Hurricane Katrina
Just before Labor Day 2005, Hurricane Katrina, with its 175 mph winds, slammed into New Orleans and the surrounding lowlands of Louisianna, Mississippi and Alabama. Much of New Orleans was flooded. Nearly all of New Orleans’ half-million residents evacuated. (Only 10,000 stayed behind.) And by the time the water and winds subsided, nearly 1,400 people had died – the highest death toll from a U.S. hurricane in more than 70 years. Damages to homes, infrastructure and businesses amounted to $125 billion – the most in U.S. history. Doctors, nurses, police officers, firefighters and others from across the U.S. rushed to New Orleans to lend a hand in finding the dead and cleaning up. Mike Kelly, along with photographer Ryan Mercer, went too, trampling through the mud to interview and photograph survivors and rescue workers, filing stories and photos. Here is a sampling
Door by Door, Deaths Revealed
September 17, 2005
NEW ORLEANS - The smell told you someone died in the brick house where Katrina's angry waters punched through the windows and climbed 7 feet up the walls.
Kevin Morrissey, a New Jersey State Police civilian rescue specialist, walked up the front sidewalk, past the broken birdbath, and stepped inside. Black slime smothered the floor under a red couch - a wheelchair by the door.
Morrissey peered into the kitchen and saw a body under a green refrigerator.
This is the way death continues to reveal its ugly face in this waterlogged city nearly three weeks after Katrina's devastating invasion. The casualties mount one by one, unceasingly, as police walk block by block, door to door in an attempt to come to grips with the devastation.
On a dusty dead-end street a few blocks from a Little League baseball field and the Food for Thought grocery store, the casualty list grew Friday by four bodies, all discovered by teams led by the New Jersey State Police.
"Devastating," said Morrissey, who lives in Middletown and searched the World Trade Center rubble after the 9/11 attacks. "You look at something like this and see what the water did, and you realize someone's whole life was over so quickly."
Morrissey did not try to lift the body. He saw only an arm and a leg sticking out from under the refrigerator. He made a mental note that the victim seemed to be African-American. But he could not determine the gender or age.
Morrissey turned and left, then called for a team specializing in removing the dead. The team found two more bodies an hour later in a rear bedroom.
One house, three bodies.
This was not Morrissey's first brush with Katrina's devastation. The day before, in a white house across the street, Morrissey found the body of a woman under a purple mattress in a rear bedroom. Friday's discovery confirmed what authorities feared - that this dead-end street only a few hundred yards from a drainage canal was a place where Katrina killed.
"It's almost like 'The Twilight Zone,'-" state police Maj. John Hunt said as he walked through the death homes a few hours later.
A few hours after Morrissey's discovery, Hunt, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall, stood by the wall and stared at the waterline - a foot above him. He shook his head in disbelief, then fell silent.
"You can't understand how frightened these people must have been," he said. "This water came in fast. Your furniture is floating. The panic, the anxiety of not saving yourself ... " His voice fell off.
This, too, is what Hurricane Katrina left behind - silence as the search parties try to find a way to describe the horror they discover block to block, house to house.
On Friday, the search that ended with Morrissey walking into the brick house at the dead end, began blocks away with the sound of broken glass.
Teams of firefighters from Belleville, assisted by Oklahoma National Guard troops and Union County police, were told to pry open doors to homes.
The neighborhood had been searched days before, with police knocking on doors to check for the living. Now it was time to find the dead.
"We know how to search after a fire," Belleville firefighter Brian Salmon said as he gripped an ax to pry open a door. "But searching for dead people who died two weeks ago? We've never done that before. I've also never smelled anything like this in my life."
Salmon swung the ax and punched open a door. Soldiers moved inside, gripping their M-4 carbines. Then other firefighters followed. Nothing inside - except the moldy odor of wet rugs, decomposing food and sewage.
"There is not one clean job in this place," Salmon said as he walked out and pulled off a surgical mask to filter the air he breathed inside. "Everything's dirty."
"There's no word to describe what you see," said firefighter Dennis Ives. "It's total devastation."
"When you see it on TV, it's bad," Salmon added. "But when you see it in person, you can't believe it. You have all your senses working here."
"I haven't found anything that's salvageable," said Union County Sheriff's Officer George Marmarou.
Outside, electrical wires hang low from poles snapped or bent by the wind. A teddy bear sits on one sidewalk, across from a fishing boat tossed against a chain-link fence. Down the block, a kitchen chair sits at the end of a driveway. Where did it come from? Who knows? But when the water swept in, things floated every which way before the waters set them down again.
Even those who stayed behind and rode out the storm have trouble explaining the aftermath.
A few blocks away, where Kevin Morrissey found the bodies, the smell of death still lingered.
So did the stuff of life.
Out back, an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme was parked in the driveway. Over the patio, a clothesline still held green, red, and yellow clothespins. By the back door, two dozen empty cans of caffeine-free soda still waited to be recycled.
Inside, the body retrieval team turned over chairs and beds, and lifted rugs. A Better Homes and Gardens magazine sat on the floor near a plant that struggled to stay green amid the black slime. Another wheelchair lay in a heap in the bedroom.
On a living room table, one item remained intact, seemingly oblivious to the floods and the rescuers.
It was a framed photograph of a gray-haired woman.
She was smiling.
N.J. Team Finds Man Who Rode Out Storm
September 17, 2005
He Lived for 3 Weeks on Military Rations
NEW ORLEANS - As firefighters swept his neighborhood for bodies Friday, David Jackson lifted a second-floor window and leaned into the morning sunlight to declare himself alive and well - sort of.
"I'm doing just fine," the 43-year-old Jackson said of his new life in a neighborhood that reeks of death.
When Katrina blew into New Orleans, Jackson elected to stay in his second-floor apartment. He stayed even when the floodwaters inched up to the ceiling of the first floor.
The hurricane was "like an 18-wheeler flying over my house," Jackson said. "I got afraid a couple of times."
On Friday, he smiled and announced to New Jersey state police and firefighters that he had plenty of water and five packages of military rations to eat.
If he needed anything, it was dog food, he said.
Not only did Jackson make it through the story, but his two dogs did, too.
As the waters rose, Jackson said in an interview that he had a chance to get out when rescue helicopters hovered over his neighborhood.
But he opted to stay.
"I'm scared of helicopters," he said. "I don't like to fly."
* * *
City's Darkest Hours
September 18, 2005
New Orleans Even More Ominous After Sun Goes Down
NEW ORLEANS - Nighttime in this wounded city.
As moonlight paints long shadows and stray dogs roam at will, a man sits down at a piano in a house on the edge of a park.
"Tell it like it is," he sings as he plunks the keys on a recent evening, his voice echoing through a grove of stately oaks.
Before Katrina, this sort of thing might not have struck anyone as odd in a city with a near-religious calling to embrace the strange side of life when the sun goes down. Before Katrina, and before most residents left in a near-biblical mass evacuation, the sound of a nighttime piano was hardly unusual. Now, with only about 10,000 of the city's nearly half-million residents remaining, piano music is weird enough for police to take notice.
There are many ways to measure changes in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina's winds and floods. But perhaps most telling is how eerily quiet it has become at night - so quiet that even an innocent piano tune might launch a criminal investigation.
"Humanity is gone, and this is what's left," said Bergen County Sheriff Leo McGuire, who led patrols here as part of a 200-officer deployment by New Jersey cops, before returning home Thursday.
"It's desolate," added Passaic County Sheriff Jerry Speziale, who swung through neighborhoods in a boat and an SUV as part of a plan to relieve pressure on the beleaguered New Orleans police.
McGuire and Speziale were commenting on New Orleans' physical landscape. But they could just as easily have been describing the city's mental outlook for its cherished nightlife.
Imagine a bouncing, foot-tapping, jazzy city, a place with a long history of making room for odd characters who patrol the night. From pirates and rum runners to all manner of Mardi Gras royalty and jazz trumpeters, New Orleans seemed to have them all - in loud, honky-tonk bunches.
Now try to imagine a city where almost everyone has left for someplace else, perhaps permanently.
"I wonder what will happen," said Webb Offutt, 55, a retired software manager who grew up in New Orleans and returned one afternoon last week to his home in the Garden District.
Offutt was lucky. His home suffered only minor damage from fallen tree limbs.
"I was depressed," he said. "Then I drove around the city."
But he did not stay overnight. He just didn't want to feel so alone in his neighborhood. Anyway, New Orleans police, their ranks riddled by resignations and officers too exhausted to come to work, told the New Jersey police officials on duty here that they would respond only to 911 emergency calls and have suspended regular nighttime patrols.
"Nobody's here," Offutt said.
But even when some form of life returns, Offutt wonders how vibrant it will be.
"People with children are gone," he said. "So are many people who lost everything. For those who still have homes, we'll stick around, but it won't be the same."
Even three weeks after Katrina struck, you can still drive for blocks at night past pitch-black homes, bars and restaurants. The only noise is the sound of your tires rolling over broken tree limbs, windows, roof shingles or aluminum siding peeled away by Katrina's punishing winds and still waiting for someone to pick it up.
You pass abandoned buses, their doors still open.
You see a small boat in a front yard. You see a minivan flipped over in a driveway, a 10-foot-wide trampoline tossed against a fence like a Frisbee. In many neighborhoods, rich and poor, doors and windows are open or broken - from Katrina or from looters. But in other neighborhoods, rich and poor, many homes are just fine. Curtains hang silently behind windows. A car sits in the driveway. A basketball rests by the backyard shrubs.
What's striking everywhere is the absence of people. Block after block is simply empty of human life. The experience of traveling through such a world at night is akin to watching films ocean explorers made of the sunken cruise ship Titanic. Everything seems suspended in a murky half-light. Things aren't alive. But they're not dead either.
As you drive, your eye catches something moving. You stop and shine a flashlight, wondering whether you might find a hardy resident who rode out the hurricane. Instead, you are greeted by the fearful eyes of dogs so hungry that their ribs show through their hair. Indeed, dogs have become the most formidable denizens of New Orleans' nights, police say. Around midnight one evening last week, gunfire erupted on a street where the posh Garden District rubs up against a poorer neighborhood.
Police from New Jersey who happened to be in the area thought it might be residents shooting at looters or perhaps even street gangs trying to muscle in on new territory. It turned out to be National Guard soldiers shooting at dogs that threatened them.
If authorities are worried about any change in the nightlife, it's that street gangs may try to move into the newly vacant neighborhoods.
On a recent moonless night, when the rains fell for the first time since Katrina, New Jersey police patrolling the darkened streets on the northwestern side of the city received some odd instructions.
Look for bicycles. And if you see any bicycles, slash their tires.
"Gangs are using bicycles to get around," said Lt. Tom King of the New Jersey State Police.
At a command post in a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in the nearby town of Hanahan, state police have started keeping a book of photographs taken of what they think may be gang graffiti. So-called "tagging" by gangs is a way of marking territory and a warning to rivals to keep out.
The concern prompted state police Maj. John Hunt in a recent briefing to pass on an unexpected request to officers from Bergen, Passaic and other New Jersey counties who volunteered to come to New Orleans to assist in the hurricane cleanup. "Anybody with gang background?" Hunt asked.
"We're trying to identify some tagging," he added. "We're aware of some tagging. We believe some of the gangs may have come back."
Later that night, SWAT team officers from Essex and Hudson counties who are equipped with night-vision goggles were dispatched on foot to patrol streets with soldiers from the Oklahoma National Guard. As they waited to step off, officers found themselves trying to pay attention to the sounds of the city - or the lack of them.
"We listen for noise," Belleville Detective John McAloon said.
His colleague, Montclair Officer Tom Westerlund, nodded. Both officers were veterans of nighttime police work. But few experiences had prepared them for New Orleans.
"It's different in a sense that no one is here," Westerlund said. "When you see something, you know it's someone who is not supposed to be here."
The night before, officers caught three crack addicts and discovered a home filled with TVs and other items thought to have been looted. Hours earlier, soldiers nabbed three men posing as New Orleans police officers.
"We figured they might be looters," said Lt. Stephen Krise, who commands the National Guard unit that accompanies New Jersey police on patrols.
On this night, police and soldiers found only a gun, left behind perhaps by a gang member or perhaps by a desperate resident trying to ward off looters and then dropping the gun to flee the rising floods.
On the next night, though, officers ran into something they never expected - two volunteer ambulance drivers from Houston and another from New Orleans, breaking into a drugstore. King, who happened to see the three as he patrolled in his SUV with officers from Brick Township, turned the suspects over to New Orleans authorities.
"They were definitely robbing the store," King said.
While small, the incident offers some insight into the desperation here.
But it also raises this question: Would such desperation blossom if New Orleans were not so empty of people? It's a question many in New Orleans are asking in one way or another now. For the city nicknamed the Big Easy, the answers may not come easily, though.
As he checked the damage to his own home, Webb Offutt thought of his future in the city he loved. Then, he thought of his city's history.
"The city has to make some decisions," he said.
"I don't know if we've ever done that before."
* * * *
Love Survives on Desire St.
September 19, 2005
Katrina Evacuee Comforted by Mom's Gesture
NEW ORLEANS - Lionel Lewis came back to a street named Desire on Sunday to look for his rifle, shotgun and pistol.
He found his mother's love.
On almost every block in this sweaty, damp city still trying to dry out from Hurricane Katrina, there are stories of courage and deceit, of people who never lost faith and people who were lost to the greed of looting or the panic of escape.
The story Lewis discovered on Sunday is about something else - about a son who stayed behind with his ailing mother as the floods climbed the walls, and about a mother who thought she would die and left a final piece of herself.
By Sunday, when he rolled down the street made famous by Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," the 55-year-old Lewis, a former sheriff's officer, did not know what to expect. The dead water snake draped atop his chain-link fence was not a good sign.
He stopped and got out. "My mom moved here because she liked the name Desire Street," he said.
A hot wind blew down the block, kicking up dust from the black muck cracking in the 95-degree heat. Lewis pushed open the fence gate and headed toward the back stairs to the second-floor apartment where his mother lived for the past three decades. He stepped over a soggy sofa cushion, once blue but now left gray by the muck and floods. He kicked aside a 10-foot piece of gutter, and stepped through the opening left by a window screen that had blown off.
It seemed as if nothing on Desire Street escaped Katrina's mayhem. Not the True Vine Church of God, where the windows were broken. Not the cars covered in mud near Sonny's Pool Hall. Not the power lines that drooped like spaghetti.
Up the block, an uprooted cedar bush had been blown through a front door. Beyond that, a 15-foot boat named Zombie was tossed against a home as if it were a toy.
"Sweet Jesus, what a mess," Lewis' wife, Cathy Allen, said as she waited near the curb with the couple's 11-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son.
"I think it's total destruction," said Chris Willburn, a member of the Entergy utility company's disaster response team, who was cruising the neighborhood.
Lewis turned and started up the outdoor stairs leading to the apartment.
When Katrina swept into New Orleans, Lewis came to Desire Street to be with his 76-year-old mother, Louise. Meanwhile, Allen was caught in the flooding on the other side of town.
She took the children and headed for higher ground, a Route 10 highway overpass. They spent two sun-baked days there and another five days amid the misery at the New Orleans Convention Center, where bodies of the dead were left in chairs. Lewis, meanwhile, watched the floodwaters rise, hoping he was high enough on the second floor to escape them.
He had no choice. His mother did not want to leave - and he would not leave her.
"You know how old people are set in their ways," he said.
The electric lights quit on the first day. So did gas for the stove. By the third day, water stopped running from the faucets. Lewis used floodwaters to flush toilets. Drinking water wasn't a problem - he had plenty of water for his mother, and his brother, sister-in-law and niece, who stayed, too.
Cooking took some creativity. Lewis brought a grill to the second-floor landing, then broke up two-by-fours to burn with the only tool he had to chop - a claw hammer.
Around noon on the fourth day, Lewis heard a Coast Guard helicopter. The chopper's wash loosened a piece of steel roofing. Lewis slipped through a window, crawled onto the overhanging roof and pushed the steel into the flooded back yard.
The chopper came down.
Mom went up first, then Lewis' sister-in-law, then his niece, then his brother - then himself.
"I was hanging off the side of the helicopter," Lewis said.
The chopper brought Lewis' mother to a military field hospital across the Mississippi River. She was then taken to an Atlanta hospital, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia.
Lewis ended up near Baton Rouge, sleeping in a friend's office.
Here on Desire Street on Sunday, as he climbed the soggy stairs to the apartment that seemed so lethal less than three weeks ago, Lewis paused and gazed at the remains of his property. His cousin, Isaac Williams, who came to help, stopped a few steps behind.
"It's unbelievable to look at this destruction," Williams said.
Lewis nodded.
"My tools are gone," he said of the equipment for his small construction business.
Lewis slipped a key into the lock. The door didn't budge. Lewis shoved. The door snapped. Lewis peered in.
The prayer to the Virgin Mary was still taped to the wall near the door. Mom's clothes still hung from a rack. Glass from a window broken by Katrina's winds was still on the floor, by the faded artificial flowers.
"Just like we left it," he said.
Lewis inched his way inside, not wanting to punch a hole in the floor. He checked some clothes he left behind and looked out the window he escaped from. Then he headed downstairs to fetch the shotgun, rifle and pistol he left behind.
"Here are the last pair of pants I wore when I went out to retrieve water," he said.
Lewis came back up the stairs and was about to leave when he and Williams noticed a gray plastic bin by the wall - with a note scribbled in black marker on the bin's white plastic top.
The note was from Louise Lewis.
"My 3 sons only. In Lord Jesus' holy name. Last chek."
Inside, under a pair of pink slippers, were bags of pennies - about $400 worth - that Louise Lewis had saved.
As the floods rose, the pennies became her will to Lionel Lewis and his two brothers, Henderson and Henry.
"Pennies," Lewis said, smiling, as he carried the bin downstairs. "She's been saving these for 40 years."
"Lord have mercy," Allen said. "In her heart, she loved us."
On Sunday, Louise Lewis was still battling pneumonia in that Atlanta hospital.
A Sign That the Big Easy Is on the Road to Recovery
September 19, 2005
NEW ORLEANS - With city officials pressing to let residents return to homes and offices as early as this week, Mike Bourne and Frank Garcia are suddenly very important guys.
Their job is putting up stop signs.
Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, few traffic signals work, and city officials are looking to stop signs - along with restraint by drivers - to be a temporary fix.
Bourne and Garcia, who work for a private contractor that installs highway signs, had their hands full Sunday with 600 stop signs.
"For sure, we can do it," Bourne said, stepping down from a ladder after installing a sign on a pole at the corner of Poydras and Carondelet streets.
"I'm looking forward to putting the city back together," Garcia added.
"People from Louisiana don't quit," Bourne said. "We like to party. We like to eat."
By 11 a.m., Bourne and Garcia had put up about 50 signs.
Only 550 to go.
The day's developments
Other news in the aftermath of the hurricane:
* A hospital accreditation official said New Orleans' health-care facilities have been shattered to an extent unmatched in U.S. history, and some hospitals are probably damaged beyond repair.
* House Republicans are looking at delaying some federal spending, including money for highway projects and a Medicare prescription drug benefit, to offset the cost of rebuilding the Gulf Coast, a leading GOP fiscal conservative said. Democrats question how President Bush can pay for the Katrina recovery and still support tax cuts.
* New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin wants to bring residents back to his city starting today with the Algiers section, across the Mississippi River from downtown. But Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen urged New Orleans residents to delay their return a bit longer. Allen said the city needs drinkable water, a 911 system and a way to notify people of future storms that might overcome the weakened levees. "We can do that, and we can do that fairly soon," he said, "but it's very, very soon to try and do that this week."
* The death toll linked to the hurricane rose to 883 along the Gulf Coast, 646 in Louisiana alone. The search for bodies continues.
* Residents found a few stores and coffee shops already stocked and open as they returned to storm-damaged homes in Jefferson Parish, a New Orleans suburb.
Residents Left in Limbo Waiting for City to Revive
September 20, 2005
NEW ORLEANS - Michael Rosen will know when his adopted city gets back on its feet.
"When I hear music again," said Rosen, who grew up in Fair Lawn and now manages the legendary Pontchartrain Hotel on the edge of the Garden District.
So far, he's heard mostly the whine of chainsaws clearing fallen trees, the grunt of garbage trucks hauling debris and the wail of police sirens chasing emergencies.
But no music.
With drinkable water still not flowing, doctors warning of public health nightmares from toxic sludge left by Hurricane Katrina and the horrific prospect of another major storm spinning up to hurricane strength in the Gulf of Mexico, residents like Rosen are left in social and psychic limbo. Common sense tells them that their battered city will recover only if people return. But are they rushing things? Not since the Civil War has a major American city emptied itself of most of its population. Not only are New Orleans residents elsewhere, from Houston to Hackensack, but thousands of homes have been rendered uninhabitable by Katrina's winds and floods and may have to be bulldozed.
If that's not bad enough, however, the city's fractured pumping and levee system is in such bad shape that officials doubt whether it can handle even a modest rainstorm, let alone another hurricane.
"I'm devastated," said Archie Irons, a catering manager who returned to find floors buckling in his home on Mistletoe Street from 3-foot-deep water. "You think everything's dry, and it's not. It's like the world has come to an end."
At least Irons can set foot in his home. Rosen's home in the Lakeview area is still waterlogged, not to the roof, as it had been after Katrina blew through and the levees broke, but still surrounded by water. "I've lost everything," Rosen said as he sat in the Pontchartrain's empty cafe.
With so many losses to so many people and so much danger still facing New Orleans, it was hardly surprising Monday morning that police handed incoming drivers a leaflet with a double-edged message.
"Welcome home," the leaflet proclaimed in the first paragraph. "You are entering at your own risk," it cautioned in the second.
All around New Orleans, from the iron balconies of Bourbon Street to the empty flood-ravaged lanes on the city's rim, residents tried mightily to balance real worries with a devil-may-care urge to party on.
"The good shepherd doesn't leave his sheep," Ray Menard said, quoting one of Jesus' parables, as he took in the traffic at the Robert E. Lee circle from a sidewalk chair.
While stubbornly optimistic about his city, Menard pointed toward a severed electrical line that still dangled in the traffic lanes around the circle, forcing cars to swerve.
A few days earlier, Menard said, a street person tied an empty plastic soda bottle to the line as a warning to drivers to avoid it.
"Why couldn't the city do that?" Menard asked.
It was just one of many reminders of how much needs to be done by a municipal government that has been criticized as distressingly incompetent. One frustrated resident left this sign on St. Charles Avenue: "Get a stick. Clear the street drains before it rains."
But clearing storm drains are only a piece of the massive cleanup.
Three weeks after looters ravaged the city, city workers have still not removed the blackened hulk of a burned-out minivan a block from Canal Street. On South Claiborne Avenue, two hearses still sat on the median, along with more than a dozen other flood-ravaged - and looted - cars. On Jackson Street, the top 30-foot section of a sycamore had snapped and stuck like a giant fork out of a church lawn. Many stores - even some on Canal Street - still had not repaired or even boarded up the windows that were broken when looters rampaged up the street in the days after Katrina struck.
"Everybody is still coming out of their numbness," said Laurence Bonnett, the assistant manager of a French Quarter grocery.
"Day by day, little by little, we'll come back," said the Rev. Frank Gresham, an evangelical pastor who drove from his Daytona, Fla., church to set up a food distribution center on the outskirts of New Orleans.
He predicted that the city's troublesome delays in cleaning up will only increase the sense of sadness among residents.
Gresham, who usually visits New Orleans during the bawdy Mardi Gras to encourage revelers to find a more spiritual outlook in life, conceded he felt melancholy about losing the city that he tried to cleanse of its unholy behavior.
"The longer it sits, the bigger the mess," Gresham said of the debris. "The people seem shell-shocked. They look like victims of a war."
Not everyone. Indeed some in this city went out of their way to display a sense of toughness amid the devastation.
Despite a pungent rotting smell wafting from a nearby sewer, Finis Shelnutt took a seat at a sidewalk bistro on Orleans Street to share a pepperoni pizza with Linda Cales and Art Haas.
As a resident walked by wearing a surgical mask, Shelnutt shook his head in disgust.
"Gee whiz, give me a break," he snapped.
More residents drifted up the street, along with soldiers from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division and rescue workers.
"It's too great a city not to come back," said Shelnutt, who owns a French Quarter building with a restaurant.
"But they have to get the people back in," said Haas, a biochemistry professor at the city's Louisiana State University Medical School.
"And they have to have someplace to go," added Cales, a former project manager for a fiber optic firm.
Everyone fell silent, then Haas spoke.
"The people are gone but the flavor is still here," he said.
Across town at the Pontchartrain Hotel, Michael Rosen walked into the empty Bayou Bar and pointed to a piano.
"Cole Porter once played that piano," Rosen said. "And Frank Sinatra used to come here too.
"It needs the music back," Rosen said of the city. "You couldn't walk anywhere without hearing live music. That's what I miss most."
What would Rosen like to hear?
" 'When the Saints go Marchin' In,'-" he said. "Of course."
Bracing for Rita
September 21, 2005
Rescuers Prep for the Worst: A Possible Second Hit
NEW ORLEANS - Engineer David Wurtzel stood Tuesday on the broken levee he calls this city's Ground Zero and balanced the lesser of two evils.
With Hurricane Rita plowing into the Gulf of Mexico, Wurtzel, a former Leonia resident who is redesigning levees for the Army Corps of Engineers, had to make a decision.
He could build up the levee. Or he could dam the canal to reduce pressure on the levee walls.
Either way, New Orleans would get flooded again if Rita visited, because the pumps that keep the city dry empty into the canals.
Wurtzel chose the dam.
"The flooding will be less," he said. "But it's the lesser of two evils."
The no-win scenario underscores the painful choices facing this city as it dries out from Hurricane Katrina's floods three weeks ago, while also hunkering down for the possibility of another battering from a large storm.
If Rita sticks to its predicted path and strikes Texas or Mexico, New Orleans may get only rain and wind gusts. But if the storm takes a Katrina-like northward turn in the gulf and aims for New Orleans, city officials expect even more devastation.
The prospect of more flooding prompted relief workers and police who came to Louisiana only days earlier to jump-start plans Tuesday for a quick getaway.
"I'm worried about the storm," dump truck driver Richard Jones said as he pulled up to Wurtzel's levee with a load of gravel. "I'm watching TV, listening to the radio. Everything."
On the western edge of the city, at a command post in a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall, Col. Joseph Fuentes, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, said troopers conducted a special briefing Monday night on plans to move 180 officers, engineers and doctors from their camp at a nearby gym to the Louisiana State Police Academy in Baton Rouge.
"I'm monitoring Rita four or five times a day," said Fuentes, who was in Louisiana for a few days to visit disaster relief teams sent from New Jersey to help restore order. Acting Governor Codey is scheduled to visit the teams today.
In Lake Charles, 180 miles to the west, the Rev. Gregory Jackson, pastor of Mount Olive Baptist Church in Hackensack, made evacuation plans of his own Tuesday after arriving a day earlier to coordinate church-based relief efforts for thousands of displaced New Orleans residents.
"It's unbelievable," he said in a telephone interview. "I can't imagine how these people who suffered through the hurricane are feeling.
"Now, the people who are here as rescuers may have to get out of town."
Back in New Orleans, National Guard and military units packed Humvees and trucks for a fast exit. The city canceled plans to let some residents and business owners return. Neighboring St. Bernard Parish, where many blocks were still under water, ordered all residents to evacuate Tuesday morning. Up on his levee, Wurtzel, still sporting the accent of his Brooklyn childhood, doesn't plan to leave.
"This is our Ground Zero," he said as he walked from a bridge where the 17th Street canal meets Lake Pontchartrain. "The walls gave way in this area."
Around Wurtzel, dump trucks rumbled by in the 96-degree heat, kicking up dust and delivering stone and gravel to fill in a 100-yard-long break in the 14-foot-high canal levee wall that crumbled Aug. 30. When that wall cracked, waves of water were released into the low-lying Lakeview neighborhood, smashing homes, sweeping away cars and uprooting trees.
Wurtzel compared it to a tsunami.
As he described how the levee broke, he gazed at a home where water punched a hole in a back wall and then slammed through the front, leaving only a dining room chandelier dangling like a skeleton. Nearby, only the foundation was left of a home that disintegrated. Up the block, a man's white sneaker and a woman's blue bedroom slipper sat in the road near a green boat.
Years before, the 17th Street canal was designed to absorb excess water from Lake Pontchartrain and stop flooding in the Lakeview and Mid-City neighborhoods, which are as much as 6 feet below sea level.
But that delicate plan was no match for Katrina. When the canal's levee broke, the canal was swollen by a 20-foot storm surge off the lake. To stop future surges from other storms while he repairs the levee, Wurtzel opted to build a steel dam to block waters from Lake Pontchartrain. He expects to finish the dam today.
It's not a perfect solution, but for now it would hold back as much as a 20-foot surge.
"There will be localized flooding in New Orleans due to rain," Wurtzel said. "But it's better than having a storm surge."
Across the canal, families gathered to look at the broken levee and worried about the storm that may break it more.
"It can't get any worse," Michelle Barkemeyer said as she peered over the wall with her husband, Brian.
The Barkemeyers lost their two-story house when floods ravaged the Lakeview neighborhood. Michelle took the couple's five children to safety Brian, a doctor, stayed behind in the premature-infant ward of Louisiana State Medical Center, not leaving until its newborns were moved to safety, including a boy who weighed just one pound.
Now, the couple are renting a place near Baton Rouge.
"This was our home," Brian said. "We had friends here. This is where our children went to school. Now everything is dispersed. It's amazing how quickly our lives can change."
Susan Boutwell-LaGrange drove to the levee from Lake Charles with her son and daughter in search of two dogs they left behind, a Chihuahua named Sandy and a dachshund named Weenie. But police would not let them cross the canal bridge.
"We don't know where they are," Boutwell-LaGrange said as her daughter, April Boutwell, hugged her brother, Charles Adams, and cried.
"It's hard to start all over," April said, as she wiped tears from her eyes.
Boutwell-LaGrange touched her daughter's shoulder and smiled.
"God's hand has been on my family," she said.
Farther down the levee, on Orpheum Street, Susan Breaux had just left the home of her 68-year-old mother and 70-year-old father, unable to persuade them to leave town as Hurricane Rita roars across the gulf.
Her parents' home made it through Katrina without getting flooded. But Breaux didn't want to take more chances with Rita.
"I don't trust the levee," she said. "That other side didn't hold."
"I don't think it's going to come here," said Charles Demarest, who noted that he is distantly related to the Demarest family that settled in Bergen County in the late 1700s. "But every rain brings more misery."
On the other side of the canal, David Wurtzel paced up and down his levee. More dump trucks arrived to unload. Near the canal bridge, two giant pumps stood ready to kick into action if more flooding took place.
Wurtzel gazed at the new dam being built, then back to the trucks dumping gravel - then to the once-stately brick homes now surrounded by mud and broken trees.
The dump trucks stopped, and for a moment the only sound you heard was the click of cicadas still in the trees.
"This isn't anything you expect," he said, "even when you expect the worst."
Signs of Search Reminiscent of 9/11
September 21, 2005
NEW ORLEANS - It was a staple at Ground Zero in Manhattan. It's here in New Orleans, as cops and soldiers search door-to-door for the dead and the living.
"X" marks the spot - in Day-Glo orange.
As search teams comb this city's flood-ravaged neighborhoods, they've adopted a code to signify that buildings have been searched. It's the same code that became a staple at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks as police and firefighters went through nearby stores and office buildings.
Here's how it works: As each team enters a house, it spray-paints the first slash of an X on the door or sidewalk. As the team leaves, it spray-paints the other slash to complete the X.
Then, the team leaves a code in different quadrants of the X.
At the top of the X, the team spray-paints the date. At the bottom, the number of dead or living found. To the left, the team leaves a code that identifies it - "NJ 5" means the fifth tactical team from the New Jersey State Police. The right quadrant is for any other messages.
For the New Jersey teams, many searches took place on an ironic date - the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
So many X's in New Orleans now carry a special link to Ground Zero: "9/11."
N.J. Trooper Is Dog's Best Friend
September 22, 2005
NEW ORLEANS - The dog was on the roof.
New Jersey State Police Sgt. Larry Belluscio knew something had to be done. But what?
Patrolling an otherwise empty neighborhood that had been flooded by Hurricane Katrina, Belluscio noticed an animal rescue team trying to coax a Rottweiler puppy weighing about 35 pounds from its perch atop a carport roof.
Like many other dogs in the area, the puppy was left behind when residents escaped neck-deep floods.
Belluscio got out of his state police Ford Explorer and walked over. The rescue team had already brought the puppy's mother to safety. But how to persuade a puppy to get off the carport roof?
A rescue team member tried a net. The dog backed away.
Belluscio walked closer.
The puppy looked at the trooper, then jumped.
Belluscio caught the dog as if he was catching a football.
"I happened to be in the right place," Belluscio said.
A Son of an Undertaker Takes in New Orleans
September 22, 2005
NJ's Governor Drops Into the Disaster
NEW ORLEANS - The funeral director's son came to this city of death Wednesday.
When he left, acting Governor Codey did what so many who journey here do in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He shook his head in disbelief and wondered how so many lives could have ended so horribly.
"I'm no stranger to death," Codey said. "I'm the son of a funeral director. But I've never seen anything like this."
The governor had just stepped out of a home on Forshey Street, where New Jersey State Police search teams found three bodies last Friday. He was about to walk across the street to a home where another body was found when he stopped, pulled off his surgical mask and stared at a brown line two feet above his head on a garage wall.
It was the high-water mark for flooding from a nearby rupture in a canal levee that sent water gushing into low-lying neighborhoods. The flood turned this block of Forshey Street into a death zone.
"This became their tomb, their coffin," Codey said.
Codey flew to New Orleans aboard an Air National Guard transport plane to visit the 185 police officers, doctors and others from New Jersey who are helping local authorities restore order and monitor health and environmental problems.
After landing at a U.S. Navy airfield across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, Codey jumped aboard a National Guard helicopter, then was driven to Bonnabel High School in Jefferson Parish, where the New Jersey contingent sleeps on cots in the gymnasium.
Walking into the gym, Codey quipped to police officers about a tent pitched there.
"Wait a minute, somebody's got the luxury suite," he said as officers laughed.
Outside, Codey might have been mistaken for a local politician on the stump, stopping to chat with teachers and custodians - until he revealed who he was, of course.
"Hi, I'm Governor Codey of New Jersey," he said.
"Hi, I'm Queenie," custodian Queenie Williams replied.
Codey praised the work of the state troopers.
"Outside, you've seen the worst of Mother Nature," he said. "And you represent the best of human nature."
But Codey's cheery demeanor and easy banter seemed to evaporate as he was taken to New Orleans' most damaged streets, his car having to swerve under a telephone pole and a dangling wire at one point.
Stopping at one of the New Jersey mobile command posts, the governor was visited by New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass and Police Chief Peter Dale of nearby Hanahan, who thanked him for the help from his state.
"New Jersey stepped up to the plate from the beginning," said Compass, who explained that 20 percent of his 1,750 officers have quit and that 600 of 1,200 police cars were wrecked by floods.
"The people of New Jersey have a lot to be proud of," Dale added. "We have been going 24 hours a day. We were about to pass out."
After speaking with the chiefs, Codey disclosed that the devastation in New Orleans had prompted him to ask that detailed plans be drawn up by New Jersey police and other authorities for a variety of possible disasters, ranging from a Katrina-like hurricane to attacks on chemical plants, nuclear power plants and airports.
"We have to be ready," Codey said.
Nothing prepared Codey for what he saw at the homes where bodies had been found.
When he walked into one house, he said, he noticed an old Life magazine with the Kennedy family on the cover. On a shelf, his eye was drawn to several books on African-American history.
Minutes later, he stood on the back patio, silently taking in the brown high-water mark on the garage wall. All around him lay the remains of a life cut short: a car battery someone set near the back steps, a hand cart for moving heavy items and extra bricks, perhaps to line the edge of a new garden.
Codey looked back to the house. Two bodies had been found in a rear bedroom, near a wheelchair. Another body, near another wheelchair, had been found in the kitchen. New Orleans authorities have not released any information on the victims - not even their gender.
"I was wondering what was going through their minds," Codey said. "What must have happened? A woman in a wheelchair? A man in a wheelchair? We don't know that. We may never know that."
If ever there was an unlikely political moment, this may have been it - a governor from New Jersey visiting a modest, one-story home in a working-class section of New Orleans, where three people he never knew died horrible deaths. But in these post-Katrina days in New Orleans, what may seem unlikely has become more and more common.
"What was going on in this neighborhood?" Codey asked several times. "Did they go to the neighbors' homes? Did anyone escape? I can't imagine what was going through their minds and the total despair that they felt."
* * * *
Color Lines in the Big Easy
September 25, 2005
Op-Ed Column
Challenges Ahead for New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS
THE HOUSE smelled like death, but Anthony Woods was talking about life. On a bone-dry day last week when the afternoon breeze rubbed at your skin like coarse sandpaper, Woods returned to a home where floodwaters swamped the first floor, soaking a cushion chair his mother had just purchased and leaving behind a muddy film on the African figurines displayed in a living room cabinet. Wafting over everything was the smell of rotting food.
Woods, 35 and a music producer, escaped those floods, barely, leaving his neighborhood on New Orleans' northwest edge for higher ground near Baton Rouge three weeks earlier. But now, in the baked sunlight of a drier day, he was back, with his mother, sister and a cousin, to assess his future.
"Well, it could be worse," he said, pointing to the water line halfway up his living room wall. "But we'll rebuild. This is my neighborhood. I'll be back."
Will he?
Many New Orleans residents ventured back to this drowned city last week, just as residents will inevitably return to the other towns and cities that Hurricane Rita ripped into. But, here in the city that calls itself "The Big Easy," returning residents already face an uneasy question not normally associated with the aftermath of a hurricane: How can New Orleans settle its questions of class and race?
The devastation by Hurricane Katrina raised all manner of concerns for New Orleans, starting with the most basic: Why build a city on land so vulnerable to floods?
But as many in New Orleans are discovering that question has become linked to issues of class and race.
There are no full-fledged, open debates, not yet. The discussions are subtle. They begin with hints dropped into the middle of discussions about the city's future or with brief comments that hang on the edge of ordinary conversations about flooded neighborhoods.
But the issues are real nonetheless. Beneath those hints and brief comments lies this potentially contentious set of facts. Many well-to-do residents of New Orleans and more than a few officials at many levels of government don't want to rebuild the neighborhoods most damaged by floods. Those badly damaged neighborhoods, with more than 100,000 homes, are where most of the city's non-white population lived.
People like Anthony Woods.
The new racial discussion in New Orleans does not cut easily along the old color lines of the civil rights movement. It is shaded by economics, class, and crime. Even the city's mayor, Ray Nagin, who happens to be black, conceded last week that his city will be smaller - perhaps losing half of its 480,000 residents because so many homes were destroyed.
What Nagin did not say when he made that prediction is what many in New Orleans already know: The most damaged sections of his city were black, poor and crime-ridden. It is those residents who are most likely not coming back.
Does this mean that New Orleans will become a Southern version of gentrified Hoboken or Washington's Georgetown, filled with white professionals?
"I hate to put it this way," a white business owner told me. "But poverty brings crime. And, while most of the people in the poor neighborhoods were black, I think it would be a good thing for New Orleans if those neighborhoods did not exist anymore. Most of the crime was in low-income areas. Those who don't have the means won't be back. That means there will be less crime if there are fewer poor people."
This man did not want to think of himself as a racist - he went out of his way to explain he was not. But consider what he was saying: He wants to rebuild, but without the poor and non-white.
What's striking is that I heard similar sentiments again and again last week, mostly from middle-class whites, most of whom considered themselves to be politically progressive and hardly fitting the mold of tried-and-true bigots.
But with the flooding came a new outlook.
Consider the words of a gay man named Karl, who lives in the French Quarter: "I think we need to have a more peaceful New Orleans. We can't do that with so much crime and drugs in those neighborhoods. We have a chance to fix our city now. We should do it."
Ironically, Anthony Woods, who is black and living in a poor, crime-infested neighborhood, said virtually the same thing when I spoke to him a day earlier. The only difference is that he wanted to rebuild his neighborhood, not get rid of it.
As he stood on his front porch, Woods gazed to his right, then his left, taking in the deserted homes still slathered with mud from the floods that rose six feet high. No one else had returned to the block. Except for the thumps inside from his mother and sister moving furniture, there were no other sounds.
The moment - as with so many others I witnessed here - was framed by a deep sense of loss. But Woods would have none of that. As I saw with so many others here who lost so much, Woods went out of his way to maintain a positive outlook. And so, as he tried to find the right words to describe what he was feeling, he adopted a line from that sunny baseball movie, "Field of Dreams."
"If they build it," Woods said of his city, "they will come."
I''s an inspiring concept perhaps. But the reality is hardly easy. Even without race and class issues, the city Woods wants to rebuild has deep problems.
The police department is a mess. In an interview, Police Superintendent Eddie Compass told me that he could "account for 80 percent" of his 1,750 officers.
Oddly enough, Compass considers 80 percent a success, not a failure that reveals 20 percent absenteeism in the midst of the city's hardest times. Put another way, try to imagine New York City with a 20 percent absentee rate by cops after the 9/11 attacks.
Meanwhile, New Orleans' water is still undrinkable. Vast stretches of the city are without electricity. And the number of homes with damaged roofs is so great that repair teams may have to be brought in from Texas - that is, if Texas can spare them after Hurricane Rita.
But fixing roofs and restoring water and electricity may be nothing compared to dealing with race and class questions.
Last week, officials of outlying, mostly white towns conceded that in the midst of the worst flooding by Hurricane Katrina they stopped large numbers of non-whites from crossing a Mississippi River bridge to escape and find dry ground. In several cases, the non-whites were turned back at gunpoint.
With that kind of terrible history, how do you rebuild a vibrant city that valued itself as a multi-racial mecca amid the South's deep racism?
"This city is one of the first experiments in multi-culturalism," said Art Haas, as he munched on a pizza in the French Quarter. "The people are gone, but the flavor is still here."
Maybe it's wishful thinking. But if New Orleans has anything going in its favor, it's that sense that things will turn out better, even as the city's levees once again falter, this time due to Hurricane Rita.
Across town, as Anthony Woods sorted through his soggy belongings, he found a house plant. It was still green, full of life, even though it has been soaked by the floods.
"This will live," Woods quipped. "It definitely got plenty of water while we were gone."
* * *
EDITOR'S NOTE: Mike Kelly recently returned from an 10-day visit to the stricken regions of New Orleans.
From 9/11 to New Orleans
September 11, 2005
Op-Ed Column
TOO MANY HOMELESS. Too few police. No water. No electricity. Whole sections of a city too toxic for rescue teams to enter. The dead left to rot on sidewalks. This is not just New Orleans.
It's the nightmare that 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean envisions if Islamic terrorists achieve their dream of setting off a nuclear bomb. Today, as America commemorates the fourth anniversary of its worst terrorist attack while coping with one of its worst natural disasters, Kean's vision is especially poignant.
Is America prepared for the worst? No, said Kean in a recent interview. After what happened in New Orleans, he said, America is far behind in preparing for such a massive loss of life, not to mention the prospect of highways clogged with people trying to escape and city streets under the control of marauding gangs of looters.
The former New Jersey governor and Drew University president who devoted most of the last two years to examining the 9/11 attacks admits to being haunted by the prospect of a nuclear attack by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida operatives. Such an attack would render an American city uninhabitable - like New Orleans right now. But as with New Orleans' worries about hurricanes, Kean argues that his chorus of warnings of nuclear terrorism are being ignored, too.
Last summer's report by the 9/11 Commission labeled nuclear terrorism America's "greatest threat." This summer, the commission's successor, the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, devoted an entire seminar to nuclear terrorism.
Is the rest of the nation listening? Are enough government officials prepared? As Kean watched televised images of frightened New Orleans residents pleading for help amid reports of inadequate policing, rampant looting and fitful confusion among government leaders, his mind kept drifting back to that nuclear nightmare. If this is what a hurricane can do in America, what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off?
"There is nothing good about a thing like this," Kean said of Katrina's devastation. "But it will force us to face the issue of response and how prepared we are."
Like those dire hurricane warnings that have been a staple of New Orleans life for years, the warnings of a nuclear attack by terrorists are not only plentiful, but increasing. And on this 9/11 anniversary, there are far too many parallels between the mess in New Orleans and predictions of chaos after a nuke is set off by terrorists.
But Kean raises an even more fundamental question: Will America continue to ignore, trivialize or simply dismiss those nuclear warnings in the same cavalier manner that New Orleans continually shut its eyes to its own vulnerability to hurricanes and floods?
Given what we've seen in the last two weeks, it's hardly surprising to discover that experts long ago labeled a hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the top three potential disasters facing America. The other chief disaster concern, besides an earthquake leveling San Francisco: A terrorist attack in crowded New York City that is even more devastating than 9/11.
In other words, a nuke.
"Bin Laden has repeatedly said he wants a nuclear device," Kean said. "He also says he would use it."
A hurricane is obviously not a nuclear bomb. But consider the similar tone in warnings: Long before Katrina swept ashore, New Orleans leaders - as well as officials in Louisiana and in the federal government - were repeatedly told the Big Easy was vulnerable to a big hurricane. Just as important, city leaders and others also knew what might happen after a major hurricane - namely, massive flooding from broken levees.
Why were those warnings ignored? And if one of America's most vulnerable cities was woefully unprepared for a hurricane that experts said was sure to come and cause widespread devastation, how can we expect the rest of the nation to prepare for a possible nuclear attack?
With that question in mind, consider some warnings about nuclear terrorism that ought to get the attention of America's leaders: The 9/11 Commission report described a 10-year effort by al-Qaida "to acquire or make" nuclear weapons. Yes, that's 10 years of hunting for nukes on the black market or trying to acquire bomb-making materials. Why has America been so slow to respond?
Even before the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden told followers that acquiring a nuclear bomb was a "religious obligation." Yes, religious. Yet, Muslim leaders have been virtually silent about the potential for such mass murder in the name of Allah.
In 1998, bin Laden associates told U.S. intelligence officials that their leader "was intent on carrying out a 'Hiroshima.' " Why wasn't this front-page news?
"There is no doubt the United States would be a prime target," the 9/11 Commission concluded.
That was big news when the 9/11 Commission report was published. But 14 months later, such a scenario is rarely talked about anymore in Congress, the White House or the Pentagon. Just like those warnings of hurricane devastation that cropped up in New Orleans from time to time, life moved on and people forgot.
Of course, the most ideal plan would not merely include preparing for nuclear terrorism, but stopping it before the fuse is even lit.
Here, the 9/11 Commission report - not to mention various experts worldwide - offers no fool-proof solution. The suggested options include stepping up the monitoring of former nukes - and bomb-making material - from the former Soviet Union to pursuing international partnerships with other nations to curtail nuclear research.
Perhaps the most successful efforts have come from counter-proliferation efforts that have shut down Libya's illegal nuclear program and cut Pakistan's illicit nuclear smuggling network.
After the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, efforts by terrorists to get their hands on nukes increased dramatically. Kean's commission found that by 2004 the CIA had identified "more than two dozen other terrorist groups" who were trying to obtain or build nuclear devices or other weapons of mass destruction.
"A nuclear bomb can be built with a relatively small amount of nuclear material," the commission report said. "A trained nuclear engineer with an amount of highly enriched uranium or plutonium about the size of a grapefruit or an orange, together with commercially available material, could fashion a nuclear device that would fit in a van."
The report went on to say such a nuclear device would easily fit inside the kind of mid-size cargo van used in 1993 by New Jersey-based Islamic terrorists who carried an ammonium nitrate bomb to the World Trade Center garage. When set off, that 1993 bomb did not topple the Twin Towers, but it blew a massive hole in the garage foundation and killed six people.
The consequences of a nuclear explosion, of course, would be far worse. "Such a bomb," the 9/11 commission report said, "would level lower Manhattan."
New York City claims to have an evacuation plan. But that plan already has problems.
Four years after the 9/11 attacks, the city's police and fire departments still do not have coordinated radio channels to communicate with each other. Imagine the chaos between firefighters and cops if a nuclear device went off? And if chaos ensued, would New York officials be left to adopt the same makeshift evacuation plan as New Orleans?
With TVs alive with pictures of desperate people trying to swim through flooded streets, Joseph Matthews, the New Orleans head of emergency preparedness, essentially washed his hands of responsibility.
"Our official policy is that everybody should take