Five months after Katrina, New Orleans comes to grip with its loss, and its future.

by Keith O'Brien, February 5, 2006

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Second in a series on the residents of South Telemachus Street. The first article appeared Oct. 16.

NEW ORLEANS -- The jukebox was scooped up last fall with all the other flooded belongings on the curb: moldy mattresses and ruined paintings, fetid refrigerators, and little Maggie Corson's discarded toys.

Cleanup crews are finally catching up with the mounds of debris that Hurricane Katrina left behind in New Orleans. The 300 block of South Telemachus Street -- a mixed-race, middle-class block in the heart of New Orleans's Mid-City neighborhood -- is as clean as it has been since the storm. Streetlights are on, and Finn McCool's, an Irish-owned pub on the corner, hopes to reopen in the next two months, complete with a new jukebox and bar.

But life is far from normal on this block. Just one home has electricity, and only one resident is living here. Life may be bustling in the Uptown section, where most homes escaped flooding, but not elsewhere. The French Quarter is open for business, but few tourists are there.

This is New Orleans five months after Katrina: still struggling to come to grips with what it lost and what it will become and preparing for Mardi Gras on Feb. 28 but nervously watching the calendar.

Hurricane season is only four months away.

Half the city's traffic lights are not functioning. In the few hospitals that are open, patients have to wait three hours to see a doctor. Less than a third of the city's restaurants have opened their doors, and ''now hiring" signs are everywhere. Dishwashers and fry cooks, bartenders and strippers -- you name it, New Orleans needs it. The people who used to fill these jobs are gone.

''Wanted!" reads one sign in the window of a French Quarter coffeehouse. ''Jazz musicians and caricature artists." Businesses have trimmed hours of operation. Hotels are short on housekeepers. Restaurants are short on everything. At Surrey's Café & Juice Bar, a popular Uptown breakfast destination, more than half of the staff have not returned.

This shortage is more than just another inconvenience for the 144,000 people living in New Orleans now. Mardi Gras -- perhaps the city's most important Mardi Gras ever -- is less than a month away, and the tourism industry is counting on it to bring visitors back.

In a typical year, Carnival season might attract 1 million visitors. Few know what to expect now. Darrius Gray, president of the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association, is worried that tourists might not have a place to stay. Of the area's 38,000 hotel rooms, Gray said, only 22,000 are operational, and thousands of those are filled with displaced residents.

Locals, meanwhile, are watching the calendar. Hurricane season has never felt closer in January than it does now. On South Telemachus Street, people talk about what will happen if another hurricane strikes, where they will go, and whether the levees will hold.

Liz and Carey Corson, who are living in Pennsylvania, do not want to bring their 5-year-old daughter, Maggie, back to a city where the levees are being rebuilt only to pre-Katrina standards. Other New Orleanians are rebuilding but frustrated by the interminable waits for electricians and city inspectors. Still others are confused.

In the past month, Mayor C. Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission recommended a four-month permit moratorium to give officials time to sort out which areas are worth repopulating. Nagin promptly disagreed. He recently urged residents to keep rebuilding. City inspectors, meanwhile, are making it easier for residents to rebuild by regularly revising damage assessments.

In these assessments, 50 percent is the magic number. Any home assessed as being more than 50 percent damaged must be elevated above base flood levels when it is rebuilt. Any home assessed as being less than 50 percent damaged can be built as is.

This is where things get tricky, said Greg Meffert, a senior aide for Nagin who is overseeing the permit process. Some people, Meffert said, want their houses assessed at more than 50 percent damaged to receive money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to elevate their homes. Others are just as determined not to raise their homes because of the cumbersome and costly nature of the task.

Thus, Meffert said, when in doubt, the city is often siding with residents, bumping assessments above or below the 50 percent threshold depending on what people want. ''There was this FEMA gasp as I publicly, basically, said, 'I'm not going to be objective here,' " Meffert said last month at City Hall in New Orleans. ''I want you to rebuild. If you want a political statement, that's what it is. I want you to rebuild."

It is a message that some residents are hearing. Buoyed by the knowledge that her church would pay to fix her flooded Telemachus house, Judy Scheurer, 50, a T-shirt saleswoman, walked into City Hall recently. She took her place in a long line snaking through the eighth-floor hallway and prepared to make her case.

As she saw it, her home was not 50 percent damaged, as the inspectors had initially determined, and she did not want to elevate her home as that assessment would require. The final call would be up to the city -- a city looking to residents as well as tourists as it struggles to rebuild.

Right now, New Orleans needs both.

''Who needs cabs? Tourists. Who drives cabs? Locals who aren't millionaires. Where are the cab drivers right now?" asked Ed Muniz, the captain of the Krewe of Endymion, the biggest of the city's Carnival parades. ''If you don't get conventions back to New Orleans, Mardi Gras back to New Orleans, the Super Bowl back to New Orleans, the Sugar Bowl back to New Orleans, it's going to dry up and blow away."


Local viability

New Orleans may be a tourist town -- the tourism industry alone was responsible for employing 85,000 people before Katrina -- but to locals it is a city of neighborhoods, some that flooded, some that didn't, some now fighting for survival.

City officials and urban planners agree: It's inevitable that New Orleans, once a city of 485,000 people, will shrink; projections say it will reach just half that total by 2008. The question is: Where will the repopulation occur? The mayor's rebuilding commission tried to address that issue last month, saying in a report that neighborhoods must prove their viability and that some areas may be best used as green space.

Community outcry quickly followed. In the city's mostly poor and black Lower Ninth Ward, where two levee breaches swept houses off their foundations, longtime residents such as Robert Richardson said they would sooner die than give up their homes, or what's left of them.

Not everyone in these neighborhoods wants to come back. Many, in fact, are now worried about a jack-o'-lantern effect: blocks of the city in which maybe one or two homes are inhabited and the rest sit in darkness. Nothing for the moment describes Telemachus Street better.

Houses here took anywhere `from 2 to 6 feet of water -- not close to the damage seen in Lakeview or the Lower Ninth Ward, but enough that almost all residents remain displaced.

Some are in Texas, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, and New York. Others are living in the suburbs of New Orleans and considering staying there. Five of the 50 people found on the block hope to be back in their Telemachus homes by the spring, and one man is there now.

''It's a mess," said Rick Leniek, who moved home last month. ''If you believe anything the . . . mayor says, you're stupid. Welcome home? If you come back home today, you're looking at a minimum of four to six months before you may get electricity. It's impossible. It's not going to happen."

This is a common complaint across the city. Entergy, New Orleans' power provider, says it has reconnected most of the city to the grid, but finding an electrician to do repairs is another matter -- and getting a city inspector to check the work even more unlikely. Meffert said the city had as few as two electrical inspectors at times, leading to long delays.

Meffert believes that will now change.

On Jan. 19, almost five months after the storm, the city suspended the need for inspectors, trusting electricians to do the work, a welcome relief for many residents who say they have waited weeks for an inspector's visit. This move, however, will probably do little to motivate people like the Corsons, who along with many families have yet to begin doing serious renovations in their home. The reason: Hurricane season is four months away.

''This summer," said Carey Corson, ''is not for us."


Risks in returning

Liz Corson, a schoolteacher, and Carey, a medical clerk, evacuated last September with their daughter to Media, Pa. They now want to return home. But concerns about New Orleans's levees have them thinking that they will remain in Pennsylvania at least until the end of hurricane season.

''That's what's stopping us, I think -- one of the big things stopping us from returning before, say, this summer," said Liz Corson, who returned to the city in January for the first time since August.

Colonel Lewis Setliff III, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the rebuilding of the levees in New Orleans, acknowledges that a risk does exist. Katrina, a category 3 storm when it made landfall and not the category 5 that was initially feared, left behind 164 miles of damaged levees in south Louisiana and 50 breaches, including five gaping holes now being repaired in Orleans Parish.

These breaches, ranging from 250 to 800 feet in length, will be repaired by the start of hurricane season June 1, Setliff said, using $750 million of the $2.9 billion appropriated by Congress for the recovery. The corps also plans to install floodgates at the city's major drainage canals, the sort of alteration that would have slowed Katrina's powerful storm surge.

But the ongoing repairs will only return the levees to pre- Katrina strength, Setliff said. Increased protection, which the corps is now studying, is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars and is probably years away. The corps will not have a final report prepared until September 2007.


Back to business

While some residents can wait to see how things develop, small-business owners do not have that luxury. Short-staffed, they are scrambling to reopen.

Along Uptown's merchant-lined Magazine Street, which is at a higher elevation and less flood-prone, some businesses are thriving. ''Dishwashers are getting paid what cooks got paid. Cooks are getting paid what nobody got paid, and I'm looking to get health insurance just to keep career-minded people," said Greg Surrey, owner of Surrey's Café & Juice Bar.

Despite these complications, he said, business is good. At Blue Frog Chocolates, another Uptown store, business is so strong that owner Ann Streiffer has actually doubled her staff. ''Magazine Street is hopping," she said. ''Traffic is really bad."

But not far away, streets are still empty. Loretta's Authentic Pralines, which once employed 13 workers, now has one, said third-generation owner Loretta Harrison. Her business, driven by tourists, is down 75 percent since reopening in late October, she said, and she is not alone in her plight. The storm has taught some business owners a powerful lesson.

''Don't put all your eggs in one basket," said Vy Banh, owner of Pho Tau Bay, a local Vietnamese restaurant that will reopen two of its four locations this spring, and a third in Lancaster, Pa. ''We love New Orleans. We're never going to turn our back on it. But we have to look around."

Back at Finn McCool's, Stephen Patterson, his wife, Pauline, and their business partner, Stevie Collins, talked recently about their options. Leaving New Orleans was never one of them.

In renovating the gutted pub, they had most electrical wires installed above last September's high-water mark, and the floor will be finished concrete, not wood. They are even optimistic that their crowd, or most of it, will return. At least they can count on a few neighbors on the block, including Judy Scheurer.

''What do you want to do?" city inspector Terry Willis asked Scheurer on her recent trip to the city permits office.

''I want to redo my home," she replied. ''It's not 50 percent damaged."

''It's not?" Willis asked.

''It's not," she said.

''Who says?"

''I do."

Willis looked at the photographs Scheurer provided. Three months ago, she was convinced she would never live there again. At the time, she was still haunted by the bodies she saw as she waded out of the city. Now she smiled as Willis agreed with her.

There was no need to elevate her home. She could start rebuilding. She could begin what was sure to be a long search for an electrician.