A Gulf ghost town

A WATER-STAINED clock hangs on a wall inside the Jackson Barracks Military Museum in New Orleans, its arms stopped at 9:40. That would be 9:40 a.m. Monday, Aug. 29, 2005, the day surging water from the Gulf of Mexico and lakes nearby flooded more than 250,000 houses in southeastern Louisiana. The stains on the clock’s bottom half show where the rising water settled in the museum -- about 12 feet high, or enough to turn the first floor into an aquarium.

While the National Guard cleans up the mess in and around the museum, the clock’s hands remain stuck -- an apt symbol for southeastern Louisiana. Six months after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to a 220-mile-long strip along the Gulf, New Orleans and its neighbors continue to have trouble putting one foot in front of the other.

Not that there aren’t signs of life. The city is in the midst of an eight-day Mardi Gras carnival. Commercial buildings across the city sport banners proclaiming “Now Open” or “We’re Hiring.” In some communities, the growing ranks of trailers and dumpsters are signs of neighborhoods rebuilding.

Other parts of the city, however, are ghost towns. In New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish, you can drive for miles without seeing an open business or a soul on the street -- except for workers removing debris. In the worst sections, such as the Lower 9th Ward, some or all of the homes and offices are besieged by mud and wreckage. The streets have been cleared of debris, but few people use them.

With billions of dollars in federal aid, insurance settlements and donations now flowing into the region, some civic leaders say opportunities abound. “It’s a pioneering kind of atmosphere,” said Ken Carter, a former mayoral candidate in New Orleans.

But the missing piece is people.

New Orleans has been losing residents steadily for 40 years, falling from 627,000 in 1960 to an estimated 462,000 in 2004. Hurricane Katrina -- along with Hurricane Rita, which landed in southwest Louisiana four weeks later -- turned the trickle into an exodus, driving out an additional 300,000. Many of them can’t move back because their dwelling places remain uninhabitable. About 120,000 owner-occupied houses were flooded in Louisiana, as were about 133,000 rentals, and thousands more sustained severe wind damage.

A disproportionate number of those forced out of New Orleans were impoverished, but the flooding also took a toll on blue-collar workers and professionals. The storms drove out about a third of the workforce from the New Orleans metropolitan area. As a consequence, even businesses whose offices weren’t flooded or blown apart have cut back their operations because their employees can’t get back into their homes. Resolving the housing problem is key to reviving the region’s economy.

Unfortunately, city and state officials haven’t made much progress on that front. Most property owners are still unable to decide what to do with their houses because they lack three critical pieces of information: how much aid they can collect, what restrictions the government will place on rebuilding and what improvements they can expect to the coastal protection system.

Katrina flattened the Mississippi coast too, leaving little more than foundations and oak trees. Floating casinos were ripped from their moorings in the Gulf and dumped blocks inland.

Yet there is a telling contrast between the activity in such Mississippi Gulf Coast towns as Gulfport and Pass Christian and what’s happening in southern Louisiana. In Mississippi, communities are close to finishing work on rebuilding plans. In Louisiana, they’ve just started.

The difference stems in part from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s quick move to get the rebuilding underway. He recruited former Netscape chief Jim Barksdale of Jackson, Miss., to lead the effort days after the storm passed. While Mississippi was developing concrete plans for coastal communities to review, Louisiana officials were lobbying the feds for aid.

But the problems in southeastern Louisiana are more complex and of a far larger scale than those in coastal Mississippi. Compounding the problem, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been slow to provide advisories on how high new or rebuilt homes must be raised to qualify for flood insurance. The data have arrived for some parishes, but the information for Orleans and three surrounding parishes won’t be ready until mid-March at the earliest.

It has also taken Louisiana far longer than Mississippi to line up the federal dollars needed to offer damaged homeowners a fair deal -- and give them an incentive to move to safer ground. In December, Congress approved $6.2 billion in block grants for Louisiana, an amount that state and local officials said was far too small. After weeks of lobbying, the Bush administration proposed to give Louisiana an additional $4.2 billion in grants, raising the pot enough for Gov. Kathleen Blanco to announce a $7.5-billion housing reconstruction plan last week.

Assuming lawmakers and federal officials approve Blanco’s plan, homeowners in and around New Orleans can start calculating whether they can afford to rebuild or relocate their homes. Next month, they should hear how high off the ground their rebuilt homes must be. State and city planners have also begun meeting with communities to discuss the new building requirements and the future shape of their neighborhoods.

Before the rebuilding effort starts in earnest, greater New Orleans will face one more hurdle. The city no longer has either the population or the tax base to support its former size, but local officials have been loath to close off any parts of town to reconstruction. The issue is divisive because flooding disproportionately hit African American neighborhoods -- not necessarily because they were lower but because they happened to be in harm’s way when levees cracked open. Two-thirds of the residences in the Lower 9th Ward were not considered flood-prone before Katrina. But more than 80% of the houses there were swamped.

The fickleness of the levee breaches has fueled a palpable sense of outrage among storm victims. This wasn’t the work of Mother Nature, they insist. The catastrophic flooding happened because the Army Corps of Engineers designed and constructed levees that couldn’t withstand the storm.

“We would have been fine had the levee not broken,” said Gen. Hunt Downer, assistant adjutant general for the Louisiana National Guard. In the case of Jackson Barracks, the telltale failure was along the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal. A huge chunk of the levee collapsed, sending a torrent of water into the Lower 9th. At Jackson Barracks, in the heart of the area, Downer said, the water rose more than 10 feet in 90 minutes and lingered for days, rendering most buildings uninhabitable. Its workforce of 1,200 is now 50.

“You go back to 1835, it never flooded,” Downer said of the historic compound. “Why would it flood now?”