My Storm: Managing the Recovery of New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

Introduction

3 INTRODUCTION I ARRIvED IN NEW ORLEANS ON JANUARy 7, 2007, THE 192ND anniversary of the historic Battle of New Orleans. I had been called to take command in a new and perhaps more daunting battle, for the life and soul of the nation’s most distinctive city. This was my first official day on the job as the “czar” to lead the post-Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. New Orleans has one of the richest racial and cultural tapestries in the United States. It’s where jazz emerged as an art form. It was a place of fame and fable. Tennessee Williams created splendid imagery for it. Marlon Brando gave it face and character in A Streetcar Named Desire. Great artists Louis Armstrong, Tina Turner, Josephine Baker, Mahalia Jackson, and Scott Joplin, and athletes such as football stars Marshall Faulk and the Manning brothers, were born or raised in the city. For many personal and professional reasons, however, few of these greats called, or call, the city their current home. New Orleans is a gem woven into America’s historic fabric. But New Orleanians, both black and white, prefer its fable, myths, and faded glory to grappling with the real issues and problems that afflict the city. Long before Katrina, New Orleans had descended from the South’s largest city in the 1940s and 1950s to a declining shell of a city by the 1970s, with rampant commercial and residential vacancies. It lost both luster and population to nearby Birmingham and Houston. The Mississippi River, the city’s artery for commerce, has also been its demon. Overflowing its banks many times, the Mississippi nearly ruined the city in 1927, a fate averted only by blowing up the dikes near the city and conscripting some of the black community to fight the flood waters. 4 Introduction Mississippi floodwaters have brought the city trial by water. Hurricanes have been at least as daunting and damaging. Originating in the Gulf of Mexico , a huge hurricane tore New Orleans asunder on September 29, 1915. The local levee district stated in a report, “The . . . 10-foot levees that are protecting the city should be questioned as not being high enough after the passage of this storm.” A parade of deadly hurricanes followed in the next half-century: Betsy in 1965, Bob in 1979, Danny in 1985, Florence in 1988, and Andrew in 1992, all preludes for Katrina in 2005. Oil drilling and pumping in the Gulf of Mexico, which in the 1970s seemed to be the city’s economic savior, removed ecologically valuable cypress swamplands , and the constant dredging and filling in of marshland has left the city even more vulnerable to storm surges that can overwhelm poorly constructed dikes. Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers technically supervised the New Orleans levees, five local levee boards oversaw this shoddy work. By 1960, the New Orleans populace and political leaders had learned to play “victim” to their economic woes by settling into passivity. For example, the port failed to adopt the modern technology of container shipping; ongoing sagas of political corruption sent scores of local administrators and politicians to jail; and official mismanagement promoted the construction of homes and commercial structures on marshland. Oliver Houck of Tulane University is quoted in the National Geographic, “Locals wanted the cheapest possible protection system; but it wasn’t cheap, it was just badly built.” In the 1960s, when Miami was learning that sprawling into sensitive marshland could endanger the city, and steering construction from areas adjacent to the Everglades, New Orleans was expanding into environmentally dangerous swamps east of the city. New Orleans has also played the victim to bad urban development by politicizing land use. Building permits were literally for sale in New Orleans. The city faced Katrina in late August 2005 with no up-to-date, comprehensive master land use and zoning plan, or even a decently staffed and funded professional planning department. When the storm hit, as Blanche said to Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire, “the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again, and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than this—kitchen—candle.” It was to this candle of a city that I came in January 2007. New Orleans had almost no internal administration , no confidence, and little civic leadership. Hurricane Katrina was a disaster of enormous size. Eighty percent of the city was damaged. No city in the United...