The Independent Special

The Independent: Ghost Town:
Bush returns to a place forever scarred by the wrath of Katrina

By Rupert Cornwell in New Orleans
Published: 29 August 2006

It was the storm that laid waste to an area along the US Gulf Coast about the size of England, in the process wreaking havoc on one of America's legendary cities. It also changed the perception of a presidency, perhaps forever.

Today George Bush returns to New Orleans, exactly a year after Hurricane Katrina, on his 13th visit since the storm, for an anniversary that has been designated a national day of remembrance. Katrina was not only the most expensive national disaster in US history, leaving an insurance bill for the devastation in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama of some $60bn £32bn). The total cost - human and emotional as well as economic - has been far higher still.

Some 1,600 deaths are now attributed to the storm. Some Gulf Coast communities were virtually wiped off the map. In New Orleans itself, half of the 500,000 inhabitants pre-Katrina have yet to return and many of them surely never will. Ray Nagin, the mayor, says population recovery will take five years, but that may be optimistic.

In some parts of New Orleans life has returned. The French Quarter is again aglitter with neon and sanitised sin, with signs proclaiming " Happy Hour, All Day, All Night."

A year ago, the Superdome, packed with refugees in scenes of Third World squalor, was a symbol of how the richest country on earth had failed its neediest citizens. Yesterday a last crew of workers was finishing the repainting of the roof, ready for the return of the city's NFL team. " Go Saints," a giant poster proclaimed, "Re-opening September 25."

But elsewhere the recent apocalypse is all too visible. The lower Ninth Ward, a poor black neighbourhood, is effectively abandoned, a frozen shapshot of the day the floods receded. But even in the once-prosperous white district a couple of miles north-west of the centre, almost all is desolation.

A few of the houses that last September were 10 feet under water are being restored, and a few have been pulled down - "We Tear Down Houses" reads an advertisement nailed to one empty home, three-quarters obscured by rampant foliage that has turned a trim suburban garden into a jungle. Everywhere there are piles of litter, and an atmosphere of sadness and palpable worry.

"We're still not prepared," said one New Orleanian. "A year on, and the same thing could happen again. Everyone blames everyone and so little gets done."

The bulk of those who have left the city are black and poor, with little financial stake in what, long before Katrina, was one of the worst-run cities in the country. In their absence, New Orleans' character, both ethnic and political, cannot but change.

A year after the hurricane - and the storm surge which breached the city's levees and left 80 per cent of it under water - a third of the debris has yet to be removed. Vast tracts of the all-but-obliterated Ninth Ward look as they did when the floods finally receded last October. They have not been rebuilt - and probably never will be.

The same may go for the standing of the President, as he vows today again to see through the rebuilding of the city, promising to his country that " never again" will it be unprepared for such a catastrophe. Nothing even Mr Bush's talented speech-writers come up with will make good the damage done. "Compassionate conservativism" was the slogan on which he was elected six years ago. But the image of him surveying the disaster from aloft amid the comfort of Air Force One as it made a detour from California to Washington definitively banished any such notions.

In those dreadful days after the storm, the authorities seemed not to grasp the scale of the disaster. Mr Bush's approval rating tumbled to below 40 per cent, where it has remained. The mess in Iraq, of course, had heavily contributed to his troubles. But Katrina delivered a coup de grace.

Since then things have improved - but slowly. Congress has allocated $110bn for reconstruction. But precisely how much has been spent is debatable. Housing plans have been developed, and Congress has passed an act setting up a Gulf Opportunity Zone. But the focus has been on privately owned property, not the public housing where New Orleans' poorest used to live. The levees have been repaired - but not to withstand the maximum Category Five hurricane that Katrina briefly was before it made land early on 29 August 2005. In other words, the flooding of New Orleans, for decades top of every expert's list of likely natural disasters in the US, could happen again.

For all this, Mr Bush, fairly or unfairly, is blamed. According to one poll this month, only 37 per cent of Americans approve of his handling of Katrina, compared with 42 per cent immediately after the storm. The consequences may become apparent in November's mid-term elections, at which the Republicans' control of both Senate and House of Representatives is at risk.

Senior Democrats have been swarming over New Orleans in the run-up to the anniversary, with a single message. The crisis had proved that their opponents were not fit to run the country.

Nature, however, deals in reality, not the statistics of political point-scoring. As New Orleans remembered Katrina, another hurricane called Ernesto was bearing down on Florida.

In this case, however, another Bush will be in charge: Governor Jeb of Florida, whose competence in matters of hurricanes even Democrats acknowledge.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1222344.ece

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The battle to ensure disaster will not be repeated

By David Usborne in New York
Published: 29 August 2006

Even before work could begin on repairing the damage caused by Katrina in New Orleans a year ago today, authorities first had to get rid of the murky and toxic water that in some places stood 14 feet deep.

After repairing damaged pump stations, it took 53 days to drain away more than 250 billion gallons. Since then the US Corps of Engineers have spent $352m (£186m) scrambling to repair some 220 miles of flood walls around the city and upgrade pumping stations.

Leaders of the corps can now assure residents that the levees today at least offer the same level of protection as before Katrina.

"I think we're in good shape," Don Powell, the Bush administration's co-ordinator of Gulf Coast rebuilding, said over the weekend. "There's no question in my mind, we're ready."

After last year's disaster, however, no one can pretend today that the old standards of the levees will be enough to protect the Big Easy against future big storms, and the process of rethinking and building up the system further has barely got under way. Indeed, damaging as it was, Katrina had actually eased to a Category 1 or 2 hurricane by the time it struck New Orleans.

The politicians in Washington, after initially lagging in their response to the post-Katrina crisis, have at least done their part. Roughly $5.7bn has now been appropriated for the reinforcing of the city's flood barriers. There is still no complete blueprint for the improvements, however, and nor have any contracts been awarded.

Under the terms of the financial assistance promised by Congress, the corps is obliged to build a system that will protect New Orleans against a one-in-100-year storm, of a type even more powerful than Katrina. It has until 2010 to complete the task.

Agreeing on achieving a 100-year standard was a milestone in itself, because it allowed the federal insurance programme to ease requirements on former residents to return to New Orleans and rebuild their homes.

The agreement meant thousands were spared from being forced to raise their houses on stilts.

Unresolved, meanwhile, is the extent to which the city and its neighbourhoods will be rebuilt as they were before last August.

Ray Nagin, the recently elected mayor, has backed away from proposals to shrink the city's footprint.

To do so would inevitably imply abandoning areas that are low-lying and which were disproportionately populated by poor blacks.

But it is predominantly those districts that today remain largely abandoned and forlorn.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1222345.ece

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The Katrina diaspora: Survivors' stories

The disaster in New Orleans scattered thousands of people across the US - and beyond. Andrew Buncombe caught up with some of the refugees

Published: 29 August 2006

They were hiding from the burning Gulf Coast sun beneath a white awning they had commandeered from among the Superdome's filth and chaos. They had found some seats which they had turned inwards - their backs to the madness around them - and they were sitting things out with their scant supplies, their bottled water and, most importantly, each other.

It was Friday evening, 2 Sept-ember 2005, when The Independent encountered the group of eight who, along with up to 20,000 other desperate people, had sought refuge from Hurricane Katrina in the stadium that was home to New Orleans' American football team. Some had been there since the previous Sunday afternoon - before the storm had struck - and for the previous four days there had been no running water, no working toilets, no air conditioning, no reliable information and increasingly little hope. The place was remarkably vile.

A year after Katrina, the stories of those eight people provide a remarkable insight into the ongoing impact of the hurricane on the lives of countless thousands of people across the US. That group of eight - young and old, black and white, a grandmother who had just retired and two teenagers expecting a child - are a microcosm of Katrina's diaspora, people who are still scattered as a result of the storm. Tellingly, of that group - four long-term residents of New Orleans, two who had just moved there and two tourists - none are still living in the city. Some have started new lives in new locations, others have returned home and are still traumatised by what they experienced. For each of the eight, their memories of Katrina and the time they spent in the Superdome shift from the surreal to the all too real.

Edith Hill, 63, and her daughter Jennifer, 32, are not planning to return to New Orleans anytime soon. Along with the rest of the eight, they were evacuated by military plane to West Virginia, where the Red Cross and local people took care of them. Jennifer remembers feeling that the military plane that flew them to New Orleans' chaotic airport was stuck in a holding pattern for what seemed like hours before it landed in West Virginia. But she was more concerned about her mother, who suffers from diabetes and who had been without her medicine for three days. She was eventually required to spend a week in hospital.

"My sister died - she was in [the Gentilly district of New Orleans], and my nephew who was with her. I have still not heard from my brother, who was living in the Lower Ninth. I lost all my family. I'm very angry," says Mrs Hill, who has now set up in home in Huntington, West Virginia.

And yet Mrs Hill and her daughter, along with her son Jonathan, who had become separated from them and was first evacuated to Dallas, have plenty of good things to say about West Virginia. The African-American family say they have been welcomed in their overwhelmingly white community, and Jennifer and Jonathan are set to attend college.

"I was born and raised in New Orleans - 200 years our family had been there - but there were never that many opportunities," said Jennifer, 32, who spent two years at Yale but dropped out to care for her sick mother. "I went back there [to New Orleans] earlier this year to collect some things. [I was struck] by the depression of friends who went back ... at the way the city was."

It is hard to describe the horror that existed inside the Superdome during those fraught days. Rubbish and filth were lying everywhere, the all-weather pitch was ankle-deep in discarded food, soiled nappies and rainwater.

People were forced to find makeshift lavatories wherever they could - sometimes just feet away from where others were stretched out. When one walked inside the stadium building the stench caused an involuntary vomiting reflex, while the acidic atmosphere made one's eyes sting and water.

Amid this horror, Linda Veches was trying to look out for others as well as for herself. She and her teenage daughter, Nicole Kruger, had come to New Orleans for a holiday. When the storm struck, their hotel sent them to the Superdome. Mrs Veches, 53, who suffers from a heart condition, was the one who found the tent and rallied the spirits of the others who took refuge beneath it.

It was not easy; one night a man who had allegedly attacked a woman and her child was beaten to death by a mob just yards from where the group was sitting. Mrs Veches had helplessly watched it happen. Days later the man's blood was still vivid on the concourse floor.

Back home in Minneapolis, Mrs Veches, a property investor, now tries to look at her experience with a broader perspective. "One has to make the best of a bad situation. You have to survive," she says, matter-of-factly. "There was lots of crazy stuff. You saw the worst of things and the best. Everybody has focused on the bad things but I keep reminding them that there was [also] good."

But her daughter Nicole, now 17, is still struggling to cope with the experience. Nightmares and anxiety have troubled her since she and her mother returned to Minneapolis, having also first been evacuated to West Virginia. She is seeing a therapist and takes tablets to help her sleep at night. "I have had post-traumatic stress disorder," she says.

"I get flashbacks to the Superdome, of being there, of seeing somebody get killed. [But] things are going well. I am working through it. This year I will be starting my senior year in high school. My friends have been supportive. First of all they were kind of interested, but now they don't talk about it because they know it stresses me."

Another of the eight still unable to sleep properly is Otto Ukele. He and his then girlfriend, Kim Wilson, had come to New Orleans with plans of starting a new life together. They appeared terribly young and playful as they sat in the Superdome with the six others and a stray dog they had found. Ms Wilson was recently pregnant. The couple had driven from Tennessee but they had barely been in New Orleans when the storm struck and they were forced to head for the Superdome.

In the aftermath the couple spent two months together in West Virginia, where Ms Wilson said she miscarried. The couple have since split up, and Mr Ukele returned to be near his family in Hill City, Tennessee, while Ms Wilson decided to stay in West Virginia.

By Mr Ukele's own admission, the past 12 months have not been easy. He has struggled to find work and to deal with what he experienced in New Orleans. Perhaps worst of all, he finds it hard to talk to anyone about it.

"[It destroyed] the relationship. It put too much stress on both of us," said Mr Ukele, 20, who is now working part-time and is expecting a child with a new partner. "[Looking back] everything is a blur. I can't sleep very well, with everything I remember and everything that happened. It's hard now because nobody in Tennessee went through that. When I am here I have to be quiet because nobody wants to talk about it."

Ms Wilson, who works at a McDonald's restaurant in the West Virginia town of Bluefield, also has a new partner. Like many forced to relocate by Katrina, she says she has been struck by the generosity of the people in her new community. She is determined to look to the future, and says she and Otto "have both moved on with our lives".

Though she believes the city's preparations for the storm were inadequate, Ms Wilson has praise for the response of the nation in the aftermath.

"I think the way our country acted and helped ... that shows a lot," she says, her opinion in stark contrast to that of many who felt abandoned after the storm struck. "The people in West Virginia and the Red Cross did not have to help. They did it out of the goodness of their hearts."

In contrast, Francette Izard, 52, still rages when she recalls what happened and the "incredible" way she and others were treated. A resident of New Orleans for more than 20 years, Ms Izard has since returned to her native France while she considers her future. She has a partner in New Orleans and has visited three times since the storm struck.

Speaking from La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast, she said: "It's terrible, terrible. It's unbelievable that after a year ... you would imagine some things would be done, and they're not. [Looking back] feels unreal, it has something of a bad movie about it. Some things are like a nightmare, but at the same time it has a reality if I think about it. I still get very enraged about the government, about the way they did not act to get people out. It is a mixture of unreality and feeling very angry, in the way that it was so unnecessary."

Ms Izard's friend, Stephanie Fontenot, 66, has also not moved back to the city in which she spent her life and raised three children. On that Friday evening a year ago, Mrs Fontenot spoke of the kindness that the others in the group had shown her, how Mrs Veches had almost magically conjured up some soap and water with which she could wash. She also spoke of the horrors of the Superdome. At times she wondered whether she would survive the ordeal.

"It's bad enough during the day, but with the arrival of nightfall it's pandemonium," she had said at the time.

Ironically, Mrs Fontenot probably had no need to go to the Superdome. She had ensured that her flat on the edge of the French Quarter was adequately supplied with food and plenty of water and, as it transpired, that part of the city did not flood when the city's levees were overcome. By contrast, inside the Superdome "it was despair everywhere".

Mrs Fontenot has since relocated to a place by the ocean at St Augustine, Florida. She returned to New Orleans in the spring to collect belongings, but has no plans to return permanently. She believes it would be too hard to find somewhere safe to live. In addition, she likes the people in St Augustine.

Like the other people she met in the Superdome that week a year ago - strangers who became good friends and who looked after one another when adversity struck - she is adjusting to her new life and to life after Hurricane Katrina.

"I have friends in Florida and I have met some really nice people," she says cheerfully. "There are so many of us scattered."

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1222347.ece