to protect public health and the environment, using techniques that did not exist 40 years ago. The new site was chosen to speed up the cleanup, they say, because the debris will not have to be hauled far. The state estimates that 7.2 million tons of hurricane debris remains to be cleaned up; the Chef Menteur landfill will take 2.6 million tons.

"You cannot rebuild until you clean up," said Chuck Carr Brown, an assistant secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, which provided a permit for the landfill. "I'm still in the eye of the storm."

The state has agreed to do some extra monitoring of groundwater, Dr. Brown said. But it has determined "there's nothing toxic, nothing hazardous," he continued. "There will be no impact" on the community, which is sometimes called Versailles.

Like so many disputes that have erupted since the hurricane, this one involves some highly charged issues: politics, money, history and race. Not to mention a highly developed distrust of government that almost all Louisianians now seem to share.

Unlike most residents of eastern New Orleans, the Vietnamese have returned, rebuilt and drawn up elaborate plans for their 30-year-old community's future. Now they feel unwelcome, said the Rev. Vien thé Nguyen, the pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church and a leader in the fight against the landfill, which opened on April 26.

"They're threatening our very existence," Father Vien said of the government agencies that approved the dump site, which residents fear will tower 80 feet or more above their neighborhood, dwarfing the new church they are planning to build, once the Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers are gone from the site.

Father Vien said he was particularly worried about the quality of water in the canal and the lagoon that run through the neighborhood of tidy brick houses. Residents use that water on the tiny waterside gardens that supply the community with sugar cane and bitter melon and Vietnamese varieties of vegetables, he said.

He and his parishioners are particularly angry at Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who in February used emergency powers to waive zoning regulations for the landfill.

"Maybe we're not the right kind of people he wanted to return," Father Vien said. Neither the mayor nor his staff responded to requests for response to the priest's comments.

The state and the Army Corps of Engineers, which is handling cleanup in the city, say that without the dump, the cleanup would take much longer. The existing dumps would not be able to process all the debris fast enough, officials say, and are too far from the blighted buildings.

And the need for the new dump will only increase, they say, as the cleanup progresses. Maurice Falk, the corps official in charge of the cleanup, said at a federal court hearing last week that only 115 houses have been demolished so far.

Given that slow pace, critics question why the landfill had to be opened so quickly, before environmental studies were prepared and the community was consulted. The community would be willing to negotiate a compromise and do its part in the cleanup of the city, said Kelly H. Tran, who lives in the Vietnamese enclave and with her husband runs a construction company that has been fixing damaged houses.

But, she continued, "It's not fair for us to have no voice in this big decision, this critical decision."

State officials said they had reviewed the site for a landfill in the past, when political opposition had blocked it, and now simply could not wait two or three months to get through the public comment period. But on April 28, after the opposition was in full cry, the state and the corps put out a notice soliciting public comment on the landfill.

If residents or opponents "have something we missed, we'll address it," said Mike D. McDaniel, the secretary of the State Department of Environmental Quality. As for those who argue that there is no emergency involved, he disagrees. "Some people can't seem to understand this is not business as usual," he said.

Environmental groups are not happy. Adam Babich, director of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, said government agencies in the region had never been vigilant about complying with environmental regulations but had been especially lax since the storm. This attitude is most apparent, he said, when it comes to landfills. In nearby Plaquemines Parish, a longtime dispute over a landfill has flared up because the dump is taking in Hurricane Katrina debris.

And sparring continues over the Old Gentilly landfill, an old-fashioned, unlined dump that the state closed in 1986 but reopened after the hurricane. It is now accepting a limited amount of debris after a suit was filed by the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, one of the groups represented by Mr. Waltzer, and it was criticized in a report commissioned by FEMA.

The fight over the new landfill is by no means over, Father Vien said. On April 27 he was showing visitors the site — and admiring the alligators gliding through the adjacent Maxent Canal — when he got the news from Mr. Waltzer that a federal judge had refused to issue a temporary injunction against the dump.

At first he seemed stunned. "I cannot believe that," he repeated several times.

Then he rallied.

"The game is not over," he said. "It just started, actually."

    A New Landfill in New Orleans Sets Off a Battle, NYT, 8.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/us/08landfill.html?hp&ex=1147147200&en=00cbcb3166ab19f9&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Political Memo

Conservative White Voters Hold Sway in an Altered New Orleans Electoral Landscape

May 7, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, May 6 — The city's changed demographics made themselves felt all week as a tight race for mayor headed toward the May 20 runoff.

Black officials have run City Hall for decades, but with the population dispersal caused by Hurricane Katrina, white voters — especially conservatives — hold the keys to the drab 1950's building downtown. Both the incumbent, Mayor C. Ray Nagin, and his challenger, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, need this group, and both are now flirting with it, flaunting endorsements from conservative white also-rans in the April 22 primary.

But the electoral dance has to be delicate in a city with long memories and short fuses. Hurricane season is bearing down, last year's catastrophe is ever present, and decades' worth of decline has not gone away. The challenges: do not scare a traumatized electorate, but do not lull it either; and distance yourself from prior black mayors — deemed corrupt by whites — but not too much.

This week Mr. Nagin, who is black, scored an endorsement from a conservative white Republican lawyer, Rob Couhig, who got 10 percent in the primary, but he also showed up at a tribute to the city's first black mayor, Ernest N. "Dutch" Morial. Mr. Nagin talked up a new hurricane plan, but suggested off-handedly that he might pull the trigger far more quickly on a mandatory evacuation in the event of another hurricane.

"Our planning efforts have been nonstop," the mayor said casually, at an urgently called city hall news conference, for which he was late, to announce his evacuation plan.

Mr. Landrieu fired back with endorsements from a raft of local law-enforcement officials, some not even from New Orleans, and denounced the continued shuttering of the flood-damaged criminal courts building.

"The judges can't get back into their own building," Mr. Landrieu said at a debate between the two candidates on Monday. "The judges can't judge unless they're in their own building." Jury trials have been suspended in the absence of a forum. Mr. Landrieu was also endorsed Friday by Louisiana's leading black minister, Bishop Paul S. Morton.

In a city of family allegiances, the candidates are shadowed by the legacies of two powerful political families that ran affairs here for decades — that of Mr. Landrieu, whose father was mayor, whose sister is a United States senator and whose aunt is the president of the school board; and the Morial clan, which produced father-and-son mayors. Though both families are Democratic and are disdained by white conservatives, any association with the Morials, especially, is currently regarded as politically toxic, given the changed electorate.

While the candidates spar, under the highway overpasses sit block after block of flooded-out, stripped, abandoned cars from which trash spills out in a filthy wasteland inhabited by a handful of homeless people. Ruined neighborhoods wait for the federal checks, not due until late summer.

That backdrop of stasis might seem to work for the challenger. But Mr. Landrieu, who got 29 percent in the primary, must persuade conservatives to overcome their old antipathies. But he cannot go back on the family's commitment to civil rights, inaugurated by his father, Moon Landrieu, the city's last white mayor. Mr. Nagin, too, is courting whites — having gotten only 6 percent of their votes in the primary. He took 38 percent overall — but he cannot afford to alienate blacks, 24 percent of whom voted for Mr. Landrieu.

Conservative whites, initially enchanted by Mr. Nagin's scandal-free administration, now question his competence after policy flip-flops and hesitations.

"The real question is, if you've been in New Orleans, can the mayor pull it off?" said Scott Wheaton, a lawyer who supported Mr. Couhig.

"Nagin, I haven't been able to see him do much, post-Katrina," Mr. Wheaton said. "Just take something as simple as getting the cars off the streets. The other question is, what's Landrieu ever run? Has he been an executive?" He noted that the lieutenant governor's career was built on politics, unlike that of Mr. Nagin, a former businessman.

"I think most people are looking for someone to get the job done," Mr. Wheaton said, adding: "I haven't made up my mind."

Mr. Nagin's dilemma was summed up in an awkward moment Monday at the ancient St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, at the edge of the French Quarter. Hesitantly, the mayor joined a gathering of black political pioneers here around the Morial family tomb, above ground and whitewashed like the others in this below-sea level town.

The reception was frigid, and Mr. Nagin quickly left. The reasons were readily apparent to anyone following this city's byzantine politics: his political career was made, partly, by damning the legacy of the patriarch's son, former Mayor Marc Morial, whose administration, beset by indictments and guilty pleas, is seen by many here as having been shot through with patronage and favoritism.

A federal investigation into the Morial administration's contracting practices has netted more than 12 indictments and guilty pleas so far. Yet the younger Mr. Morial still gets a rapturous reception from black audiences here on trips back from his current job as head of the National Urban League in New York.

That Monday night at the debate, Mr. Nagin made a veiled reference to what is at the back of some whites' minds here: the Landrieu and Morial clans are too close to each other. "I don't come from a political family or organization," he said. "Do we want to go back to the politics of the past?" The old Morial political organization has endorsed Mr. Landrieu.

"From what I've heard, the family has had a relationship with the Morials," said Rand Voorhies, a neurosurgeon standing outside his columned, Italianate mansion in the Garden District.

Still, he was fastening Landrieu signs to his elegant wrought-iron fence.

"I've been told that won't happen, though," said Mr. Voorhies of a formal alliance between the Landrieu and Morial factions. In the primary, Mr. Voorhies supported the conservatives' darling, Ron Forman, a zoo executive, in the primary. Now, the doctor is going with the lieutenant governor, endorsed last week by Mr. Forman.

If he is elected, Mr. Voorhies said, "what it might convey is, the electorate is serious about changing things, so some voter in Dayton, Ohio, won't be worried about pouring money down a rat hole," referring to the federal money that will soon be flowing here. "Because in the final analysis, it's the rest of the country we're going to be depending on."

    Conservative White Voters Hold Sway in an Altered New Orleans Electoral Landscape, NYT, 7.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/us/07orleans.html

Critic's Notebook

At Jazzfest in New Orleans, the Party Must Go On

May 2, 2006
By JON PARELES
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS, May 1 — The first weekend of the 37th annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival ended on Sunday night with a rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In." When the familiar chorus arrived, the white handkerchiefs New Orleanians seem to keep handy on all occasions were waved high.

Yet it wasn't the jaunty, clichéd jazz version. Bruce Springsteen played "Saints" as nothing less than a hymn, and he sang a rarely noticed final verse: "Some say this world of trouble is the only world we'll ever see/ But I'm waiting for that morning when the new world is revealed."

It was a fitting wrap-up for a weekend that found hope, and solace, in the continuity of tradition. Jazzfest, as everyone calls it, is itself a tradition after nearly four decades, and like Mardi Gras, it is not only a tourist magnet but also a defining event for the city. "It's bigger than just the music," said George Wein, the chief executive of Festival Productions and the executive producer of Jazzfest. "This is people's lives."

Music in New Orleans has always been entertaining, but never just entertainment. It held on to cultural memories, negotiated between Old and New World aesthetics, and bound together families, neighborhoods and communities. It's party music, but it's also a secular ritual. And while the city has spawned far more than its share of gifted musicians, its music was not created from the top down.

It bubbled up out of the neighborhoods, including some that are now just wreckage. Its roots, constantly renewed in pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, were in street parades and barroom jam sessions, full of nonprofessionals who knew how to shake a tambourine.

After the hurricane New Orleans music could no longer be taken for granted, in or out of the city. There was an immediate and worldwide surge of interest. Musicians who had gotten by on regular local club dates now work a larger touring circuit — sometimes between their old home and their new one — and performers from New Orleans will be all over the summer jazz festivals in the United States and abroad.

Even with much of the city's population displaced and scattered, New Orleanians are determined not to let the music and its public celebrations disappear. At Jazzfest, Mardi Gras Indians, who usually take the whole year to hand-sew their elaborate feathered and beaded suits, were resplendent. Social aid and pleasure clubs, the neighborhood associations that sponsor parades and funerals, might not have had their old neighborhoods to return to, but they showed up at Jazzfest to parade in brand-new suits. Gospel choirs exiled from their home churches regrouped to sing about unswerving faith.

Although Jazzfest does not compile final figures until after the festival ends, it was clearly well attended, with more than 100,000 tickets sold in advance for its six days. Sets by headliners had sprawling and tightly packed audiences. The first weekend included stars from outside New Orleans, like Mr. Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock and Elvis Costello, along with New Orleans's own multimillion-selling rapper, Juvenile.

Paul Simon, Jimmy Buffett, Lionel Richie and the country hit maker Keith Urban are booked for the second half, Friday through Sunday. Some stars were working for nothing more than expenses, to show support for the festival and for New Orleans.

Mr. Springsteen led his large but never unwieldy Seeger Sessions Band — with horns, fiddles, banjo and more — in a set featuring folk songs from Pete Seeger's repertory. The arrangements gleefully veered toward south Louisiana Cajun music and New Orleans traditional jazz. Mr. Springsteen had written new verses about New Orleans for Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live," and he dedicated it to "President Bystander." Introducing the song, he said, "This is what happens when people play political games with other people's lives."

Mr. Costello was there because in November he had recorded an album with Allen Toussaint, an archetypal New Orleans songwriter. That album, "The River in Reverse," is scheduled for June release, and the songs from it that they performed together touched on mourning, anger and resolute optimism. But the heart of the festival wasn't in the visiting stars: not in Mr. Springsteen's set, or Etta James's soulful and sassy rhythm and blues, or in having the Edge, U2's guitarist, jamming with the Dave Matthews Band, as he did on Saturday.

This Jazzfest, with the world's attention on New Orleans, was even more concentrated on the city's own music than it has been in decades. About 92 percent of the performers were from Louisiana and from New Orleans in particular, though at the moment they may be living elsewhere.

Jazzfest's essence was in the gathering of a 50-woman choir from the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, which sustained $9 million in damage and now holds services for parts of its congregation in Houston and Baton Rouge as well as New Orleans. Some choir members had not seen one another since the hurricane. They, and other performers at the festival, kept saying, "It's like a reunion."

The Mahogany Brass Band was playing for the first time since the storm, and it was the first time all its members, dispersed as far as Phoenix and San Francisco, had seen one another. Brice Miller, the band's leader, started a strikingly emotional "St. James Infirmary" alone as a tearful solo trumpet dirge; when he sang the lyrics — about seeing a lover's dead body — he interjected, "My baby's New Orleans."

Musicians aren't the only ones who have reconvened for the festival. Vaucresson's Sausage Company, founded in New Orleans in 1899, has served its Cajun sausages at every Jazzfest, and it wasn't about to miss this one. Its factory was lost in the hurricane. To serve food at this year's festival, it restarted production in nearby Kenner, La., while rebuilding its old place. Vendors reported some of their best Jazzfest sales ever. It seemed everyone wanted a piece of New Orleans.

There were songs about the hurricane and songs that had been transfigured by it. The accordionist Dwayne Dopsie and his band, the Zydeco Hellraisers, performed a song he had written and recorded before Katrina — "My Name Is Hurricane" — as a frenzied two-step that had become prophetic. Gospel performers like Yolanda Adams sang about getting through storms. Juvenile's "Get Ya Hustle On" had a verse about using checks from Federal Emergency Management Agency to buy drugs.

The good times in the music were more treasured at this Jazzfest, and rightly so. Making happy music after so much sorrow was a defiant and beautiful laugh in the face of tribulation. Behind the scenes every New Orleans band at Jazzfest had to recreate itself after the city was evacuated: to find its place in New Orleans or to reconstitute it somewhere else. The New Birth Brass Band, originally from New Orleans, wore its latest T-shirts depicting both Louisiana and Texas.

New Orleans music hasn't stopped putting pleasure first. Jazzfest is, as always, a festival of good-time dance music, whether it's traditional jazz, bayou zydeco, brass-band struts, Mardi Gras Indian chants or fiercely complex electric funk. A superb jazz pianist, Jonathan Batiste, grounded his jubilant, splashy harmonies in Caribbean and New Orleans rhythms. Brass bands like Rebirth, New Birth and the Soul Rebels spanned classic second-line swing and hip-hop-influenced funk, with the Soul Rebels also pushing toward Latin beats. And there was plenty of straightforward funk from New Orleans elders like the Meters and Dr. John, as well as next-generation funk bands like Galactic and Papa Grows Funk.

The destruction in New Orleans is bound to change the city's culture. (For one thing, an influx of Mexican labor for construction could add yet another ingredient to New Orleans music.) And whether a majority of the city's population can ever return will be decided by large political and economic decisions, not by who's appearing in the clubs.

But this Jazzfest was a symbol of how eager the city is to rebuild itself, and how resourceful its inhabitants — current and former — can be. If the New Orleans of deep local traditions cannot renew itself, it won't be for lack of desire.

The triumph of this year's festival is that on the surface it is a normal Jazzfest: crowded, sweaty, ebullient and full of homegrown New Orleans spirit. "Normal is an incredible word to use down here," said Quint Davis, the producer and director of Jazzfest. "Normalcy is a nonexistent term."

    At Jazzfest in New Orleans, the Party Must Go On, NYT, 2.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/arts/music/02jazz.html

Qatar Grants Millions in Aid to New Orleans

May 2, 2006
By STEPHANIE STROM
The New York Times

The nation of Qatar plans to announce today roughly $60 million in grants to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina, including $17.5 million to Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically black Catholic university in the United States.

Other beneficiaries are Tulane University, Children's Hospital in New Orleans, Habitat for Humanity, Louisiana State University and the March of Dimes.

Nasser Bin Hamad M. al-Khalifa, Qatar's ambassador to the United States, said the remainder of the $100 million his country had pledged would be assigned in the coming months.

"Hurricane Katrina was so devastating that everyone in Qatar and the rest of the world felt a responsibility to really act," Mr. Khalifa said. More than 50 countries donated money, expertise and materials, according to a tally by Foreign Policy, a magazine published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Qatar was one of several Persian Gulf nations to donate tens of millions of dollars. Saudi Arabia, for instance, gave more than $100 million, and the United Arab Emirates pledged $100 million.

Poor nations also donated. Less than a year after the Indian Ocean tsunami engulfed it, Sri Lanka gave $25,000 to the American Red Cross. Bangladesh gave $1 million, Cyprus $50,000, Ghana $15,000 and the Dominican Republic $50,000.

European countries tended to offer expertise, supplies and equipment instead of money. Denmark, for example, donated blankets, water purification units and first aid kits.

Many donor countries funneled their gifts through the State Department or other government agencies. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, for instance, used $66 million of foreign assistance to underwrite Katrina Aid Today, a consortium of nine religion-based and secular relief organizations led by the United Methodist Committee on Relief that is using the money to offer case management services to 100,000 families for two years.

The Department of Education now controls $60 million donated by foreign governments that it said it would disburse to organizations to rebuild classrooms and libraries, buy books and maybe even pay teachers' salaries.

"We want to give the money where it will have the greatest impact so the foreign governments can see how their funds are being used," said Valerie Smith, an Education Department spokeswoman.

Countries also gave money to the American Red Cross and to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, the charity set up by former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton.

Qatar elected to distribute its money directly, rather than rely on an intermediary.

Ambassador Khalifa said the country wanted to insure transparency and accountability.

"Our past experience is that while you can give to any organization or to a government," he said, "you have no control over the money and then you discover the people most affected have not benefited."

To identify projects Qatar might want to support, the ambassador and his representatives talked to relief organizations, educators, members of Congress and other experts, and some embassy staff members traveled to the region.

Mr. Khalifa also drafted former Secretary of State James A. Baker; Laura D'Andrea Tyson, dean of the business school at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former economic adviser to President Clinton; Lee Raymond, former chief executive of the Exxon Mobil Corporation; and John J. DeGioia, the president of Georgetown University, to serve as an advisory board.

Qatar is giving Xavier, which is in New Orleans, $12.5 million to add 60,000 square feet to its College of Pharmacy so it can increase enrollment. The gift has additional benefits, the ambassador said, because it will provide construction jobs and because students from the university work in community clinics.

Xavier will also get $5 million for scholarships for students affected by the disaster.

"It's going to allow us to help those students to finish their educations," said Norman C. Francis, Xavier's president. "That's important because Xavier is the No. 1 producer of African-American graduates in the natural sciences, and those students then go on to get admitted to medical school."

Tulane will receive $10 million to help undergraduate students from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama who were affected by Hurricane Katrina, as well as students from those states entering the university next fall.

"The money will follow those students all the way through to graduation," said Scott S. Cowen, the university's president. "We anticipate over four years it will support roughly 300 students."

Qatar's $5.3 million gift was the biggest Children's Hospital has ever received, said Steve Worley, its president. The hospital will use $5 million to establish the Qatar Cares Fund, which it will use to underwrite medical care for needy children whose families were affected by the hurricane. The remaining $351,000 will go toward restoring the two of the hospital's five primary care clinics that were left standing after the storm.

"It's hard to know how to express our gratitude," Mr. Worley said.

    Qatar Grants Millions in Aid to New Orleans, NYT, 2.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/us/02charity.html

Bush visits New Orleans as FEMA criticized

Thu Apr 27, 2006 4:05 PM ET
Reuters
By Matt Spetalnick

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - President George W. Bush promised a better U.S. response to any catastrophic storm this season but his administration rebuffed a new call to shut down the agency most blamed for mishandling Hurricane Katrina.

Bush made his pledge on Thursday during his 11th trip to the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast, where his motorcade passed badly damaged houses, boarded up from top to bottom and awaiting rehabilitation. Later, he donned work gloves and a carpenter's apron to pound nails into a house frame.

"We pray that there is no hurricane this coming year, but we're working together to make sure the response will be as efficient as possible," Bush said.

Bush's trip came as he is struggling to pull up public approval ratings that have hit a record low. His effort to refocus attention on post-Katrina rebuilding, backed by $100 billion in aid he has helped push through Congress, was overshadowed by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's conclusion that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is beyond repair.

In a report on Thursday, the panel recommended it be replaced with a beefed-up national preparedness agency that would be better able to respond to disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

The White House said it was opposed.

"As we're heading into this hurricane season, now is not the time to really look at moving organizational boxes," Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser to Bush, told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina killed about 1,300 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless when it shattered New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1.

LOOKING TO NOVEMBER

Continuing political fallout from the disaster has been high on a list of troubles that have shaken public confidence in Bush, raising election-year concerns among his fellow Republicans that they are in danger of losing control of Congress.

Democrats have left little doubt they hope to use the stark symbolism of New Orleans' wrecked, boarded-up neighborhoods to seek electoral advantage in the November congressional elections.

"This report confirms in stark terms what the people of Louisiana have known for many months," Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, said.

"The handling of Hurricane Katrina by the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA was an organizational nightmare of immense proportions and that tragic administrative bumbling caused untold hardship for the people of Louisiana," she said.

Bush's popularity has also been hit by growing public disenchantment with the Iraq war and gasoline prices that have topped $3 a gallon in parts of the United States.

His approval rating fell to 32 percent in a CNN poll released this week and to 36 percent in a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll Wednesday. Both were all-time lows for each poll.

The White House officially billed Bush's trip to New Orleans and the Mississippi coast as paying tribute to thousands of volunteers assisting in reconstruction. But he also wants to reassure residents the administration is following through on its promise to help them rebuild.

Sakura Kone, spokesman for the grass-roots aid group Common Ground Relief, said Bush's trip sent the false impression that the government has put New Orleans back on track, while thousands still struggle with ruined homes.

(Additional reporting by Joanne Kenen in Washington and Jeffrey Jones in New Orleans)

    Bush visits New Orleans as FEMA criticized, R, 27.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyid=2006-04-27T200454Z_01_N26423267_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-BUSH.xml

In Rebuilding as in the Disaster, Wealth and Class Help Define New Orleans

April 25, 2006
The New York Times
By GARY RIVLIN

NEW ORLEANS — Floodwaters were still sloshing around inside the houses of Eastover, a gated subdivision that was home to some of this city's wealthiest black residents, when the neighborhood association decided to hire a boat for a rescue operation last September.

The rescuers were not searching for someone stranded, but rather trying to retrieve a roster of residents from the association's offices so it could start learning who planned to move back.

The group was so well organized and financed that it recently retained a professional planner to help respond to the city's requirement that devastated neighborhoods devise their own revival blueprints.

Elsewhere, in the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly black working-class community where some of New Orleans's poorest people lived, displaced residents voice that same steely resolve to rebuild. But they had no neighborhood association, at least until mid-February, when Charmaine L. Marchand, the area's state representative, took it upon herself to create one. "No one else was organizing," Ms. Marchand said, "so I felt it fell upon me as the only elected official from the Lower Ninth to do something."

So while other neighborhood organizations were trying to assemble enough residents to justify the deployment of precious city services, those behind the newly minted Lower Ninth Ward Homeowners Association were busy writing bylaws and selecting officers well into March.

Just as disparities between rich and poor were exposed in the days after Hurricane Katrina, class and wealth seem to be playing a significant role as elected officials struggle to determine which neighborhoods will be rebuilt and which should revert to swampland, if not bulldozed and sold en masse to a developer. While Eastover is full of the sound of saws ripping wood and the pneumatic punch of nail guns, the sound of the Lower Ninth Ward is mainly silence.

On one level, the rebuilding plan approved in March by Mayor C. Ray Nagin appears to put every neighborhood on the same footing. That plan places responsibility on residents to determine who is moving back to their communities and to decide collectively on a vision for their neighborhood.

But not every community has the same resources to track down former neighbors and draft a plan that can provide for things as diverse as a local elementary school and a grocery store.

"Some communities are more able than others," said Steven Ringo, a retired Air Force sergeant who not long before the storm had returned to the Lower Ninth Ward, where he was born, to start a janitorial services business. "People don't have the same training and background and schooling and experience at working the system."

More than half the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward own their home, according to census figures, and yet before the hurricane only one small corner of the ward, the Holy Cross neighborhood, an enclave of historically significant homes, had established a homeowners association.

The Lower Ninth had been a tightknit community, but the lack of a strong organization meant that there was no board of directors to take charge immediately after the storm, as the Eastover Property Owners Association did. There was also no central database of residents' names and e-mail addresses.

As a result, while the Eastover group had contacted virtually all the subdivision's 350 households by early January, the Lower Ninth Ward Homeowners Association, Ms. Marchand said, had tracked down only a small fraction of its residents. The city has said that a neighborhood's ability to draw back a "critical mass" of its people will be a crucial indicator of whether it can be redeveloped and receive city services.

The Lower Ninth Ward has been further handicapped because so many of its residents are far from home and lack the means to participate in planning, said Muriel Lewis, director of the National Association of Katrina Evacuees, an advocacy group that lobbies on behalf of Gulf Coast evacuees scattered across 25 states. No other New Orleans neighborhood has as many residents dispersed around the country as the Lower Ninth, Ms. Lewis said.

"We're talking about people who don't have the money to just pick up and come here for a meeting, no matter what the stakes," she said.

Unlike Eastover, which did not exist until the mid-1980's, the Lower Ninth is a community rich in history, home to families whose roots date back generations. Yet it is also a community where the average home sells for $60,000 to $75,000, while in Eastover the homes start at around $400,000 and are more typically priced in the millions.

"You had doctors and lawyers and your successful entrepreneurs in Eastover," said Ruston Henry, who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward and ran a pharmacy there before the hurricane. "Here you had just hard-working people. You have your mechanics and waiters down here, people not used to working the system."

Even the architects of the city's reconstruction plan acknowledge that it favors better-off communities. From the outset, said Joseph C. Canizaro, the plan's primary author, its success has depended greatly on the availability of outside experts, including architects, planners and economic development professionals, who would help residents develop their blueprints.

"From the beginning, we've believed it was critical to provide communities, especially our poorer communities, the help they need in working out a plan," Mr. Canizaro said.

Yet obtaining the $7.5 million that Mr. Canizaro and other officials estimate New Orleans needs to pay for those experts has proved difficult. The city initially thought the federal government would provide the money, but when Washington declined, the City Council decided in late March that it had no choice but to devote $2.9 million in community development funds to hire outside planning experts.

"This helps, but we should've started two months ago," said Oliver M. Thomas Jr., president of the New Orleans City Council.

[Last week the Rockefeller Foundation pledged $3.5 million to the rebuilding effort. That money will be used to underwrite the cost of hiring urban planners, architects and other experts, and also to hold planning meetings in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Dallas and Houston, the four cities with the greatest number of displaced New Orleanians.]

"I'm sure people in the Lower Ninth Ward, once they have their hand on the pencil, will draw up something good," Mr. Thomas said. "But we need to provide organizers the support they need to help them create a new vision for their community."

The Lower Ninth is not entirely without resources. Mr. Thomas was born and raised there, and any number of outside groups — among them the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, an activist body better known by its acronym, Acorn — have been working to help the area recover.

Yet it is also a community that was harder hit than any other in New Orleans. Even today, nearly eight months after the storm, there are no FEMA trailers in the Lower Ninth Ward because the area is still without gas and drinkable water.

Eastover, on the other hand, had electricity and other utilities before most of its neighbors elsewhere in the battered eastern half of the city.

"The Lower Ninth Ward is dead compared to my area," said Ms. Lewis, of the evacuees association, who before the hurricane lived in a middle-class neighborhood in eastern New Orleans. "We have people working on their homes every day. There's nothing in the Lower Ninth Ward."

    In Rebuilding as in the Disaster, Wealth and Class Help Define New Orleans, NYT, 25.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/us/25class.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Levees not fully ready for hurricane season

Updated 4/24/2006 9:53 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Anne Rochell Konigsmark

NEW ORLEANS — All day, every day and into the night, crews for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pour concrete into walls, pack dirt into hills and ram steel into the earth. They are scrambling to undo the damage Hurricane Katrina inflicted on the region's levee system.
Their task is urgent: Hurricane season begins June 1.

But even when the holes are plugged — a $2 billion endeavor — the entire 350-mile protection system remains flawed, the corps now admits. Flood walls are too weak in some places; earthen levees are too short in others. Locals say the only thing that will save the low-lying region from more flooding this summer is not getting hit with a strong storm.

"I think we can limp along through this hurricane season," says Julie Quinn, a state representative whose district includes the 17th Street Canal, which flooded the Lakeview neighborhood.

Then she laughs. "With some divine intervention, we'll be OK. I just can't imagine we're going to see another Katrina."

Corps officials are confident that by June, they will repair the breaches and other damage incurred along almost half the levee system. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the corps, announced April 12 that the agency wants to correct and strengthen the entire system to withstand storms stronger than Katrina, which was a Category 3 when it made landfall the morning of Aug. 29 in Plaquemines Parish.

Hurricanes are measured on a rising scale of intensity, from Category 1 (sustained winds of 74 mph or more) to Category 5 (156 mph or above).

By 2010, if Congress funds it, the corps will have made the system "better and stronger than it has ever been," Strock says.

That's years and at least $4 billion away. For this year's storm season, which lasts six months and promises to be active, the corps will not be able to upgrade the 181 miles of levees that remained intact during Katrina. An inspection of those undamaged areas began only last week, says Dan Hitchings, the corps' Director of Task Force Hope, which is overseeing levee repairs. Weaknesses, known and unknown, abound in those sections, the corps and other experts say.

"It's all a matter of reducing the risk as quickly as we can," says Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the corps' Director of Civil Works. "But a different storm (from Katrina) on a different track with a different speed could do different damage."

The difference between this year and last? Awareness, Hitchings says. Much of the levee system is the same as it was when Katrina hit, and that means it might fail again. "You're going to have what you had (before Katrina), and that's all you're going to get," Hitchings says. "The threat is the same."

The parts of the city that did not flood — well-known areas along the Mississippi River such as the French Quarter, the Garden District and the area around Tulane and Loyola universities — likely will remain safe, the corps says.

Strock says he is most concerned about the low-lying neighborhoods on the east side of the city, such as the 9th Ward, as well as St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. Levees in those areas could be topped again. And some flood walls along Lake Pontchartrain, on the north side of the city, likely are as weak as those that broke in other places.

Half the system destroyed

The corps designed and built the levee system after Hurricane Betsy, a Category 3 storm, hit and flooded New Orleans in 1965. That was the last major hurricane to strike the city until Katrina.

It took decades to build the system: It took only hours to knock almost half of it down.

In the chaotic, post-Katrina world, no issue unites New Orleanians like the levees. Trusting in the corps is not easy. "I'm very hopeful we're going to be safer," says U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La. "But based on the corps track record, I have grave concerns."

On this, most residents agree: Hurricane Katrina did not destroy hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and kill more than 1,000 people. Failed levees did.

"Our city has been destroyed, and it was the federal government that did it," says Rhett Accardo, a former nurse at a now-closed hospital. "People are as mad as they would be if al-Qaeda had hit us."

More than half the city's 450,000 residents have not come home since flooding nearly emptied the city eight months ago, according to Mayor Ray Nagin's office, and many say their decision to return and rebuild hinges on levee safety.

"When people think about getting hit by a hurricane, they feel like those things are inevitable, and just a chance you take in life," says Bob Thomas, director of the Center for Environmental Communications at Loyola University. "But after repeatedly being told by the corps that we were safe, this is different.

"The break in the levees caused people to lose faith in the government's ability to protect them. I gotta tell you, I'm nervous, more because of the frailty of the infrastructure than the power of any storm. The corps is saying the levees will not break now, but that's what they said last year."

As the corps works to repair levees, it also wants to repair the agency's reputation. Meeting the June 1 deadline is part of that effort. Riley and others say work of this scale has never been undertaken under such a tight deadline.

"We have absolute confidence in the repair of the damaged portions," Riley says. "We've got a great system in place that will go a long way to protect New Orleans."

The corps has asked three separate groups of experts to investigate what went wrong with the levees and to ensure that the current work is correct. The agency has invited the most outspoken critics to tour here and offer advice. There are frequent news conferences at levees and alongside flood walls. And the corps has taken the blame for mistakes. The agency admits design flaws led to the collapse of flood walls along canals that cut through the city. "Everyone at the agency feels shocked and numb," Hitchings says. "That was not supposed to happen."

Critics are impressed with the corps' repair work. Floodgates, placed at the mouths of three canals that cut through the north end of New Orleans, will prevent storm surges from entering the city from Lake Pontchartrain.

"The gates are beautiful," says Bob Bea, a University of California-Berkeley engineer who has been investigating the levees with a National Science Foundation grant. He has been an outspoken critic of the corps.

After a recent tour of levees in St. Bernard Parish, another expert said the soils being used to rebuild the earthen hills were much better than what was originally there. "Our concerns have been pretty well addressed," says Raymond Seed, a Berkeley engineer working with Bea.

Paul Kemp, with the Hurricane Center at the University of Louisiana, said he is "astounded" by the recent progress. But he remains worried about earthen levees along the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish, and along a shipping channel in St. Bernard Parish, saying they need to be reinforced or "armored" with concrete to prevent erosion. The corps plans to armor levees in coming years, but not for this hurricane season.

"Right now, these levees are not going to do well with a combination of wave and storm surge," Kemp says. "This is a work in progress, and we're going to have that progress perhaps interrupted by a hurricane."

About $1.5 billion in improvements to the levees, including armoring, is currently in a supplemental spending bill before Congress. President Bush has not yet asked for the $2.5 billion needed to provide protection from a "100-year storm" — that is, a storm that has a 1% chance of occurring in a given year. And the White House has announced it will not ask for the $1.6 billion needed to protect the lower part of Plaquemines Parish from such a flood.

Even at its best, the system would not withstand a Category 5 storm. That's why Louisiana's elected officials have been pushing the federal government to fund a complete makeover of the levees. The corps is studying what it would take to provide Category 5 protection; a report is due to Congress in December.

"This hurricane season makes me very uneasy," says Bea, who lived here in the 1960s and lost his home in Hurricane Betsy. "The corps is trying to do in a few months what it couldn't get done in 40 years. If I lived in New Orleans, I'd get a second-floor apartment and put my stuff in storage."

For some, the job is personal

Germaine and Shane Williams would like to see Category 5 protection before they feel truly safe. The two young brothers begin work every day at dawn, rebuilding a 4,000-foot section of the canal wall that collapsed and flooded the 9th Ward.

For the Williams brothers, the job is personal: They grew up here. Their mother's flood-ruined home, marked by the city as unsafe to enter, is walking distance from their work site. On both sides of the canal, the working-class neighborhood remains mostly uninhabited, a ghostly landscape of smashed houses and overturned cars.

"We're building it pretty strong," says Germaine, 23, about the steel-reinforced, concrete wall. "I feel better about it."

When asked if he would rebuild in this neighborhood, Germaine says: "I don't know about that. I wouldn't stay this close." Shane, 20, agrees: "It would take a higher wall."

Germaine now lives with his father in a travel trailer in St. Bernard Parish; Shane lives with friends in an area of the city called the West Bank.

Some residents who have chosen to rebuild in flooded areas say they're trusting the odds, not the corps.

"Katrina was once in 100 years," says Fred Yoder, who just moved back into his Lakeview home. "You can say we have to have Category 5 protection, but that's not going to happen right now. The levees won't be up to standard this year, but we just have to have faith."

    Levees not fully ready for hurricane season, UT, 24.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-23-levees_x.htm

Vote for Mayor Points to Change in New Orleans

April 24, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, April 23 — Mayor C. Ray Nagin may have led Saturday's mayoral election, but he now faces a popular and better-financed opponent on a political landscape utterly changed by Hurricane Katrina, one in which the long-running dominance of the city's black vote has been significantly reduced.

Black residents, whose neighborhoods were the most devastated by the storm, voted in much smaller numbers than whites did on Saturday, even more so than usual. White turnout is usually higher than black turnout, but the gap was about double what it is normally, analysts said Sunday.

As a result, most of the votes here were cast against Mr. Nagin, who is black, even though he came out on top in a crowded field, with 38 percent of the vote. If that trend holds, New Orleans will elect its first white mayor in nearly 30 years on May 20, when Mr. Nagin will face Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who got 29 percent, in a runoff.

If Mr. Landrieu receives two-thirds of the 30 percent received by the white candidates who finished behind him, Mr. Nagin's days as mayor will be over. Adding to his difficulties, Mr. Nagin must mobilize the citizens who were displaced from the city by Hurricane Katrina and who failed to turn out for Saturday's voting.

Against a backdrop of perennial declines in black voter participation here, that could turn out to be a challenge too great for the mayor's not inconsiderable political skills.

"He has to expand the electorate, and that's a big hurdle," said Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans. "Blacks displaced by Katrina, these people are going to be horribly difficult to reach."

Over all, the turnout was surprisingly good given the difficult circumstances; about 80 percent of voters who took part in the 2002 election cast ballots. But the gap was largely, though not exclusively, made up of blacks displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The turnout of registered voters — though not necessarily habitual voters — in black neighborhoods was about half that in white neighborhoods.

Relying on black voters who are already back here, or who managed to participate in the early-voting system set up for evacuees, may not be enough for Mr. Nagin. In some black precincts, particularly in the Lower Ninth Ward, turnout was down by a quarter or more from the previous election. Areas that did not flood, where the turnout was highest, were precisely the ones where Mr. Nagin fared the worst.

Another hurdle for Mr. Nagin is Mr. Landrieu's strength among blacks, over 20 percent of whom voted for the lieutenant governor, analysts said. He and Mr. Nagin won similar amounts of the 21,351 absentee votes. But Mr. Nagin got less than 10 percent of the overall white vote, a huge drop from the previous election, when he carried all the majority-white precincts. He has also lost much of the white financial support that helped propel him.

For months, civil rights leaders have vigorously fought holding an election here at all this spring, with as many as two-thirds of the citizens displaced. At the least, they argued in court and elsewhere, satellite voting centers should have been set up in neighboring states in addition to the ones set up around Louisiana.

But though logistical hurdles played a role in preventing some evacuees from voting, even Mr. Nagin's strategists said that a larger trend might be at work.

Jim Carvin, the mayor's veteran campaign consultant and the engineer of every successful mayoral campaign here since 1970, predicted that in the end blacks would rally to Mr. Nagin, while white voters who supported him in 2002 would come back to him. But Mr. Carvin said that much of the New Orleans diaspora, predominantly black, might be lost to the city for good.

"The challenge is to get more voters out of New Orleans," he said, arguing that looking elsewhere could be futile. "We have a good shot at that, as African-Americans tend to vote for African-Americans."

Mr. Carvin said he was surprised at the low turnout among blacks displaced by the storm. "I think it was a serious underparticipation, which would seem to indicate that a lot of these people are not coming back, so therefore why vote," he said. "They have jobs and residences. We may have lost them as a population."

He said Mr. Nagin might partly make up for that loss by attracting the white conservatives who supported two losing candidates Saturday. Yet that may be difficult.

Even before Mr. Nagin angered many whites with a speech in January predicting that the city would be "chocolate" once again, his previous base of support in the largely white Uptown neighborhoods here had begun to wither — a fact the now-infamous declaration may merely have recognized, since it appeared to be a bid for black support.

Whites here have tended to focus their disenchantment at the slow recovery more on Mr. Nagin than have blacks. And there is a widespread perception that Mr. Nagin's unguarded language — his tirade immediately after the storm, for instance — has cost him credibility in Washington. He has repeatedly shifted position on important issues, like the location of trailer parks. And he ignored the central recommendation of his own recovery commission, to hold off rebuilding in the most severely damaged areas.

White business leaders who supported him enthusiastically four years ago deserted him entirely in this election, throwing their support mostly to an Uptown business executive, Ron Forman, who won 17 percent of the vote. Now, some Uptowners who contributed to Mr. Forman say they will support Mr. Landrieu, albeit with some reluctance. In the State Legislature, where he served for 16 years, this scion of the state's leading political family did not earn high marks from the business lobby.

"I will probably support Landrieu, because he does after all represent some change," said Richard Currence, a Forman contributor, retired executive with an offshore oil services company and Uptown resident. "His record in the Legislature, for the business community, left a lot to be desired. People like me are going to have to swallow pretty hard. I've got to overcome that and say he's the guy of the two that can do a better job in leading the city out of the mess we're in."

In his speech after the voting Saturday, Mr. Nagin referred to two wealthy businessmen here who have previously backed him, Joseph C. Canizaro and Donald T. Bollinger, apparently in a renewed bid for the support of the business community.

True to his relaxed style, Mr. Nagin scheduled no campaign events Sunday, in contrast to Mr. Landrieu, who held a news conference at which he again emphasized what he considered the importance of the biracial coalition that supported him.

His campaign had sought to "not polarize or divide anyone," he said, and indeed, he largely avoided the central question of whether some neighborhoods should not be rebuilt. He had tried to represent "all segments of the population," he said. "African-Americans and whites have supported this candidacy."

At a time when citizens here are angry at elected officials at all levels, Mr. Landrieu said he hoped to win back the full city's confidence. "My job is to earn the trust of all New Orleans voters," he said.

That festering anger will not help Mr. Nagin, among whites or blacks. "The incumbent right now, he looks like he's lost the grasp to get this city moving," said Walter Ennis, a black insurance adjuster who said he voted for Mr. Landrieu on Saturday.

    Vote for Mayor Points to Change in New Orleans, NYT, 24.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/us/24orleans.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

New Orleans Hip-Hop Is the Home of Gangsta Gumbo

April 23, 2006
The New York Times
By KELEFA SANNEH

FOR thousands of people — we'll probably never know exactly how many — Hurricane Katrina was the end. But for listeners across the country, that not-quite-natural disaster also marked the beginning of a party that hasn't ended yet. Ever since those awful days last year, the country has been celebrating the rich musical heritage of New Orleans.

There was a blitz of benefit concerts, including "From the Big Apple to the Big Easy," a pair of shows held simultaneously at Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall last September. A New Orleans jam session closed the show at the Grammy Awards in February. There have been scads of well-intentioned compilations, including "Our New Orleans: A Benefit Album for the Gulf Coast" (Nonesuch), "Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now" (Concord) and "Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Benefit Concert" (Blue Note), a live album recorded at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Benefit. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony last month, a video segment paid tribute to New Orleans music through the years, from Louis Armstrong to the Neville Brothers; there was also the inevitable New Orleans jam session.

But one thing all these tributes have in common is that they all ignored the thrilling — and wildly popular — sound of New Orleans hip-hop, the music that has been the city's true soundtrack through the last few decades.

Rap music remains by far New Orleans's most popular musical export. Lil Wayne, Master P, Juvenile, Mannie Fresh, B. G., Mystikal and many other pioneers have sold millions of albums, and they have helped make their city an indispensable part of the hip-hop world. Unlike all the other musicians celebrated at post-Katrina tributes, these ones still show up on the pop charts, often near the top. (Juvenile's most recent album made its debut at No. 1, last month.) Yet when tourists and journalists descend upon the city next weekend, for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, they'll find only one local rapper on the schedule: Juvenile, who is to appear on the Congo Square Louisiana Rebirth Stage at 6 p.m. Saturday.

Maybe New Orleans rappers don't mind being left out. No doubt most of them prefer popularity — and its rewards — to respect. But why should they have to choose?

Hip-hop was long considered unfit for polite society. And yet the extraordinary snubbing of New Orleans hip-hop comes at a time when the genre is gaining institutional validation. The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History recently announced plans for a hip-hop exhibit. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum exhibited "Roots, Rhyme and Rage: The Hip-Hop Story" in 1999. Colleges and universities around the country are offering conferences and courses devoted to hip-hop history. At the same time that hip-hop is being written out of the history of New Orleans, it's being written into the history of America. Could that possibly be a coincidence?

The story of New Orleans hip-hop begins in earnest with what is known as bounce music: festive beats, exuberant chants, simple lyrics that ruled local nightclubs and breezeway parties in the late 1980's and early 90's. The future hip-hop star Juvenile got his start in the bounce-music scene. But like many New Orleans musicians before him, Juvenile found out that having a citywide hit wasn't quite the same as having a nationwide hit.

By the mid-90's, Southern hip-hop was starting to explode, and so some New Orleans entrepreneurs figured out ways to go national. Master P, a world-class hustler and less-than-world-class rapper from the city's rough Calliope projects, founded a label called No Limit, and used it to popularize a distinctively New Orleans-ish form of hard-boiled hip-hop. For a time Master P was one of pop music's most successful moguls. (He made the cover of Fortune, and he never let anyone forget it.)

Master P's crosstown rivals were the Williams brothers, proprietors of Cash Money Records, which eventually replaced No Limit as the city's dominant brand name. Cash Money signed up the hometown hero Juvenile (who was raised in the Magnolia projects), as well as the city's greatest hip-hop producer, Mannie Fresh. Working with a great group of rappers including Lil Wayne and B. G., Fresh perfected an exuberant electronic sound; he did as much as anyone to pull the musical legacy of New Orleans into the 21st century. You could hear brass bands in the synthesizers, drum lines in the rattling beats, Mardi Gras Indians in the sing-song lyrics. (If you're wondering where to start, try Juvenile's head-spinning 1998 blockbuster, "400 Degreez," which has sold 4.7 million copies.)

Like most musical stories, this one doesn't really have a happy ending — or any ending at all. Master P's empire dissolved, which explains why you might recently have seen him on "Dancing With the Stars." Mystikal, one of the city's best and weirdest rappers, split with No Limit in 2000, and he's currently serving a jail sentence for sexual battery and tax evasion. Juvenile, B. G. and Mannie Fresh have all left Cash Money, though Lil Wayne remains.

The came Katrina. Not all of the city's stars were living in New Orleans when the storm hit, but all lost houses or cars or — at the very least — a hometown. Lil Wayne moved his mother to Miami; Mannie Fresh set up shop in Los Angeles; B. G. is living in Detroit.

But the music never stopped. Juvenile's "Reality Check" (UTP/Atlantic), released last month, was the fastest-selling CD of his career; for the defiant first single, "Get Ya Hustle On," he filmed a video in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward. B. G. recently released a strong new album, "The Heart of tha Streetz Vol. 2 (I Am What I Am)" (Koch); it was strong enough, in fact, to earn him a new record contract with Atlantic. In "Move Around," the album's first single, Mannie Fresh sings (sort of) the cheerful refrain: "I'm from the ghetto, homey/ I was raised on bread and baloney/ You can't come around here, 'cause you're phony."

And then there's Lil Wayne, who last fall released "Tha Carter 2" (Cash Money/Universal), perhaps the finest album of his career (it has sold about 900,000 copies so far). In his slick lyrics and raspy voice, you can hear a city's swagger and desperation:

All I have in this world is a pistol and a promise
A fistful of dollars
A list full of problems
I'll address 'em like P.O. Boxes
Yeah, I'm from New Orleans, the Creole cockpit
We so out of it
Zero tolerance
Gangsta gumbo — I'll serve 'em a pot of it

All right, so this isn't the stuff that feel-good tributes are made of. Despite the topical video, "Get Ya Hustle On" is a mishmash of political commentary and drug-dealer rhymes. (The song included the well-known couplet, "Everybody tryna get that check from FEMA/ So he can go and score him some co-ca-een-uh.") And much of the music portrays New Orleans as a place full of violence and decadence: expensive teeth, cheap women, "choppers" (machine guns) everywhere. If you're trying to celebrate the old, festive, tourist-friendly New Orleans, maybe these aren't the locals you want.

Furthermore, much of the post-Katrina effort has focused on "saving" and "preserving" the city's musical heritage. Clearly top-selling rappers don't need charity. In fact, many have been quietly helping, through gifts to fellow residents and hip-hop charities like David Banner's Heal the Hood Foundation.

But it's worth remembering that many New Orleans hip-hop pioneers — from DJ Jimi to the influential group U.N.L.V. — aren't exactly millionaires. And for that matter, many rappers aren't nearly as rich as they claim. In any case, glowing recollections aren't the only way to pay tribute to the city. The story of Katrina is in large part a story of poverty and neglect; it's no coincidence that many of the rappers come from the same neighborhoods that still haven't been cleaned up. Surely the lyrics to a Juvenile song aren't nearly as shocking as those images most of us saw on television.

The language of preservationism sometimes conceals its own biases. If all the dying traditions are valuable, does that also mean all the valuable traditions are dying? If a genre doesn't need saving, does that also mean it's not worth saving? If New Orleans rappers seem less lovable than, say, Mardi Gras Indians or veteran soul singers, might it be because they're less needy? Cultural philanthropy is drawn to musical pioneers — especially African-American ones — who are old, poor and humble. What do you do when the pioneers are young, rich and cocky instead?

Believe it or not, that question brings us back to the Smithsonian, which has come to praise hip-hop. Or to bury it. Or both. The genre is over 30 years old by now, and while its early stars now seem unimpeachable (does anyone have a bad word to say about Grandmaster Flash or Run-DMC?), its current stars seem more impeachable than ever. From 50 Cent to Young Jeezy to, well, Juvenile, hip-hop might be even more controversial now than it was in the 80's; hip-hop culture has been blamed for everything from lousy schools to sexism to the riots in France. In a weird way, that might help account for the newfound respectability of the old school. To an older listener who's aghast at crack rap, the relatively innocent rhymes of Run-DMC don't seem so bad. If the new generation didn't seem so harmful, its predecessors might not seem harmless enough for the national archives.

Maybe the New Orleans hip-hop scene — "gangsta gumbo" — just hasn't been around long enough to make the history books. But that will change, as the rappers start seeming less like harbingers of an ominous future and more like relics of a colorful past. New Orleans hip-hop will endure not just because the music is so thrilling, but also because the rappers vividly evoke a city that is, for worse and (let's not forget) for better, never going to be the same.

After all, long before his name was affixed to an airport, Louis Armstrong, too, seemed manifestly unfit for polite society. Back when he recorded "Muggles," an ode to marijuana, he was a symbol of the so-called "jazz intoxication" that was corrupting an earlier generation the way hip-hop is corrupting this one.

A quarter-century from now, when the social problems that Juvenile and others so discomfitingly rap about have become one more strand of the city's official history, they may find themselves honored in just the kinds of musical tributes and cultural museums that currently shut them out. By then, their careers will probably have cooled off. They'll be less influential, less popular, less controversial; not coincidentally, they'll have a less visceral connection to the youth of New Orleans. And finally, their music — and maybe also their recording studios, their custom jewelry, their promotional posters — will seem to be worth saving. Perhaps, like so many other pop-music traditions, "gangsta gumbo" is a dish best preserved cold.

    New Orleans Hip-Hop Is the Home of Gangsta Gumbo, NYT, 23.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/arts/music/23sann.html

Runoff Election Is Set for New Orleans Mayor's Race

April 23, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, April 22 — Mayor C. Ray Nagin made a strong showing Saturday in the city's first mayoral election since Hurricane Katrina but failed to escape a runoff election next month in which he will face Louisiana's lieutenant governor, Mitch Landrieu.

With 94 percent of the city's 442 precincts reporting, Mr. Nagin had 39 percent of the vote, ahead of Mr. Landrieu, who had 28 percent. A third leading candidate, Ron Forman, a local businessman, had 17 percent.

Because no candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote, Mr. Nagin and Mr. Landrieu will compete in a runoff on May 20.

Mr. Landrieu's showing Saturday put him in a strong position to become the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father, Moon Landrieu, left office in 1978. He is likely to pick up most of Mr. Forman's vote, almost exclusively concentrated in white precincts. In addition, Mr. Landrieu apparently picked up as much as 20 percent of the vote in black precincts, according to analysts on local television stations.

Mr. Nagin, however, the only major black candidate, polled better than expected, setting up what is likely to be an intense campaign between the two men over the next month.

With turnout apparently low in black precincts, Mr. Nagin appealed for unity after the results were in.

"If we don't come together as men and women, we will perish as fools," he said. "We must become comfortable with one another."

Some black voters interviewed here Saturday, dissatisfied with the slow pace of recovery, said they were supporting Mr. Landrieu.

"We have no direction right now," said Marvin Keelen, who had journeyed from Baton Rouge to vote. "We can't make any decisions."

Nonetheless, it appeared that Mr. Nagin, who had not previously been popular in black neighborhoods, would pick up a large share of the black vote.

Mr. Landrieu, in a speech to supporters Saturday night, invoked his biracial support. He said the city's different racial and ethnic groups "almost in equal measure came forward to propel this campaign," and he promised to "push off the forces of division."

His campaign hopes to draw on the popularity of his political family among black and white voters. Mr. Landrieu's sister, Mary, is a Democratic United States senator from Louisiana.

State officials went to elaborate lengths to involve the tens of thousands of people still displaced from this damaged city. But for months, civil rights groups have challenged the very notion of holding an election now. Officials accepted ballots mailed and faxed in at the last minute, and the state set up voting places all around Louisiana.

Throughout the day, New Orleans citizens streamed past piles of debris to vote in improvised polling places. The hurricane's floodwaters had destroyed dozens of voting sites, forcing state officials to cobble together giant makeshift ones.

Some had traveled hundreds of miles to cast their ballots, piling into buses in Atlanta for an overnight trip, or getting into cars bleary-eyed for a long morning voyage from the rural hinterlands.

Many came to a giant warehouse on Chef Menteur Highway in flood-ravaged eastern New Orleans, where officials had combined 50 precincts and 27 voting places into the biggest of the makeshift precincts. Citizens cast their ballots under signs bearing the names of destroyed voting places in the Ninth Ward: "7925 Alabama St.," or "St. Mary's Academy," or "Schaumberg Elementary School."

In a festive atmosphere, voters greeted relatives and friends they had not seen since the storm and spoke of what they said was the imperative of appearing in person to vote.

"This is New Orleans; this is my home," said Frank Echols, who said he had driven all morning from Mississippi, over 100 miles. His home in eastern New Orleans was heavily damaged in the flooding.

"I could have voted by mail, but I wanted to be part of this," said Mr. Echols, a retired official with the city's mass-transit agency. "We don't know what the future is going to hold, but we're going to be part of it."

Melva Pichon had driven nearly eight hours from Conroe, Tex. "This determines the future of our city," Ms. Pichon said. Saying she had opted for the incumbent, she added: "I want to make sure that the person who gets in has experienced this before."

State election officials described turnout as steady all day. Before Saturday, some 20,000 people had already voted by mail or at early voting centers set up throughout the state.

With the massive task of reconstruction here stalled, citizens said repeatedly before Saturday's tally that they were looking for the city's chief executive to present a clear way forward.

Throughout the truncated mayoral campaign, the leading candidates largely avoided confronting the central issue: whether some neighborhoods were so inherently vulnerable to flooding that they should not be rebuilt. That issue, so tied up with sensitive questions of race and class, seemed too hot to handle in the current campaign, though analysts speculated it might now be taken up in the runoff.

    Runoff Election Is Set for New Orleans Mayor's Race, NYT, 23.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/us/23elect.html?hp&ex=1145851200&en=d28f81ca4b3166a0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Mystery and Unease as New Orleans Is Set to Vote

April 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, April 21 — Last week, the N.A.A.C.P. chartered four buses in Houston, hoping to fill them with voters returning to Louisiana to cast their ballots early in this city's mayoral election. But only six people showed up, and several buses made the trip empty. It seemed a bad sign for black participation in the vote.

Around Louisiana, on the other hand, 20,000 residents have already cast ballots, more than 10 times the normal number, and many of them are likely to have been evacuated from black neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina. What appear to be contradictory tea leaves help explain why this election is one of the most mysterious in the region's history, so fraught with uncertainty that for weeks analysts have been hedging their bets on the outcome.

Nobody knows how many people will show up to vote here on Saturday and whether most will be black, as in elections for a generation, or white. Nobody knows exactly how many people are in the city. A white mayor may rule at City Hall for the first time in nearly 30 years, or maybe not.

"We don't know the racial composition of the electorate," Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans, said. "We don't know the racial composition of the evacuees."

Those questions of race are likely to determine which two candidates emerge from the election to compete in the runoff on May 20, assuming no candidate gets a majority of the vote.

For all the confusion, there is general agreement on the three leading candidates, Mayor C. Ray Nagin, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and Ron Forman, a local businessman. The latter two candidates are white, and if they are the winners on Saturday, it will represent a significant upheaval in the city's power structure.

As many as 200,000 of the city's 290,000 registered voters may be living outside New Orleans. Most are probably black, as were two-thirds of the 20,000 who already voted, according to the secretary of state's calculations. The low participation indicates to Ms. Howell that most evacuees will not be voting. Having failed to delay the vote in court, many civil rights advocates have argued for weeks that the cumbersome absentee process would disenfranchise black voters.

Thousands of residents may pour into the city on Saturday, or perhaps not. For many who do, the ritual of voting has been upended. Fewer than a third of the normal 256 polling places will operate. Meanwhile, state officials have erected large billboards all over New Orleans telling voters where to call if they are unsure of their new polling place. In an unusual move, Louisiana's secretary of state has come from Baton Rouge to take charge of the vote.

There will probably be confusion on Saturday, but so has there been throughout an electoral season that feels grafted onto the city's overriding preoccupation — whether New Orleans has any future at all.

So for many here, the vote for mayor is more than just an election. Uptown, downtown, in black and white neighborhoods, residents say they will never cast a more significant vote.

"It's the most important election ever for the city," Wayne Gillette, a white lawyer, said outside his home in the Gentilly neighborhood. "It's about the whole direction for the city."

Heather Wright, a white jeweler in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, said: "This mayor, whoever it is, could be the one that could possibly turn the city around. Possibly turn around the schools, end the corruption."

With recovery from Hurricane Katrina stuck in neutral, a political climate of indecision and not a single federal dollar yet delivered for rebuilding, the voters are waiting for some clue, any clue, about what comes next.

A timid campaign behind them, frustrated New Orleans voters await both signs that the city's troubled past is not also its future, and a leader who can pull them from the morass. No candidate addressed what many said was the central issue, whether some flooded neighborhoods should be rebuilt. Over and over, voters interviewed this week — especially white ones — said they were looking for someone who would take a stand, and break with the past.

"Somebody has got to have the guts to stand up and say, 'No, you can't rebuild there.' Somebody has got to draw the line somewhere," said Russell Lawson, gesturing across the counter in the cool of Markey's Bar in the Bywater neighborhood. "We're waiting for someone to show some leadership. We have the opportunity to rebuild the city into something so much better than what we had before."

But there is disagreement over what that should be, just as there is a sharp split about the cataclysm — who performed well, who did not — and its aftermath. Mayor Nagin has lost considerable popularity since the storm, and without a sharp surge in support from black voters, never his biggest cheerleaders, he may be knocked out in the vote. Mr. Forman has done well mostly among white voters seeking a change at City Hall, and Mr. Landrieu is hoping to capitalize on his well-known political family name that has previously been popular among both races.

The unknowns over this election have added to the general uncertainty.

"A lot of people are very depressed and upset, more than you can see," said Charles Myles, a concrete worker who is black, sweeping up outside the trailer that is now home in the Gentilly neighborhood, one of the most integrated in the city. Behind him was his gutted house, inundated by seven feet of water after Hurricane Katrina.

"It's just going to be a very long time before we recover," Mr. Myles said. "We need someone up there who can make sure that everybody does what they are supposed to do, someone that stays on Bush."

The fault line is race. Most black voters are rallying around Mr. Nagin, expressing hurt over the scorn now aimed at him by former white supporters. The attacks on Mr. Nagin, derided by many whites as indecisive, flip-flopping and refusing to acknowledge that some neighborhoods might be too vulnerable to rebuild, are taken personally.

A bastion of black political power is seen as slipping away with the city's changed demographics, and Mr. Nagin, not previously popular with most black voters, is regarded as the only defense.

"I don't know nobody else but Nagin," said Clark Joiner, a black construction worker in the Marigny neighborhood. "He didn't do nothing wrong. He's got a little plan. People just need to let him go along."

Mr. Nagin "did all he could do," Bishop B. L. Goss Sr. said in one of the old black Uptown neighborhoods on the river. "Nagin couldn't have done no more than what he did. Let him stay there and finish what he did."

Others here, weary of the trash, the ruined houses and the businesses teetering on the edge of collapse, do not relish that prospect. "All I see is indecision on the part of Nagin," said Lance Wesa, a French Quarter jeweler who is white. Mr. Wesa said he might have to close his store for the summer.

"It's a terrible time for this city," Paul Poché, who is white, said as he watered his luxuriant garden in Bywater. "We've got to get it together, see what we can make out of the ruins. If the help's going to come, it's going to have come from somewhere else. Because this place is a wreck."

    Mystery and Unease as New Orleans Is Set to Vote, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/us/22election.html?hp&ex=1145764800&en=97cacea07f55dc23&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Grant Will Revive Planning to Develop New Orleans

April 20, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Louisiana officials plan to unveil an organization today that will revive the process of creating a New Orleans rebuilding plan, using $3.5 million newly pledged by the Rockefeller Foundation.

The ambitious effort calls for six months of work by urban planners, architects and other experts, along with public meetings in New Orleans's 13 community districts and in the four cities that have taken in the greatest number of the displaced: Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Dallas and Houston.

Billions of dollars in federal community development grants cannot be released until a comprehensive rebuilding plan for the state is in place. Sean Reilly, a member of the board of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which is readying the statewide plan, said the other affected parishes had completed their basic planning, leaving Orleans Parish as "the last and most important piece of the puzzle." The city's Bring Back New Orleans Commission was putting neighborhood-by-neighborhood planning in place when federal financing dried up.

The new group, the Community Fund Support Organization, will be managed by the Greater New Orleans Foundation, a local public charity. The full budget for the planning process has been estimated at $7.9 million. The portion not covered by the new Rockefeller Foundation pledge is to be raised from public and private sources.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana applauded the grant and the planning process that it will produce.

"What people need is to get the right kind of information to make smart decisions for themselves, and it's the one ingredient that they have not been given," Ms. Blanco said in an interview. "They just hear noises out there, but nobody has sat down in the various neighborhoods, and it has to be done that way."

The Rockefeller Foundation, which has already provided $3 million to Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina, is one of the nation's largest foundations, with assets of more than $3 billion.

The sum it is providing for the planning effort is unusually large, said Darren Walker, director of the foundation's domestic program. Holding some public meetings outside the state will add to the time and expense required, Mr. Walker said, but it is essential that the people of New Orleans have a voice in the process, wherever they are.

"Everyone has a role to play," he said, adding that the effort "marries the best of urban planning with the wisdom and local knowledge and authentic voice of community residents."

"We owe it to ourselves as a nation," Mr. Walker said, "to not allow this opportunity to pass."

    Grant Will Revive Planning to Develop New Orleans, NYT, 20.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/us/nationalspecial/20rockefeller.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Replacing lost housing is off to a slow start

Updated 4/17/2006 12:26 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Mindy Fetterman

One idea for new housing in the post-hurricane, post-flood New Orleans is a tiny yellow "Katrina Cottage" that can withstand a hurricane's winds. If it gets wet inside, you just hose it out — no mold. It will cost about $35,000.

Another is a 20,000-lot development with "New Orleans-style" homes on a farm next to a golf course in a neighboring suburb. The homes will cost from $150,000 to $250,000.

A third is an "urban loft" condo development with a pool on the roof at the edge of the Warehouse District near the French Quarter. Prices not announced.

And the flashiest: A gleaming steel-and-glass tower, 70 stories high, with condos that will cost much more than any of the above. It would be the tallest building in Louisiana. The name on the tower: Trump.

"Everybody's drooling, waiting for the building boom to begin," says Rick Whitney, a small developer who has 16 properties in the New Orleans area.

That hasn't happened yet.

Despite tentative plans announced by a few developers, and new flood maps out last week that give homeowners some guidance about how high above ground to rebuild, the housing purgatory that has gripped New Orleans for more than seven months remains. And it won't ease soon.

The new home construction plans announced so far target wealthy buyers, even out-of-towners who might want a "weekend place" in downtown New Orleans. They're being built in the "high and dry" land near the unflooded French Quarter or in a suburb miles away.

When built, they'd replace a fraction of the nearly 250,000 homes in the metro area that were damaged when Hurricane Katrina ripped through in late August and the levees failed, flooding some areas of town with 14 feet of water.

None of the developments are aimed at replacing the tens of thousands of damaged and uninhabitable homes in lower- or middle-class areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview or St. Bernard Parish.

Some individual new homes are being built by historic preservation groups and charities such as Habitat for Humanity and Catholic Charities of New Orleans, which announced this month it would build 4,000 rental and elderly housing units. More than 50,000 homeowners have gotten permits from the city to repair their homes, and many are.

Even though the "Katrina Cottage" would be a replacement for low-income homes, it's just an idea. The cottage is envisioned as a modern-day "Sears house," like the mail-order homes sold by the retailer in the early 1900s.

"It's a tale of two cities right now," says developer Roger Ogden, co-owner of the Canal Place Mall downtown, which was looted and burned after the hurricanes. It reopened in February.

"We have the historic infrastructure, the French Quarter, the Museum District and others, that are back open," he says. "But in the outlying suburbs of Orleans Parish and St. Bernard Parish, where the extensive flooding caused mind-boggling destruction, nothing much is happening yet."

Waiting to decide

In New Orleans, it's still a waiting game.

Property owners had been waiting for advice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to tell them how high to rebuild to qualify for flood insurance and rebuilding money. Last week FEMA said buildings must be at least 3 feet off the ground and meet its base flood elevations. Buildings in the lowest-lying areas might have to be raised up to 11 feet. Most homeowners were reluctant to rebuild until the new flood maps came out. It could take more than a year for governments to OK the guidelines.

Renters have had to wait for their landlords to decide what to do, too — 47% of New Orleans' housing was rental property,

The state of Louisiana is waiting for congressional approval for an additional $4.2 billion it wants to fund a proposal to subsidize homeowners for up to $150,000 for damage (minus insurance), provide low-interest loans to rebuild, or buy property outright for up to $150,000. The House has approved it; the Senate has not.

Property owners are waiting to find out how much money they'll get from the federal government if they abandon their property. Until then, city and parish governments can't decide if they want to redevelop it. Until then, developers can't decide where to build.

Some Louisiana parishes (the equivalent of counties) are considering ideas for rebuilding that are coming from meetings called charrettes (French for "carts"), being led by a group of so-called New Urbanist architects brought in by the state. And separate neighborhood meetings still are underway to try to assess how many people will return. That will help governments decide which areas get rebuilt first.

Walter Leger is head of the Louisiana housing recovery plan that is awaiting Congressional approval.

But personally, he's like many in New Orleans: He can't decide what to do.

His home in St. Bernard Parish was flooded with 14 feet of water, which killed the 45 trees around it. He doesn't know if he should rebuild. Will the levees hold for this hurricane season, which starts in June? Or is it time to sell and move to higher ground? What will his neighbors do? If he rebuilds, would his house be the only one on the street for years?

"I haven't made a decision yet," says Leger (pronounced Ley-jere). "And that's one of the fundamental problems in New Orleans."

A little yellow house

One of the most innovative ideas for housing is a cottage that a group of architects is proposing be built to replace homes destroyed throughout the Gulf Coast.

The 170- to 1,700-square-foot cottage could be bought as a kit from a home repair retailer, such as Lowes or Home Depot, and assembled on a lot. Or it could be pre-made by a manufacturer and delivered by truck. Traditional "stick" construction could be used to build it from a set of architectural plans.

The cottages can withstand 130-mile-an-hour winds and can be built with plastic-foam-core concrete panels that won't mold. The houses cost $100 a square foot.

A homeowner could live in the tiny cottage while building a bigger house, then use it for a studio or workplace. Or it could serve as the "kernel" of a house, and be enlarged later.

"Everybody loves the idea that they can order a house that would be cute and nice and turn up, and that's the end of it," says architect Marianne Cusato, who designed a 770-square-foot cottage shown in St. Bernard Parish last month. "People see them and want one in their backyard."

Her "Katrina Cottage" is one of several designs being proposed by New Urbanists architects, a loose collective of architects that is advising Mississippi and Louisiana on how to rebuild. They get their name because they design communities with homes, retail stores, schools and offices within walking distance, in an old-fashioned, town-center way.

Officials in both states are lobbying to have Katrina Cottages replace FEMA trailers that are being provided as temporary housing. But FEMA says that would require a change in federal law. Negotiations continue.

"We're proposing a new model of housing, to replace 20,000 FEMA trailers in our communities with something akin to the Katrina Cottage," says Gavin Smith, director of recovery and renewal for Mississippi. "They're more livable and more in keeping with our coastal architecture. They're safer and can be anchored on elevated foundations."

The New Urban Guild early this month showed 16 Katrina Cottage designs at a national manufactured housing show to strong interest, says Steve Mouzon, co-founder of the guild. One company signed a contract to make them. "Everybody wants to be first out of the gate" if the government approves spending money for the cottages, he says.

A slow pace on the ground?

Some criticize the seemingly slow pace of planning and rebuilding in New Orleans and Louisiana compared with neighboring Mississippi. Many blame the federal government for being slow to approve money to support homeowners.

"At this point, seven months after the storms, people are discouraged that there are not programs outlined to help them," says Patricia Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans.

Charrette planning meetings have been held in all 11 Mississippi towns devastated by hurricane winds (flooding was not the issue there), and 10 have adopted the plans. Only Biloxi declined, because its city government is continuing an earlier development plan supported by its casinos.

But in New Orleans and Louisiana, property owners — and the governments — have been more reluctant to accept planning advice from outsiders.

An Urban Land Institute plan for New Orleans, released right after the hurricanes, called for major sections of the city near Lake Pontchartrain to be abandoned for parks and wetlands as the area is rebuilt. That set off a public outcry about property owners' rights and abandonment of some poor, African-American neighborhoods. The plan died.

Even help with FEMA trailers has caused controversy. Property owners don't mind them set up in an individual's backyard, but there's been resistance to putting groups of trailers together. Two weeks ago, Mayor Ray Nagin suspended construction of FEMA trailer parks after neighbors in the upscale Lakewood Estates objected to trailers being installed there.

Only one neighborhood in New Orleans plans to host the urban planning architects for meetings on how to rebuild their neighborhood, the middle-class African-American neighborhood of Gentilly. The meetings begin tomorrow. Yet, reaction has been mostly positive to the plans, which have been adopted in St. Bernard Parish next door, and Cameron and Vermillion parishes on the western edge of the state.

"I hate to second guess those on the ground, living with it every day," says Bruce Karatz, the CEO of KB Home, the national home builder which has announced plans to build homes in a nearby town (Developers' plans, 3B). "But the institutions and entities (in New Orleans) have not been able to get much going on the residential side."

That might be true, New Orleanians say.

But they say that's because the damage is so widespread and so devastating that it takes time to work through all the issues of rebuilding.

"Whatever happens in New Orleans, it's not going to be some grandiose, Big Brother, you-do-it-this-way-or-go-to-hell kind of plan," says developer Ogden. "It's democracy in action. The individual property owner will have a say. The neighborhoods will have a say. The city will have a say. The state will have a say. And all of the others (insurers, bankers, the federal government) will have a say," he says.

"It's not the best in terms of speed," Ogden says. "But it's who we are."

    Replacing lost housing is off to a slow start, NYT, 17.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2006-04-16-new-orleans-housing-usat_x.htm

Torn by Storm, Families Tangle Anew on Custody

April 16, 2006
The New York Times
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

NEW ORLEANS — Last June, after a long dispute, a judge decided that Bobby F. Spurlock and Zandrea Johnson should share custody of their daughter.

Then came Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Spurlock, whose home in Jefferson Parish was undamaged in the storm, remained in Louisiana. Ms. Johnson, whose home in eastern New Orleans was destroyed, evacuated, with the child, to Memphis.

Now Ms. Johnson plans to stay in Memphis indefinitely, and an already unpleasant clash over the best interest of a 6-year-old girl is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

The storm and the flooding that came with it here uprooted families, leaving them in staggering states of stress and uncertainty.

For some families, already torn apart by separation and divorce, like Mr. Spurlock and Ms. Johnson, the fallout has been especially damaging, producing painful new battles over child custody and visitation, financial support and division of assets.

"How can things change from joint custody to relocation in a couple of months?" asked Mr. Spurlock, a 37-year-old sales manager for a car dealership. "I am not trying to take her from her mom, but I want equal time with my daughter."

After the damaged Orleans Parish Civil District Court set up operations near Baton Rouge in October, custody and support cases began to mount.

Since January, when the court returned to New Orleans, judges and lawyers say they have seen scores of family disputes related to the storm. Other parishes have experienced similar surges.

Now the school year is coming to a close, allowing for less-disruptive movement of children, and new filings for divorce are increasing.

"Families that were operating on an emotional string, well, that string has broken," said Paulette R. Irons, a district court judge. "All that's left is dissension. It will be a busy summer, I can tell you."

Although some broken families have just been struggling for a new sense of stability, others have used the storm to try to beat the legal system, Judge Irons said. She said she had seen noncustodial parents who had spirited away their children without notice, custodial parents who had moved without good cause and parents who had tried to avoid payments of child support.

Judge Irons said she had also noticed an increase in domestic violence petitions, some of which appeared to have been efforts to bolster custody claims.

Some cases involve demands by parents for the return of children who were taken to other cities, and others are requests from relocated parents to stay temporarily in a new place with their children or to move permanently. In some cases, both parents have relocated.

Jeffrey Harris, a disabled ship worker who moved to Arlington, Tex., after the hurricane, is using a legal aid service to try to arrange visits with his 5-year-old son, whom his wife took to Alabama. The couple's divorce proceedings were interrupted by the hurricane, and Mr. Harris's lawyer is now in Atlanta.

"All I want is to have my divorce final and get to see my son, and it ain't happening," said Mr. Harris, 36, who said he had not seen his son since before the hurricane. "I am on a fixed income. I just can't get over there to see him. I don't know what to do."

There have been so many cases like Mr. Harris's in Texas that the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers sponsored a Webcast with the Texas Bar Association last month on family law issues related to Hurricane Katrina. Among the topics discussed was jurisdiction.

The Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act states that if a person has lived in a state for six months, that state may be able to assert jurisdiction in a custody case. Although new jurisdiction is not guaranteed, the act potentially allows people from the storm-affected region to seek a new day in court wherever they move.

Louisiana has strict guidelines governing requests for relocation in settled custody cases. They include prior written notice to the remaining parent of the intent to move, and a waiting period during which the remaining parent can file an objection.

But the guidelines do not address emergency upheavals, like those caused by Hurricane Katrina, which leave judges the messy task of determining when a required evacuation becomes a voluntary relocation and — when children are involved — who can stay where and for how long.

"It's hard to make these decisions," Judge Irons said. "On the one hand you want people to come back, but you don't want them to have to come back to squalor. It's just case by case."

Standing in the gutted, musty shell of her former apartment in the Lakeview section of New Orleans, where the 17th Street canal flood wall was breached, Stiliani Revere said she felt victimized by the process.

In October, Ms. Revere said, a Jefferson Parish judge told her she would lose custody of her 5-year-old daughter if she tried to move the child out of the New Orleans area. Her former husband, who declined to comment, had filed for emergency custody after Ms. Revere's evacuation out of the state.

Ms. Revere left New Orleans a day before Hurricane Katrina struck, stopping in Memphis and Houston before settling temporarily in Fort Worth. She enrolled her daughter, Isabella, in school, and said she had planned to stay at least through the fall school term while she figured out a plan to return.

Instead, she said, she felt compelled to return to New Orleans while her life was still in a chaotic swirl. She moved in with an aunt in Jefferson Parish, and Isabella enrolled in her third school in two months.

"I had just lost every single thing I owned, and now a judge was telling me I could lose my child if I didn't come back," said Ms. Revere, 33, her eyes rimmed with tears, as she gazed out of the cloudy window of her daughter's former bedroom. "It just seemed crazy and unfair."

Ms. Revere has had an unusual view of the other side of the custody issue. She is a legal secretary for the lawyer who represents Mr. Spurlock in his case to have his daughter returned. Ms. Revere and Mr. Spurlock each empathized with the other's plight.

Holding an envelope addressed to "Daddy" in a child's careful, oversize print, and bearing a Memphis postmark, Mr. Spurlock said he was shattered by a judge's decision in December to allow his daughter to remain in Tennessee. He said Ms. Johnson, a nurse, could have been compelled to move closer to facilitate visits.

"This is my biggest nightmare, having to go into court as an African-American man and justify my desire to be an involved father," said Mr. Spurlock, adding that he vowed long ago not to be like his own, largely absent, father. "I said I would never be that stereotype, and now I am being treated like a deadbeat."

Ms. Johnson and her lawyers did not respond to requests for an interview.

Other cases remain undecided. Wayne Jacque, a New Orleans police officer, and Quandra Broussard, a soldier with an Army maintenance unit, had been awaiting the completion of their divorce when the hurricane struck.

Their daughters, Asia, 10, and Kiara, 6, had been living with Mr. Jacque in eastern New Orleans for three years. Ms. Broussard had spent time in Iraq and now lives in Lawton, Okla., near her Army base.

The girls have lived with neither parent since the hurricane. Mr. Jacque, who remained on duty after the storm, sent them to his brother's house in Dallas for what he assumed would be a short stay. But with his home in New Orleans destroyed and the children's school still closed, the girls have been unable to return.

Mr. Jacque has been awarded temporary custody, but a court-appointed evaluator must decide which parent will eventually have primary custody. "I just want them with me," Ms. Broussard said. "They shouldn't be in Texas."

Mr. Jacque, 34, is living in a trailer and working extra hours to try to pay for a new home before the court evaluation. "I am nervous," he said. "I wasn't before the storm. I knew I had done everything I should do as a parent. But I can't show a social worker that my kids would be living with me in a trailer."

Not every situation has worsened since Hurricane Katrina. Solangel Calix, a professional flamenco dancer and the mother of three teenagers, said she and her former husband barely spoke before the hurricane.

But when Ms. Calix and the children evacuated to Houston, her former husband, a restaurateur, who asked that his name and the names of the children not be mentioned to preserve their privacy, helped set her up in temporary housing. The two now speak regularly.

"I have been flabbergasted," Ms. Calix, 50, said. "But almost losing everything puts things into perspective, to where family is what matters, what counts."

Some lawyers are pushing for legislation that would add guidelines relating to emergency evacuations into the state's relocation statute. In the meantime, some warring spouses are taking their own precautions.

Judge Manny Fernandez, a chief judge in St. Bernard Parish, which was heavily damaged, said he had heard a case recently in which the parents specified in their custody agreement how the children should be relocated in the event of an evacuation.

"I was in practice for 34 years before becoming a judge, and I've never seen anything like that," he said. "Everything has changed now."

    Torn by Storm, Families Tangle Anew on Custody, NYT, 16.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/us/nationalspecial/16custody.html?hp&ex=1145246400&en=39eb9a2fbb84bfd3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Levee decision angers residents

Sat Apr 15, 2006 1:48 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

BURAS, Louisiana (Reuters) - Seven months after Hurricane Katrina, Richard and Brenda Simmons still agonize over whether to rebuild their smashed two-story home in lower Plaquemines Parish on the southeastern tip of Louisiana.

Their decision got harder this week after the U.S. government said it may not spend the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to raise all the levees on the thin strip of land jutting into the Gulf of Mexico.

Like many here, the announcement hit Brenda, 48, hard. She said she is angry that lower Plaquemines, a seafood and energy hub with an eroding coastline, may get left out while much of southern Louisiana wins beefed-up flood barriers.

"There are people who have lived their lives down here, for heaven's sakes. They want to come home, they have no place else to go. They put their heart and soul in this area," she said.

Residents and business owners now wonder if they will be able to get insurance if they try to rebuild the ravaged area.

Virtually every structure in Buras, a town with a pre-Katrina population of 3,300 about 60 miles south of New Orleans, was damaged by Katrina on August 29. Less than a month later, Hurricane Rita's storm surge swamped it again. The Simmonses' street is strewn with wrecked homes and debris.

This week, Donald Powell, U.S. President George W. Bush's Gulf Coast rebuilding chief, said the administration will ask Congress for $2.5 billion to strengthen the levee system in New Orleans and the vulnerable surrounding areas by 2010.

The plan is to protect 98 percent of the population from a 1-in-100-year flood by adding stronger walls and making the levees taller, in some cases 7 feet.

But the plans don't include the south Plaquemines peninsula through which the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf.

STUDYING ALTERNATIVES

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimated it would cost another $1.6 billion to protect just 2 percent of the at-risk population, or about 14,000 people in small towns like Buras, Triumph and Venice.

The Corps' Lt. Gen. Carl Strock said engineers are trying to figure out how to protect the narrow strip of land.

"Right now we're looking at massive earthen levees throughout the system. There might be a more cost-effective way to provide point protection in critical areas," he said.

But Lonnie Greco, operations manager for Plaquemines Parish, said using population to decide levels of protection is unfair.

"It was very disappointing," Greco said. "What the rest of the country doesn't realize is it is the only parish we have in the state of Louisiana that puts out the oil and gas revenues and has the seafood industry. The state's going to lose and the rest of the country's going to lose."

The parish accounts for 40 percent of the state's energy revenue.

Outside the wreckage of his house, Richard Simmons, a 50-year-old sheriff's deputy, pointed out Americans suffered a big spike in gasoline prices when his region's ability to supply oil was hobbled by the storms and said that could happen more frequently without the necessary protection here.

Venice, the parish's southernmost town, has reopened a handful of restaurants and stores to serve the oil, gas, shipping, commercial-fishing and sport-fishing crowds. But the devastation is still staggering, with trailers reduced to crumpled metal and boats left capsized on land.

Here, Carey McCarta, 60, is working to get the Deuces Wild bar reopened for business. It is gutted and its walls bear a brown line showing it sat in more than 6 feet of water.

He said his parish should get better levees afforded the rest of Louisiana, although he predicted residents will return regardless, as they did after Hurricane Camille in 1969.

"I've been here 40 years, I've paid my federal taxes and I've paid my share of them," said the veteran boat captain. "We've made it our home and I think we ought to be protected."

    Levee decision angers residents, R, 15.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-04-15T174822Z_01_N14240706_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-PLAQUEMINES.xml

Lenient Rule Set for Rebuilding in New Orleans

April 13, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS, April 12 — Federal officials issued unexpectedly lenient guidelines on Wednesday for rebuilding the flood-damaged homes of New Orleans, potentially allowing tens of thousands of homeowners to return to their neighborhoods at costs far less than they had feared.

Under the guidelines issued here by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, huge swaths of homes might still have to be rebuilt at least three feet off the ground, or risk getting no federal reconstruction money or insurance.

But the announcement, anxiously anticipated as a critical step in rebuilding this still-ravaged city, was nonetheless greeted with some relief by local officials and residents. They had feared that, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's catastrophic flooding, the government would demand that some houses be raised by as much as 10 feet, at enormous expense.

The lesser requirement assumes that the area's damaged levee system will be solidly reconstructed. To that end, federal officials also announced Wednesday that most of the system's 36 miles or so of flood walls — which sit atop levees in places where massive earthen structures are not practical — would be torn down and replaced. The cost for that and other levee improvements is $2.5 billion, which the Bush administration said Wednesday that it would actively seek from Congress.

The announcement dovetails with a political climate in New Orleans in which the idea of not rebuilding damaged neighborhoods has been strictly taboo. In a heated mayor's race that is now reaching its conclusion, no candidate has been willing to say some areas should not be rebuilt because of flood danger.

Now, the federal government — by making rebuilding requirements less stringent than had been anticipated — appears to have concurred, though FEMA officials did not say specifically why they chose the three-foot figure.

Some experts were critical of the decision. "It's wacky," said J. Robert Hunter, a former director of the federal flood insurance program. "Three feet — where did that come from? Why are we building up three feet, when the water was up over the roof?

"What's that three feet going to do?" Mr. Hunter asked. "Instead of coming up with real science, they're making it up. Which means that people are going to be at risk, they're going to die again, and taxpayers are subsidizing unwise construction with very cheap insurance."

In addition, though the upgraded levee system will guard against 100-year floods — those that have a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year — it will protect against the most powerful storms.

"One-hundred-year protection and Category 5 protection are not the same thing," said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief engineer of the Army Corps of Engineers.

At one point over the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Katrina was a Category 5 storm; when it made landfall along the coast last August, it was described as Category 3 or 4. The greatest flood damage occurred after the storm had passed and the levees and flood walls gave way.

Most officials here, though, said they were relieved that homeowners can get on with rebuilding now that the federal house-raising requirement is known.

"Over all, the new flood maps released by FEMA today truly do represent some good news for the city and its rebuilding process," said Greg Meffert, executive assistant to Mayor C. Ray Nagin. "Essentially, these new maps more or less maintain the city to the already previously enforced 100-year flood elevation standards."

For months, Louisiana authorities have complained that FEMA was dragging its feet in issuing new flood-elevation requirements, the first since the mid-1980's. The delay caused uncertainty for thousands of people, they said.

Now mortgages can be applied for, and lives that had been on hold can move forward.

"I would view it as good news, and I would view it as information that we can use to get on with planning our lives," said Sean Reilly, of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which will decide how federal rebuilding money is spent. Mr. Reilly agreed with Donald Powell, the top federal official in charge of Gulf Coast rebuilding, who said while making the announcement here: "The good news is, it's not a dramatic-type elevation."

As it is, many homes — even severely damaged ones — may not have to be raised at all, if they already meet or exceed the three-foot requirement. And since it applies only to homes that were destroyed or "substantially damaged," which the guidelines describe as damage to more than half the structure, the potential impact is further reduced because city officials have been liberal in revising damage assessments downward. In addition, virtually all two-story homes in which the first floor was wiped out but the second was untouched fall below the 50-percent threshold.

"It's good news for a lot of people," said Matt McBride of the Broadmoor Improvement Association. The Broadmoor neighborhood flooded badly. "It's basically good news, in that people don't have to raise their houses to exceed Katrina flood levels. For a lot of historic homes, this doesn't change many things."

LaToya Cantrell, for instance, president of the Broadmoor association, got five feet of water from Lake Pontchartrain, but because her house was already elevated by four feet, she will not have to raise it.

Even in neighborhoods of newer houses, like those in eastern New Orleans, which was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina's flooding, the federal government's new requirement could be considered generous.

"All of the two-story houses in eastern New Orleans have less than 50 percent damage, and this doesn't affect them," said Mtumishi St. Julien, a homeowner in that area who heads the Housing Finance Authority of New Orleans. "It's not going to drastically impact New Orleans, as some people suggest."

FEMA officials, in making their announcement, declined to say how many homes would be affected, or whether the most popular ground-level type of new construction — slab-on-grade — might still be allowed.

The announcement by the Army Corps of Engineers that the floodwalls would be replaced was the clearest admission yet by the Corps that much of New Orleans's levee system had long been flawed, and was not simply overpowered by forces that went beyond what the system was designed to withstand.

General Strock, the Corps' chief engineer, said the entire system of floodwalls would have to be examined to determine what must be replaced. "We must assume that because the foundations of these levees are pretty much the same throughout the system" the problem is widespread, he said.

In a conference call after the announcement, General Strock said even the system being planned would not prevent flooding in New Orleans in the case of another hurricane like Katrina. "But it will not be catastrophic flooding" caused by a breach in the system, he said.

Until the completion of the upgraded network of levees and flood walls, planned for 2010, he said, "there is a heightened level of risk that will go down over time."

Still uncertain is the fate of lower Plaquemines Parish, jutting into the Gulf of Mexico and severely flooded by Hurricane Katrina. Home to about 2 percent of the New Orleans area's population, the parish would require an additional $1.6 billion to raise its levee system to FEMA guidelines, money the Bush administration has not promised to seek.

Wednesday's advisory, as officials called it, opens the door to new flood-insurance maps, which will come later this year. Even for those who must raise their houses, the federal requirement could be good news because elevating a house by as little as five feet can cost more than $100,000. Up to $30,000 in federal money is available to homeowners for such projects.

Whatever the opinions of outside experts, the new federal policy was viewed favorably here.

"Over all, it's good news in that FEMA has agreed Katrina was only a one-time event, and flood insurance won't be based on catastrophic events but on common sense," said Mr. McBride of the Broadmoor association.

    Lenient Rule Set for Rebuilding in New Orleans, NYT, 13.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/us/nationalspecial/13rebuild.html?hp&ex=1144987200&en=e022aa34d1256035&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Louisiana officials say Katrina recovery wasteful

Tue Apr 11, 2006 12:46 AM ET
Reuters
By Michael Depp

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Multibillion-dollar hurricane recovery efforts on the U.S. Gulf Coast are plagued by bloated costs and waste with too many contractors getting a piece of the action, lawmakers said at a hearing on Monday.

Louisiana legislators frustrated by the slow pace of recovery accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Army Corps of Engineers of spearheading a flawed rebuilding process with little transparency and contractor oversight.

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, held the field hearing as part of efforts to avoid the mistakes made after Hurricane Katrina in future crises.

"There seems to be a great pillow in the middle," Kevin Davis, president of storm-ravaged St. Tammany Parish, said of a disconnect between FEMA management and on-the-ground personnel. "Creativity and flexibility are discouraged."

The August 29 storm killed at least 1,300 people along the Gulf Coast. The region is bracing for the formal start to the 2006 hurricane season on June 1 against a backdrop of often-fractious relations with the federal agencies.

Coburn questioned the Corps' debris removal contracts as an example of mismanagement. He asked why details were not being divulged and questioned FEMA's deferral of key cleanup initiatives to the Corps.

"We believe that they have the requisite experience that we don't have within FEMA," responded Tina Burnette, deputy director of acquisitions for Katrina under the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency.

But Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, said the Corps contracted out its key cleanup operations to large, private firms, which in turn sub-contracted down a lengthy chain of companies before any work was done.

Too much of $100 billion-plus earmarked for Louisiana hurricane relief efforts is tied up in wasteful subcontracting practices, lawmakers said often at the hearing.

Also, local contractors are frequently being shut out of big jobs despite laws guaranteeing their role, Vitter said.

Derrell Cohoon, chief of the Louisiana Association of General Contractors, which represents 700 firms, said local players were getting subcontracts that were too small and piecemeal to be either profitable or meaningful.

Several politicians complained about FEMA travel trailers used for temporary housing, which have cost the agency $50,000-$70,000 each to buy and install. The money would be better put in residents' hands to repair their homes or to find other housing, the said.

The trailers themselves have been troublesome. One local politician testified some of his constituents have had them delivered, only to be locked out because different contractors were in charge of handing out the keys.

    Louisiana officials say Katrina recovery wasteful, R, 11.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-04-11T044646Z_01_N10398609_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-RECOVERY.xml

In Attics and Rubble, More Bodies and Questions

April 11, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

NEW ORLEANS, April 5 — When August Blanchard returned to New Orleans from Pennsylvania in late December, his mother was still missing. Family members, scattered across the country, had been calling hospitals, the Red Cross and missing persons hot lines, hoping she had been rescued.

But Mr. Blanchard, 26, had a bad feeling. Twice, he drove past the pale green house on Reynes Street in the Lower Ninth Ward, where he and his mother, Charlene Blanchard, 45, had lived, yet he could not bring himself to enter.

It was not until Feb. 25 that one of Mr. Blanchard's uncles nudged the front door open with his foot and spied Ms. Blanchard's hand. Dressed in her nightgown and robe, she lay under a moldering sofa. With her was a red velvet bedspread that her daughter had given her and a huge teddy bear.

The bodies of storm victims are still being discovered in New Orleans — in March alone there were nine, along with one skull. Skeletonized or half-eaten by animals, with leathery, hardened skin or missing limbs, the bodies are lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters or lying face down, arms outstretched on parlor floors. Many of them, like Ms. Blanchard, were overlooked in initial searches.

A landlord in the Lakeview section put a "for sale" sign outside a house, unaware that his tenant's body was in the attic. Two weeks ago, searchers in the Lower Ninth Ward found a girl, believed to be about 6, wearing a blue backpack. Nearby, they found part of a man who the authorities believe might have been trying to save her.

[On Friday, contractors found a body in the attic of a home in the Gentilly neighborhood that had been searched twice before, officials said.]

In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, there were grotesque images of bodies left in plain sight. Officials in Louisiana recovered more than 1,200 bodies, but the process, hamstrung by money shortages and red tape, never really ended.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, where unstable houses make searching dangerous, a plan to use cadaver dogs alongside demolition crews was delayed by lawsuits and community protests against the bulldozing. In the rest of the city, the absence of neighbors and social networks meant that some residents languished and died unnoticed. Many of the families of the missing were far from home, rendered helpless by distance and preoccupied with their own survival.

Now, as the city begins to rebuild in earnest, those families still wait, agonizing over loved ones who are unseen and unburied, but unforgotten.

"We never reached out to anyone to tell our story, because there's no ending to our story," said Wanda Jackson, 40, whose family is still waiting for word of her 6-year-old nephew, swept away by floodwaters as his mother clung to his 3-year-old brother. "Because we haven't found our deceased. Being honest with you, in my opinion, they forgot about us."

She continued, "They did not build nothing on 9/11 until they were sure that the damn dust was not human dust; so how you go on and build things in our city?"

In October and November, the special operations team of the New Orleans Fire Department searched the Lower Ninth Ward for remains until they ran out of overtime money.

Half a dozen officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency rebuffed requests to pay the bill, said Chief Steve Glynn, the team commander. When reporters inquired, FEMA officials said the required paperwork had not been filed.

During that period, if someone called to ask that a specific location be checked for a body, Chief Glynn said, there was no one to send. The Blanchards were not the only family left to find a loved one on their own.

Others had no family to find them. The name of Joseph Naylor, 54, was posted on Hurricane Katrina message boards by a friend, J. T. Beebe, who said in an interview that Mr. Naylor had no relatives except maybe an estranged cousin. Mr. Naylor was found in his attic on March 5.

Anita Dazet, who lives on a street that had little flooding, said she had been back home for five months before she thought to check on her neighbor, Lydia Matthews, whom Ms. Dazet described as mentally ill, and found her dead. Ms. Dazet said she had assumed that the same church that regularly left meals on the porch for Ms. Matthews had helped her evacuate.

Ms. Blanchard, too, was described by family members as mentally ill, but able to care for herself. When family members urged her to evacuate before the hurricane, she refused. "She would get violent if you tried to make her leave," said Shirley Blanchard, a sister.

In February, FEMA agreed to pay for the search for bodies to resume, and on March 2 the agency's special operations team was able to begin a systematic check of the 1,700 structures in the Lower Ninth Ward, the site of the city's worst destruction.

It is tedious, hot work. Each team of firefighters works with one or two dogs trained to find human remains. If the dogs sense a body, the workers lift heavy furniture, dig through stinking mud or pull down ceiling tiles to find it.

Often, the search is fruitless — in part because of Hurricane Rita, which flooded the area again two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Many who had perished in the first storm were washed away, leaving behind only the smell of death.

According to a fluorescent orange scrawl on Ms. Blanchard's house, a search was conducted in September by the New Orleans police. Many bodies were overlooked during initial searches, partly because houses were structurally unsound or, with their contents in heaps, impossible to walk through. A thorough check might have required hacking through a collapsed roof or moving a small mountain of debris.

This time around, no one wants to miss anything. On a recent day, firefighters spotted a gallon-size pickle jar in an exposed attic, suggesting that someone had tried to weather the storm there. Because the house could not be entered safely, a piece of heavy equipment called an excavator was summoned to dismantle it. But the firefighters found nothing.

And finding a body is just the first step. Of the 14 bodies found since mid-February, none have been definitively identified and released for burial, partly because FEMA closed a $17 million morgue built to handle the dead from Hurricane Katrina. The morgue was used for eight weeks, and agency officials said there was no longer enough volume to justify keeping it open.

FEMA declined to allow the New Orleans coroner, whose own office and morgue were ruined in the storm, to continue to use the autopsy site.

For now, newly found bodies are stored in a refrigerated truck in Baton Rouge, La. The coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard, says a temporary office will be ready in about a week.

To Geneva Celestine, Ms. Blanchard's mother, who was on the front porch of the house when her body was discovered, not being able to bury her daughter is only the latest in an exhausting series of horrors.

"It's awful," she said by telephone from Pennsylvania. "To go there and find your own child, something they're supposed to be doing. Something they've got paid to do. And you see the mark on the house. It's really sad."

Early on, families were so angered by delays in releasing bodies that a few picketed the morgue. But although there is no longer a morgue to picket, the jurisdictional squabbling that contributed to the delays has not ended. Dr. Minyard's state counterpart, Dr. Louis Cataldie, said he had a mobile morgue and could take DNA samples immediately if Dr. Minyard would allow it.

"We have a very good idea who some of those people are," Dr. Cataldie said. "If we could get DNA, we could confirm it very quickly."

Bringing that kind of resolution to families is what motivates the searchers, who spend days in the desolate landscape of chest-high weeds and houses popped open like packing crates. Searching a single structure can take half a day.

Mickey Bourgeois, a search team member, recalled an incident when the team was told where to look for a mother and a baby. They found only the woman, he said.

"When something like that happens," he said, "you can't talk the guys into leaving until everything's out of the house."

Happy Blitt contributed research from New Yorkfor this article.

    In Attics and Rubble, More Bodies and Questions, NYT, 11.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/us/nationalspecial/11body.html?hp&ex=1144814400&en=5ea32a03bfe94873&ei=5094&partner=homepage

As Katrina Recedes, Newspapers Still Float

April 10, 2006
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

BILOXI, Miss., April 8 — Glenn Currie, an architect, slid 50 cents into a coin box here the other morning and pulled out a copy of The Sun Herald, the local daily published in nearby Gulfport.

"I read it every day," he said. "They report what we need to know."

Mr. Currie, 59, said he especially appreciated the paper's before-and-after series, which features a building before Hurricane Katrina struck seven months ago, and after, often to shocking effect.

Less than 80 miles west in New Orleans, a similarly intense reader interest is taking place. At CC's coffeehouse on Magazine Street one morning last week, there were so many people absorbed in that day's Times-Picayune that the scene looked like a commuter train.

"These writers are energized and passionate," said Angele Thionville, 34, a mother of three boys, as she glanced up from the paper. She was not a big fan of The Times-Picayune before Katrina, she said, but now if she misses the paper one day, "I feel so out of touch."

While much of the country has moved on from coverage of Katrina, considered the largest natural disaster in modern American history, both The Sun Herald and The Times-Picayune remain all Katrina, all the time. For their role in covering and enduring the storm, both papers have received accolades, and next week both may well receive Pulitzer Prizes.

Both papers have struggled along with their communities, and during the recovery have faced some similar issues and adopted similar approaches to their new reality. But there are major differences, too. Both have taken on a new importance as news sources and as advocates in their communities. With buildings along 70 miles of the Gulf Coast reduced to matchsticks and parts of New Orleans abandoned and still without reliable electricity or phone service, The Sun Herald and Times-Picayune are connecting with readers the way newspapers did before the arrival of television.

The big question, ultimately tied to the economic fortunes of their areas, is what kind of future these newspapers will have as news organizations and businesses. Here their stories diverge. The Sun Herald, which before the storm had a circulation of 47,000 daily and 55,000 on Sunday, has rebuilt its circulation and advertising base; it is just 400 shy of its prestorm circulation and a few percentage points short of its prestorm ad revenue.

Even as many homes and buildings remain skeletal or in mounds of debris, the presence of casinos here and the likelihood that more will come has instilled confidence in the region.

The Times-Picayune, which had more than five times the circulation of The Sun Herald, now has regained about two-thirds of its readers, with a circulation of 176,000 daily and 196,000 on Sunday. But readers are returning faster than advertisers. Only 10 percent of the city's businesses have reopened. "We're suffering significant revenue losses," said Ashton Phelps Jr., publisher of the newspaper, which is owned by Advance Publications.

The obstacles that New Orleans and its newspaper faced in the storm and continue to face are on a different order of magnitude from the Gulf Coast as a whole. More than 200 people died in Mississippi, and 300 are still missing. In New Orleans, more than 1,100 died, and 2,000 are missing.

New Orleans faces bigger challenges, too, in part because of its terrain. The water remained in New Orleans, while it quickly drained from other communities along the coast. New Orleans is scrambling to reinforce the levees as the next hurricane season approaches, and residents are still waiting for flood maps before they decide whether to rebuild, leaving a cloud of uncertainty over the city. It is also in the midst of a chaotic mayor's race with two dozen candidates, making its leadership seem unstable and its direction unclear.

The tiny Sun Herald, indeed much of the Gulf Coast, has been overshadowed by the attention paid to New Orleans. But recognition may be at hand. Editor & Publisher, which reports on the newspaper business, said last month that The Sun Herald was in line to receive the Pulitzer Prize for public service.

The Times-Picayune, according to Editor & Publisher, is a Pulitzer finalist in two categories: commentary (by Chris Rose, one of its columnists) and breaking news, for reporting that a major levee had been breached and the city was being flooded while other media were reporting that New Orleans had been spared.

The Pulitzer board, which does not comment on finalists at this stage of the process, is meeting in New York later in the week to vote on the winners, and is to announce them next Monday.

The report that The Sun Herald may be under consideration for the public service award, journalism's highest honor, has already been something of a victory for the paper — and something of a disappointment for The Times-Picayune, stoking a newfound competition between the two. The Sun Herald likes to emphasize that it did not miss a day of print publication, while The Times-Picayune points to the scope of the disaster in New Orleans and its near-impossible reporting conditions.

The Pulitzer board can move finalists to different categories, so no one can say if either paper will make the cut or in which category. But the head-to-head competition over Katrina coverage suggests that the board will have to grapple with the very definition of public service.

The spotlight on New Orleans after Katrina has been a sore point for Mississippi. The Sun Herald has editorialized to that effect, complaining that the national media had left the broader Gulf Coast a footnote in the New Orleans story.

Before the storm, The Sun Herald, which is owned by Knight Ridder, had an emergency plan in place. The paper, in advance, sent four of its news staff members and two Knight Ridder designers to its sister paper, The Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus, Ga., while most of the staff reported along the coast and hunkered down in the Sun Herald building.

The building was built after Hurricane Camille destroyed the region in 1969. It sustained little damage from Katrina, and its presses remained dry, but it lost all power and communications. Shortly, the Knight Ridder cavalry arrived in Gulfport.

"They showed up with sat phones, chain saws, food and water," said Stan Tiner, The Sun Herald's editor and a former marine. "The logistics were very well organized." Even P. Anthony Ridder, the company's chief executive, showed up.

The Times-Picayune staff evacuated its building in delivery trucks as the floodwaters rose, and headed to Baton Rouge, La. A small band of reporters and editors felt sick at the thought of leaving and commandeered a delivery truck to return to New Orleans, defying martial law to report the news. The Times-Picayune suspended publication for three days.

Staff members at both papers experienced much of the grief that their readers did, but while many lost their houses, no employees died. Some lost loved ones, and all have their own harrowing tales.

Jean Prescott, 64, a features writer at The Sun Herald, said that her sister and her sister's husband drowned in their house. The authorities subsequently misplaced the bodies, she said, then they cremated someone else instead of her sister. The family did not receive her sister's ashes for three months.

"It wasn't unique," Ms. Prescott said. "So many people were found dead, they just couldn't keep track."

Workers at both papers said they are throwing themselves into telling their readers' stories instead of coping with their own.

"We're journalists and we just pack it away," said James O'Byrne, 46, features editor of The Times-Picayune, whose home was ruined. "You don't get a special badge of courage for losing your home," he said; it was a common event.

Anita Lee, 49, a reporter at The Sun Herald, said, "We're just not dealing with a lot of it," as she stepped around the debris of her former home and showed off the government-issued trailer where she lives now. "Our insurance is up in the air, our S.B.A. loan is not finalized, our house has not been torn down, and we're writing about other people in the same situation."

In some ways, she said, the shared experience with her readers has made her job easier. "I always tried to get to a level of understanding with the people I was interviewing," she said. "Now I get there a lot quicker."

The experience has given the pages of both papers a new urgency, and both seem less constrained by traditional objectivity, to the point of printing front-page editorials.

"We're far more direct in getting at what we think matters," said Jim Amoss, the editor of The Times-Picayune. "The urgency is palpable."

Mike Perlstein, 45, a criminal justice reporter at The Times-Picayune, said that articles about underhanded dealings and "good-old-boy New Orleans ways of doing things" that once drew ho-hum reactions are now "drawing howls of outrage from readers and keeping the news staff really engaged."

"There are issues on the business side, as there are with any newspaper," he added. "But we're still riding a riveting and unbelievable story about the rebuilding of a major American city."

Part of that rebuilding for the city and the paper depends on the return of advertisers. "It's a chicken-and-egg thing," said Tod Smith, who directs advertising plans for major clients in New Orleans. "What comes first, the services that people need? Or the people who support the services? There are a lot of unanswered questions."

The paper has many ads for car dealers (many people had car insurance, so practically all cars in New Orleans look brand new). The paper also is running small ads for services like mold remediation and air-duct cleaning. And its big department store, Dillard's, is open and buying full-page ads.

On the Gulf Coast, Dillard's remains shuttered. But Vicki Barrett, the advertising director at The Sun Herald, said that what the paper had lost in retail advertising, it had gained in classified ads. Perhaps one measure of the comeback status of both regions is an ad in The Sun Herald that would seem unthinkable in New Orleans — a company promising to meet "all your swimming pool needs."

The Sun Herald is optimistic about its future. South Mississippi, with its miles of white sandy beachfront and new casinos being built inland, expects more than $30 billion in new investment in the next few years.

"It's going to be a boom like no newspaper market has ever seen," said Ricky R. Mathews, The Sun Herald's publisher.

Gary Pruitt, the chief executive of McClatchy, which recently agreed to buy Knight Ridder, agrees. Mr. Pruitt is selling 12 of Knight Ridder's 32 papers, but he is keeping The Sun Herald, saying it meets his criteria for a growth market.

"We're basing our decision on our readings of the business and population projections and the resiliency of the local economy," he said.

Mr. Phelps, of The Times-Picayune, addressed the matter at a meeting of newspaper executives recently.

"The $64,000 question for us is this: What is the economy going to look like 18 months, two years from now, when most of the insurance checks have been cashed and the federal relief efforts taper off?" Mr. Phelps asked.

"We just don't know," he said, adding later: "The truth is that it's so big, we have still not found the bottom of how life has changed for us. We're still riding Katrina's winds."

    As Katrina Recedes, Newspapers Still Float, NYT, 10.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/10/business/media/10hurricane.html

New Orleans fearing return to crime-ridden past

Fri Apr 7, 2006 1:48 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Recent killings on the streets of New Orleans have some in the hurricane-ravaged city fearing one revival they had hoped to avoid -- its distinction as one of America's most crime-ridden cities.

Months after floodwaters that submerged 80 percent of New Orleans subsided, residents enjoyed an unfamiliar respite from the gang- and drug-related crime that gripped the city for years.

Now, as evacuees trickle back from Houston, Atlanta and elsewhere to rebuild in the birthplace of jazz, so are some violent criminals, police and a community activist said.

"Crime today is not as bad as it was before August 29, which is before (Hurricane) Katrina. But I think it's also safe to say that crime has been escalating in this city, particularly since it has begun to repopulate," said Raphael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a police watchdog group.

"That's what I think the public is concerned about, they're seeing some upticks, some escalation since January, and particularly since Mardi Gras, and they're concerned we may be returning to pre-Katrina."

During Mardi Gras in February, 22-year-old Jermaine Wise was shot and killed. In March, police arrested Ivory "B-Stupid" Harris, 20, in connection with the killing.

On March 19, musician Michael Frey, 28, was walking home in the Faubourg Marigny area near the French Quarter when a robber killed him with a shotgun blast to the chest.

The same day, a gunman opened fire on one of the famous music processions that are part of New Orleans funerals and killed Christopher Smith, 19, and injured another man.

POLICE SAY CRIME IS DOWN

Despite the brazen acts, police contend crime is down by a wide margin, even accounting for the evacuation. The current population, about 200,000, is less than half the pre-storm number.

"Everybody talks about crime, but the reality is we've got less crime now that we've had in decades. Overall, our crime figures seem to be down around 70 percent," New Orleans Police Department spokesman Juan Quentin said.

There have been 18 homicides this year, down from 68 by April 2005, he said. Part of it is because the department's 1,400 officers have the resources to follow cases and make arrests under Chief Warren Riley, Quentin said.

In 2004, there were 264 murders, or 56 per 100,000 people, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That compares to seven per 100,000 in New York and a national average of 5.5 per 100,000.

Quentin said some troublemakers are among those returning to the city, but he characterized them as "gang wannabes." He also dismissed reports that gangs were setting up shop in abandoned homes around town.

Jeweler Janet Bruno-Small said prior to the hurricane, "there was just something in the environment that was very dangerous and very volatile. However, since the storm, I've felt pretty safe. Although recently people have been warning me to be more cautious."

Before Katrina struck, the majority of the crime in New Orleans was linked to drug trafficking and an overtaxed court system that gave criminals light sentences, Goyeneche said.

One prescription for keeping crime down after the country's worst natural disaster is demanding professionalism from a police force that had a reputation for corruption and poor relations with the public, he said.

The police department is struggling to rebuild credibility after dozens of its officers abandoned duties or looted stores in the chaos after the storm.

    New Orleans fearing return to crime-ridden past, R, 7.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-04-07T174750Z_01_N06345725_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-CRIME.xml

Patchy Recovery in New Orleans

April 5, 2006
The New York Times
By GARY RIVLIN

NEW ORLEANS — Anyone looking for a potent symbol of the battered state of the economy here seven months after Hurricane Katrina might stop by the offices of Don Hutchinson, the city's economic development director. People seeking assistance from Mr. Hutchinson's agency are greeted by a pair of revolving doors that have been sheathed in plywood and shut since shortly after the storm struck at the end of August. Visitors must enter through a side door.

There are any number of signs signaling a steady but unsure recovery in New Orleans, from a vibrant nightlife in pockets of town to census estimates that suggest that the city is repopulating at a much faster pace than predicted a few months ago.

Yet those signs of optimism only bring into sharp relief the alarmingly sluggish pace at which the city's economy is recovering. By Mr. Hutchinson's count, fewer than one in 10 businesses has reopened its doors since a surge of water buried four-fifths of the city. By comparison, New Orleans officials estimate that 40 percent of the residents have returned home.

Before Katrina struck, New Orleans was home to 22,000 businesses, the vast majority of them small establishments with 99 or fewer employees. Today, barely 2,000 of those have reopened.

"The recovery in New Orleans is going more slowly than we had hoped," said David Wyss, the chief economist at Standard & Poor's, which grades the financial health of municipalities. "We look at the numbers from Mississippi and Alabama and see what we expect to see: a lot of people hurting, but lots of rebuilding activity to the point where I would describe the economies there as strong." By contrast, Mr. Wyss said, "there's far less activity in New Orleans than you would expect six or so months after a hurricane."

Most of the businesses that have resumed operations fall into one of two categories: restaurants (29 percent of the food establishments operating in the city before Katrina have reopened, according to the city) and large companies with the economic means to fix up their facilities and cover the extra costs of doing business in an area that is functioning but disabled.

"Small businesses don't have the large cash reserves like the big guys do," Mr. Hutchinson said.

A lack of working capital, though, is only one potential hurdle confronting a small business here. Another is a lack of customers.

Ruston Henry, for instance, the younger half of a father-son team that ran the H & W drugstore in the Lower Ninth Ward, figures that they need to borrow more than half a million dollars before they are able to reopen.

But money, Mr. Henry said, is not their main concern. The Lower Ninth Ward, still without drinkable water or gas, is an unpopulated swath of town that has lain in ruins since the levees were overwhelmed, drowning the area.

"We were a neighborhood pharmacy," Mr. Henry, 44, said. "And what's a neighborhood pharmacy without a neighborhood?" They have applied for a Small Business Administration loan to gut, refurbish and restock a store that Mr. Henry described as having been destroyed by the flooding. (Flood insurance, he said, would cover only a small part of their losses.)

But they are in no rush, Mr. Henry said, to reopen this storefront, which his father and a partner established in 1963.

Thousands of business owners are apparently confronting the same sorts of issues. There is no reason to reopen a shuttered auto repair shop in the Ninth Ward or New Orleans East, an area north and east of downtown where a majority of the city's black professionals lived before Katrina, when most of the cars one sees in these devastated communities are abandoned vehicles destroyed by the storm.

A tour of the ravaged eastern half of the city shows mile after mile of abandoned businesses and vacant malls. It does not seem to make a difference whether a business is part of a chain, like a McDonald's or a Rite Aid, or a big-box retailer like Toys "R" Us, or simply a mom-and-pop dry cleaner or boutique store. All sit unoccupied — forlorn, damaged reminders of how far New Orleans must go to recover from what many describe as the worst natural disaster in modern American history.

In the meantime, Mr. Henry and his wife, Kim, a self-employed environmental engineer, are living with their two teenage children in Jackson, Miss., where Mr. Henry found work as a pharmacist with Wal-Mart. The couple, who lived in the Lower Ninth before the storm, also lost their home.

Virgil Robinson Jr., the chief executive of Dryades Savings, a black-owned bank based in New Orleans, said, "You would think we would be making lots of commercial loans to business damaged by the storm, but so far we're not." Businesses, like homeowners, Mr. Robinson said, are putting off making big decisions until federal authorities publish new flood maps, which will provide critical guidance for rebuilding.

They are also seeking "a clearer sense of which communities will be coming back when," Mr. Robinson said, before seeking money to rebuild.

"There's so much uncertainty that basically most of our customers are taking a wait-and-see attitude," he said.

A lack of housing is proving another roadblock for even the most well-intentioned businesses, as is the lack of essential services. Dryades's crosstown rival, Liberty Bank and Trust, one of the country's largest black-owned banks, was situated in a six-story glass tower in New Orleans East before Katrina struck. It invested the money required for its head office to be ready again for occupancy by January, yet two more months would pass before BellSouth could re-establish phone service and Internet access in a part of town covered by six feet or more of water.

"We basically need to rebuild the entire telecommunications infrastructure in the eastern half of the city," said Merlin Villar, BellSouth's director in the area. Pockets, though only pockets, of New Orleans East have phone service, Mr. Villar said, and BellSouth is in the process of replacing switching stations and trunk lines destroyed by flooding.

Liberty reopened its headquarters in late March, though the building that was once occupied by some 75 employees now has perhaps 15 workers.

"Housing is still a big issue," said Alden J. McDonald Jr., the bank's chief executive. "We can only move back employees who have been able to find a place to live back in New Orleans." The majority of Liberty's employees, including Mr. McDonald, are working out of a temporary beachhead that the bank established in Baton Rouge shortly after the storm, 80 miles to the north and west.

"My feeling is we're only at the beginning of the Katrina curve," said Ken Murray, an entrepreneur who has founded two companies in New Orleans. "I think another year or two will pass before we fully understand how big a chunk of activity was taken out of the city's economy."

That is a phenomenon, however, that Mr. Murray will be observing from afar. Shortly after the storm, he moved his two businesses — one a 50-person sales and marketing firm called Parker, Murray & Associates, founded in 1990, and the other a software start-up, VanillaSoft, that employed 16 people before the storm — to Dallas. That affects other businesses because he relied heavily on local merchants for supplies and services, but he said he felt that he had no choice but to leave town.

Mr. Murray cited both a lack of housing and the uncertainty of the business climate for years to come as two of the primary factors prompting him to move his operations to Texas.

"I'm talking to a lot of other business owners who want to be part of the recovery, but share my concerns," he said.

Those who express optimism about the future of the New Orleans economy note that most of the city's hotels are again open for business, as are the majority of companies in the central business district. Economic development ideas that languished before the storm — like a vague plan to establish New Orleans as a worldwide center for biotechnology innovation — have been revived as city leaders hope to leverage the sympathy expressed by people around the country into actual businesses.

At first glance, the employees of Energy Partners would seem to provide some hope. The company, a publicly traded oil exploration business, chose to move back into its downtown headquarters in December, despite the many headaches that persisted, including unreliable mail service and an incomplete health care system.

Yet while Energy Partners and its chief executive, Richard A. Bachmann, exhibited the kind of can-do spirit that the city needs these days, the company also embodies the precarious nature of the local economy. Whether Energy Partners and its 100 or so employees will stay in New Orleans remains to be seen. The company's commitment to New Orleans, Mr. Bachmann said, is no stronger than the city's will to reform itself. If he does not think that city, state and federal officials have made progress on a number of fronts over the next year — from shoring up the levee system, much of which is federal responsibility, to an overhaul of a public school system that ranked as one of the worst in the nation — then he may leave town.

"There are a number of companies like us that are working for change that will leave if it continues to be the same old business as usual," Mr. Bachmann said.

Yet for some, business as usual would be a dream come true. Mr. Robinson of Dryades Savings described "the general unreliability of everything right now." The electrical equipment at his downtown branch, two blocks from the corner of Canal and Bourbon Streets, was destroyed when the basement of his building took nine feet of water. He ordered new equipment and lined up electricians, but delivery of the equipment took much longer than expected. And he learned the hard way about the demands on tradesmen working in New Orleans now. He had initially hoped to reopen the branch in December, but it did not open until March.

"The concept of a completion date is a very fluid concept right now," Mr. Robinson said.

    Patchy Recovery in New Orleans, NYT, 5.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/business/05recovery.html

FEMA Trailer Park Fails to Survive Storm From Residents

April 5, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, April 4 — A mayoral election is less than three weeks away, and the sympathy of elected officials for the irritations of voters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is boundless.

As a result, there will be no trailer park in Lakewood Estates, a collection of solid, spacious homes behind a high locked gate in the Algiers section.

Last weekend, angry residents of the neighborhood took to the street to protest a trailer park being built on their doorstep by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for 34 single women and their children who were left homeless by the hurricane. FEMA, their signs proclaimed, was "raping" their neighborhood.

Construction was already well along — some 20-odd trailers are already in place on the dusty lot — but fortunately for the residents of Lakewood Estates, campaign season is also well along.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin, habitually relaxed in his reactions, wasted not a moment this time. On Monday morning, with news of the residents' uprising in the local media, Mr. Nagin called a news conference.

"I'm very upset about it," he said. The contractor had "disrespected" citizens. FEMA had "bullied" city workers. Enough was enough. "This is unacceptable," the mayor said.

The disputed trailer park was now history, Mr. Nagin said. And so, for the moment, were all other trailer sites in the city, whose construction the mayor proclaimed "suspended."

The residents of Lakewood Estates had won. FEMA, though, said it was puzzled, especially since the Algiers trailer site had been approved by the mayor months ago, said Darryl Madden, an agency spokesman. All the necessary building permits had been obtained, Mr. Madden said.

A lawyer for the city declined to comment, citing a pending suit by the residents. City documents disputed the assertion that the building permits had been obtained, but a City Hall news release indeed confirmed "that this particular Algiers site was not removed from the original list."

Seven months after the hurricane, fights over where to house its displaced victims continue. Up and down Louisiana, but particularly around New Orleans, residents and local officials have taken action against the incursion of displaced city residents — overwhelmingly black — who are portrayed as bearers of crime and bad living habits, and as destroyers of property values.

Some of the most virulent opposition has occurred in the victims' own backyard. Last December Mr. Nagin backed away from a list of proposed city sites after expressions of outrage. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco was forced to intervene here late last year, when officials could not agree on where to put the trailers.

And by the end of last year, 32 of Louisiana's 64 parishes had banned these trailer sites. Only eight had approved them unconditionally.

If these flare-ups are less frequent than before, FEMA says the need for temporary housing is nonetheless as great as ever. In New Orleans, where the agency has set up nearly 10,000 trailers, 109 sites await Mr. Nagin's approval, the agency says. He has already approved more than 100 such sites, some 17 of which are occupied. FEMA says about 12,000 requests for trailers are pending in the city, with new ones coming in all the time.

"I think it's appalling and I think it's yet another example of 'not in my backyard,' " said William P. Quigley, director of the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University and a litigant on behalf of hurricane victims, speaking of the Algiers site. "The people of New Orleans have been made more welcome across the U.S. than they have been in their own hometown."

The sudden loss of the Algiers site is a sharp blow, Mr. Madden said. "This was going to be a location where we were going to be able to place 34 displaced families, at a time when placing families is important," he said.

"The fact is, we have been working on this site since the mayor approved it," Mr. Madden said. "For this decision to be made at this juncture jeopardizes our effort to provide housing to displaced citizens in the aftermath of Katrina."

Security cameras watch the entrance of Lakewood Estates, and a sign proclaims "24-hour camera surveillance in progress." The collection of trailers sits on a two-acre plot on one side of a low wall, a humble contrast to the substantial, well-landscaped dwellings on the other side.

"If you look at this facility, it looks like Guantánamo," said the protest leader, Edward D. Markle. He was still furious at FEMA, though the site appears dead, for now. "It's bad," Mr. Markle said. "You've got a thousand locations that are better. I won't be able to take a bath without them seeing me."

He suggested that a much larger plot of land, across the road and away from the homes, would have made a far more suitable location.

"It's not an issue of we don't want them in our backyard," Mr. Markle said. "We invite them in our backyard. We just don't want them in our bathrooms and bedrooms."

    FEMA Trailer Park Fails to Survive Storm From Residents, NYT, 5.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/us/nationalspecial/05trailers.html

Race Is at Fore as Vote Nears in New Orleans

April 4, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, April 3 — As the first vote since Hurricane Katrina, the April 22 mayoral primary was supposed to be about the critical choices facing this battered city — an issues-filled debate about whose reconstruction plan was best.

Instead, with the city's majority-black status in doubt for the first time in decades, one dominant motif has emerged in the campaign: race, which for nearly 30 years has been merely a muted subtheme in politics here. Since 1978, New Orleans has elected black mayors, and there has been little doubt about the racial identity of the eventual winner.

This year, the three major candidates or their supporters have aligned themselves along racial lines, with each camp hoping it has singled out the correct, and as yet unknown, demographic. In part, this is a measure of how far the office of mayor has been reduced in the seven months after the storm.

Though the candidates' promises and speeches have filled the airwaves in advance of the primary election, there is little doubt that the real force in rebuilding will be the billions in pending federal aid. That money will be doled out largely by the State of Louisiana; the role of any future New Orleans mayor will be strictly secondary.

"The decisions are going to be made elsewhere," said Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans.

This impotence, though not formally acknowledged by the candidates, has created a vacuum into which has rushed the politics of racial identity, closer to the surface this year than in any other election in recent memory.

Tough discussions about whether some neighborhoods should not be rebuilt or whether the city should issue far fewer building permits have been largely absent. Even contemplating such notions publicly is considered a political kiss of death.

As a result, debates have been rowdy, substance-free brawls, mostly among a slate of 22 aspiring mayors, with unknown candidates gleefully taking potshots at their better-known peers.

No candidate appears to be making a more explicit racial bid than the incumbent mayor, C. Ray Nagin, the one major black candidate in the jostling, Hurricane Katrina-inspired crowd.

An unknown executive in 2002, elected largely through white support and for years the target of sharp criticism among blacks here as failing to favor black-owned companies, Mr. Nagin has been all but abandoned by the white businessmen who enthusiastically supported him the first time. They now fault his posthurricane leadership and are donating thousands to Mr. Nagin's white opponents.

As a result, he has remade himself as a black candidate — first with his provocative speech in which he predicted New Orleans would once again be a mostly black "chocolate city"; later by disavowing a reconstruction plan devised by whites, which was seen by blacks as cold-shouldering ruined African-American neighborhoods.

This past weekend Mr. Nagin took part in a protest march over the election here led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, figures he has not previously been close to.

Jim Carvin, his veteran campaign consultant, acknowledged that Mr. Nagin was counting on a moment of racial solidarity.

"In each election black voters have voted for black candidates against a white candidate," said Mr. Carvin, who has advised every successful New Orleans mayoral campaign since 1970. "My feeling is they will do the same thing again."

But the polarized election here is also partly a legacy of the storm's unequal damage, which caused greater suffering and displacement, proportionally, among blacks. Many black voters are still living elsewhere and will have to vote using unfamiliar absentee mechanisms that may hold down their participation. In many black neighborhoods, there is considerable worry that whites are about to retake control after nearly three decades of black rule.

"There is anxiety, fear, that this can take us back so many years," said Bishop Paul S. Morton Sr., an influential black minister here and head of the Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church, the largest church in the state before Hurricane Katrina. "There's a lot of people that are really, really concerned."

On the other hand, said Ms. Howell, the political scientist, "there are many white voters who see this as their chance to take the city back."

Their candidate is Ron Forman, who remade the city's once-decrepit zoo, is head of the private, nonprofit Audubon Nature Institute and has for years been lionized by many white residents of Uptown.

Mr. Forman is a rarity in New Orleans, a professional success who has not moved elsewhere. Signs with his name are plastered all over the fanciest homes in the Garden District but are conspicuously absent on poorer blocks.

Mr. Forman, a businessman from a working-class background, is not making an explicit racial appeal. But a recent packed Uptown gathering of young professionals supporting him was a sea of white faces.

"Most of us in this room go to Newman, Country Day or Trinity," Mr. Forman said, naming the city's elite private schools, acknowledging the room's racial homogeneity, then suggesting that not everyone in the city was as fortunate.

"How are you going to get the African-American vote?" a young man called out, neatly pinpointing Mr. Forman's dilemma. He responded that he worked on that issue "every day."

Straddling the middle is Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, the most politically polished of the lot, a veteran state legislator and the son of a former mayor and brother of a United States senator.

Two of these three candidates are all but certain to meet in a May runoff — the field of 22 is testimony to posthurricane civic activism, but the other 19 are given little chance — and Mr. Landrieu thinks he will be one of them, precisely because of his biracial appeal.

"I'm the only candidate that has African-American and white support, in equal numbers," Mr. Landrieu, who is white, said in an interview last weekend, before castigating his two major opponents for representing narrower segments of the electorate.

Political professionals largely back his judgment, partly because the Landrieu family has a long history of attracting black voters.

In a recent mayoral debate, Mr. Landrieu was the one candidate who zeroed in on what is likely to be the defining dynamic in New Orleans for years to come: "The most important thing is the mechanism to move the money from the government to the citizens," he said.

Yet there is evidence that the calculations of Mr. Carvin, who began his string of mayoral successes helping to elect Mr. Landrieu's father in 1970, may be correct. Mr. Nagin may well be able to count on a strong lift from racial solidarity.

Bishop Morton said: "African-Americans are usually very loyal to African-American candidates. I've talked to some people who say, 'I don't care how bad the black is, he's better than any white.' "

Yet the professionals acknowledge that with much of the electorate missing, and the rest of it a racial and socioeconomic mystery, any projections made now are meaningless.

"I've done elections for 50 years," Mr. Carvin said, "and I've never had one like this."

    Race Is at Fore as Vote Nears in New Orleans, NYT, 4.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/us/nationalspecial/04orleans.html

Bill Cosby tells New Orleans blacks to reject crime

Sat Apr 1, 2006 10:36 PM ET
Reuters
By Russell McCulley

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Entertainer Bill Cosby urged New Orleans' black population on Saturday to cleanse itself of a culture of crime as it rebuilds from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina last year.

Cosby, whose criticism of some aspects of modern African-American culture has stirred controversy in recent years, told a rally headed by black leaders that the city needed to look at the "wound" it had before Katrina struck.

"It's painful, but we can't cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound," Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people in front of the city's convention center.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children," he said.

"What kind of a village is that?"

Cosby sparked heated debate in 2004, when he criticized blacks whom he said were putting a higher priority on music and fashion than on education and morality.

Before Katrina killed more than 1,300 people and displaced hundreds of thousands, New Orleans had nearly half a million residents, 70 percent of them black. An estimated 30 percent of the city had incomes below the poverty line.

Less than half the population has returned to the heavily damaged city and evacuees remain scattered across the country. Many of those who have come back are whites who lived in affluent areas that were less affected by flooding.

Other speakers, including civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, denounced what they said was an attempt by state and federal officials to disenfranchise the evacuees in April 22 local elections by not setting up out-of-state voting stations.

Jackson said evacuees should be allowed to vote in "satellite" polling places outside the state, just as Iraqi and Mexican expatriates have cast ballots from the United States in elections in their home countries.

"If we in fact can use this technology for Mexican-Americans and Mexico, then we ought to," Jackson said. "If we can use this technology for Iraqi-Americans in America to Baghdad, then we ought to. We can use the same technology for New Orleanians, wherever they are in America."

Voting stations will be available at 10 sites in Louisiana outside of New Orleans, but state officials have said casting ballots outside the state is not allowed.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who is black and faces 21 challengers in his re-election campaign, said not enough was being done to guarantee a fair vote.

"We deserve to be treated like Americans," he said.

    Bill Cosby tells New Orleans blacks to reject crime, R, 1.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-04-02T023605Z_01_B728330_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-PROTEST.xml

Levee Plans Fall Short of FEMA Standards

March 31, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

New Orleans's levees do not meet the standards that the Federal Emergency Management Agency requires for its flood protection program, federal officials said yesterday — and they added that the problem would take as much as $6 billion to fix.

FEMA has long based its flood planning on whether an area is protected against a flood that might have a 1 percent chance of occurring in any year, also known as a 100-year flood. Without that certification, the agency's flood maps have to treat the entire levee system as if it were not there at all, which means that people hoping to build in the affected areas might have to rebuild their homes at elevations of 15 or even 30 feet above sea level in order to meet new federal building standards.

But since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the agency has toughened its 100-year standard, based on new information about land subsidence and the increasing severity and frequency of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. There is also new data about weak soils in the area and the failure of some of the city's floodwalls.

As a result, the levees that the Army Corps of Engineers is now building will not meet the new FEMA standard. Donald Powell, the federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding, said Thursday that the Corps now believes it cannot meet that standard without spending additional billions to upgrade the flood protection system still further.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana expressed outrage over what she called a monumental miscalculation and said it was shocking to learn that $6 billion more might be needed for the hurricane protection system.

"This means that, just two months before hurricane season, the Corps of Engineers informs us they cannot ensure even the minimum safety of Southeastern Louisiana," Ms. Blanco said in a statement. "This is totally unacceptable."

But Mr. Powell said in a news briefing yesterday that the $2 billion that the Army Corps of Engineers is currently spending and the $1.4 billion in additional funds it has requested will make the system stronger and better than it has ever been. Asked if he would feel comfortable living in the area despite the government's inability to certify the levees, he responded, "after the Corps completes its work, yes."

Mr. Powell called the difference "a regulatory issue, not necessarily a safety issue." When the current work on the levees is complete, he said, there might be flooding from a storm like Hurricane Katrina, but the levee system would not fail catastrophically again.

Although people can rebuild without the federal flood maps today, many homeowners may well decide that the risks of rebuilding are too great. The Louisiana Recovery Authority has said that its plan to provide grants to those who rebuild will favor those who meet FEMA requirements.

Mr. Powell said that to start the process of getting the new flood maps, the federal government only needs to state that it does intend to meet the certification standard — a process that it can undertake for the entire system at the full $6 billion, or pick and choose projects to cut costs.

The flood advisory documents, which will begin the process of creating final flood maps, could emerge within days, Mr. Powell said. It will take up to 18 months to complete the maps.

In the briefing, Mr. Powell said that rebuilding the city could take 25 years — a sentiment shared by many disaster recovery experts. He added, however, "It could be much shorter than that, depending on how they plan their future. I'm going to be doing everything I can to make this as short as possible."

Matt McBride, a member of the community group in Broadmoor, a New Orleans neighborhood that was inundated during Hurricane Katrina, said many city residents would be disappointed by the levee announcement. While many people in his neighborhood were committed to rebuilding, he said, "It's just one more headache on top of the hundreds that we're dealing with."

    Levee Plans Fall Short of FEMA Standards, NYT, 31.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/us/nationalspecial/31levees.html

As Life Returns to New Orleans, So Does Crime

March 30, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, March 29 — The wail of police sirens is back, and gunfire again punctuates the night. As drug dealers move into flood-damaged houses, alarmed residents say that in the last few weeks, they have begun to sense a return to the bad old days before Hurricane Katrina, when crime was an omnipresent straitjacket on life in this city.

In a city that once led the nation in homicides per capita, crime has long been a leading indicator of New Orleans's health and prospects — an unavoidable part of the equation for a walk around the block or a trip to the grocery store.

That diminished greatly after the storm, when several hundred thousand people were evacuated. But there are signs that the past may be returning, with a new twist.

Police officials say the landscape of abandoned houses, stretching block after block, after Hurricane Katrina is being incorporated into a revived drug trade, with the empty dwellings offering an unexpected convenience to dealers returning from Houston and Atlanta.

Residents concur, pointing to this boarded-up house or that abandoned-looking shed as a place where they have seen young men congregating.

"It's coming back," said Capt. Timmy Bayard, the New Orleans police officer in charge of narcotics investigations.

"It's not as plentiful as it was," Captain Bayard said. But, he added, "we're starting to grab some people." His men, searching abandoned houses in the Eighth Ward, have found drug stashes. He said it was like "looking for a needle in a haystack."

There are popping sounds of gunfire at night in the Central City and St. Roch neighborhoods flanking downtown — not as often as before, but enough to induce unease.

"Less, yeah, but it's started back up," said the Rev. A. P. Williby, who owns a house in Central City. "Shooting and killing — that's what we had before. It ain't going nowhere."

Two shootings, one of them fatal, occurred in January and earlier this month.

Parasol's, a classic old-line bar in the Irish Channel neighborhood, was held up at midnight recently. And a young man was killed after handing over his wallet in the Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood of popular bars and restaurants.

On Web forums, there are reports of robberies and break-ins.

In Houston, which saw a sharp spike in killings after Hurricane Katrina, police officials say they have noticed a decline since the beginning of the year.

Homicides were up 24 percent in 2005, but Houston police officials say the number would have been down 2 percent, absent cases in which either the suspect or the victim was a storm evacuee.

Last fall, there were "multiple" hurricane-related killings in Houston nearly every weekend, said Houston police Sgt. Brian Harris of the Houston police, but the violence has significantly eased, he said.

New Orleans again appears to be drawing the people who wreaked havoc on its streets before the storm.

A local murder suspect wanted in Houston, for example, drifted back here and was arrested in Kenner, a New Orleans suburb, this month.

In the past, even when there were lulls in crime, many residents felt as if they were living in a city under siege.

Perception became part of the reality, fueling an exodus of whites and blacks to the suburbs or out of state.

The drug culture has been deeply ingrained here and never fully disappeared. A local rapper called Juvenile, in his new post-hurricane album, declaims: "E'ybody need a check from FEMA/ So he can go and sco' him some co-ca-een-uh."

But crime is nowhere near its pre-storm levels. With the city's population reduced by at least three-fifths, statistics indicate that crime is down 60 percent to 70 percent over all, the department said.

There have been 16 killings this year, compared with more than 60 for the same period last year, which means quieter days for the police but still works out to an annualized rate of 32 killings per 100,000 people, ahead of Cleveland and Chicago.

A gnawing sense of vulnerability, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, is returning. On any block, it may have no more concrete basis than the sight of idle young men hanging out, but it is real nonetheless.

"They're beginning to surface again," said Alfred Barrow, a newspaper deliverer, painting his porch on an empty-looking block at 3rd and Magnolia in Center City.

"I'm out here throwing papers at 3 a.m., and I see them. What reason is there for them to be out there?" The anxiety is not helped by the police department's struggle to return to normal. At about 1,400 officers, the department is not far from its strength of just under 1,600 officers before Hurricane Katrina.

But the department is operating out of trailers, much of its data-gathering capability is impaired because of storm damage, and about 80 percent of its officers lost their homes in the storm.

There is evidence that the non-working poor — the population most implicated in crime, as victims and perpetrators — may be returning in higher percentages, for now, than middle-class residents washed out by the storm. A population map prepared for the city appears to suggest as much.

"It looks like the worst have come back," said Andrew Jackson, a homeowner on Villere Street in the Eighth Ward.

"That house over there," he said, pointing to an empty-looking dwelling down the block where he said youths congregate. "You don't see 'em during the day, but you see them at night."

There are a few hopeful signs. Before, this was a city virtually awash in guns, experts say. The contractor who cleaned up the city's storm drains after Hurricane Katrina said his crews had recovered a least a dozen firearms. Guns are not as prevalent, the police say.

Another aid, officers and residents say, is a new level of cooperation from citizens who had traditionally mistrusted the New Orleans police.

For years, the police here had complained that witnesses and residents refused to help, fearing retribution from gangs and drug dealers.

Killings in broad daylight on busy blocks produced few or no witnesses.

Now, "the people who are here are the people who want to be here, and they don't want that back," said Kenny Zeiger, who described his block in the St. Roch area as "one of the three worst corners in the neighborhood" for drug activity before the storm.

"The people are calling the cops more," Mr. Zeiger said.

Capt. John Bryson commands the Sixth District in Central City, a high-crime area.

"It's incredible," Captain Bryson said. "People you normally wouldn't believe would want an association with the police department call us up."

He is confident about keeping the lid on, even as more people return.

"We have control," he said. "We have gained this ground."

Less than a mile away, Mr. Barrow is skeptical — about the present, and the future.

"It don't take much to improve what it was," he said, "because what it was, was probably the most vicious killing scene in the U.S."

    As Life Returns to New Orleans, So Does Crime, NYT, 30.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/national/nationalspecial/30crime.html?hp&ex=1143694800&en=aedc309160e6e44a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Judge Refuses to Delay New Orleans Vote

March 27, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:32 p.m. ET
New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A federal judge on Monday refused to delay New Orleans' April 22 mayoral election, telling both sides to solve any problems that might hinder displaced residents' ability to vote.

''If you are a displaced citizen, like I am, we have a burning desire for completeness,'' said U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle, whose own New Orleans home flooded after Hurricane Katrina.

Lemelle said voting will help the city rebuild, but he warned that its residents have already lost trust in institutions. ''I recognize that there is still room for improvement in that electoral process,'' he said.

Civil rights groups had urged the judge to postpone what would be the city's first municipal elections since the hurricane, arguing that too many black residents won't be able to participate.

The Aug. 29 storm flooded 80 percent of the city, destroying some polling places and scattering more than half the population. What was a mostly black city of nearly half a million people was reduced to well under 200,000 inhabitants.

Some black leaders say the state's plan to allow mail voting for residents in other states, along with satellite polling places elsewhere in Louisiana, won't do enough to give all displaced residents the opportunity to vote.

''We can see that train wreck coming in slow motion,'' plaintiffs' attorney Bill Quigley said Monday.

Secretary of State Al Ater, the state's top election official, said he was prepared to work with the plaintiffs and the judge. ''I'm very proud of what we're doing,'' he said.

The city elections had been set for Feb. 4, but state officials said they could not possibly hold balloting that soon after Katrina. The postponement led to a lawsuit by residents who wanted no delays, and the state then set the April 22 date. The state's emergency plan includes polling stations in 10 Louisiana cities, a national advertising campaign, and an easing of voting rules to allow displaced residents to cast ballots.

Mayor Ray Nagin, criticized in some quarters for his response to the hurricane, is running for re-election against nearly two dozen opponents, including Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and Audubon Institute chief executive Ron Forman.

Monday's hearing was called after the NAACP and other civil rights groups argued the plan contained the equivalent of a poll tax, the voting fee that was banned after it was abused in the South to disenfranchise blacks. They said displaced residents would have to pay for transportation to vote in New Orleans and the expenses would be the ''modern equivalent of a poll tax.''

Fewer than 10,000 registered voters have requested absentee ballots, said Dale Atkins, who is campaigning for re-election as civil district court clerk.

Other complaints include cumbersome absentee ballot procedures, frequent movement of precinct locations and a refusal to share information about how candidates can reach the displaced voters.

Election procedures in Louisiana and many other Southern states are subject to Justice Department approval because of their history of racial discrimination.

Several black leaders argued Friday for satellite voting locations outside Louisiana, though a spokeswoman for Ater said state law doesn't allow out-of-state voting operations.

''This is a Florida in the making,'' said Urban League President Marc Morial, a former New Orleans mayor, referring to Florida's extensive voting problems in the 2000 elections. ''If you see an election train wreck coming, why not do something to prevent it before the wreck occurs?''

------

On the Net:

Elections Division: http://www.sec.state.la.us/elections/elections-index.htm

    Judge Refuses to Delay New Orleans Vote, NYT, 28.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-New-Orleans-Elections.html

Levees may not protect all New Orleans: officials

Thu Mar 23, 2006 6:31 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Mayor Ray Nagin said on Thursday he is confident that $770 million of levee repairs will protect most of New Orleans this hurricane season, but officials warned another Katrina-strength storm could swamp low-lying areas again.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is racing to meet a June 1 deadline -- the formal start to the hurricane season -- to have the 350 mile levee system protecting New Orleans and the surrounding area back to pre-Katrina condition or better.

Nagin and presidents of two nearby Louisiana parishes said after a tour of levee and floodwall repair projects with Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the Corps' director of civil works, they were pleased with the progress, which is now 49 percent complete.

"Based upon their scope of work, the number of contractors that they have, the progress thus far, it looks as though June 1's a good date and we should be just about ready," Nagin said at a construction site where massive temporary gates for his city's 17th Street Canal are being built.

About 169 miles of levees were damaged in the August 29 hurricane. Levee failures led to flooding of 80 percent of New Orleans and wholesale destruction in parishes like St. Bernard and Plaquemines. More than 1,300 people were killed on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Nagin and Riley said they could not be 100 percent sure that neighborhoods among the worst hit after Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward and parts of New Orleans East, will be safe should another big hurricane slam the region this summer.

Both areas were submerged when a levee holding back the Industrial Canal breached, and both still lie mostly in ruins.

Nagin this week warned anxious residents who want to rebuild in those areas that risks will be high for about two years, until long-term flood-control improvements can begin.

"It's less risk with these repairs, but there still is risk and even if we go into September 2007 and complete all the authorized projects, there will still be risk," Riley said.

When this round of repairs and reinforcement is done, the system should be stronger than before, so the danger would be from the levees being topped, he said.

Various engineering groups have blamed breaches on a range of factors, from soil erosion and settling along floodwalls to poor design and maintenance by the Corps and its contractors.

Nagin said he is now comfortable with Corps officials' claims about the quality of the repair work on the levee system protecting New Orleans, most of which was built in the 1960s.

"It's a different time and space. The world is watching and monitoring it a lot closer, paying attention ... and I've also talked to some independent engineers, and they seem to be on track. It looks much better," he said.

Some residents remain wary.

"I don't know -- I hope it holds. We've been through too much down here now," said retired longshoreman Earl Green, 79. He lives in a rented apartment after evacuating to Arkansas and Michigan and has opted not to rebuild his flooded home.

The 70-ton gates set for the mouth of the 17th Street Canal, where a breach caused flooding in the Lakeview area, are aimed at protecting against a surge from Lake Pontchartrain.

U.S. President George W. Bush has asked Congress to appropriate an additional $1.46 billion for long-term levee and pumping-station improvements. It has yet to be approved.

    Levees may not protect all New Orleans: officials, R, 23.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-03-23T233124Z_01_N23174169_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-LEVEES.xml

Nagin: N.O. now has better levees, plans

Posted 3/21/2006 12:39 PM Updated 3/21/2006 2:37 PM
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — New Orleans is better prepared for the upcoming hurricane season because of stronger flood walls and better evacuation plans since Hurricane Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin said in an interview Tuesday.

"We should be able to sustain another Katrina," the mayor said.

"If a Category 5 hits us, probably the city will be gone and the levees will still be standing. The work they're doing is just incredible," Nagin said of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. (Related story: Baton Rouge wrestles with population growth)

The Corps, which designed and built the city's levees, has been heavily criticized by residents who note the city survived the worst of the Aug. 29 storm but then was swamped when flood walls broke, inundating 80% of the city with brackish water. Many have expressed fear about the condition of the levees as the June 1 start of hurricane season approaches.

But Nagin told The Associated Press he's confident the Corps is using better materials and designs on the levees.

He also said that evacuating the city in the event of another hurricane should be smoother. He said he would be in closer contact with forecasters at the National Hurricane Center so he'll know quickly whether a mandatory evacuation will be needed. The one ordered two days before Katrina hit was the city's first.

Nagin said he is concerned about the large number of travel trailers in which people are living while they repair their homes. Because the trailers are not very secure in high wind, they may need to be evacuated faster than the rest of the city.

"They could turn into little missiles," Nagin said.

But he predicted residents would be more likely to comply with evacuation orders now. In the future, he said, they will be bused away from the city rather than to shelters like the Superdome, where residents were stranded in hot, dank conditions for days after Katrina hit in late August.

"People are pretty attuned to leaving if I say you have to leave, so I don't see that as being as much of a challenge," he said.

Nagin is up for re-election April 22 and facing a slate of two dozen candidates, including Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu.

The mayor said he believes the city can be mostly restored in the next five years.

New Orleans officials estimate about 189,000 of the city's roughly 455,000 pre-storm residents have returned, and Nagin said he expects a significant jump in population after the end of the school year, when many families with children enrolled in schools elsewhere can return without disrupting their education.

He said the pace of rebuilding will likely depend on federal and state aid, but too much bureaucracy could hobble hopes for restoration.

"The worst-case scenario is the state creates an incredible bureaucracy to issue this money, everything gets bogged down and bottle-necked and lots of people get frustrated and we kind of limp along at half the population we had," he said.

On Monday, Nagin endorsed a proposal that would allow all residents to rebuild homes in neighborhoods shattered by the hurricanes. An advisory commission had recommended flooded neighborhoods be replaced with parks and that the city go slow in rebuilding low-lying areas.

    Nagin: N.O. now has better levees, plans, UT, 21.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-21-nagin-hurricanes_x.htm

New Orleans mayor warns of risk in rebuilding plan

Mon Mar 20, 2006 11:30 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin finalized a sweeping plan on Monday to rebuild the city after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, rejecting calls to turn ruined neighborhoods into parks but warning some residents that floods are still a risk.

Nagin delivered his recommendations on a slew of proposals by his Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which seek to revive the battered city's communities, repair its economy, revive its rich cultural scene and restructure a city government hobbled by inefficiency long before the storm.

When it issued its report last January, the commission angered some hard-hit residents with calls to replace badly damaged and flood-prone areas with green space for a smaller population and to slap a moratorium on building permits.

Nagin told about 500 people packed into a hotel ballroom that he tossed out those parts of the report and urged citizens to make their own decisions on rebuilding homes.

He said he is more confident that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is improving the crucial levee system to a condition that will protect the city this hurricane season while many residents are reclaiming their neighborhoods.

But he warned that Corps officials have told him some of the worst hit areas, New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward -- which still lie in ruins 6-1/2 months after the disaster -- will flood again if another hurricane hits.

"Even with the restoration of higher, better fortified levees, this challenge is corrected, but it will not be fixed for probably another year or two," Nagin said.

"That's why it's important that you as citizens have the option of rebuilding on your own, or taking advantage of the buyout options in the Failed Levee Homeowner Recovery Program I pioneered."

Residents of those neighborhoods have complained they are being denied opportunities to rebuild from the August 29 storm, and still lack basic services like electricity and sewers.

About 80 percent of city known as the birthplace of jazz was flooded when Katrina breached several levees. The hurricane killed as many as 1,300 people along the Gulf Coast and another 2,000 are still listed as missing.

The population of New Orleans proper is still estimated at under 200,000, less than half the pre-Katrina number.

Besides setting up a framework to revive, the commission's recommendations seek to close the historical standard of living gaps between rich and poor, and black and white residents, said Nagin, who is campaigning for re-election.

That would be accomplished partly through state-funded programs to add badly needed low-income housing for purchase and rental, by improving the decimated public transport system and increasing access to health care.

Some at the meeting were not impressed, like nursing instructor Cora Charles, a longtime Lower Ninth Ward resident.

"I got my tax bill in December and I paid it before January 31. On the back of it, it said police and school, and now I can't even get a school open in the Lower Ninth," Charles, 70, said to cheers from the crowd. "Maybe I can get my taxes back. Is that possible, mayor?"

Nagin gave community leaders until June 30 to submit long-term development plans for their neighborhoods.

    New Orleans mayor warns of risk in rebuilding plan, R, 21.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-03-21T043019Z_01_N20201750_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-PLAN.xml

Behind Louisiana Aid Package, a Change of Heart by One Man

March 20, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

Louisiana was in a foul mood on the February day that President Bush's Gulf Coast rebuilding coordinator, Donald E. Powell, stood before an audience of fellow bankers in Baton Rouge.

Two weeks before, the administration had rejected Louisiana's housing recovery plan. Mr. Powell's own idea of housing aid excluded thousands of homeowners, many of them poor, who lived in the flood plain but did not have flood insurance when Hurricane Katrina hit.

Asked about those who had counted on federally built levees to protect them, Mr. Powell, a wealthy man from the dry Texas Panhandle, noted that he had been responsible enough to buy flood insurance for his home in Amarillo.

The members of the Louisiana Bankers Association were not won over. Nor was The Advocate, Baton Rouge's newspaper, which demanded Mr. Powell's dismissal, calling him a "flint-souled" bean counter whose only concern was "guarding the money."

Those with a more charitable view, Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, among them, complained that he lacked the authority to be effective, and some critics wondered if he was simply another presidential crony.

But barely a week would pass before Mr. Powell did an about-face that turned many of his critics into fans, showing that not only had he listened to the locals, but also that his conclusions had carried weight with Mr. Bush. With Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and Mayor C. Ray Nagin at his side, Mr. Powell announced that the president would seek $4.2 billion more for Louisiana to compensate homeowners — even those in the flood plain.

Mr. Powell's epiphany came after hours of listening to Louisianians: the decision makers; the woman who cleaned his room at the Sheraton; Victoria Reggie Kennedy, the wife of Senator Edward M. Kennedy (whom he called after hearing she was a Louisiana native); the inspectors examining high-water marks in homes. As he drove through New Orleans with Mr. Bush on March 8, he pointed to a small restaurant in the Ninth Ward and rattled off the owner's real estate woes.

"He had a learning experience," said Walter Isaacson, vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. "It's the most amazing thing for somebody of his stature. It's because by himself, he walked around. He walked around and talked to people."

Mr. Powell says walking about in the region incognito, in blue jeans and boots, is becoming a bit harder now that people are starting to recognize him. "I went with no preconceived thoughts," he said. "And I realized that while Mississippi was an act of God, Louisiana was an act of God and man. There were some flaws. The levees breached."

Last week, Mr. Powell spent much of his time lobbying House members, successfully, to preserve the appropriation. For several days, other states mounted an effort to siphon off some of the money, and conservatives said the entire amount was too large, but on Thursday the House overwhelmingly approved it.

Mr. Powell's work on the housing plan made many Louisianians think that in appointing him, the administration had finally done something right. Garland Robinette, a talk-radio host in New Orleans who has interviewed Mr. Powell several times, recalled telling him, "I was totally prepared to not like you at all, and it aggravates me that you're doing something to make me think you might be a good guy after all."

For Mr. Powell, former chief executive of the First National Bank of Amarillo, the listening tour was part of any banker's due diligence. Texas bankers are a particular breed — conservative, unpretentious and keenly competitive. One newspaper columnist recalled that years ago, after being offered a job in Amarillo, he received a solicitation call two hours later from Mr. Powell's bank. Asked about the incident, Mr. Powell said, "I probably was mad at our people because it was two hours."

Given his prominence in the Texas Panhandle, Mr. Powell's political connections go almost without saying. To the first President Bush, he is an old friend; to the second, he was a top fund-raiser. He had been to Washington only three times, he said, before he was appointed chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 2001, a position he left several months early to take his current post in November.

Mr. Powell, 64, is from a working-class family in Amarillo, where he helped his father peddle tobacco and snacks to shopkeepers. A football scholarship made him the first in his family to go to college. He began his career by walking into a bank and asking for a job. During the Texas banking crisis of the 1980's, Mr. Powell hauled the Amarillo bank from the brink of failure.

The $4.2 billion was not his first accomplishment as recovery czar. Until he intervened, state officials had spent hours trying to ensure that the federal government would continue to pick up all recovery expenses, a routine matter that, nevertheless, was authorized for a month at a time.

He also persuaded the president to ask Congress for an additional $1.5 billion for the state's levee system, doubling the previous request. And he became a go-to guy for local officials who hit snags in issues like debris removal and trailer placement.

But his rejection of the housing buyout plan, called the Baker bill after Representative Richard H. Baker, the Louisiana Republican who created it, infuriated many state officials. State leaders had taken great pains to build support for the plan, which called for the creation of a federal agency to buy and sell damaged property. Mr. Powell caused further outrage by skewering the Baker bill — gratuitously, many thought — in an opinion article in The Washington Post.

But he continued to push for an alternative. The first step was to agree on how many houses were damaged, and how badly. Mr. Powell forced Louisiana to justify its figures house by house, using aerial photographs and numbers collected from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Red Cross and insurance companies. He was involved in details including how to reward those who had carried insurance and how to provide incentives for people to rebuild more safely. But he made no promises.

"He's a good poker player," said Andy Kopplin, a former chief of staff for Governor Blanco who is now the executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. "I'd been getting calls and making calls to those guys at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night and sending data sets up. There was an extraordinary effort going on that gave us hope; at the same time, it was never clear to us that we were going to get a breakthrough."

Some Louisiana Democrats suggested the $4.2 billion was nothing more than damage control by the administration, noting that the president had been hammered for his lack of attention to Hurricane Katrina in his State of the Union address and quickly responded by announcing $18 billion in new money for the Gulf Coast. Further reviled after rejecting the Baker bill, they say, Mr. Bush opted to devote the $4.2 billion to Louisiana, which had been shortchanged in an earlier appropriation.

But Mr. Powell said that the entire effort was influenced not by politics, but by hard data. "I'm on a mission, and I can't — while I'm sensitive to it — that can't guide me," he said of public opinion. "I can't be either pushed or held back. I know if we're attempting to do the right thing. I have a conscience. If you're moving, someone's going to be critical."

In the meantime, the flint-souled banker seems to be winning the battle for hearts and minds. Louisianians who might have been his adversaries have taken to inviting him over for brunch with the family and praising his frugality.

But Mr. Robinette, the talk-show host, reserves the right to change his mind if Mr. Powell starts to deliver bad news despite Mr. Bush's promises to the region.

"It could still be good cop, bad cop," Mr. Robinette said, "and we just haven't seen the bad cop yet."

    Behind Louisiana Aid Package, a Change of Heart by One Man, NYT, 20.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/nationalspecial/20powell.html?hp&ex=1142917200&en=8f0d52d85ab643ad&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Grim find shows normalcy still eludes New Orleans

Sun Mar 19, 2006 8:22 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - A backhoe gingerly lifted away twisted lumber, shingles and soiled household items in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward to reveal a decayed body.

Before the remains could be moved onto a stretcher, bagged and loaded into a van, workers found a second corpse in the same small area of the tangle that was once a house and repeated the process as passing cars slowed.

The scene on the 2400 block of Tupelo Street on quiet Sunday morning could have just as easily never played out.

But it did, and two more of the estimated 400 people missing in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina's floods more than half a year ago would be stricken from the list.

A successful Mardi Gras, the return of pro basketball and crescendoing sounds of construction and jazz music lull people into a sense that normalcy is returning after America's worst natural disaster and the botched early response.

The scene on Tupelo Street shows it hasn't.

It began early in this section of the Lower Ninth with two students working to clear the mounds of debris that still litter the ruined neighborhood, officials at the scene said.

Walking by wreckage of a house that had just been bulldozed off the street where it sat since the water subsided, the students noticed a limb in the tangled mess and called police.

Officers arrived, then officials with the coroner and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and then a search and rescue team with a red truck and a sniffer dog. It is a well-established procedure.

Tim Campbell, a chaplain with Victim Relief Ministries, arrived to read a prayer for the dead.

Coroner's investigator Orrin Duncan said more bodies are being found each week as the pace of home demolition picks up in the Lower Ninth Ward, a mainly African-American community that was hammered by a torrent when the levee that held back the city's Industrial Canal breached after the August 29 storm.

He is still not used to it.

"It affects me. It's my home," the 35-year-old said. "It definitely affects me, thinking that they didn't search."

The bodies on Tupelo are too decomposed to immediately determine their gender, he said. They are darkened, stiff, vaguely human in form, anonymous.

Hurricane Katrina killed an estimated 1,300 people along the Gulf Coast, and 80 percent of New Orleans flooded when the levees gave way. Spray-painted markings on the wrecked homes in this neighborhood suggest searchers went through them months and months ago.

Henry Irvin, 69, who lived in the neighborhood for five decades, said he was angry rescue crews did not find the bodies earlier when they moved the debris off the street.

"They did a lot of pushing homes around here. I'm just glad they're going through it the right way now," he said.

(Additional reporting by Matt Daily)

    Grim find shows normalcy still eludes New Orleans, R, 19.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-03-20T012143Z_01_N19223160_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-DEAD.xml

In Louisiana, Graft Inquiries Are Increasing

March 18, 2006
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

KENNER, La. — Long before this suburb west of New Orleans was shaken by Hurricane Katrina, it was notorious for its fierce political infighting, for name-calling and mudslinging, for charges and countercharges of cronyism and corruption.

But accusations about matters like ticket-fixing are one thing, and allegations involving millions of federal dollars for storm recovery are quite another.

In February, federal prosecutors in New Orleans began bringing witnesses before a grand jury looking into possible fraud in Kenner municipal contracts that were awarded immediately before and after the hurricane. The mayor and the entire City Council have been subpoenaed to testify, although the government has not made clear its target.

Growing numbers of subpoenas may soon be issued across Louisiana, where local politics remains a blood sport and corruption has been a bad habit. That combination has become far more volatile with the addition of millions of dollars in aid beginning to flow from Washington and an army of auditors, investigators and prosecutors determined to make sure that the money is properly spent.

So far, the scrutiny has resulted in several major fraud prosecutions around the state. The government has filed charges against a politician in St. Tammany Parish, north of New Orleans, who is accused of seeking hurricane contract kickbacks, and against several federal workers accused of seeking bribes and a contractor who was paid millions of dollars for work the government says he did not perform at a tent camp.

New hurricane fraud investigations are being opened "sometimes by the day," said Jim Letten, the United States attorney in New Orleans, who was the lead prosecutor in the corruption case against former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, convicted in 2000 of a scheme to extort money from businessmen seeking gambling boat licenses.

"Additional investigations focus on everything from fake charities to identity theft to contractors behaving fraudulently to public corruption cases," Mr. Letten said.

Grand jury investigations normally take place in secret, and Mr. Letten said he could not discuss the focus or the scope of the inquiry in Kenner, a city of 70,000 people that is home to New Orleans's airport.

But some information has become public, in part because the mayor and several City Council members have held news conferences on the investigation. Reporters were waiting in the halls of the Hale Boggs Federal Building on March 9 when a contractor and all seven members of the Council trooped up to the fourth floor to testify. And the contracts in question have been a subject of public acrimony between the mayor and the Council, a circumstance that led to a fistfight between a contractor and the brothers of a councilman at a Mardi Gras ball in February.

"Kenner is the home of hardball politics," said Jeff Crouere, a political commentator who is a former executive director of the Louisiana Republican Party. (Almost all the battling politicians in Kenner are Republicans.) But the grand jury inquiry, coming so soon before hotly contested city elections on April 1, "is just an incredible situation," Mr. Crouere said, "where voters are left scratching their heads."

Dominic O. Weilbaecher, a city councilman and former interim mayor, has raised questions about at least $22 million in city spending on debris removal, trailers and public relations.

The spending was approved by the current mayor, Philip L. Capitano, who is running for re-election. A former ally of his, Mr. Weilbaecher contends that Mr. Capitano is now rewarding campaign contributors, overpaying cronies and generally spending taxpayer money without demonstrating that the city is getting anything in return.

"I've been talking to guys from the F.B.I. for two years, just because of the foolishness I've seen from this administration," Mr. Weilbaecher (pronounced WHILE-backer) said in an interview.

What is new, he said, is that federal money is now involved: the city is seeking reimbursement for storm-related expenses from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"My take is, the U.S. attorney wants to send a message that regardless of what's going on with elections or any other thing, you don't mess with the federal government," Mr. Weilbaecher said.

The mayor replied that his efforts after the storm saved the city money, got it up and running quickly, and did not involve any impropriety.

"We did it better, we did it cheaper," he said in an interview. "That's why it's so funny we're being investigated by a grand jury right now, when we were more efficient, cheaper and better than all the surrounding communities."

The mayor later sent along a letter he had received from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business praising his "bold and intelligent leadership" after the storm.

Randal Perkins, owner of a major debris removal company that worked in Louisiana and Mississippi after the hurricane, said in a phone interview that he believed Kenner was paying less on its cleanup contract than the Army Corps of Engineers was spending on similar work.

"It's politics," Mr. Capitano said of the inquiry. Mr. Weilbaecher and another councilman, Michael McMyne, "are trying to help the guy who ran against me" in the last election.

That guy, Nick Congemi, is the police chief and brother of Mr. Capitano's predecessor as mayor. The chief is among four candidates challenging Mr. Capitano this time.

"I don't think anybody can plot with the U.S. attorney's office," Mr. Congemi said recently. "That accusation is a simple politician's answer to a deep dilemma he's in now."

Whatever is behind the accusations, Mr. Letten, the prosecutor, had no choice but to look into them, said L. Eades Hogue, a former federal prosecutor representing the contractor who has appeared before the grand jury. "It smacks of politics," Mr. Hogue said, "but the U.S. attorney is obligated to investigate allegations such as these."

Even some critics of the mayor do not dispute that this city of about 15 square miles began rebounding from the hurricane faster than many other communities. But they suggest that this had less to do with politicians than with the route of the storm, which struck hardest at points farther east.

"As bad as it was, this city was blessed," said John T. Lavarine III, who like his father before him serves on the City Council. "We were on the western fringes."

Which is not to say that Kenner escaped unscathed. Driving his Crown Victoria through the city recently, Mr. Lavarine headed north and west to Loyola Drive, where white FEMA trailers line the streets like false teeth in front of damaged houses. Across town, a huge apartment complex that housed mostly Hispanic residents sits moldering, roofs torn off and walls tipped in.

Worried about rebuilding their homes and about the next hurricane, Kenner's residents, some politicians among them, seem embarrassed by the investigation and fed up with the political squabbling.

"The fighting and all has not served the city well," said Edmond J. Muniz, a retired businessman and politician known for founding Endymion, one of the biggest Mardi Gras krewes, or parade groups, who decided at the last minute to run for mayor. "I don't know how to put it. I wouldn't want to say we are a laughingstock, because it isn't funny."

    In Louisiana, Graft Inquiries Are Increasing, NYT, 18.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/national/18kenner.html?hp&ex=1142744400&en=0fb7509d51026e7a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

FEMA Will Try to Recoup Millions Distributed for Hurricane Relief

March 18, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, March 17 — Acknowledging that it wrongly distributed tens of millions of dollars in hurricane relief last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Friday that it would try to recoup aid from thousands of individuals or families who fraudulently or otherwise wrongly collected money.

Officials at the agency said it was a routine step taken after any disaster because in the rush to distribute emergency aid, benefits were occasionally paid twice to the same family or to people who were ineligible.

"In every disaster there are just some people who are bad apples who attempt to take advantage of the programs," said Donna Dannels, the acting deputy director of disaster recovery at FEMA.

But auditors examining the $6.8 billion in disaster assistance distributed last year to 1.7 million households after Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma said FEMA was to blame for much of the abuse because of a woefully inadequate accounting system that left it vulnerable to fraud.

"The right way to do this is to prevent it in the first place," said Gregory D. Kutz, managing director of a unit in the Government Accountability Office that has already found that thousands of people submitted duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers to receive aid. "You will never catch even a fraction of the people who have committed fraud here."

So far, FEMA has sent letters to 1,500 families asking them to return payments, which most frequently came in the form of $2,000 in cash but could legally reach $26,200 per household.

FEMA's requests for repayment came after it conducted its own search for duplicate payments and other irregularities.

The letters that went out this week were just the first wave. FEMA officials said Friday that they would most likely seek the return of aid from 2 percent to 3 percent of approved applicants. They said that they could not estimate how much money they would try to recoup, but that it could be up to $100 million.

In some cases, payments were made to families to cover immediate expenses that have since been reimbursed by private insurance, Ms. Dannels said.

But the inquiry by Mr. Kutz and his staff members, which is still under way, has already shown that thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of inappropriate payments were made because people were able to apply for and collect aid repeatedly.

For example, about 5,000 of the 11,000 victims of Hurricane Katrina who collected FEMA debit cards worth $2,000 that were distributed in Texas also received $2,000 payments in the mail, even though they were eligible for only one so-called expedited assistance payment to buy food, clothing and other emergency supplies.

Separately, investigators found that thousands of payments for cash aid and rental assistance were sent to people who applied with falsified Social Security numbers or numbers that belonged to people who had died.

The problem, the investigators found, was that when people called FEMA's toll-free registration number, the agency did not try to confirm their identities by using government records to match the applicants' names with the submitted Social Security numbers.

"FEMA provided the fraudsters an opportunity that was very appealing to steal money," Mr. Kutz said. In one case, a person used 15 different Social Security numbers to collect $41,000.

The weaknesses in FEMA's emergency aid system are not new: in 2004, after Hurricane Frances in Florida, it gave out $31 million in aid to more than 12,000 residents of the Miami area that auditors later ruled was largely unjustified because hurricane-force winds never hit the area. FEMA ultimately moved to recoup much of this money as well.

Individuals who receive a letter from FEMA will have a month to repay the requested amount before they will be charged interest. Recipients will have a chance to appeal, but if the appeal is not sustained and the payment is not made, the debt will be turned over to the Treasury Department to collect.

Officials from FEMA and the treasury could not say Friday how successful the government had been at recovering excessive or unjustified payments from past disasters.

R. David Paulison, the acting FEMA director, said the agency was moving to correct some of the problems, including establishing a way to verify applicants' identities when they applied for aid over the phone, a system that would be in place for the next hurricane season.

Ultimately, Mr. Paulison said, there will never be a way to stop all fraud and waste.

"For every instance of an incorrect payment, there are thousands who were genuinely in need of the federal government's help," Mr. Paulison said in a statement Friday. "It is our job to ensure there is not delay in receiving that assistance."

    FEMA Will Try to Recoup Millions Distributed for Hurricane Relief, NYT, 18.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/politics/18fema.html

Clergy urge Washington to end Katrina aid delays

Fri Mar 17, 2006 6:26 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeffrey Jones

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Some 150 U.S. religious leaders, after touring areas of New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, chastised Washington on Friday for delaying billions of dollars in aid for a region known for its historic churches.

Members of the clergy from 80 cities and 30 denominations called on Congress to quickly pass $4.2 billion in supplemental housing funding Louisiana has requested so thousands of evacuees scattered around the country can come home.

The pastors gathered in New Orleans for a summit to launch a national campaign for their efforts, during which they visited such areas as the Ninth Ward, Gentilly Woods and New Orleans East that are still in ruins more than half a year after Katrina triggered levee breaches and massive flooding.

Churches throughout the flooded areas, especially in the Ninth Ward, were damaged.

As many as 150,000 homes in New Orleans were damaged in the August 29 hurricane. The population of the city is still under 200,000, less than half the pre-storm number.

"I'm just overwhelmed with the magnitude of the neglect," Rev. Heyward Wiggins of the Camden Bible Tabernacle in Camden, New Jersey, told Reuters after the tour. "It's as if it's become a forgotten city."

Hurricane Katrina took 1,300 lives along the Gulf Coast, and about 2,000 people are still listed as missing.

The House of Representatives on Thursday passed $19 billion of funding for Gulf Coast reconstruction, but refused to earmark a full $4.2 billion for Louisiana housing programs, as the state had requested.

The Gulf Coast money is part of a $91.9 billion bill that also provides funds for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Senate's version has not yet cleared its Appropriations Committee.

Religious leaders, brought together by the People Improving Communities through Organizing, or PICO, network of faith-based organizations, said the housing money should go solely to Louisiana, not shared among all Gulf Coast states, as some lawmakers have suggested.

They also said they were urging that members of Congress support a bipartisan initiative for Louisiana to get rebuilding money from offshore oil and gas royalties and lease sales.

The Rev. Rayfield Burns of the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri, said he and his colleagues were calling on their congregations and communities to press lawmakers into more speedy action on recovery so those "in exile" in other parts of the United States can be "freed."

That includes spurring the Federal Emergency Management Agency into quicker action providing trailers and other temporary housing to those who needed it, leaders said.

    Clergy urge Washington to end Katrina aid delays, R, 17.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-03-17T232553Z_01_N17410544_RTRUKOC_0_US-HURRICANES-CLERGY.xml

House Approves $4.2 Billion in Aid Sought by Louisiana

March 17, 2006
The New York Times
By LESLIE EATON

It took weeks of crunching data, crossing fingers and lobbying in Washington. But Louisiana officials and the Bush administration succeeded yesterday in persuading the House to approve $4.2 billion in hurricane relief that state officials say is crucial to their effort to rebuild houses and apartments ruined by last year's storms.

The House did not require that all this money be spent in Louisiana, as the state's delegation and the White House had urged, leaving state officials concerned that some of the money might be claimed by Mississippi or Texas.

But before voting 348 to 71 to spend the money, the House beat back continuing efforts by conservative Republicans to eliminate all of the $19 billion of hurricane spending from the $92 billion emergency supplemental spending bill, which also includes large sums to pay for the war in Iraq. These lawmakers, trying to curb government spending, have also raised concerns that the hurricane money is not being spent wisely.

Though the measure still faces critics in the Senate, its passage in the House was a deep relief for Louisiana officials, who have struggled to come up with a housing plan after the White House rejected a proposal earlier this year to create a special agency to buy up flooded properties and sell them to developers.

"I want to thank the country for its generosity, in that these funds will let these people go back to work," said Representative Bobby Jindal, Republican of Louisiana, whose district includes suburbs west and north of New Orleans.

Housing remains in short supply in Louisiana, and state officials say that makes it virtually impossible for the local economy to recover.

Mr. Jindal said he expected the money to be reserved for Louisiana, even though that is not required in the version of the bill passed by the House.

The money approved by the House yesterday is in the form of community development block grants, which the state can use to buy out properties that cannot be safely rebuilt, as well as to restore houses and rental units. Under the plan for the money proposed by Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, homeowners could receive up to $150,000, while owners of rental properties would be eligible for loans and other assistance.

Donald E. Powell, whom the Bush administration appointed to oversee the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, supported the plan and visited Capitol Hill to explain it, a spokeswoman said in an e-mail message.

Mr. Powell and Sean Reilly, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority who also met with House staff members earlier this week, emphasized that the $4.2 billion request was based on a rigorous analysis of the state's losses.

"Every single dollar ties back to a destroyed house or a destroyed piece of critical infrastructure," Mr. Reilly said in an interview.

This approach contrasts with the state's early estimates of its needs, which critics on Capitol Hill said were overblown and unsubstantiated.

Louisiana will soon send another lobbying contingent to the Senate, which is not expected to vote on the bill until May, Mr. Reilly said.

"It gives us more time to make our case," he added, "but the bad news is, every delay means a delay in recovery. People are really hurting."

In the meantime, senators from Texas and Mississippi are likely to try to get more hurricane-relief money for their states, either by increasing the appropriation or by ensuring that they get some part of the housing money approved yesterday.

Texas has estimated that it needs $2 billion in hurricane aid, and a spokesman for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, said yesterday that she was committed to taking as much money as she could to her state.

Some members of the Louisiana delegation expressed disappointment that the $4.2 billion was not explicitly reserved for their state, which they say suffered disproportionately from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

"This has put us in a competition for the pittance, the few dollars," said Representative Charlie Melancon, Democrat of Louisiana, whose district includes St. Bernard Parish, which was deeply flooded after Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Melancon said he was also frustrated that the House had not approved an amendment he sponsored to increase the $1.46 billion in the bill to rebuild New Orleans levees.

"They're hoping we disappear off the radar screen," Mr. Melancon said of his colleagues. "People who wear Christ on their sleeves and vote against helping people are the biggest hypocrites."

    House Approves $4.2 Billion in Aid Sought by Louisiana, NYT, 17.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/politics/17aid.html

Trailers, Vital After Hurricane, Now Pose Own Risks on Gulf

March 16, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

PORT SULPHUR, La., March 11 — In its rush to provide shelter for victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has created a pressing new Gulf Coast hazard: nearly 90,000 lightweight trailers in an area prone to flooding, tornadoes and, of course, hurricanes.

The risks of living along the coast inside what amounts to little more than an aluminum box are already obvious to Mitchell and Marie Bartholomew, whose travel trailer here in Port Sulphur, about 40 miles southeast of New Orleans, rocked so violently in a recent routine storm that they abandoned it for a hotel.

"It rattles, it rolls," said Mr. Bartholomew, 62, a retired boat captain, whose trailer sits between the Mississippi River and the slab where his home once stood. "It is like telling you to get out."

Government officials along the Gulf Coast and in Washington agree that the temporary housing, while better than a tent or emergency shelter, is far from ideal.

"They're campers," Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi told a Senate committee this month. "They're not designed to be used as housing for a family for months, much less years. The trailers don't provide even the most basic protection from high winds or severe thunderstorms, much less tornadoes or hurricanes."

With hurricane season less than three months away, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in an interview that he too was worried about the situation. Not only are the trailers lightweight, they are often placed next to partly reconstructed homes and debris that can turn into dangerous projectiles when the wind picks up, Mr. Chertoff said.

Since the travel trailers used by the Bartholomews and others are intended to be portable, they are mounted on wheels so they can be pulled by large pickup trucks until, on reaching their destination, they are jacked up and mounted on concrete blocks. Designed initially for recreational use, the units — 35 feet long, 8 eight feet wide and weighing about 6,000 pounds — are much smaller, lighter and less expensive than so-called mobile or manufactured homes, which are typically emplaced permanently.

More than 87,100 families in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are living in the FEMA trailers, while only some 2,300 are in the sturdier mobile homes.

FEMA ordered far more travel trailers than mobile homes after the hurricane because the trailers could be towed to a homeowner's property and quickly dropped into place. Being portable, they are not generally covered by building codes and not explicitly banned in flood zones.

For further security along the windy Gulf Coast, FEMA secured the trailers to the ground with steel straps that connect to four corner anchors, although many homeowners have installed their own trailers, in some cases without anchoring them at all.

The added security for the FEMA trailers means that while they may vibrate or rock in the wind, they should not be vulnerable to tipping over until winds exceed 75 miles per hour or so, said Mark C. Smith, a spokesman for the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. That speed is typical during intense tropical storms, extremely severe thunderstorms and all hurricanes. (FEMA agrees that 75 m.p.h. should be the threshold for evacuation, although Eddie Abbott of Gulf Stream Coach, a trailer manufacturer, said he thought an anchored trailer would be stable at higher wind speeds.)

By comparison, new coastal homes must be able to withstand winds of up to 110 to 150 m.p.h., depending on location, said Gene Humphrey, an official in the Mississippi fire marshal's office.

The potential hazards with the trailers are obvious across the gulf region. In Myrtle Grove, La., north of Port Sulphur, FEMA trailers sit on the ground below houses that are suspended on stilts to avoid routine floodwaters that would swamp the trailers. Elsewhere, they have been installed just a few feet away from homes that remain ripped wide open from Hurricane Katrina.

Add wind, and the environment can quickly become treacherous. Jimmy Cappiello, a retired oil platform operator who now lives part time in a Port Sulphur trailer, saw sheet metal, trash, wood planks and even the carport from a nearby house flying during a recent storm. He waited it out in his pickup, which he felt was more solid than the trailer.

"I ain't taking no chances," Mr. Cappiello said. "I don't feel safe in it."

In early February, the New Orleans police reported that at least one FEMA trailer was ripped from its anchors when a tornado passed through. And last July, in Pensacola, Fla., a number of trailers installed after a 2004 hurricane were damaged or flipped when Hurricane Dennis hit.

Mr. Humphrey, from the Mississippi fire marshal's office, said he realized that many families wanted a trailer next to their damaged houses. But FEMA, he said, made a mistake in installing the lightweight trailers, instead of the heavier mobile homes, in this high-wind zone on the coast.

"This is pretty serious," he said. "It never should have happened."

With so many trailers and damaged homes along the gulf, and with some levees weakened, local officials will most likely call for coastal evacuations more frequently this year, said Mr. Smith, the Louisiana official. "The key," he said, "is going to be trying to figure out how to word it so people don't get a false sense of security, but people don't panic, either."

Mr. Chertoff said he had already spoken with officials at FEMA and the Defense Department to make sure that federal agencies are ready if needed to help in evacuations.

"We are going to say, 'We want to see the plan, and we want to see what the capabilities are,' " Mr. Chertoff said. " 'And if you don't have the capabilities, we need to know that, because we are going to make sure we have those capabilities in place.' "

In recent weeks, some coastal cities, including Biloxi and Ocean City, Miss., have decided that when severe storms approach, they will open temporary shelters where people living in travel trailers or damaged homes can wait out the bad weather.

"We have to be on our toes sooner," said Ashley Roth, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. "The trailers are just not safe to stay in, in the event of severe weather."

Some trailer residents along the coast in Mississippi and Louisiana said they would not be reluctant to head for more solid shelter. "They won't have to tell me — we will be moving out," said Daisy Lightell, 57, of Happy Jack, La., north of Port Sulphur, who lives in a FEMA trailer with her husband. "Otherwise, we could end up in 'The Wizard of Oz.' "

Above all, officials want to discourage residents from trying to evacuate with their trailer in tow, a circumstance that could create an even worse hazard.

"I imagine there are going to be some people who consider it," said Jesse St. Amant, emergency preparedness director for Plaquemines Parish, La. "But I hope they think better of it. Trying to haul a travel trailer during an evacuation would be cumbersome and dangerous."

    Trailers, Vital After Hurricane, Now Pose Own Risks on Gulf, NYT, 16.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/national/nationalspecial/16trailers.html?hp&ex=1142571600&en=d0f0bab8f007d825&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Forecast on Shrunken New Orleans

March 15, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS, March 14 (AP) — By the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans will have less than 60 percent of the population it had before the storm, according to a study prepared for the city.

The hurricane, which struck Aug. 29, emptied New Orleans of almost all its estimated 465,000 residents. The city's population has rebounded to an estimated 189,000, state officials said.

The new study, conducted by the RAND Corporation, projects that the population will be 272,000 by September 2008, 58 percent of the prehurricane level.

Sections of the city that suffered only wind damage or minor flooding are filling up now.

"But when you look at other parts of the city with serious flood damage, the amount of work needed to make those areas livable again is likely to take a lengthy time," said Narayan Sastry, project leader of the study.

Gregory C. Rigamer, president of GCR & Associates, a New Orleans consulting firm, said he expected the city to reach a population of 250,000 to 275,000 by the end of 2006. "Then, it's going to slow down because the efforts to recover the remaining areas are going to be difficult," Mr. Rigamer said.

The RAND report paints a bleak picture for the city's prestorm residents who lived in poverty, an overwhelming number of whom are black and many of whom did not have cars to leave the city before the hurricane.

"Lack of transportation will also make it difficult for poor evacuees to travel back to the city to evaluate the condition of their former residences and either to begin the process of repairing their homes or to find a new place to live," the study said.

In issuing the study, RAND warned that it had to work quickly, had limited data and was confronted with considerable uncertainties in New Orleans in drawing its conclusions. It said more study would be needed.

    Forecast on Shrunken New Orleans, NYT, 15.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/national/nationalspecial/15population.html

Louisiana Turns to the Needs of Renters

March 15, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, March 14 — Underscoring the serious housing shortage for workers here, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana announced a $1.75 billion plan Tuesday to encourage landlords to repair or build apartments and houses for rent.

Officials hope the plan will lead to the restoration or construction of as many as 45,000 dwellings in a city where huge swaths of low-income housing were left unlivable by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters. But they emphasized that the plan was contingent on approval by Congress, which has been increasingly reluctant to give Louisiana a special hand.

The money for the plan would come out of the $4.2 billion that President Bush has proposed sending to Louisiana to cover housing needs. But Congressional appropriators seem determined to reduce that amount, in part because lawmakers from neighboring Texas and Mississippi have asked for some of the money, and in part because conservatives maintain that the tens of billions already appropriated for emergency relief and reconstruction in the region is enough. The issue comes up for debate in the House on Wednesday.

Before the hurricane, just over half the residents of New Orleans were renters. The labor shortage being felt in all areas of the local economy — "now hiring" signs are still abundant — is partly a result of the wholesale destruction of small apartment buildings, rental houses and apartment complexes throughout the city.

Governor Blanco, a Democrat, accentuated the point Tuesday in announcing her plan. Nearly half the estimated 200,000 jobs lost in the metropolitan area because of the storm were low-wage jobs, she said.

"Rebuilding or reopening affordable apartments and rental homes is critical to getting our workers, and their families, back home," the governor said in an outdoor news conference at a development of single-family homes and apartments.

Until now, the focus has been on getting homeowners back on their feet. Three weeks ago the state unveiled a $7.5 billion package of loans and grants to help owners rebuild and repair.

But perhaps even more critical to the immediate revival of South Louisiana's low-wage economy is establishing rental housing for workers. "This whole program is intended to make sure there is available housing at affordable rents," said Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, created by the governor.

Under the two chief provisions of the plan, about $940 million would be made available to small landlords in no-interest loans _— money they would not have to repay until the property was sold — and $585 million would go to developers, as a direct subsidy for rents and debt.

The proposal would prod developers to build housing for a mix of incomes, and landlords to fix up apartments for lower-earning households. For instance, bigger loans would be provided to landlords charging lower rents, and developers would be pushed to mix unsubsidized apartments into their government-aided projects, in a bid to avoid the islands of poverty that characterized the city before the storm.

Ms. Blanco and Mr. Kopplin announced the proposal at one such rental development of mixed incomes: River Gardens, which planted New Orleans-style homes — Creole cottages, for example, and camelbacks, a local version of a split-level — on the site of one of the city's worst housing projects, St. Thomas, now demolished. The new development was completed not long before the storm, but hardly shows wear.

Though derided by some critics outside New Orleans as a tasteless pastiche, River Gardens replaced a sprawling, dangerous complex that was a deathtrap to many of its residents. Gunfire could be heard nightly in the project's environs, which had one of the highest murder rates in the city.

The new, well-maintained development near the Mississippi River is light-years away from that, and indeed Ms. Blanco held it up as a model on Tuesday.

Yet what would have been acceptable as everyday occurrences at St. Thomas can create their own set of problems now, as was evident Tuesday when several tenants loudly interjected criticism at the news conference.

Officials later said some residents had had difficulty adapting to the new development's requirements, and indeed one woman, Sharese Jones, complained that she was "being evicted from here because of a TV" that she had kept on all night.

"Everybody who's back here, who's low income," Ms. Jones said, "is being picked on."

    Louisiana Turns to the Needs of Renters, NYT, 15.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/national/nationalspecial/15rent.html

Road to Rebirth Diverges on a Mississippi Bridge

March 14, 2006
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

BILOXI, Miss. — At the eastern tip of this city there was once a bridge. Like much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, it was reduced by Hurricane Katrina to a muddle of concrete and pilings, tumbled over like a giant line of dominos.

Everyone wants it rebuilt as soon as possible. But officials on one side of the bridge — those in Biloxi — favor a large, multilane structure that can accommodate casino workers and the new horde of gamblers. On the other side, in Ocean Springs, officials want to restore the four-lane drawbridge that once spanned the bay, hoping to keep their French-colonized, tree-lined town the definition of quaint.

The debate over what should replace the Biloxi-Ocean Springs bridge in many ways illustrates the entire rebuilding effort along the Mississippi coast, where cities, drained of resources, infrastructure and people, struggle toward rebirth.

Gov. Haley Barbour's rebuilding commission and many small-town officials advocate a planning approach known as New Urbanism, which supports pedestrian friendly, historically themed developments where people of mixed incomes share the same neighborhoods and are closely linked by public transportation. Given a rare chance to redesign their landscapes, many residents and officials want to see towns designed around trolley cars, pedestrian walkways and open spaces.

"I want us to be a more walkable town," said Lou Rizzardi, an alderman from the nearby beachfront city of Pass Christian. "We don't have sidewalks, we don't have gutters, we want our downtown to be more dense. This may be a pipe dream, but it's the way we used to live."

But critics here mock New Urbanism as being impractical and ignorant of the preference of most Americans for privacy over community, and as creating towns that often look like film sets rather than real communities.

"A lot of people there are more into the arts and come from other areas," said Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi, speaking of Ocean Springs and its preference for a smaller bridge with a bicycle lane. "And I don't see people riding bikes 85 feet in the air."

Officials from Biloxi and Gulfport, robbed by the hurricane of their fishing docks and antebellum homes and emboldened by new legislation that permits gambling on land, believe their cities' futures lie in rows of casinos, high-rise condominiums and a new multilane bridge. Officials deride the idea of trolleys replacing cars on busy roadways and suggest that such ideas are preferred by people who come from, as they say here, "away."

Pass Christian, once a haven for retirees and people with second homes, is now warily weighing offers from the condominium developers it once avoided, as all the town's businesses have been swept away, leaving its coffers empty.

Other places are equally desperate; Waveland and Bay St. Louis, neighboring cities with distinct cultures and histories, are considering a merger.

And as with New Orleans, which Mississippi residents say has overshadowed the narrative of their plight, the struggle to rebuild here is also a struggle for a future identity, as the culture, physical landscape and industries of the region face inevitable change.

The historically rich, laid back, slightly tawdry Mississippi coast has always stood apart from the otherwise largely provincial state. With its French colonial history, the coast has carried few of the historical burdens wrought by cotton plantations, slaves and the civil rights movement.

The state government, which has long encouraged local control, is not poised to dictate a uniform rebuilding agenda for its coastal region, even though state planners may support the smaller approach. And so commerce seems poised to drive the decision making instead.

"The coastal communities are different, but they are linked, and that is the complexity of it," said Charles Reagan Wilson, the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. "But it is going to be difficult for each town to preserve the character they have had before Katrina. The model for the future of the coast to me seems to be the Florida Panhandle, with condos and things like that. That is the private, economic, capitalistic future."

The devastation of the coast here remains shocking to the uninitiated eye; towns where people have clearly worked night and day just to remove debris look as though they were hit by a hurricane six days ago, rather than six months.

In Pass Christian, where nary a house is standing and bedsheets are still threaded through the trees, the order to boil water only just ended. Its municipal government, like many in the region, is housed in a doublewide trailer.

Biloxi is still a tangle of crumbling buildings, bent signs and silent streets. But all that changes in the parking lots of the three casinos that have opened on land, where drivers are lucky to find a space. Crowds appear within the casinos from seemingly nowhere, as if planted in place, with people holding cocktails and clutching room keys that double as casino entry cards in the cavernous, smoke-fogged halls.

"Biloxi is going to be high-rises and condos," said Duncan McKenzie, president of the Chamber of Commerce and a vice president of the Isle of Capri casino. "People refer to what happened here as a tragic opportunity." Even before the storm, casinos were Biloxi's second-largest industry after the military, employing 15,000 people and generating $19.2 million in taxes.

But now there are few places for the lowest-paid casino workers to live. In the western part of Biloxi, the mom-and-pop motels and low-income apartment buildings were destroyed, and developers have been buying up land for large condominiums, Mayor Holloway said.

"Low- and moderate-income housing was a problem before Katrina," Mr. Holloway said. "And it is an even bigger problem now. We are working with the casinos to see if they are interested in developing housing for their workers."

In light of these many problems, Mr. Holloway, casino executives and others believe that it is in the best interest of Biloxi to have a functioning bridge that links workers to homes, gamblers to casinos and the city to the rest of the coast as soon as possible.

The State Department of Transportation wants to build an eight-lane, 85-foot-tall bridge to replace the decimated four-lane structure, paid for with federal funds unleashed after Hurricane Katrina.

But officials in Ocean Springs deplore the notion of a large bridge dumping traffic into its tree-lined town. They prefer a bridge half the size, with a bicycle lane. The chasm between Ocean Springs and Biloxi in some ways can be accounted for by the relative damage of each. The beachfront homes in Ocean Springs — one of the oldest cities in America, founded in 1699 — took a beating. But its downtown was more or less unscathed, which has led the town to not only survive, but flourish.

Once a quiet bedroom community with a number of artists, upscale women's sportswear shops and picturesque restaurants and candy stores, the town is now dotted with new restaurants and bars that are filled with volunteers, contractors and neighbors who do not want to take the long route into Biloxi now that the bridge is out. Just as important, it has the one thing that separates the surviving towns from the sinking ones: a still-standing Wal-Mart.

"We've been a place for people to escape," said Donovan Scruggs, the planning and development director in Ocean Springs. "Pre-Katrina, there was not much of an after-7 crowd downtown. Now we have a vibrant little nightlife downtown. Our revenues increased 50 percent in November over the same period in 2004."

There is a similar chasm between Waveland and Bay St. Louis, which are considering the merger. Bay St. Louis has fewer resources than Waveland and about half its budget, and it sees a future more oriented toward tourism. Waveland, which is resisting the merger concept, wants to rebuild its downtown like a miniature French Quarter.

"I am hard-pressed to see where combining would benefit the people of Waveland," said Mayor Tommy Longo of Waveland, as he ate a barbecue sandwich recently in City Hall (yes, a trailer), trying to get through another day of negotiating insurance claim complaints, Army Corps of Engineer problems and out-of-state deliveries.

Residents say they just want their old town back, name and all.

"Waveland has always been Waveland," said Cindy Peterson, folding laundry in her government trailer. "We should go back to what it was. Nothing like Katrina will happen again in my lifetime anyway."

    Road to Rebirth Diverges on a Mississippi Bridge, NYT, 14.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/national/nationalspecial/14biloxi.html?hp&ex=1142312400&en=3c97ae39e2759e0e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Billy Graham returns with Big Easy sermon

Posted 3/12/2006 8:01 PM Updated 3/13/2006 12:25 AM
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In his first public sermon in nine months, evangelist Billy Graham delivered his message of repentance and salvation Sunday to an overflow arena crowd in this city slowly recovering from devastation.

The Rev. Billy Graham, right, talks with his son Franklin before delivering a sermon at a New Orleans service.
By Bill Haber, AP

The 87-year-old required a walker to get to the podium but was greeted with a standing ovation and screams from the capacity crowd of 16,500 inside New Orleans Arena. Another 1,500 people watched on a large screen on a concourse at the neighboring Superdome — an evacuation center where flooding and rancid conditions reigned the week after Hurricane Katrina hit Aug. 29.

Graham told the crowd he watched television with shock as it became clear that Katrina and the broken flood system had destroyed much of the city and caused so much suffering.

"I had no idea the punch it had," he said.

But he also said he watched in awe as rescue personnel and others came to the aid of distressed residents. That, he said, was when "we knew the God of love was watching over us."

Sunday's message was his first evangelistic sermon since June, when he led his final revival meeting in New York City. He was in New Orleans for a two-day event organized by local ministers and his son, Franklin Graham, now the leader of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Graham's 20-minute sermon included an altar call — an invitation to accept Christ as savior that is a hallmark of his evangelism. "If you're not sure of your relationship to God, if you're not certain and you'd like to be certain, I'd like you to come," he said.

Graham has preached to 210 million people worldwide in a ministry career that spanned more than six decades. But in recent years he has suffered from Parkinson's disease and prostate cancer. Four years ago, he had a series of brain surgeries — the remnants of which still cause him pain.

On Wednesday, Billy Graham toured some of the neighborhoods hardest hit when Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, unleashing torrents of water and chaos on the city.

He addressed a gathering of ministers on Thursday, saying no one could say why something like Katrina happened, but that he believes the city of New Orleans has the foundation for a spiritual revival.

    Billy Graham returns with Big Easy sermon UT, 12.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-12-graham-service_x.htm

Bush Insists on Approval of Full Aid for Louisiana

March 9, 2006
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

NEW ORLEANS, March 8 — President Bush demanded on Wednesday that Congress provide Louisiana with the full $4.2 billion he has requested in housing aid for this storm-battered state, even as the House and Senate began considering whether some of that money should go to other states in the region.

Visiting New Orleans after taking more criticism last week for his handling of Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Bush said he fully understood the "pain and agony" of people frustrated with the pace of reconstruction. He urged local officials to speed the removal of debris and said the federal government would rebuild the levees to provide greater protection against floodwaters like those that swamped the city six months ago.

Mr. Bush inspected the damage and cleanup efforts here, and said he was impressed by the desire of hurricane victims to "pick up and move on and rebuild." The president, in shirt sleeves, spoke at a work site here, in front of construction cranes, cement mixers, bulldozers and excavation equipment.

Mr. Bush's visit, his 10th trip to the region since Hurricane Katrina, came as a political battle erupted among Gulf Coast states seeking federal money for relief and reconstruction.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from Texas and Louisiana are engaged in a tussle over the proposed $4.2 billion in housing assistance for Louisiana, with Texans demanding a share of the money to compensate their state for taking in hurricane refugees.

Speaking in New Orleans, Mr. Bush allied himself with Louisiana over his home state. "Congress," he said, "should make sure that the $4.2 billion I requested goes to the state of Louisiana."

In the House, the Appropriations Committee on Wednesday took up the administration's $4.2 billion request, without designating it exclusively for Louisiana. John Scofield, a spokesman for the panel, said the committee was simply following its standard practice, which is not to set aside money for a particular state.

Mr. Scofield said the money would be distributed to hurricane-afflicted states on the basis of need, under a formula devised by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and predicted that Louisiana would get the "bulk of the money."

Sean Reilly, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, said Louisiana would fight any effort to split the money that Mr. Bush had promised Louisiana. "The number didn't come out of thin air," Mr. Reilly said on Wednesday. "It was fact-based. Every dollar ties back to a damaged house or a damaged piece of local infrastructure."

In the Senate, where the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, testified on Wednesday before the Appropriations Committee, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, said her state was "absorbing enormous costs that should be the federal government's."

For example, Ms. Hutchison said, Texas is still educating 38,000 Louisiana schoolchildren at a cost of $6,000 per child, but is getting just $4,000 from the federal government.

"We shouldn't have to spend on the Katrina evacuees our regular allocation of C.D.B.G. money and not have that reimbursed," she said, referring to Community Development Block Grants. "That is not fair."

But another Republican on the panel, Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, strongly urged colleagues to limit the block-grant money to Mississippi and Louisiana.

Mr. Bond also said it was unwise for Congress to give out huge sums when the states had not produced "comprehensive plans" for recovery.

"I don't believe this is any way to run a program," he said. "The American public expects planning and accountability, not a request for a larger bar tab, and while it may sound offensive, we do expect results."

On Tuesday, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, a Democrat, said she feared that Congress would "chip away" at the money promised to Louisiana and divert some of it to other states.

"I do not for a minute seek to minimize the needs of Mississippi, Alabama or Texas," Ms. Blanco told the Senate Appropriations Committee. "The entire Gulf Coast suffered, but Louisiana bore the brunt of this disaster."

Mr. Bush took a helicopter tour of the New Orleans area and went inside an abandoned home in the Lower Ninth Ward, the low-income, working-class neighborhood ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The city has made progress cleaning up debris, he said, but "there's still a lot of work to be done, no question about it."

Speeding to a levee on the Industrial Canal here, Mr. Bush's motorcade passed by dozens of collapsed homes and overturned cars and mounds of rubble, clothing, toys and furniture.

With Governor Blanco and Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at his side, Mr. Bush said: "The vast majority of debris on public property has been removed. Most of the remaining debris is on private property, in yards or inside houses that need to be gutted or demolished. To get the debris, the residents need to give permission, in most cases, to the local authorities. They need to get back to their houses, so they can decide what to keep and what to remove."

The president expressed confidence in the work of the Army Corps of Engineers, saying the agency would repair the city's flood-protection system before the next hurricane season began in June.

Mr. Bush said the engineers were "correcting design and construction deficiencies," so the levees would be "equal or better than what they were before Katrina." But he said Congress had shortchanged the financing, and he urged lawmakers to provide $1.5 billion more for work on the levees — an elaborate system of embankments and structural barriers.

Federal spending on Hurricane Katrina relief is rapidly approaching $100 billion. To date, the White House said, $88 billion has been made available, "with another $20 billion requested" by the administration.

After inspecting the damage in New Orleans, Mr. Bush went to an elementary school in Gautier, Miss.

Laura Bush, traveling with the president, said 1,121 schools in the Gulf Coast had been damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Mrs. Bush, a former school librarian, announced an initiative to rebuild the book collections of those schools.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

    Bush Insists on Approval of Full Aid for Louisiana, NYT, 9.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/national/nationalspecial/09bush.html

Tough Hurdles for Companies in Move Back to New Orleans

March 8, 2006
The New York Times
By GARY RIVLIN

NEW ORLEANS, March 7 — When Frank A. Glaviano Sr. told friends that he believed his company, Shell Oil, would return to New Orleans despite the devastation done by Hurricane Katrina, many had a good laugh. Forget it, they said; you are moving to Houston.

After all, more than 100 Shell employees lost their homes when water covered much of the city and the surrounding suburbs. Mail delivery was still unreliable, air service remained thin, and only a small fraction of the previous hospital capacity was back. With Shell's American base in Houston, it seemed to make sense to move its exploration and production unit there from New Orleans.

But Shell, a subsidiary of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, returned last month to its marbled office building here at One Shell Square, after making an extraordinary investment to do so. It bought $32 million in residential properties in the area — 120 houses and condominiums in all — to lease to its employees. The company owned no residential property in the United States before Hurricane Katrina.

In considering whether to move back its 1,000 employees who worked in New Orleans before the storm, Shell had to monitor closely things like the federal government's commitment to rebuilding the levees and the city's progress in reviving its school system.

"In the end, we decided to do the right thing by the city, the company and our employees," said Mr. Glaviano, the company vice president in charge of Shell's operations here.

Shell's unusual move demonstrates the difficulties that businesses of all sizes have encountered in moving back to New Orleans, and the dedication that is required to restart commerce in a city where basic necessities, like roofs, can be difficult to come by. To reopen their doors, many businesses have had to develop expertise in flood protection, transportation and medical care.

Chevron, one of Shell's competitors, which this week moved back the last of its 700 or so employees who worked in New Orleans before the storm, has added a paramedic to its staff and leases an ambulance so it does not have to rely on the city's 911 system in an emergency.

Most companies, of course, do not have the resources of a company like Shell, which reported record profits of $25.3 billion in 2005. "A lot of smaller companies, and even a lot of medium-sized ones, cannot afford the costs of getting up and back in business," said Don Hutchinson, the director of economic development for the city.

As a result, six months after Hurricane Katrina, at least four of every five businesses in New Orleans are still shuttered, Mr. Hutchinson said. About 60 percent of the downtown businesses have reopened, he said, but that statistic is deceptively high because many companies are moving back only part of their workforce.

Another large energy company, Dominion Exploration and Production, a subsidiary of Dominion Resources, has announced that it will start moving employees back to New Orleans this month. But 140 of those positions — 40 percent of its pre-hurricane workforce — will remain permanently in Houston, according to David J. Auchter, a Dominion spokesman.

Entergy, the country's fifth-largest power company, has so far issued no public statement about the fate of its 1,500 employees who worked in New Orleans before the hurricane, except to say that whatever the company's decision, not all of them will be moving back.

"The question isn't whether New Orleans is going to take a huge hit in terms of job loss," said Jay Lapeyre, a local businessman who, as chairman of the Business Council of New Orleans, speaks on behalf of more than 50 of the area's largest corporations. "The real question is where we'll have to rebuild from once we know where we've bottomed out."

Many factors went into Shell's decision to move back to New Orleans, including a workforce that was eager to return. Informal polling, said Rob Ryan, a Shell vice president, showed that more than 80 percent of employees preferred moving back to New Orleans over staying in Houston, including those who had temporarily relocated to Houston. A sense of corporate responsibility was also a factor.

New Orleans is a city where oil and gas exploration takes a back seat only to tourism and perhaps the port in terms of economic impact, and before Hurricane Katrina, Shell was the industry's largest employer in the city. Its tower — a white marble monolith on a premier corner of the downtown business district — is the second tallest in town. The Place St. Charles office building is the tallest.

From Shell's perspective, the city had a variety of factors working in its favor, including its culture and especially its geography. The easy access to the rich oil reserves in the waters off the Louisiana coast first drew exploration firms to New Orleans decades ago, and the wells could not easily be abandoned — at least not by firms with the means and the will to stay.

"A lot of the smaller oil and gas companies haven't committed to return," said Mr. Hutchinson, the city economic official. "Basically, it's still wait and see with most of them."

That was Shell's attitude for weeks after the storm. Houston is the energy capital of the nation, and there were efficiencies in moving the company's operations to the home office. To many executives, there was no question that Houston represented the path of least resistance.

"This was one of those decisions," Mr. Glaviano said, "that had several executives feeling very strongly that we should relocate to Houston and several feeling very strongly in favor of moving back."

Shell was luckier than many of its rivals. The building Dominion called home before the storm, across the street from the Superdome, still sits abandoned, with roughly half of its windows covered by plywood. The basement and first floor of Chevron's office tower were flooded, which meant it was not ready for occupancy until the end of January.

The building Shell calls home, in contrast, sits atop a pedestal of white marble stairs. "The building was fine," Mr. Ryan said. "The key issue for us was whether we could bring 1,000 employees back."

To answer that question, Shell set up a virtual war room to monitor the city's progress and help its executives calculate the wisdom of returning. The company assigned about two dozen employees to judge the city's progress on a long list of factors, like repairing the pumping stations and providing parking in the central business district.

Other big companies did the same, including Chevron, which approached the task with military precision. It issued daily situation reports, devising a color-code system "just like the federal government does to track the terrorist threat level," said Matthew Carmichael, governmental affairs director for Chevron in New Orleans. Early on, the company deemed almost every core function code red.

It was in late October that Mr. Glaviano and his colleagues decided to move back to New Orleans, yet it was not until January that a thorough audit of the state of the city prompted the company to conclude that "the city was sufficiently back, from a safety and security perspective," Mr. Ryan said.

Nonetheless, Shell employees are returning to find that working downtown remains a challenge. Flight capacity is less than half of what it was before the storm — a crucial issue for a company with headquarters in another city. Mail service is still so unreliable that customers often pay the extra expense of overnight services to pay bills and send other important documents. The 120 or so Shell employees who lost homes no doubt appreciate that the company leases them housing at cost, but some of the units are a two-hour drive from downtown.

Still, despite these and other inconveniences, most of the employees seem happy to be back home, Mr. Glaviano said. Certainly he is. "Walking through the lobby," he said, "it feels like an ordinary day to me."

    Tough Hurdles for Companies in Move Back to New Orleans, NYT, 8.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/national/nationalspecial/08shell.html?hp&ex=1141880400&en=517a42f7bc218865&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Political storms unabated in Bush New Orleans trip

Wed Mar 8, 2006 1:09 AM ET
Reuters
By Matt Spetalnick

WACO, Texas (Reuters) - President George W. Bush returns to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans on Wednesday seeking to fend off the latest fallout from a political storm that has battered his popularity and shows no sign of blowing over.

Bush's trip, his 10th to the city since Hurricane Katrina, comes amid fresh scrutiny of his administration's botched response to the disaster, high on a list of troubles that have shaken public confidence in the president in his second term.

With his approval ratings at or near an all-time low, Bush hopes to refocus attention on his $19.8 billion request to Congress for new aid to the Gulf Coast to reassure residents he is following through on his promise to help them rebuild.

The increase in federal funds has stirred hopes, but many in New Orleans remain frustrated by the slow pace of progress on the ground, especially in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods hardest hit by massive flooding after the August 29 storm.

"It's a shame to call this America," said Briscoe Brazella as he pulled waterlogged belongings from his home in the city's Lower Ninth Ward. "If this was America as God intended ... every home here would just about be rebuilt by now."

More than six months after Katrina struck, much of New Orleans, once best known as a boozy tourist mecca that lived by the motto "Let the good times roll," is still in ruins.

Barely a third of its nearly half a million inhabitants have returned and it's not clear how many more will.

Bush has faced new criticism over a video showing officials warning him the day before Katrina hit that levees meant to protect New Orleans from flooding could fail. Critics said it made it hard to accept the White House's insistence that it was surprised by the storm's intensity.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that more than six in 10 Americans disapprove of the way Bush handled Katrina.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan has maintained that while Bush was not satisfied with the federal response, the video had been "twisted" out of context.

But Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University, said: "Bush has to do some damage control."

STRUGGLING TO REVIVE APPROVAL RATINGS

Bush's trip, coupled with a stop in Gulfport, Mississippi, comes as he is struggling to pull up his job performance ratings, which dropped to 34 percent in a CBS News poll last week.

Katrina is only one of a list of woes that have damaged the administration's credibility. Others include growing pessimism over the Iraq war and Bush's failure to head off tempests such as a Dubai firm's plan to take over key U.S. port operations.

The president's weakness portends a tough fight for fellow Republicans in November congressional elections.

Defiant House Republicans moved to block the ports deal, which they consider a security risk, by attaching an amendment to spending legislation for the Iraq war and hurricane relief.

In need of a boost, Bush's aides may have timed his New Orleans visit to tap into any upbeat mood lingering from the city's scaled-down Mardi Gras revelry, which ended last week.

He overnighted at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Details of his schedule were kept under wraps. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat with whom Bush has had chilly relations, planned to meet him, her office said.

She and governors of other hurricane-stricken Gulf states urged Congress on Tuesday not to shortchange them on aid.

Residents will be looking for signs Bush is serious about returning the historic jazz city to its glory. McClellan said Bush wanted to "get an up-close look at the ongoing recovery."

But many were disappointed by Bush's last stopover in January when his motorcade bypassed the worst devastation. His comment that the city was a "heck of a place to bring your family" became fodder for late-night TV comedians.

(Additional reporting by Jeffrey Jones in New Orleans and Peter Kaplan, Richard Cowan and Donna Smith in Washington)

    Political storms unabated in Bush New Orleans trip, R, 8.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-03-08T060847Z_01_N07416533_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-HURRICANE.xml

White House defends quality of levee construction

Posted 3/6/2006 10:05 PM
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House on Monday defended the quality of materials being used to rebuild the levees around New Orleans, as President Bush got assurances from the Army Corps of Engineers that it was on track to restore the system by the start of hurricane season.

Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, head of the Army Corps, told Bush in a private briefing that 100 miles of the 169 miles of levees damaged by the Aug. 29 hurricane have been restored. He repeated the briefing later for reporters at the White House.

Strock took issue with findings from two teams of independent experts who said the Corps was taking shortcuts and using substandard materials, leaving large sections of the system substantially weaker than before the hurricane.

"We are using the right kind of materials," Strock said. "There is no question about that."

The findings, first reported Monday in The Washington Post, were made by engineers on a National Science Foundation-funded panel and by a Louisiana team appointed to monitor the rebuilding.

Strock said the Corps had yet to see the findings or information on where the teams took their samples. He suggested the monitors may have been testing the wrong soil. He said the Corps is trucking in clay from Mississippi to rebuild the system because the local soil does not meet quality standards.

Strock acknowledged that the levees will not be able to protect low-lying areas in the event of another Katrina-like storm this year.

"If we were going to have another Katrina-like event, I think I can say with a high level of confidence you wouldn't see the catastrophic flooding that we saw in the first event," Strock said. "You would see overtopping, though, of levees. You would see flooding in low-lying areas."

Strock said the president, who is visiting the Gulf Coast Wednesday, told him he appreciated the Corps' work and that it was meeting the commitments that he made to restore the levees in time for the next hurricane season.

"He expressed confidence that we're doing that," Strock said. "So I think that he's comfortable with where we are."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan also rejected allegations of inferior rebuilding.

"The Corps of Engineers is using modern design and construction methods, which have greatly improved the last 40 years, which is the time when those levees were originally built," McClellan said.

Bush signed legislation Monday extending unemployment benefits another 13 weeks for victims of Katrina and Rita. The benefits had been scheduled to end last Saturday for at least 165,000 victims, including small-business owners and self-employed workers.

The White House also defended Bush on Monday against fresh criticism that he was disengaged and uninformed in the run-up to Katrina's landfall.

Last week's reports about Federal Emergency Management Agency briefings, particularly before Katrina hit, prompted fresh criticism by lawmakers who said the government should have been better prepared for the storm that flooded New Orleans and killed more than 1,300 people. A video of an Aug. 28 briefing showed officials warning Bush and others that the storm might overtop levees, put lives at risk in the Superdome and overwhelm rescuers.

McClellan said the criticism of Bush for not asking questions during the video ignores the fact that before the videoconference he had been on the phone with governors in the region and received updates from then-FEMA chief Michael Brown and his own staff. Bush got on the videoconference to boost morale, not collect information, McClellan said, and he left before it ended for a previously scheduled press event at which he made a statement on the hurricane.

"Some have twisted the facts to fit a story line," McClellan said. "He was not there to participate in the full briefing. He was there for that purpose: to lift their spirits."

McClellan also said that referring to Bush's statement four days after the storm that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," ignores the explanations given by the White House and Bush himself about what he meant.

"What the president was referring to was the sense that, after the storm had initially passed, that there was a sense that that worst-case scenario had not happened," McClellan said. "Some have taken it out of context to suggest he was referring to any predictions before the hurricane hit."

    White House defends quality of levee construction, UT, 6.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-03-06-levees_x.htm

House Speaker Offers Hope for New Orleans

March 4, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, March 3 — Six months after he said it did not make sense to rebuild parts of New Orleans, J. Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, stood amid the rubble of the Lower Ninth Ward on Friday and, in a reversal, spoke words of comfort.

"I think you have to be here firsthand on the ground to see the impact," Mr. Hastert, an Illinois Republican, said while standing on the banks of a breached levee that allowed a surge of water to wipe away a swath of the city.

"We want to make sure these edifices are safe and that the system is foolproof," he said, so that New Orleans does not have to "relive this nightmare over again."

Mr. Hastert and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, arrived in New Orleans on Thursday with a 34-member Congressional delegation on a fact-finding tour of the section of the Gulf Coast devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana officials took advantage of the opportunity to urge support for President Bush's proposed aid package.

"We are extremely dependent on your good graces and understanding," Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said.

"We ask for your mercy and plead for your help," Ms. Blanco added.

Mr. Hastert made no commitments, but said that he was most interested in making sure taxpayers' money would be well spent and that people would not be in harm's way again.

Ms. Pelosi was blunter, saying, "I'm not absolutely certain that our federal agencies on the ground here are meeting that challenge."

In the Ninth Ward, the delegation was greeted on Friday by about three dozen protesters who were angry about what they called Mr. Hastert's slow pace in getting to New Orleans. The speaker's visit came after tours of the city by the Prince of Wales and the king of Jordan.

When the Congressional leaders said they were shocked by the extent of the flood devastation, the protesters said they should have expressed that feeling earlier.

"You wouldn't be shocked if you had come sooner than six months," one protester, the Rev. Will McCadney, shouted toward the delegation.

Mr. McCadney's congregation had been based in the Ninth Ward but is now scattered around the country. He said he had hoped to get answers from the delegation. But the protesters were kept about 100 yards from the officials, and Mr. McCadney said he was dismayed that he could not get close to Mr. Hastert.

Later, Governor Blanco, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and others talked with the protesters.

"Why did it take six months for them to come see us?" Mr. McCadney asked. "That's too long. I feel bewildered, left. Forgotten."

Asked about his earlier comments about not rebuilding New Orleans, Mr. Hastert said, "I think that was a misrepresentation of what I said. I said, Before you rebuild New Orleans, you have to make sure the people are not in harm's way."

    House Speaker Offers Hope for New Orleans, NYT, 4.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/politics/04tour.html

New Orleans Official Vanishes for Week, but Surfaces to Run for Mayor

March 4, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, March 3 — For a week she was on the lam, a fugitive from the remnants of this city's judiciary and her high responsibilities as well.

Nobody knew where the Orleans Parish clerk of criminal court was hiding out — or if they did know, they would not say. In a kind of carnivalesque charade that seemed like an extension of Mardi Gras, arrest warrants were issued, the city's top judges, furious, made threats, but still the clerk, Kimberly Williamson Butler, refused to appear. That she is also the city's top elections official in a week when candidates were filing to run for mayor only made the disappearance more breathtaking.

Ms. Butler had been asked by the judges to relinquish some of her responsibilities in applying for federal money to clean up the flood-damaged courthouse. She refused, and the judges of the criminal court issued a warrant for her arrest.

Meanwhile, as she hid from the authorities, the critical lynchpin of New Orleans's faltering criminal justice system — cleaning up the city's flooded evidence room — was balanced on Ms. Butler's game of hide-and-seek. With thousands of defendants backed up, trials cannot move forward until rusty guns, muddy clothing and other items are decontaminated. But Ms. Butler was not playing.

Finally, in a coda that segued perfectly into the frayed city's uneasy perch between cheer and despair, Ms. Butler showed up in court Friday to answer the judges' summons, only to announce to reporters on the courthouse steps that she was quitting her job — so she could run for mayor.

"You know what? I don't think I'm the right person to be clerk of court," a beaming Ms. Butler announced.

Her pastor was standing behind her, and a revelation appeared to be in the offing.

"I think I'm the right person to be mayor," the now former clerk said.

A reporter called out: "Are you serious? Are you running for mayor?"

Ms. Butler remained firm.

Inside the courthouse, law clerks shook their heads in disbelief at yet another unreal post-Katrina moment. Ms. Butler, meanwhile, had already warmed a stump speech to serve as the mayoral race's 15th candidate, one based on the politician's time-honored gambit of recent personal experience. She was, after all, facing a contempt hearing in front of every criminal court judge in the city, all of them unamused, on Monday at 9 a.m.

"The things that I'm going through, I'm just like an average everyday New Orleanian," Ms. Butler said, her voice rising. "I can identify with people that have made mistakes and had to stand before judges. I can identify with people that have lost their homes, because I'm living in a hotel room myself."

Once close to Mayor C. Ray Nagin, Ms. Butler has pursued an erratic course in public life here, plummeting from semi-folk-hero status after Mr. Nagin fired her three years ago — she was considered mayoral material back then — to opprobrium for failing to deliver all the voting machines to precincts in an election in 2004.

Hovering in the background of her latest career episode is the already chaotic state of the criminal justice system here. With the public defenders' office down to a fraction of its prestorm strength, judges have threatened to release thousands of indigent defendants who have been waiting for trials, and who depend on free legal help.

But those trials themselves cannot go forward without the physical evidence, which sat in the flooded-out basement of the Art-Deco criminal courts building in Mid-City — five feet of water, for over two weeks. Among other things, a critical ledger book detailing the room's holdings must be cleaned up.

Ms. Butler is the custodian of that evidence; the judges, hoping to help her out, had in January appointed her veteran predecessor, Edwin Lombard, to aid in its decontamination, and in pursuing the necessary FEMA-financed contracts.

Ms. Butler had at first apparently welcomed the help. But then she decided it was an assault on her authority, and refused to go along.

In the meantime, the legal community in New Orleans — already on edge with uncertainty over what is to become of the thousands of criminal defendants in limbo — has been observing the minidrama with bemusement, aware that there is a serious underlying problem.

The evidence "must be decontaminated and reorganized," said Kevin Kelly, clerk to Chief Judge Calvin Johnson. "That must happen, and it hasn't happened quickly enough. This is affecting the due process rights of numerous criminal defendants."

Like many other public officials here, Ms. Butler was eager to demonstrate her status as a victim of Hurricane Katrina.

"There are a lot of people that have chosen not to come back," she said, "but I believe in New Orleans, and I believe that we need a leader right now. I tell you what, every day, there's not a day that goes by that someone doesn't say, you need to run for mayor."

And with her lawyer cutting off any more questions, Ms. Butler walked off across Poydras Street, beaming.

    New Orleans Official Vanishes for Week, but Surfaces to Run for Mayor, NYT, 4.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/national/nationalspecial/04clerk.html

Debating a Shipping Shortcut That Turned Against New Orleans

March 3, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS — It has been a long road back for New Orleans Cold Storage. After Hurricane Katrina, with no power for its freezers, 32 million pounds of chicken rotted in the waterside warehouse of the shipping company, and the reek was detectable from a mile away.

The company put itself back together, but its 135 jobs are suddenly facing a more serious threat. New Orleans Cold Storage, like other nearby businesses, owes its livelihood to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, the reviled navigational shortcut between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico that many faulted for much of the city's devastation.

The canal, referred to locally as Mr. Go, is widely considered an environmental disaster. Residents and officials here say they want it shut down or at least bottled up. If the channel is closed, thousands of jobs could be lost unless the government spends $400 million to move the nine major businesses that currently depend on the channel directly to the banks of the Mississippi.

In the struggle to build adequate flood protection, as the canal dilemma shows, even the easy decisions are hard. A city whose economy was built around shipping and trade cannot easily limit its access to water.

And that helps to explain why so many hard decisions like whether some neighborhoods should be abandoned are not being made at all.

The role of the canal in the flooding six months ago is not in dispute. Computer models of the storm and photographs suggest that the canal acted as a funnel for water being forced up toward the city, leading to the breaches in the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal that devastated the Lower Ninth Ward.

Last month, the State Legislature passed a resolution urging Congress to close the canal, which the Army Corps of Engineers completed in the 1960's.

"People are really afraid of the Mr. Go and have a right to be," said Henry Rodriguez Jr., president of the devastated St. Bernard Parish, just east of the city.

Mr. Rodriguez's sector suffered widespread damage because of levee failures along the length of the canal.

"My No. 1 choice would be to close it entirely," he said, adding that his parish could also live with options like installing movable gates to close the outlet for storms.

For decades, Mr. Go has also come under criticism for destroying the wetlands alongside it by acting as a channel for saltwater from the gulf, which kills vegetation, and it has never lived up to its promise as a major navigational waterway.

The channel has become such a presence in the collective consciousness here that a lawyer, Soren Gisleson, recently wore a Mr. Go Mardi Gras costume with a wig coiffed to resemble a tidal wave and a watery blue strip painted from his face down the center of his white tuxedo.

Nonetheless, the revival of New Orleans Cold Storage and other shipping-related businesses has been a bright spot in the flattened economy, one the city would like to nurture. Mark E. Blanchard, executive vice president of the company, said shutting the canal, or even letting it languish, would be a severe hardship.

"We worked for a long time with the Port of New Orleans to be able to build this facility on the water," Mr. Blanchard said.

The plant, which opened in 2003, employs 135 people directly, along with 200 union-represented stevedores hired by a contractor, for a $13 million payroll in the last year. The company was preparing to build a third berth and expand its warehouse by a third.

Having made an $11 million investment based on the government's original commitment that it would keep the canal clear and deep, New Orleans Cold Storage faces a number of difficulties. The storm cut the canal depth, to 22 feet from 36 feet, meaning that the company's clients have to use smaller ships.

After being loaded, they continue east into the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal, which connects to the river through a lock, and go back to sea down the Mississippi. But the locks, which are 80 years old, are too narrow for many larger ships, so that solution is temporary at best.

Without a sense of future success, Mr. Blanchard said, "we'd probably have to reconsider where we expand in the future."

Those who support some continued use of the canal but are resigned to a future without Mr. Go say the effects on businesses and their employees should be softened.

The state economic development secretary, Michael J. Olivier, said that the nine businesses that would be most hurt by closing the canal has 1,000 employees and that an additional 9,000 jobs would be affected.

"What are we going to do about these nine businesses now, who in good faith located there?" Mr. Olivier asked. "I would hope that we can convince Congress and the administration that they should have a role in helping to fix that."

Gary P. LaGrange, president of the Port of New Orleans, said it would cost $381 million to relocate all nine businesses to the banks of the Mississippi and $5 million a year to take goods to ships on the Mississippi by truck or barge until new wharves can be built on the river.

"Any way you slice it, you're going to have added transportation costs, which makes you less competitive," Mr. LaGrange said. "These are only interim solutions. We've got to look to long-term solutions."

The Corps of Engineers has proposed building navigable gates to stop storm surges from funneling up the canal. But corps officials say the ultimate fate of the canal will be determined as part of long-range studies of the levee system. No decision about closing the canal is imminent, according to the corps.

Major water projects are notoriously time-consuming. Construction on a new lock for the nearby Inner Harbor Navigational Canal started in 2002 and has not been completed. Congress first authorized it in 1956.

To Mr. Rodriguez, the parish president, the top question is how to give residents a sense that their safety comes first. "What's more important," Mr. Rodriguez asked, "people's lives or the economy?"

Mr. Blanchard, of the shipping company, said he knew that rebuilding was vital.

"It's a huge balancing act between people having houses and people having jobs," he said. "You can fix all their houses and make them whole here. But if there are no jobs, what are they going to do?"

    Debating a Shipping Shortcut That Turned Against New Orleans, NYT, 3.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/national/nationalspecial/03canal.html

Divers Work the Gulf Floor to Undo What Hurricanes Did

March 1, 2006
The New York Times
By JAD MOUAWAD

ABOARD M.S.V. BOTNICA, in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana, Feb. 22 — Gliding gracefully half a mile below sea level, two robotic submarines are part of an unusual repair job intended to restore much-needed oil resources to the nation's strained energy network. After two months spent digging and cutting and shuffling heavy equipment by remote control, their job should be done by early March.

But the huge task of fixing the country's most important energy hub is far from over. Six months after Hurricane Katrina battered the gulf with 175-mile-an-hour winds and waves higher than eight-story buildings, more than a quarter of the region's oil output is still shut down.

The shortages, amounting to 6 percent of the country's domestic production, have worsened a global picture of razor-thin margins of supply, playing a central part in keeping oil prices around $60 a barrel.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged 167 offshore platforms and 183 pipelines, shut down production for weeks and pushed prices to their highest levels since the fall of the shah of Iran led to the oil shock of the early 1980's. Nineteen movable well-drilling rigs snapped from their moorings and drifted, some as far as 60 miles.

By contrast, Hurricane Ivan, rated as one of the most severe storms in the gulf when it struck in 2004, destroyed just 7 platforms in shallow waters and damaged another 24 structures and 102 pipelines.

"The storms cut a huge swath over the landscape," said Allen J. Verret, the president of the Offshore Operators Committee, an industry group. "We were still recovering from Hurricane Ivan when the terrible sisters came."

Now, he said, "we are all concerned by how long it takes to bring it all back up again."

Few will openly say so, but oil companies are racing against the clock. In less than four months, the next hurricane season kicks off.

Last year's severe storms forced the United States and its allies to release strategic stocks of petroleum held for emergencies like wars or embargoes. More than 20,000 miles of underwater pipelines and 3,000 offshore platforms were in the path of either storm.

Today in the gulf's offshore region, 362,000 barrels of oil a day, out of a total of 1.5 million barrels, remain shut off, along with 15 percent of the region's natural gas production, or 1.5 billion cubic feet a day.

Restoring production has proved exceptionally arduous because of the storms' impact on communities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Oil companies had to deal with workers who had lost their homes, contractors who had lost their equipment and widespread destruction to the region's basic infrastructure.

"All the components of the production system have to be in place" before output can be restored, said Melody Meyer, who heads Chevron's production unit in the Gulf of Mexico.

Shell, the top oil producer in the gulf, estimated the cost at $250 million to $300 million. The company said that three-quarters of its total capacity of 450,000 barrels a day had been returned to production.

But one of its biggest structures, Mars, which produced about 140,000 barrels of oil a day before Hurricane Katrina, is not expected to restart until the second half of 2006. The platform was badly damaged when a drilling rig tumbled over in the storm, shattering equipment, living quarters and the intricate network of electronics and pipes that girdle all platforms. Also, the pair of pipelines that take Mars's oil and natural gas to shore were badly damaged.

With no realistic option of towing the platform back to a shipyard, repairs had to be done at sea. Nearly 500 workers have been living in a floating hotel flanking the platform, linked by a pontoon while they complete the tedious job of refitting and rewiring the structure.

Other major producers, like BP and Chevron, have similarly suffered. Chevron, which lost a major platform during Hurricane Rita, said that its output was back at two-thirds of its prestorm capacity of 300,000 barrels a day. The company indicated that as much as 20,000 barrels of oil a day would probably never be restored. Over all, it put its bill from the storms at $1.4 billion, a figure that includes the estimated lost production.

"We're scrambling for resources, like everybody else," said John R. Sherwood, the chief executive of Anglo-Suisse Offshore Partners, a small oil producer that lost 5 of its 30 shallow-water platforms. "There's a tremendous strain in the service sector, which was stretched anyway because of the high energy prices and has been magnified by the two storms."

The industry was already facing a shortage of ships and qualified crews, marine technicians and offshore experts before the hurricanes. Divers to inspect the platforms are especially in demand. Special teams had to be brought from Canada.

The work is especially slow when it comes to finding and fixing pipelines in the gulf's shallows, where the water is so opaque that divers have to blindly feel the ground with their hands until they find a missing bit of pipeline.

"It's definitely been nonstop around the clock," said Craig Reynolds, managing director of Specialty Diving in Hammond, La. For the first time, he has had to place customers on a waiting list of one to two weeks.

The Gulf Coast is by far the most sensitive region for the nation's energy supplies. Refineries in Texas and Louisiana account for nearly half the country's domestic capacity and most of them were affected by the storms.

Today, as much as one million barrels a day of capacity, or 6 percent of the nation's total refining capacity, remains shut down. Most of that should be back by the end of March, according to the Energy Department.

The recent wave of hurricanes has exposed the country's reliance on the region's fragile infrastructure and raised uncomfortable questions about its reliability as America's most critical domestic energy source.

"We haven't done anything to reduce our vulnerability," said Ted M. Falgout, the director of Port Fourchon, the largest servicing hub for the offshore industry, about 80 miles south of New Orleans. "I hate to think of the next hurricane season."

The port is a beehive of active cranes, docks and wharfs, with helicopters zooming above, a constant stream of trucks coming in and ships heading out to sea. Everything needed to run an offshore platform, from tissue paper to heavy electric generators, is loaded there.

It took port officials three days to clear the waterway after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Falgout said. While other ports on the coastline were devastated, Port Fourchon managed to resume operations within days.

In the weeks after the storm, some oil companies used small tankers and barges to take oil to shore, or redirected flows through undamaged pipelines. Even as they repair the damage, most companies continue to explore the depths of the gulf for new reserves.

"They have every incentive to get things restarted," said Chris C. Oynes, the head of the Gulf of Mexico regional office of the Minerals Management Service of the Interior Department.

At sea about 45 minutes by helicopter from Port Fourchon, the 318-foot-long Botnica — which normally does duty as an icebreaker — is about the last thing you would expect to find in the semitropical gulf waters. While Shell mustered an armada of 24 ships to inspect its equipment in the gulf, it needed a special type of ship, able to stay precisely above a particular spot for weeks on end, while minisubmarines replaced two 85-foot-long sections of pipelines linking Mars to the coast.

"No other vessel was available for the job," said Mike Coyne, a senior Shell engineer, who oversees the company's 1,500 miles of pipelines in the gulf.

The pipelines, about 100 miles southeast of New Orleans, were crushed when a drilling rig broke free from its moorings during Katrina, dragging along a 12-ton anchor that plowed the sea floor.

Shell's engineers had to come up with novel procedures for a job performed beyond diver depth, and rig new tools so they could be powered by the hydraulic system on the minisubs. The work used remotely operated underwater vehicles for the first time in that kind of repair, and involved dozens of engineers onshore, a step-by-step manual thicker than a New York phone book, and minisubs nicknamed Mil-28 and Mag-77.

"It sounds simple but it's actually quite complicated when you have to do it at 3,000 feet below the sea," said Frank Glaviano, the head of production for North and South America at Royal Dutch Shell. "It's never been done before."

On the control deck, the ship's captain seemed torn about his soon-to-end assignment.

"They would really need us right now in Finland," said Leif Kampe, the captain of the Botnica, which usually slices though 30-foot-thick ice at this time of the year. "But there's more money to be made here."

And it's warmer. "It's nice," he added, "being here with the Southern guys."

    Divers Work the Gulf Floor to Undo What Hurricanes Did, NYT, 1.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/business/01gulf.html

Storm's Missing: Lives Not Lost but Disconnected

March 1, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

BATON ROUGE, La. — As far as Curtis Broussard Jr. is concerned, he is not missing. He is in Missouri City, Tex., where he plans to stay. But according to the State of Louisiana, Mr. Broussard, formerly of Cherry Street, New Orleans, has not been found.

His daughter, Antonette Murray, had not heard from him since Hurricane Katrina. In January, she finally reported him to the state, expecting to hear back that he was dead. But though he was added to the missing list, other family members had known of his whereabouts since September, and a reporter recently put Mr. Broussard back in touch with his daughter after a few telephone calls.

Despite intensive efforts to reach the scattered refugees of Hurricane Katrina, nearly 2,000 such names remain on the state's list of people still unaccounted for, out of 12,000 that had once been reported. Even now, new missing persons reports trickle in; there were 99 over the two-week period that ended Feb. 5.

But officials say the number is less a measure of the storm's lethal power, or even of the lives it upended, than of the trauma, disarray and instability that persist half a year later. Only about 300 of those on the list are believed to have died in the flooding; many of the rest are adrift in America, having failed, for a variety of reasons, to remain in touch with their own families. A call center set up by the state to reunite families has struggled to get government financing and research tools.

Many of the recent reports of missing people are from distant relatives or friends looking for news. But others are more urgent: they come from mothers looking for their children's father; from families who have just found a relative's body in New Orleans and need to register that person officially, a requirement before a body can be released by the authorities; or from people who seem only now to be able to assume any task beyond day-to-day survival.

"We get some calls that say, 'I just thought about my fiancé is missing,' " said Lenora Green, shaking her head in a mixture of sympathy and disbelief. "It's like they just click back into reality because of the shock they're going through."

Ms. Green is a shift supervisor at the Find Family National Call Center, a vast array of cubicles, computers and telephones in a former sporting goods store in Baton Rouge, created after the hurricane to help people locate loved ones, living or dead. The call center is a collection place, not just of names and vital statistics, but of the most intimate stories of a poor city broken apart by crisis.

They include every permutation in the grand mosaic of human relationships, an intricate design of unpaid child support, paranoia, grudges, helplessness and anguish, the lonely cul-de-sacs of estrangement and old age.

"Some people are just getting out of jail," Ms. Green said. "Some, it's like baby-mama drama, I call it."

Some evacuees simply do not have access to the one human link most taken for granted: the telephone. Numbers have been changed, disconnected, rinsed away. "That's how I got lost," said Alvin Alphonse Jr., who was put on the missing list by a former girlfriend claiming to be his cousin. "I didn't have anybody written down, no numbers, nothing."

Scott Shepherd, another call center worker, allowed one couple to use the telephone at the center after they told him they did n