Class, color are guiding the repopulation of New Orleans
_ G O D _
Worlds apart
Class, color are guiding the repopulation of New Orleans
by BLAINE HARDEN
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/10-05/10-23-05/b01pe632.htm
NEW ORLEANS
It was a Thursday, the first of September, just four days after Hurricane Katrina,
and floodwater stood seven feet deep in the living room of Robert Bouchon's big brick
house on Memphis Street in Lakeview, this city's largest middle-class, white
neighborhood.
The Bouchon family, though, had already assembled an interim middle-class life on the
outskirts of Houston, where Robert and his wife, Cathy, together with their three
young children, had fled in their minivan.
They moved into a furnished two-bedroom apartment in a gated enclave in a suburb
called Kingwood. They had enrolled the children in a Roman Catholic primary school
similar to the one that was still underwater in Lakeview. They had also called State
Farm Insurance to collect on their house and their BMW X3, a three-month-old SUV that
was submerged in the driveway back home. They registered online for assistance from
the Federal Emergency Management Agency and decided for the sake of family mental
health not to watch news coverage of "the craziness" back in New Orleans.
"Everything was out of control, so we just kind of put on blinkers to our little
Kingwood experience," Bouchon, 43, a soft-spoken structural engineer, said in a
recent interview as he sat on a sofa in his Houston apartment.
When Katrina blew in and levees gave way, the high water, in many neighborhoods, was
colorblind and classless. It clobbered Lakeview, a leafy and serene white area where
longtime residents cannot remember serious flooding, as cruelly as the Lower Ninth
Ward, a black neighborhood with a long, dismal history of high water.
But in New Orleans, where affluent whites live high and working-class blacks live
low, the privileges of neighborhood quickly asserted themselves. For many, race and
class predicted patterns of escape, dictating whether flight would be a nervous drive
out of town or a caged week of torment and humiliation.
These days, as planners and politicians look ahead, many realize that the future of
this city, which before the storm was more than two-thirds black and nearly one-third
poor, swings on two simple questions:
Are residents coming home? If so, which ones?
It now appears that long-standing neighborhood differences in income and
opportunity -- along with resentment over the ghastly exodus -- are shaping the
stalled repopulation of this mostly empty city.
subhead
On the same day the Bouchons moved into the apartment in Houston, Ora Goines, 59, a
retired hospital secretary, remained mired in chaos here, together with her daughter,
her son-in-law and her two grandchildren, who are 13 and 2.
Their one-story, wood-frame house was underwater on Delery Street in the Lower Ninth
Ward, and they had evacuated to one of the city's public hospitals, where Goines'
daughter, Germaine Mills, 33, worked as a clerk and where employee families had been
offered refuge.
But it soon turned into a prison, as storm water rose eight feet deep around
University Hospital. Power, plumbing and air conditioning failed, and backup
generators flooded. Most of the hospital's food reserves flooded before they could be
moved to higher floors.
With toilets out, management ordered everyone -- 500 family members and staff, along
with 110 patients -- to use buckets lined with infectious waste bags. They were
supposed to pour in bleach to kill the smell. But on the fetid seventh floor, where
Mills and her family were assigned, there was no bleach. By midweek, towering stacks
of those bags made the entire hospital smell like a sewer. Staff workers smashed
windows to let fresh air into the stifling building, which was later declared
unsalvageable.
Four days after the storm, with military helicopters lancing across the city, staff
members and their families were hungry, sweaty and stuck. Boats finally hauled them
away to buses on Friday. "I wouldn't say I was scared; I was angry," Mills said.
"Every day we got a different story about why the National Guard couldn't come and
get us."
Her anger wilted into exhaustion during a 24-hour bus ride to a church shelter in
Tyler, Texas. "Imagine sitting that long on a bus after what we had been through,"
she said. "Our body odors and the stench from a backed-up toilet on the bus -- it was
just awful."
subhead
Billions upon billions of federal dollars will be spent in coming months and years to
rebuild the city's levees, to support new housing and clean up the colossal mess.
There seems certain to be a massive increase in job opportunities, skilled and
unskilled.
Still, anxiety is building that New Orleans will not bounce back as Chicago did after
the fire or San Francisco after the quake. There is concern that it will be much
smaller, whiter, richer and more homogeneous: an anodyne, theme-park version of the
Big Easy dominated by highbrow restaurants and lowbrow bars of the unflooded French
Quarter.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin pleaded last week for everyone to "come on home," saying there is
no place else where they can find "red beans and rice and gumbo and all those things
that you love."
Displaced families -- from Memphis Street in affluent Lakeview that is 94 percent
white and from Delery Street in the working-class, 98 percent black Lower Ninth
Ward -- are struggling as they pick up the pieces of their lives and ponder the
sanity of taking the mayor's advice.
Should they bring themselves and their children back to a below-sea-level city that,
for all its sweet music and gastronomical allure, is largely a ruin, as well as a
sitting duck for the next big storm?
Courtesy of Katrina, these families have much in common. They are shellshocked,
scattered across the country and homesick. They are sick of insurance forms and
worried about how their kids are getting by without their friends.
But there is already a compelling difference.
Memphis Street families believe that, if they want to, they will probably be able to
rebuild in Lakeview and resume their lives.
Lakeview, where 66 percent of children go to private school and 49 percent of
residents have a college degree, was pumped dry within three weeks of the storm.
Memphis Street smells now of bleach, which kills mold, and resounds to the thwack of
crowbars and the whine of chain saws. Insurance adjusters have begun making rounds.
subhead
Robert Bouchon has already received a check for the $40,000 BMW he left parked next
to his pool in his back yard when the family fled to Houston. State Farm has since
hauled it away. He was the first on his block to hire workers to gut the first floor
of his house down to the studs.
On Memphis Street, many of his neighbors are also busy organizing a comeback. Water
has been turned back on and Gary Quaintance, three houses away from the Bouchons, has
drained unspeakable greenish-brown liquid from his pool and refilled it twice. Many
front lawns on Memphis Street have been piled high with kitchen and living room
ruins, awaiting garbage trucks to haul it all away.
For families from Delery Street, meanwhile, a realization is growing that the odds
of coming back get longer each day.
"My life is moving on," said Mills, who lives now with in-laws an hour outside New
Orleans in the town of Paincourtville, in Louisiana's sugar-cane country.
There, her husband, Terrelle, has a $7.50-an-hour job at an Ace Hardware store. Her
mother, Ora, has a $7-an-hour job at a Big Lots discount store. Her 13-year-old,
Kortney, is in a local public school, and Mills is planning to enroll in a nursing
program in nearby Baton Rouge.
"I got to go with the flow," said Mills, whose fury lingers over the hardship her
family endured while waiting five days for federal, state and city officials to
figure out how to get them out of a major hospital. "I can't say we won't go back,
but as of right now we are not going back."
In the Lower Ninth Ward, where more a third of residents lived in poverty and 6
percent had a college degree, a hastily rebuilt levee failed in late September to
hold back the storm surge of Hurricane Rita. Most of the place was again submerged.
Parts of the neighborhood, including the Goines and Mills house on Delery Street, are
still flooded and residents are still barred -- for their own safety, the city
says -- from coming back on their own to see their homes.
Ora Goines' car, a mold-infested 1999 Hyundai Sonata that is not insured against
flood damage, has been drifting around for weeks inside the chain-link fence that
encircles her side yard. Her house is still standing, but much of her block on Delery
appears to have been bombed, with cars flipped atop semi-collapsed roofs, telephone
poles snapped in half. Her next-door neighbor's two-story house was ripped from its
foundation and floated across the street.
Before Rita engulfed the neighborhood with water for the second time in less than a
month, Goines, her daughter Germaine and the rest of her family tried to go back to
see their house. Police would not let them get close.
Goines concedes that her house is a goner, and so does her insurance company, which
has cut her a check for $66,000. She says, too, that she is a goner, as far as New
Orleans is concerned.
"I decided that I don't have any use for New Orleans," she said recently in the
dining room of her son-in-law's father's house in Paincourtville. Like her daughter,
she sounds angry. "I wouldn't have thought like that, but it flooded, and I don't
trust New Orleans anymore."
subhead
Planners have raised the possibility of razing much of the Lower Ninth Ward and
turning it into a flood-plain park. It is talk that infuriates those who have been
forced to flee and are resigned to the necessity of bulldozers.
"I know they are going to have to tear my house down," said Joan Howard, 36, a
housekeeper, who lived across Delery Street from Goines. "But I believe it's only
right that they build me another house -- if I decide to go back. I know it's like a
war zone down there, mister. Everything is destroyed. But I got the flood insurance."
Howard and her husband, Danny, 50, a truck driver, live now in the western suburbs of
Houston, where they say they nearly emptied their savings account to come up with
three months' rent for a $527-a-month, one-bedroom apartment for themselves and
Howard's two teen-age children, Ashton and Ashley. They have furnished it with three
air mattresses from Wal-Mart and a kitchen table and chairs from Goodwill Industries.
Joan Howard's father bought them a big-screen TV.
Three times in the past three weeks, Howard and her family have tried to get back to
see their house on Delery Street. The first time, they got past police, wrapped
plastic bags around their legs up to their knees and waded. Howard said they had to
stop when the stinky water reached their knees. Two more recent trips failed because
their three-bedroom, one-story brick house, in perhaps the lowest corner of the
one-time swamp that is the Lower Ninth Ward, is still inaccessible without hip boots
and permission from police.
"Us being homeowners, this flooding has really thrown us on our side," said Howard,
who had been in her house for 11 years. "We wasn't poor really. We was really
blessed, but we had to work for it. We had a big, beautiful house."
The house still stands, unlike many on the street. Inside, the ceiling has collapsed.
Furniture, appliances and other contents appear to be have been run through a savage
rinse cycle, as in a washing machine with toxic water. Webs of mold are everywhere,
and the smell is horrific.
subhead
Robert Bouchon was one of the first residents to come back to Memphis Street. He tied
a canoe to the front porch of his house on Sept. 13, two weeks after the storm. The
city was officially closed to residents, but police and the National Guard were
quietly allowing Lakeview residents in.
"It was very hot and very quiet," Bouchon said. "The tops of cypress trees were
sticking out of the still water. There were no birds. It was pretty except for the
fact that, you know, it was your neighborhood and it was underwater."
The front door was swollen shut, but he used a log to break down a side door, which
opened onto the pantry.
"That's when it hit me," he said. "It was like a bad science experiment. The smell
was just awful."
Furniture had floated from room to room. An antique mahogany dining table, which
belonged to his wife's grandmother, had fallen to pieces. The water had risen high
enough to take the paintings off the walls, which were bare and stained black from
the flood. Mold had started to grow.
Boxes of brownie mix and bags of chips floated on the pantry floor. The Bouchons had
long planned and hurriedly canceled a birthday party for Emma, their 12-year-old, for
Saturday before the storm. In the refrigerator were 24 rotting hamburger patties that
Bouchon and his wife had prepared for the party.
It was to have been the first chance for 15 kids from the neighborhood to swim in the
Bouchon's new pool, completed just two weeks before Katrina.
After he drove back to Houston and told his wife, Cathy, about the house, she began
waking up at all hours of the night.
"I would picture everything that I owned floating in that nasty water," she said.
"Your mind can't stop. I was picturing the mold growing on my wedding dress."
subhead
A week later, Sept. 20, Robert returned home again. Memphis Street was impassible
because of fallen trees, but it was dry. Lakeview was still officially closed, but
authorities were letting many residents in.
In rubber boots and shorts, Bouchon slathered bleach on first-floor walls, found
that nearly all the family photo albums had been ruined and rescued the kids'
computer, which had been upstairs on the undamaged second flood and was fine. The
children had begged him to fetch their video games.
Two weeks later, he hired a four-man crew that spent two days clearing out soggy
sheetrock and dragging ruined kitchen appliances out to the front yard. As they
worked, he found his wife's wedding dress, which had blackish-green tendrils of mold
climbing up white satin, and hung it outside on the back porch.
As foul as the mess was, all the Bouchons wanted to do was go home.
"We miss our possessions, but mostly it is the neighborhood, our friends, the kids'
friends," he said. "It was so close."
He expects, too, that his business -- inspecting and designing foundations for
residential and commercial buildings -- will boom in the rebuilding of New Orleans.
He has already been asked to evaluate a number of damaged buildings.
But returning is not without its anxieties. What scares Bouchon and his wife is the
levee -- just a half mile from their house -- that failed on the 17th Street Canal
and deluged his neighborhood with outpouring from Lake Pontchartrain. A team of
engineers from outside the city has concluded that floodwater did not overtop the
levee; the barrier apparently gave way because of poor construction.
"Look, I am an engineer and I know how these things should be put together," Bouchon
said. "Before the flood, I had no reason to believe the levees wouldn't work. Now, I
have questions. This was not a natural flood, in my opinion. It shouldn't have
happened. If they just rebuild the levee the way it was, that's not good enough.
"We want the neighborhood to come back; we want the school to come back. We just have
to answer all these questions, and that will take time."
The Bouchon children -- Emma, Owen, 9, and Patrick, 7 -- have seen pictures of their
house, but their parents do not believe it would be good for them to visit.
"We won't take them there for a while," Bouchon said. "It would be so overwhelming."
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I intend to last long enough to put out of business all COck-suckers
and other beneficiaries of the institutionalized slavery and genocide.
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"The army that will defeat terrorism doesn't wear uniforms, or drive
Humvees, or calls in air-strikes. It doesn't have a high command, or
high security, or a high budget. The army that can defeat terrorism
does battle quietly, clearing minefields and vaccinating children. It
undermines military dictatorships and military lobbyists. It subverts
sweatshops and special interests.Where people feel powerless, it
helps them organize for change, and where people are powerful, it
reminds them of their responsibility." ~~~~ Author Unknown ~~~~
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