A Hot, Soggy, Grim Homecoming

George LePert pushed a curly, sweat-soaked tendril of hair back from his face and shook his head. The 29-year-old had just hauled a pile of sodden, muddy CD cases out of his house here in St. Bernard Parish, to the east of New Orleans.

In the oppressive heat, the stench of rot hung heavy in the air. “I’m not going through this again,” he said. LePert gestured back to the mud-blackened interior of his crumpled house on Dubarry Place. “Once I’m done today, I’m leaving for good.”

Across the way, Linda Griffiths watched her son pull his great-grandmother’s photo, caked in sludge, from their home of 12 years. “I’ll be back,” said the nurse assistant, rubber-gloved hands on her hips. “I was born here, raised here, my daddy is buried here and I will be too. It may take years, but I’m coming back home.”

Residents all along Dubarry returned to the street Tuesday, after officials reopened St. Bernard Parish to the public Monday. They came to salvage what they could from homes battered by winds, then flooded and buried in contaminated mud.

They worked with their boots mired in muck, sometimes grim and teary, often armed with a little black humor. “It’s not often you get to break into your own house,” said Terry Monaghan.

As the neighbors took in the devastation, many said the decision to stay in New Orleans or start fresh elsewhere was hardening into resolve. “I would love to come back here and will, but for the time being, St. Bernard Parish does not exist,” said Monaghan, a welder.

“I’m done here,” said LePert.

The decisions made on Dubarry Place will be repeated around New Orleans as its citizens return to take stock of their homes and their lives. Mayor C. Ray Nagin began inviting residents back to viable parts of New Orleans this week, but up to 150,000 houses will have to be torn down in parts of the city and in surrounding areas, such as St. Bernard Parish.

The demolitions will force choices that are going to reshape New Orleans. City officials will have to decide how to rebuild neighborhoods, where that should happen and to some extent, who will get access to the real estate. Families will have to decide whether it is worth coming back.

“New Orleans will rebuild, but it may well not look the same,” said Jim Schwab, a senior researcher at the American Planning Assn. in Chicago.

Nagin has said he expects a much smaller city of about 250,000, about half New Orleans’ previous size. “We are going to lose a significant portion of our population” in the next year to 18 months, Nagin said last week. He attributed that decline to the city’s reduced infrastructure.

Much of New Orleans’ reinvention will happen in neighborhoods such as Dubarry Place, where residents pulled on rubber boots Tuesday and began searching for signs of their lives before Hurricane Katrina, which hit Aug. 29.

This is a neighborhood of squat brick bungalows, chain-link fencing and Ford trucks. Before Katrina, daughters lived across the street from mothers, and cousins shared duplexes. Boisterous kids, lots of them, made all kinds of noise in the street.

“It’s so quiet now, there isn’t even a bird out here,” said Hope Callais, a family member who was helping Griffiths. Each bungalow bore a spray-painted X left by search teams looking for bodies. Yards lay encrusted in greenish-brown mud.

Griffiths, 50, is staying in Monroe, La., where she is renting a trailer. Tuesday’s visit was her first look at the house. “Devastating,” she muttered. Her family hadn’t wanted her to come, but she’s hardheaded, they said. Her son, Celestino Ortiz, waded into the house again and again, usually emerging empty-handed to take breaks from the stench and the heat.

“There’s just nothing to salvage, nothing,” said Griffiths as she waited outside in her orange gloves and black boots. “Seven hours’ drive and nothing left.”

But slowly they made progress: They found a silver tray her parents owned, a few bracelets and best of all, a lockbox filled with important papers. “That makes me feel better,” Griffiths said, but she worried about the two Chihuahuas she left behind.

“Man, I wish I knew if my dogs were in that house or not,” she said. Maybe, she hoped, an animal rescue team had found them.

Griffiths joked with her daughter Starla that since she had paid the rent Friday, before Katrina hit the next Monday, the landlord might give her a break when she returned to live in the house, or whatever he built in its place.

A question facing New Orleans is whether to rebuild on its low-lying areas, said Schwab of the planning group. Schwab said the city could rebuild the levees and establish tougher building codes, or restore wetlands in the areas and relocate people.

As New Orleans grew, it spread. Historic areas in the city slowly became more affluent and tended to be on higher ground. “Advertently or inadvertently, lower-income people and minorities tended to be pushed into areas where they were at higher risk,” Schwab said. If those people are moved, he noted, “fairness and social equity requires we have to make a really serious attempt to provide low-income for housing these people.”

The city and planning officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency aren’t anywhere near to making decisions. On Friday, FEMA hopes to conclude search-and-rescue missions for the New Orleans area, agency spokeswoman Alison Hadley said. After firefighters go through the standing houses, contractors can assess the housing stock. Then urban planning can begin. The questions will extend beyond architectural style.

Statistically, New Orleans has the highest percentage of native-born residents of any city in the United States, APA figures show. People such as Griffiths are born there, live there, die there. But there may be a substantial portion of younger people such as LePert who will not come back.

“It’s a real question that we have to get a handle on, so planners can have a clear idea of how big a city to plan,” said Schwab. “We’re seeing that given the chance to start anew, some people are taking it.”

One woman who had driven her minivan from Houston that morning was turning around to head back. “There’s nothing, nothing, nothing left,” she said, and put the car in reverse. Around New Orleans, people who consider leaving speak of hurricane fatigue, of exhaustion from the flooding, of worries about the kinds of jobs and schooling available in the months to come.

LePert, taking a break in front of the wreckage of his aunt’s house, said that loss drove his decision to relocate to Mansura, La. “I lost everything, everything,” said LePert, a stocker at a Super Discount store. “TVs, all my music, five computers. My boss doesn’t think he’s going to come back to open his business. I’ll find a temp agency in Mansura, keep working and rebuild on higher ground.”