After Katrina: 'The Sanity We Have Now Is a Gift From God'

NEW ORLEANS (Aug. 29) -- By the time I arrived here from Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina hit, the Blackwater guards had settled in at the Sheraton on Canal Street. Some of them had rappelled into downtown from Blackhawk helicopters, or so they told us.

We never knew if that was actually true, or if their tale was meant to make us feel more or less secure. But what it certainly did was add to the sense that things were not yet under control. Directing me to the elevators across the lobby, the front desk clerk instructed me to turn left just past the guy with the semiautomatic rifle. Breakfast was pancakes outside at the Salvation Army truck. We were glad to have them.

The Gulf Coast, where I spent the first week after the storm, had been pummeled in ways that shocked even the most experienced hurricane hand. I was working for USA Today at the time, partnered with a colleague who'd already lost his first rental car when the surge hit his beachfront Holiday Inn in Gulfport, Miss. We had a dozen or so hurricanes between us. Still, the vistas Katrina left behind were nothing short of stunning.

In Waveland, Miss., a coastal town of 7,000, every building downtown had been reduced to rubble. Just two landmarks stood stubbornly amid the debris: the tiled steps leading to the slab from which City Hall had vanished, and the commemorative sign thanking volunteers who rebuilt the structure in 1969 after Hurricane Camille roared through. Katrina was not above cruel jokes.

As bad as it was on the Gulf Coast, it was hard to find the right words to describe the situation in New Orleans. The Walmart, stripped by looters who included city cops, was now under 24-hour guard, even though there was nothing left to steal. Reports of more shootings still swirled, although by that point the city was virtually empty save for the military and officers from an array of law enforcement agencies from other states. Rumors grew so wild that one -- my favorite -- had sharks from Lake Pontchartrain swimming the streets of the affluent neighborhood of Lakeview.

But the phantoms were unnecessary. The real, hard numbers are plenty shocking on their own, even today. Katrina killed 1,836 people in Louisiana, another 221 in Mississippi. In the New Orleans metropolitan area, more than 182,000 homes and office buildings were destroyed. Damage figures ran to $100 billion. To say the events were unlike any disaster that has ever befallen an American city -- a profound statement on its own, for being true -- has now become cliche. New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast are fundamentally changed. Its residents as well, but not just by the storm. The road back has left its marks, too.

"It's like a death," says Tracie Morris Schaefer, a photographer who documented the stories of the holdouts for a traveling exhibit called "Why I Stayed."

"Everybody I know is a little different. Friends you never thought would get divorced are divorced. Friends you thought were better off financially couldn't rebuild. My mom was dealing with Alzheimer's, but Katrina pushed her over the edge."

Maurice Sholas, 40, a Harvard-trained rehabilitative pediatrician forced to relocate to Atlanta, calls Katrina the great equalizer. "I have resources, friends and family. I'm educated, politically connected," he says. "That gave me a false security that I would be fine. I would not be fine."

'How Is My Life Different? How Is It Not?'

It took more than three weeks to finally pump New Orleans dry again. With the power out, nightfall fell like a curtain and was eerily silent. The most frequent noise, aside from the rumbling of National Guard jeeps, was the lonely barking of abandoned dogs.

Mayor Ray Nagin holed up in the Hyatt Hotel, across the street from the Superdome, where 26,000 residents, mostly poor and black, sought refuge in conditions that descended into chaos. The police chief, Eddie Compass, did his bit to feed the rumor mill by suggesting that a baby had been raped there.

Every day or so, Nagin emerged to brief the media. At one session, he announced that a selection of Cadillacs "appropriated" by some New Orleans police officers -- the force lost 500 squad cars to the flood -- were being returned the dealership, with thanks. A few days later, Nagin announced his police chief, by then under siege, was stepping down. Nagin hung on for another 4½ years before exiting the stage last spring, much to the relief of his worn-out constituency. The Hyatt, battered severely, never reopened. Renovations finally got under way this month.

For those affected by the storm, all of life today falls neatly into two categories: pre-Katrina and post.

Post-Katrina, Joe Landry is a municipal court judge. Pre-Katrina he worked as a part-time city prosecutor. The federal and state courts were displaced for months, but the municipal court reopened that October. With no furniture. Everyone sat on the floor. The lawyers wore shorts. The pre-Katrina docket had disappeared with the flood. The new docket consisted mostly of citations for curfew violations and public drunkenness.

"I understood the intoxication better than the curfew violations," he says. "It was a time when a whole lot of alcohol was consumed just to numb the pain."

Landry, 54, and his wife, Kay, 53, lucked out and secured a spare bedroom in Baton Rouge for the evacuation. Five adults and a dog wound up sleeping in it for five weeks.

After the storm, he launched a flat-bottomed boat from the interstate and headed toward Lakeview, where his extended family lost 12 houses. "I'll always remember that first sight," he said told me recently in the living room of his rebuilt house. "A gentleman, dead, floating, tied by his ankle to a street light." (Landry had planned to move into rental property he owned in western Louisiana, but Hurricane Rita polished that off. "Just to make sure we lost everything we owned," he said.)

Landry showed me the water line, halfway to the ceiling, just below a shelf where "Rising Tide," the story of the great Mississippi River flood of 1927, lay on its side. Another bit of Katrina humor? New Orleanians would beg to differ. The hurricane did not flood their city -- the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for that because faulty levees gave way. A federal judge agreed, and if you try to talk about what Katrina did to their city, you will be corrected.

The events of Aug. 29, 2005, led to the largest displacement of an urban population that the nation has ever experienced. Once scattered across the country, people stayed on the move. For David Payton they carried away with them his dream of running for public office, which disappeared when his political base dissolved in the diaspora. Payton himself, now 45, moved nine times. Steve Himelfarb moved six. Known locally as the Cake Man, he owned the Cake Cafe in the French Quarter. Both survived the storm, but not the drastic hike in rent that followed in Katrina's wake. Himelfarb, 47, gave all of the cafe's food to the police and decamped for New York in search of work so he could save enough to rebuild his business.

"How is my life different? How is it not?" he asked when we met at the new Cake Cafe at the corner of Chartres and Royal in Foubourg Marigny, just outside the Quarter. He described the interim before he reopened in 2007 as "living in a bad B movie." But he would not change the experience. "I was more alive and aware at a pure psychological level than I had been for a long time."

The Upsides of Anger

Cheryl Wagner, a writer, distilled the frustrations of those early post-Katrina months in her 2009 memoir, "Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around":

So when the hammer breaks in your hand and you drive to the hardware store to replace it but the hardware store flooded and never reopened and you finally find a place that is open and you have to get a thirty-dollar hammer or no hammer at all and you suck that up and grab the last one and head to the checkout and the telephone is still out so they can only take cash and you go to the ATM and it's smashed and then you finally somehow, someway get cash and go back and get that golden hammer, but also a nail in your tire, don't get mad. Just take the deepest breath of your life and figure out how to get that tire fixed.

The Times-Picayune, which won the Pulitzer Prize for its Katrina coverage, has done its own part to capture the nightmarish and seemingly endless application process homeowners must survive to qualify for federally funded grants to finance the reconstruction of storm-damaged homes. The newspaper dubbed the program, called Road Home, "the hellish Inquisition."

Rage became one of the most useful byproducts of the endless tangling with dysfunctional bureaucracy, and spawned thousands of new civic activists. Pre-Katrina, Patricia Jones, 35, was a mom with her own quiet bookkeeping and tax-preparation business in the mostly impoverished Lower Ninth Ward. Post-Katrina, she's the outspoken head of the Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association, prodding, poking and agitating to get help rebuilding the Lower Nine, where fewer than 3,000 former residents -- about 30 percent of the total -- have returned.

"The Road Home? We thought, fine, we'll fix up our house quick and be back. It was delay after delay. Then it was, wait a minute, how much are you going to give me? First it was $125,000. Then it was $70,000. I said, 'Come again? I just refinanced my house. My house was built in 2000, it's not even old.'"

Jones moved on to the Small Business Administration and obtained a loan to close the gap between the Road Home money and the cost of repairing the house. The ground shifted again at the closing. Her family could have the loan only if they used it to pay down the Road Home grant.

"I could see why people walked away," she says. "We've been hit from so many angles, the partial sanity we have now is a gift from God.'"


'I Was a Victim Then. I'm a Survivor Now'

If anyone should have been consumed by anger, it was Steve Gallodoro, a St. Bernard fire captain and safety inspector. His 82-year-old father was among the elderly patients who drowned inside St. Rita's Nursing Home, which failed to evacuate. Gallodoro discovered the bodies.

When I met him in 2005, a week or so after that grim event, he painfully recounted the reassurances he'd had from the nursing home owners that led to the family decision to leave its patriarch in their hands. I saw Gallodoro again last week. "Katrina didn't turn me into an irate person," he said. "I was a victim then. I'm a survivor now."

Gallodoro had lived all his life in St. Bernard. He raised his kids a few doors down from his brother, Joe, and his sister, Cheryl. Sixty miles of interstate separates the siblings now. Still a captain on the parish force, he commutes in from his new place in Mississippi. Both Cheryl and Joe moved north of Lake Pontchartrain.

"There isn't a person who went through the storm who hasn't second-guessed themselves," he said. "Those who left are wondering if they should have moved back. If they came back, they wonder if they should leave."

Gallodoro's move was made easier when his three children and four grandchildren followed him to Mississippi. They live nearby.

"It doesn't feel like our old neighborhood," he says. "But it feels like home."