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AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY |
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by Nancy Gibbs
The Aftermath By NANCY GIBBS Sep. 12, 2005 New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge three meters below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola. A city built by rumrunners and slave traders and pirates was never going to play by anyone's rules or plan for the future. So as Katrina, wicked and flirtatious, lingered in the Gulf with her eye on the town, many citizens decided they would stay, stubborn or stoic or too poor to have much choice. As for the ones packing up to go, disaster officials told them to take a look around before they left, because it might never look the same again. But by the time President Bush touched down in the tormented region on Friday, more than just the topography had changed. Shattered too was a hope that four years after the greatest man-made disaster in U.S. history, Americans had got smarter about catastrophe, more nimble and visionary in their ability to respond. Is it really possible, after so many commissions and commitments, bureaucracies scrambled and rewired, emergency supplies stockpiled and prepositioned, that when a disaster strikes, the whole newfangled system just seizes up and can't move? It may be weeks before the lights come back on and months before New Orleans is mopped out, a year before the refugees resettle in whatever will come to function as home, even without anything precious from the days before the flood. But it may take even longer than that before the nature of this American tragedy is clear: whether the storm of '05 is remembered mainly as the worst natural disaster in U.S. history or the worst response to a disaster in U.S. history. Or both. Watching helpless New Orleans suffering day by day left people everywhere stunned and angry and in ever greater pain. These things happened in Haiti, they said, but not here. "Baghdad under water" is how former Louisiana Senator John Breaux described his beloved city, as state officials told him they feared the death toll could reach as high as 10,000, spread across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. No matter what the final tally, the treatment of the living, black and poor and old and sick, was a disgrace. The problem with putting it all into numbers is that they stop speaking clearly once they get too big: an estimated half a million refugees, a million people without power, 30,000 soldiers, up to $100 billion in damage. "This is our tsunami," said Biloxi, Mississippi, Mayor A.J. Holloway. The overstatement is forgivable, for at some point suffering becomes immeasurable, reduced to a hopeless search for a place to sleep, or a bottle of water or a body to bury. Mother Nature behaved as everyone warned one day she would, but human nature never fails to surprise. Stripped of safety and comfort, survivors made their choices: greed, mercy, mischief, gallantry, depravity or a surrender to despair. So nurses hand-pumped the ventilators of dying patients after the generators and then the batteries failed, while outside the hospitals, snipers fired at ambulances, and invading looters with guns demanded that doctors turn over whatever drugs they had. Hijackers shot the tires of fleeing vehicles, slapped the spares on after the owners escaped and drove the cars away themselves. Some police officers battled the looters; others joined them. As the floodwaters rose, EMS technicians told Time they were left stranded at the downtown Hampton Inn by panicking cops who jumped into their private cars to flee the city. In the wretched Superdome, where several people died before they could get out, a young violinist took out his instrument and played a Bach adagio. "These people have nothing," he told a Los Angeles Times reporter. "I have a violin. And I should play for them." Around the country, people watched the scene in growing horror, as babies and old people and diabetics and those worn out surviving the storm died on live television for all to see. Churches started assembling comfort kits; 500,000 hot meals a day are being prepared by Red Cross disaster volunteers. "I just had a gentleman walk in off the street and write a $10,000 check," said a Red Cross director in Massachusetts. She'd never seen him before; he had no family down there. He just said it seemed the right thing to do. The private response was all the more urgent because the public one seemed so inept. Somehow singer Harry Connick Jr. could get to the New Orleans Convention Center and offer help, but not the National Guard. Bush praised the "good work" on Thursday, then called the results "not acceptable" on Friday. By then, 55 nations had offered to pitch in—including Sri Lanka, whose disaster scars are still fresh. "Get off your asses, and let's do something," New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin raged in a radio interview that he ended in tears. But he of all people was in a position to understand the odds. A city known both for its charm and its rot, not just from the termites consuming whole neighborhoods but from a corrupt police force, dissolving tax base, neglected infrastructure, rising poverty and a murder rate that inspired old-timers to pack a gun beneath their tuxes on their way to the Mardi Gras parade, could hardly have been less equipped to cope with a catastrophe that everyone knew was coming. "Half of Louisiana is under water," former lawmaker Billy Tauzin used to say, "and the other half is under indictment." Three of the top state emergency officials were recently indicted for mishandling disaster funds. Louisiana staggered under the blow, but others all along the Gulf Coast were ravaged as Katrina, still spitting tornadoes and spraying wood and shingles and glass, made her way slowly up to Canada to die at last. A sudden twirl coming ashore meant that the Mississippi coast got smacked the hardest. In many towns, what the winds spared the floods claimed, as the gusts flung water into the streets in storm surges as high as 8 m. "It was like the houses were playing bumper cars around here," said Biloxi fisherman Alan Layne. There were cemetery coffins tossed around the beach, and disemboweled slot machines, and boats perched up in trees like ridiculous overweight birds. In Gulfport, Mississippi, the sea-salty air smelled of corpses. At one Catholic church, only the foundation remained—and a sign that read mass at 9 a.m. bring a chair. John Padgett, a boat captain in Pass Christian, Mississippi, who runs supplies to the off-coast oil rigs, saw his cottage disappear. But he was able to throw his dogs, a tent, a sleeping bag and a Coleman stove and lantern into his pickup before the storm arrived. He's living in the woods just north of Gulfport off Highway 49. "Everything I own now is in that truck," he told Time, "but the shelters are too overcrowded and uncomfortable. I was born and raised on this coast, so I'm a good little redneck. I got a bow and arrow to kill food, and that's what I'm going to be eating." Where will he go from here? "I don't know," he said. "But at least in the woods I don't have to smell the dead bodies." But it was in new orleans where the cameras converged, a city that had braced for the worst, then briefly exhaled when it looked as if the threat had passed. Several hours after the storm moved through on Monday, some streets were essentially dry. Then shortly after midnight, a section almost as long as a football field in a main levee near the 17th Street Canal ruptured, letting Lake Pontchartrain pour in. The city itself turned into a superbowl, roadways crumbled like soup crackers as the levees designed to protect them were now holding the water in. Engineers tried dropping 1,400-kg sandbags, but the water just swallowed them. As the days passed, the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the levees, admitted they weren't able to assess what might work. Part of the problem was a lack of heavy helicopters; the choppers were all busy doing search and rescue. The levee breach left 80% of the city immediately submerged and 100,000 people stranded. Canal Street lived up to its name. As the temperature rose, the whole city was poached in a vile stew of melted landfill, chemicals, corpses, gasoline, snakes, canal rats; many could not escape their flooded homes without help. Among those who could, only a final act of desperation would drive them into the streets, where the caramel waters stank of sewage and glittered with the gaudy swirls of oil spills. A New Orleans TV station reported that a woman waded down to Charity Hospital, floating her husband's body along on a door. For the first time ever, a major U.S. city was simply taken offline, closed down. Food and water and power and phones were gone; authority was all but absent. Most of the people left to cope were least equipped: the ones whose Social Security checks were just about due, or those who made for the Greyhound station only to find it already closed, or those confined to bed or who used a wheelchair. "We're seeing people that we didn't know exist," declared U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael Brown in a moment of hideous accidental honesty. Rescue workers could hear people pounding on roofs from the inside, trapped in attics as the waters rose. The lucky ones were able to cut holes with knives and axes to reach the open air. Emergency workers hovered from house to house, plucking out the living, leaving bodies behind. The potential for a disaster in the air was such that pilots told Time reporter Adam Pitluk, who was embedded with them, to help scan the skies for stray news helicopters and sightseers in Cessnas among the flocks of military craft. "It was like a pickup game," said U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander Bill Howey, a helicopter pilot. "You got three or four different types of Army helicopters, same for the Navy. Then there's Customs, Coast Guard, Marines, and then there are the news helicopters." While rescuing a group of blind people trapped for five days, a Marine helicopter pilot told Time's Tim Padgett, "It's like flying into a hornets' nest." When Dr. Greg Henderson, a pathologist turned field medic, arrived at the Convention Center on Friday, he was the only doctor for 10,000 people. "They're stacking the dead on the second floor," he told Time by phone. "People are having seizures in the hallway. People with open running sores, every imaginable disease and disorder, all kinds of psychiatric problems. We have people who haven't had dialysis in several days. They'll be going into kidney failure. I just closed the door on a man who ran out of medicine for his kidney transplant. Very soon his body is going to go into rejection." Henderson went in with New Orleans police, and when people saw him in scrubs, they surged at him from every side. He tried to tend the sickest and the babies first. "The crowds here have gotten a bad rap. There are not many human beings you could cram into a building with 10,000 others, in 105° heat [41°C], that wouldn't get just a little pissed off." He tried to get them settled and asked them to show him the sickest. "And they lead me. It's not a subtle thing. It's generally the ones who are seizing on the floor." Helicopters airlifted the sick from around the city to the airport, converted into a field hospital where patients were being pushed around on luggage carts and triaged for evacuation. At Lakefront Airport on the edge of the city, fights broke out for seats on the departing choppers. "The gang bangers," said Jimmy Dennis, 34, a Lakefront Airport fire fighter who had been up for two nights trying to keep order, "couldn't understand that we had to get the sick people out first." Frightened, the small band of fire fighters called in 10 New Orleans police with semiautomatic weapons to settle the crowd. In the few hospitals left operating, the staff fought to keep people alive until rescue came, only to have days pass with no relief. At Charity Hospital, in the dark but for a lone generator and dying flashlights, nurses who hadn't bathed in days tried to sterilize themselves with hand sanitizer. Two patients on the parking deck died waiting to be evacuated. Caregivers wept as they begged for help that did not come. "They'd been keeping these patients alive for a week with very little in terms of resources," says Time contributor and CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, "and to see them die on the deck—it really was very difficult." After Gupta arrived by helicopter on Wednesday, hours passed before it was safe to ferry him past the snipers and across a putrid moat into the hospital building. With a full evacuation still several days away, "people came to me and said, ‘Why haven't they taken care of us? Why did they forget us?'" The food supply was down to beans and a few raw vegetables; candy vending machines had long since been emptied. "One of the guys here has been trying to call FEMA, and all he gets is a busy signal or voice mail," Gupta said. The stress was so overwhelming that perhaps half a dozen hospital staff members had to be treated in the psychiatric ward. The basement morgue was flooded, so the growing numbers of bodies were stacked in body bags in the stairwells. The seething center of the angry Crescent City was the Superdome, refuge of utterly last resort for 25,000 people who had waited out the worst of the storm while the sheet-metal roof peeled like fruit, letting the rains pour in. Soon there was no light, no air, no working toilets. Reports came that four of the weakest died that first night. An elderly man, playing cards and seemingly fine, threw himself over a railing inside the stadium and committed suicide, witnesses told TV reporters. Members of the city's EMS team made their way there only to find anarchy. "We tried to start triaging and getting the special needs in one section," a technician recalls, but his team was overwhelmed by the hungry crowd and retreated with armed guards to Army trucks outside. When a 4th Infantry Division helicopter arrived, all but three of the evacuees had to be wheeled onto the Chinook, the elderly panting like animals suffering heatstroke, their mouths sagging and their tongues heavy and swollen. One paraplegic woman looked as if she had been broiled, her motionless legs beet red on the front and ghostly white on her calves. The evacuees were frightened, of both their plight and the booming helicopter that was there to save them. As the chopper pulled away, mothers down below screamed after it for rescue, holding their children high and sobbing. Opportunity and desperation make a flammable mix. all along the coast, people broke into parked cars to siphon gas. Police reported that a man in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, shot his sister in the head in a fight over a bag of ice. A rescue team from Texas that had ferried hundreds of people to safety in their flat-bottom boats were told by a New Orleans sheriff that unless they were armed, they should get out of the city. At one point, rescuer Randy White says, "Someone yelled out to me, ‘If you don't get us out by 12 o'clock, we're going to start shooting all the rescuers.'" One man was standing on Canal Boulevard with water up to his chest wearing a mink coat that he had liberated from a store. "This natural disaster is beginning to look like a Watts riot," said a worried congressional aide in Washington as he watched the chaos. "There's something really ugly going on here, something wrong at a deeper level." One thing that was wrong may have been that right and wrong had jumped their tracks. For all the scorching images of armed thugs making off with sneakers and wide-screen TVs, the larger reality wasn't as simple as the President's call for "zero tolerance"of looting. Was it wrong to take a bottle of milk from a store when your baby was sobbing and there was no way to pay for it if you tried? When cans of food are scattered in the debris, does taking them amount to theft, or salvage? At one point, police with guns drawn escorted Dr. Henderson through a Walgreens as he emptied the pharmacy of drugs to use in the Ritz-Carlton's French Quarter Bar, now turned makeshift clinic. Dudley Fuqua, tall and lean in baggy blue shorts, broke into neighborhood shops and took canned goods, frozen chicken and ribs and cigarettes to his neighbors, who called him a hero. "I was in a building with no food, no water for five nights," Fuqua's neighbor Mohammed Ally, 70, told Time's Brian Bennett. "They were taking care of the elderly people." Fuqua saw a neighbor using his empty refrigerator as a rowboat to paddle through the water to get help for his pregnant wife. When the buoyant refrigerator tipped, Fuqua dove off a second-story balcony to help and sliced his feet on a rain gutter. "I was going to make sure everyone was O.K." Only by Friday did some palpable help arrive, in the form of thousands of National Guard troops and lumbering convoys of supplies. Virtually alone, Lieut. General Russel Honore, commanding Joint Task Force Katrina, whom Mayor Nagin referred to as the John Wayne dude, seemed to be moving pieces into place. He was out in the streets with his troops, directing convoys and telling anxious Guardsmen to keep their weapons pointed down. He "came off the doggone chopper," Nagin said, "and he started cussing, and people started moving. And he's getting some stuff done. They ought to give that guy full authority to get the job done, and we can save some people." Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless. Furious critics charged last week that the government had not heard the warnings. Instead it cut the funds for flood control and storm preparations, mangled the chain of command, missed every opportunity. And an angry debate opened about how much the demands of the Iraq war, on both the budget and the National Guard, were eating into the country's ability to protect itself at home. Louisiana Republican Congressman Jim McCrery—working the phones with FEMA, the Army, the White House, state officials—argues that Katrina revealed how much doesn't work. "Clearly, with all the money we've spent, all the focus we have put on homeland security, we are not prepared for a disaster of this proportion whether it's induced by nature or man."
And this time a crucial
consolation was missing. After 9/11, whatever the evidence of
intelligence failures, many people still saw that attack as almost
unimaginable, so brutal and brazen an assault. But Katrina was in the
cards, forewarned, foreseen and yet still dismissed until it was too
late. That so many officials were caught so unprepared was a failure
less of imagination than will, a realization all the more frightening in
light of what lies ahead. For if we couldn't help our citizens in an
hour of desperate need, how well will we do in six months or a year,
when many are still jobless and homeless, but no longer center stage?
With reporting by Mike Billips/Biloxi, Massimo Calabresi, Sally B. Donnelly, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, Ellin Martens, Coco Masters and Carolina A. Miranda/New York and Greg Fulton/Atlanta
How Did This Happen? The hurricane was the least of the surprises. Why a natural disaster became a man-made debacle--and what this catastrophe says about our rescue capabilities four years after 9/11 By AMANDA RIPLEY Sep. 12, 2005 Hindsight is 20/20.
But once in a rare while, foresight is too. For years, researchers have
described exactly what would happen if a megahurricane hit New Orleans and
the surrounding Gulf region. They predicted that the city levees would not
hold. Their elaborate computer models showed that tens of thousands would
be left behind. They described rooftop rescues, 80% of New Orleans
underwater and "toxic gumbo" purling through the streets. If experts had
prophesied a terrorist attack with that kind of accuracy, they would be
under suspicion for treason. --With reporting by Brian Bennett/New Orleans, Cathy Booth Thomas/Baton Rouge, Massimo Calabresi, Sally Donnelly, Mark Thompson, Karen Tumulty, Douglas Waller and Adam Zagorin/ Washington, Jeff Chu/New York and Jeanne DeQuine and Kathie Klarreich/Miami Rebuilding A Dream How do you put back a city and a region so devastated? The same way? Differently? By RICHARD LACAYO Sep. 12, 2005 As the scope of the calamity in New Orleans was beginning to become apparent last week, Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House, stepped back for a moment and thought the unthinkable--out loud. In a very unguarded comment to the editorial board of the Daily Herald, a suburban-Chicago newspaper, the most powerful Republican in the House said, "It doesn't make sense to me" to rebuild the city because its position below sea level would make it vulnerable to another floodwater catastrophe. Talking about what the Federal Government should do, he said, "We help replace, we help relieve disaster. But I think federal insurance and everything that goes along with it ... we ought to take a second look at that." That is not, to put it mildly, what the people of New Orleans--or of most other parts of the U.S.--were expecting to hear. "That's like saying we should shut down Los Angeles because it's built in an earthquake zone," said former Louisiana Democratic Senator John Breaux. Before the day was out, Hastert's office had issued a statement insisting that he had meant to say only that when the city is rebuilt, it will be important "to consider the safety of the citizens first." In contrast, President George W. Bush, in his televised address the day before, assured the nation that he had ordered his Cabinet to come up with a rebuilding plan for New Orleans and the rest of the devastated Gulf region. Have no doubt: those places will be rebuilt, although the effort needed for such smaller cities as Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., may be different from the kind required for New Orleans, with its sizable downtown and wide metropolitan area. There are times a city suffers a disaster so enormous that it never recovers. Think of Pompeii. Or Chernobyl. But cities tend to be durable things. They eventually shake off the effects of even the worst catastrophes. A decade after the Great Fire of 1871, Chicago had a booming economy and a population of half a million people, up from about 300,000 the night the fire began. Berlin, Hiroshima, Rotterdam--all were leveled during World War II; all are flourishing now. Devastated cities are frequently rebuilt in ways not so different from how they looked before disaster struck. Established property lines and existing infrastructure are confines that are hard to escape. Look at the World Trade Center site, where the determination to bring back all 10 million sq. ft. of lost office space and the presence of below-ground features like an electrical-utility switching station have had more influence on the shape of reconstruction than any number of visionary architects. Add to that the human tendency to take comfort in the thought that an area that has suffered near destruction can be resurrected in much the same form. "Modest improvements, not truly visionary rethinking," is the norm when cities rebuild, says Lawrence Vale, a co-editor of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster. "There is too much urgency to rebuild fast, and not much can be done to withhold that. Visionary ideas don't catch on until later." In its most appealing neighborhoods, New Orleans is already something better than any mere visionary idea. It's a city that people love precisely for its unrationalized flavor, for its freewheeling French Quarter and its elegant Garden District, both largely spared. But beyond the city known to tourists, it's also a place riven by class and race; of its 485,000 people, 67% are African American, many of them poor. The city they knew was already fraying at its foundation, its history crowded with a long line of buccaneers in public office offering dreams with one hand while pilfering with the other. The rebuilding effort, which will involve tough decisions about what and where to rebuild and about which places get funding first, is sure to bring all those problems into sharp relief. "The first thing they have to do is overcome their own mind-set," says Joel Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History. "They need to think about investment, infrastructure. And they will need a sense of rigor. This is a city famous for corruption where everything is for sale. Throw a bunch of federal aid money at that, and things get worse." Things could not be much worse than they are now. The first step in rebuilding New Orleans will be simply to draw off the water that covers 80% of the city. Most pumps around the levees are submerged and inoperable, explains Jonathan Stewart, a professor of civil engineering at UCLA who has been tracking the situation closely. "They'll have to bring in other pumps from around the country on barges and just keep them pumping," he says. "The Army Corps of Engineers estimates they can remove a foot every day." When the waters come down, they will expose a city that will have been steeping for weeks in a noxious soup. Although emergency-management officials are relieved that the flooding did not crack open the storage tanks of the large petrochemical factories south and east of the city, the waters still contain a poisonous mix of gasoline, household and industrial chemicals and stinking human waste. They will leave a layer of heavily contaminated silt everywhere. John Pardue, director of the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at Louisiana State University, says, "We're going to have to find out how deep the contamination is. Can we scrape it off, or are we going to have to replace topsoil?" Then comes what promises to be the most painful part, a process that might be called municipal triage. The foul waters will have plenty of time to ruin houses' and other buildings' insulation and wiring. Masonry structures will probably survive the flooding. The worst hit can be stripped back to the concrete, power washed and resurfaced. But a great many wooden structures -- meaning most of the city's housing stock -- will be bloated wrecks subject to mildew and collapse. So for a long time, before it can become a city of construction cranes, New Orleans will be a city of bulldozers. That's what could do the most damage to the things that gave the city its character--the center-hall cottages with their columned porches, the rows of single-file shotgun houses with their carved brackets supporting deep overhangs. Many of those dwellings were in serious decay even before the storm hit, but as long as they stood, there was the chance to preserve and restore them, as has been happening in the city's transitional neighborhoods like Bywater. Once they are gone, will flavorless 21st century tract houses replace them? Or, worse, nothing? Flood insurance offered by the Federal Government is required by most lenders before they will provide a mortgage for a house in a flood-prone area. But that insurance has a cap of $250,000 or 80% of the replacement cost of the home, whichever is less. How many low-income families, their resources strained by the disaster, will be able to come up with the difference? Even the loans that the Federal Emergency Management Agency makes available require a good credit record, which for many people may be one hurdle too many. Rebuilding the city, however, will open opportunities to do things better. Hospitals could be redesigned to provide parking on the lower floors so that any future flooding would not reach the floors where patients and medical records would be kept. After the 1989 earthquake collapsed sections of San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway, the city demolished elevated segments and developed a splendid park and waterfront esplanade. "We didn't replan the city," says Mary Comerio, author of Disaster Hits Home, a study of six postdisaster reconstruction efforts. "But we took these terrific opportunities to remake pieces of it." There are still a lot of people in city planning and engineering who are glad that Hastert spoke their innermost thoughts. "They should just move the whole city to higher ground," says UCLA's Stewart. "There's nothing you can do about the fundamental problem, which is that it's 9 ft. [on average] below sea level." Of course, Venice is also ever threatened by water, but nobody suggests just letting it sink. Postdisaster reconstruction is therefore likely to focus on strengthening the levees, but some experts in the field see that as a losing proposition in the long term. "Americans' disposition to buy a technological fix is why disasters are getting larger and larger," says Dennis Mileti, director emeritus of the natural-hazards center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Although everything we do helps reduce losses, when a big one comes that exceeds what our technology was designed for, the damage is [catastrophic]. It ends up putting more people at greater risk in Miami, San Francisco, all the cities we love." Yet there are strong arguments--beyond the sentimental ones--in favor of keeping New Orleans where it is. In a piece posted online in the Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report, Stratfor chairman George Friedman points out that the Mississippi River is the centerpiece of the nation's internal-waterway transit system and that the ports around New Orleans are the "key exit" of North America. They are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by oceangoing vessels. And those essential ports require a skilled force--a city--to make them work. "New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure," he writes. "It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist." And will go on existing. Even Hastert knows that New Orleans isn't going anywhere. In the same interview in which he expressed those doubts about the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans, the Speaker acknowledged the human impulse to stay put. "We build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures," he said. "And they rebuild too." Then he offered an explanation: "Stubbornness." In the months to come, as the reconstruction of New Orleans and the wider Gulf region gets under way, look for stubbornness to be the order of the day. --Reported by Amanda Bower/ San Francisco, Terry McCarthy and Jeffrey Ressner/ Los Angeles and Maggie Sieger and David Thigpen/ Chicago A Calamity Waiting to Happen The Gulf Coast ravaged by Hurricane Katrina is one of the most delicate ecosystems on earth--and one of the most economically important areas in the U.S. Can those two realities coexist? Sep. 12, 2005 Slidell Marina area is virtually destroyed. Sections of the 8-mile-long Interstate 10 bridge collapse into Lake Pontchartrain. Bay St. Louis Highway 90 bridge across Bay St. Louis is destroyed. Beachfront homes are washed away. Gulfport Hospital suffers extensive damage. Hurricane winds rip the roofs off eight schools serving as shelters. Waveland Storm surge swamps town of 7,000 people. Most houses are destroyed; hundreds of cars are submerged. Biloxi Massive floating casinos are destroyed or hurled hundreds of feet; dozens are reported killed in one apartment complex. Mobile Downtown Mobile is severely flooded. An oil-drilling platform floats away from a shipyard and strikes the bridge over the Mobile River. Pensacola Water sweeps over two barrier islands, causing downtown flooding. AMERICA'S SOFT UNDERBELLY ... The heart of the U.S. oil industry happens to be a magnet for hurricanes. Katrina tore right through it, slowing production and sending prices soaring. Nine oil refineries that produce about 12% of U.S. gasoline remain closed. Natural gas production--about 20% of the U.S. total--also comes to a halt. About 500 Gulf oil rigs are out of service, some suffering major damage. Two major pipelines have been reopened, though at reduced capacity. ... GETS MORE VULNERABLE EVERY YEAR The shriveled Louisiana coastline is dying a slow death at human hands. 1 Over the centuries, the Mississippi flooded periodically, bringing downstream fresh silt that replenished wetlands and water that nourished the plants growing there. 2 This flow created a large delta of swamps and barrier islands that absorbed storm surges and protected inland areas. 3 When the river is constrained to a channel by levees, the silt is funneled out to sea. 4 Without water flow and natural silt replenishment, the land outside the levees dries and sinks under its own weight, allowing salt water to intrude and killing plants that fed off the fresh water. 5 Drawing drinking water from the land outside the levees only makes matters worse, hastening the sinking. IS THE WORST STILL TO COME? Some scientists think we may have entered a new cycle of heavy hurricane activity after relative calm over the previous 30 years. Major natural disasters in the U.S. 1888 The Great Plains Schoolhouse blizzard in January and a New England blizzard in March kill more than 600 people. 1889 The Johnstown flood kills more than 2,200 people in Pennsylvania. 1900 The Galveston hurricane of 1900 kills 8,000 to 12,000 people--the deadliest disaster in U.S. history. 1906 The San Francisco earthquake and fire destroy much of the city. Estimates of the death toll range from 700 to more than 3,000. 1927 The Great Mississippi Flood kills as many as 1,000 people and leaves thousands more homeless. 1928 The Okeechobee hurricane kills 2,500 to 3,000 people. 1935 The Labor Day hurricane of 1935 kills more than 400 in the Florida Keys. 1938 The New England hurricane kills more than 600 from New York City to Boston. 1950's "Storm of the Century" blizzard kills 383 people in 22 states. 1969 Hurricane Camille pounds the Gulf Coast, killing 256. 1972 Though a relatively weak storm, Hurricane Agnes causes $11 billion in damage along the East Coast. 1974 Tornadoes sweep across 13 Midwest states, killing 315 people. 1989 Hurricane Hugo thrashes South Carolina, causing $12 billion in damage. 1992 Hurricane Andrew kills 26, causes $44 billion in damage. 2005 Path of Hurricane Katrina. [This article contains complex maps and diagrams. Please see hard copy or pdf.] New Orleans Lake Pontchartrain Vermilion Bay Lake Maurepas Gulf of Mexico Atchafalaya River Mississippi River Baton Rouge Lafayette Lake Charles New Iberia Morgan City Houma Approximate extent of hurricane force winds Approximate coastline in 1975 Louisiana Offshore Oil Port Offshore oil facilities Isles Dernieres Grand Isle Garden Island Bay Breton Sound Chandeleur Islands Port Sulphur Mississippi Delta Approximate extent of hurricane-force winds Fort Walton Beach New Orleans Under Water The storm passed, and the city had survived. Then a levee broke. The worst-case scenario had arrived By KRISTINA DELL Sep. 12, 2005 [This article contains complex maps and diagrams. Please see hard copy or pdf.] WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS New Orleans is surrounded by a 350-mile (563 km) system of levees that hold back the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. When three levees failed, the city filled like a bathtub. 1 OVERTOPPING Floodwaters may have risen past the tops of the levees. The city's pumping system, designed to handle smaller storms, lost power and failed. Canal Levee walls 2 BREACHING Because the flooding didn't begin until after the hurricane, some suspect the levees may have leaked from within. The water pressure would have turned tiny cracks into gaping holes 3 REPAIR Crews have been trying to plug the collapsed levees with giant sandbags and concrete barriers. Once the levees are sealed, the challenge of draining the city begins. That job could take months NEW ORLEANS Lakeview Tulane University Loyola University Audubon Park Metairie Jefferson Orleans Ave. Canal 17th St. Canal 17th St. Canal breach Water treatment plant St. Charles Hospital University Hospital Memorial Medical Center Memorial Medical Center Tulane Hospital Mississippi River Levee Levee Interstate 10 Levee St. Louis Cemetery 1 and 2 Mount Olivet Cemetery Fairgrounds Arabi French Quarter Garden District City Park West Bank Ponchartrain Park Park University of New Orleans London Ave. Canal London Ave. Canal breach Second London Ave. Canal breach Industrial Canal breach St. Claude Medical Center Charity Hospital Canal St. Interstate 10 TIME Graphic by Ed Gabel and Lon Tweeten; text by Kristina Dell Sources: Dean Gesch, U.S. Geological Survey; Army Corps of Engineers; Digital Globe; New Orleans Times-Picayune. Inset model of downtown New Orleans "Intelligent 3D Map" provided by ITspatial, imagery provided by Sanborn Mapping Storm Lashed Many have no homes to go to. Others don't want to go home. In their own words, survivors recount how they escaped the floods and fetid conditions--and agonize over what comes next. Sep. 12, 2005
"We lost everything, but the worst
part of it was the looters. They came and stole from our rubble." BILLY
GOLLOTT, Biloxi, Miss.
"You have to take the scratches. [But] I think it killed our town. I feel sorry for all the old houses." JULIANA DOUGLAS, 9, Biloxi Samer El Hajj, 26 NEW ORLEANS He was there for a reunion of the International College of Hospitality Management. Instead, he got a three-day master class in crisis control in a Sheraton hotel with no air conditioning. "This experience was the worst to live through compared to all I have seen during the Lebanese war ... The mayor couldn't manage to find a bus." Ray and Dorian Kutos PASS CHRISTIAN, MISS. The morning after the storm, the father and son left their ruined home to await rescue at the nearby beach. Four days later, they were still camped out on the decimated strand, with little more than a tarp and a few bottles of water, desperate for a ride north out of Pass Christian or a working phone to tell relatives they were alive, if not exactly well. "The house was rocking in the wind. I looked out the attic window, and water was approaching fast. I thought we were done for." Paula Lane WAVELAND, MISS. As water filled the house where Lane and her friend Roy Henderson sought shelter, Henderson dived into the floodwaters and returned with a small boat that had been tied to a neighbor's tree. Clinging desperately to their tiny ark, 10 people floated to safety through the hurricane's winds. "It felt like somebody dropped nuclear bombs on us. There's a lot of dead people here. We've lost a lot of family members." "I don't care if they take me to Honduras. Just get me out of New Orleans. I'm never going back there." CHARLENE WILSON, whose son is still missing.
Dipping His Toe Into Disaster Slow, awkward and at times tone-deaf, Bush mishandled the storm's first days. Now he has his own recovery problem By Matthew Cooper Sep. 12, 2005
It isn't easy picking George
Bush's worst moment last week. Was it his first go at addressing the
crisis Wednesday, when he came across as cool to the point of uncaring?
Was it when he said that he didn't "think anybody expected" the New
Orleans levees to give way, though that very possibility had been
forecast for years? Was it when he arrived in Mobile, Ala., a full four
days after the storm made landfall, and praised his hapless Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director, Michael D. Brown, whose
disaster credentials seemed to consist of once being the commissioner of
the International Arabian Horse Association? "Brownie, you're doing a
heck of a job," said the President. Or was it that odd moment when he
promised to rebuild Mississippi Senator Trent Lott's house--a gesture
that must have sounded astonishingly tone-deaf to the homeless black
citizens still trapped in the postapocalyptic water world of New
Orleans. "Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house--he's lost his entire
house," cracked Bush, "there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm
looking forward to sitting on the porch."
Bush seemed so regularly out of it last week, it made you wonder if he was stuck in the same White House bubble of isolation that confined his dad. Too often, W. looked annoyed. Or he smiled when he should have been serious. Or he swaggered when simple action would have been the right move. And he was so slow. Everyone knew on Sunday morning that Katrina was a killer. Yet when the levees broke after the storm, the White House slouched toward action. And this from a leader who made his bones with 9/11. In a crisis he can act paradoxically, appearing--almost simultaneously--strong and weak, decisive and vacillating, Churchill and Chamberlain. This week he was more Chamberlain. There was no breaking off from his commemoration in Coronado, Calif., of the 60th anniversary of victory over Japan, but there were videoconference calls and the like. The White House is "very, very slow sometimes," says a former Administration official. Besides, members of the A team were on vacation: chief of staff Andy Card was in Maine; Dick Cheney was in Wyoming; even Condoleezza Rice was out of town, shoe-shopping in Manhattan. Many of Bush's best p.r. minds, including media adviser Mark McKinnon, were in Greece at the wedding of White House communications director Nicolle Devenish. Had they been around, perhaps Bush would not have been accompanied only by his dog Barney when he returned from vacation in Crawford. Part of what dogged Bush was long-standing traits. He showed his usual reluctance to ask for sacrifice from Americans, and that added to the sense that he just didn't get it. While Southern Governors facing fuel shortages in the coming days have called on drivers to scale back use of their cars, Bush did so only as an afterthought. "We ought to conserve more," he finally said on Thursday, making it seem like a vague option. The same day, Bush all but spurned offers of help from allies because of the way it would look. "I'm sure he saw it as a sign of American weakness to be taking aid from other countries," says the former Administration official. A Bush aide countered that his boss "wasn't rejecting offers; he wasn't focused on it." Bush did begin to admit that the response was "unacceptable." But even when it came to enacting the role of Consoler in Chief, he sometimes sounded more like a quartermaster, running through long lists of things the government was sending to the Gulf Coast, rather than empathizing with people. That may be why the White House wheeled out his pitch-perfect wife Laura on Friday, to lend some genuine compassion to the moment. Of course, Bush has a history of floundering at the start of a crisis and then finding his voice. Handling Sept. 11 is now considered his finest hour, even though he stumbled dramatically at first. But last week offered no New York bullhorn moment. He can't threaten to get Katrina "dead or alive." The victims didn't need a photo-op gesture of reassurance so much as water, food and escape, plus help for the long haul. And for an Administration that has staked its reputation on fighting the war on terrorism, no one can be very encouraged by the first crisis test-drive of the Department of Homeland Security. What's more, while Americans might have rallied around Bush as he faced a foreign threat, this time the enemy is his own bureaucracy, the one that left American refugees to fend for themselves far longer than anybody thinks is acceptable. As he drove to meet the President, Bobby Jindal, the Republican Congressman from metro New Orleans, complained about aspects of the federal response: "The bureaucracy needs to do more than one thing at a time. It's appropriate to save people with helicopters, but it can't be done to the exclusion of everything else." Jindal, who served in the President's Administration, would like Bush to ask Colin Powell to come back to run the relief operation. Others urge Bush to rope in New York City's savior Rudy Giuliani. Given the President's own performance, passing the buck wouldn't be the worst thing.
Here's What You Do Four leaders whose communities were devastated by natural disasters share their experiences and counsel with their counterparts on the Gulf Coast. Sep. 12, 2005
• KATE HALE
After Hurricane Andrew tore across South Florida in 1992, the slow federal response exasperated Hale, then Dade County's director of emergency management. She famously said on TV, "Where the hell is the cavalry on this one?" You are there to protect people's lives and property. That's a very significant burden when it's one person, but when it's thousands of people ... The first thing you want to do is to stabilize the situation and get help to people. You have to set up centers to do that. You have to provide information. You have to be able to provide water--and in the South in the summertime, ice. A variety of decision makers will come in from the state and federal level who have authority and certainly responsibility. There were people who worked well with us, and there were people who showed great disdain to those at the local level. Some of the local leaders and officials I worked with felt that people came into our community without knowing our plans or what our community was like. It's very important that local authorities be given every opportunity to provide input and that local authorities be regarded as the local experts. • MAWARDI NURDIN The mayor of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, returned to his city a day after a tsunami struck on Dec. 26. His first act: to show people how they could help themselves I have to admit that I was one of the first people to break into grocery stores the day after the tsunami. I did it because help had not arrived and people were hungry. I guess it was natural that people started looting to look for food. But if looting gets out of hand, then it's time to call the army for help. The first priority is to provide these three things for the people--housing, food and clean water, and health care--while you take care of the infrastructure. One major difference between Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami is that we in Banda Aceh were totally caught off guard. We didn't even know that water could rise that high. The Americans, I believe, are more familiar with hurricanes. I can't imagine how we could have survived the first few days--before help started arriving--without the solidarity among the people of Banda Aceh. And now I can't imagine how Aceh would be able to get back on its own feet without the solidarity of the world community. We lost 62,000 lives in Banda Aceh alone. It's been eight months since the tsunami struck. Look how slow the rebuilding of people's houses has been. • PETE WILSON Governor of California from 1991 to 1999, Wilson led his state's response to the 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 61 people and caused more than $20 billion in damage in greater Los Angeles Citizens are looking for leadership that will bring immediate solutions: they need potable water, they need shelter, they need food, in many cases they need medical attention. They don't necessarily know what level of government provides these things--and they don't care. They want the response. In the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake, I was permitted to suspend regulations. In a matter of seconds, the earthquake had reduced the bridges of Interstate 10 to rubble. If we had followed all the existing regulations about holding all kinds of hearings, it would have taken two years to rebuild. We took bids on not just the price but also a finish date. We offered incentives: a bonus of $200,000 for every day they were early and a penalty of $200,000 for every day they were late. The low bidder put crews on 24/7, on three shifts, and we were able to reopen I-10 in less than three months. • JOSEPH RILEY The Charleston, S.C., mayor led his city's recovery after Hurricane Hugo in 1989 When Hugo was approaching, I had all the city department heads in my office, and I said that what we had coming was an opportunity--though not one we would want in a million years--to serve the citizens in the time of their greatest need. So you ratchet up all your actions and energies to a close-to-superhuman level. You have to commit to keep them up, because you have a huge number of things going on simultaneously. The best analogy I can give is that we're at war and the enemy is just below the horizon. If we don't do each one of these things as quickly as we can, the enemy comes over the horizon and captures us. In a time of disaster, you're the citizens' leader, more so than any other time. You're their counselor, their coach, their cheerleader, their security giver--you're all those things. There's a grieving process after a disaster, and you have to get the spirit up and keep it up. You're helping people get to the rebuilding stage. Their houses are a shambles--or gone--but they have to get up in the morning and take that step forward. --Compiled by Jeff Chu/New York and Zamira Loebis/Banda Aceh
The Fragile Gulf Soggy soil, eroding shorelines, sudden storms, global warming. Why the Gulf Coast is so treacherous--and why we'll never leave By JEFFREY KLUGER WITH CATHY BOOTH THOMAS/ BATON ROUGE Sep. 12, 2005
If you want to get a true sense of
how thoroughly Hurricane Katrina punished the Gulf Coast last week, a
flyover by helicopter or Air Force One won't do it. The real picture
doesn't resolve itself until you go 450 miles up, where a flock of
Earth-observing satellites have been training their cameras on the Gulf
of Mexico and beaming what they see back home. Researchers at Louisiana
State University in Baton Rouge began studying the first portfolio of
pictures taken since the hurricane hit last week, and what they saw was
a shock. Entire barrier islands are missing. Coastal marshes have been
shredded. A Native American encampment to the south of Port Sulphur
seems to have vanished. Everywhere, dark watery splotches appear in the
spots where the overloaded levees failed and burst.
"The city," says oceanographer Nan Walker, staring dourly at an image of New Orleans, "has turned to water." New Orleans, of course, has always been more or less waterlogged. It sits in a bowl that averages 9 ft. below sea level, with Lake Pontchartrain brimming to its north, the Mississippi River running to its south and the Gulf of Mexico crashing at its door. Keeping a place like that dry would be a city planner's nightmare in the best of circumstances. But New Orleans' circumstances have never been ideal; the city was built in the center of one of the most hurricane-prone spots in the world. "New Orleans naturally wants to be a lake," says Timothy Kusky, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at St. Louis University. Apparently, the city got its wish last week. Which raises the inevitable question: If New Orleans is such a dangerous place, what in the world are we doing there--or, for that matter, anywhere else on the perilous Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas? Soggy soil, eroding shorelines and sudden storms make the whole region an unstable mess even without human intervention. And the more we build there, the worse we seem to make things, clawing away the natural river routes and marshlands that replenish the land and sucking out the oil and other subterranean resources that hold up the surface. Now, many experts warn, with greenhouse gases raising global temperatures, we are spawning more and deadlier hurricanes, ones that could kill a city in a single blow--if Katrina hasn't already done that to New Orleans, Gulfport and Biloxi. But if the cities on the Gulf Coast have always been potential deathtraps, they have always been gold mines too--great natural ports on a warm-water gulf, perfectly situated to profit from the traffic moving up and down one of the world's most important shipping lanes: the Mississippi River. The port of South Louisiana moves more tonnage each year than any other in the nation. Add to that the commodities the Gulf produces, including nearly 30% of the nation's oil, 20% of its natural gas and a third of its fish and shellfish, and it is clear--as many have pointed out since last week--that even if New Orleans were completely leveled, we would have to build something in its place. What complicates the story of the destruction--and makes the loss of life so tragic--is our role in the disaster. If it's true that human activity had a lot to do with making the region vulnerable to a hit by a hurricane like Katrina, it's also true that we knew all along the kind of environmental damage we have been doing to the Gulf. Now that we're paying the price for our recklessness, what are we going to do about it? It was always evident that the Gulf of Mexico was a sweet spot for cyclones, but it took modern meteorology to explain just why. You need a lot of things to get a hurricane going, most important among them an existing storm with a bit of spin to it wedged between warm ocean water and a colder band of air above it. Locate all that at least 300 miles north or south of the equator--where the rotation of the Earth's slightly narrower circumference exacerbates the spin of the storm--and you have everything you need to sustain a hurricane. The Gulf has all those ingredients, and its cities and towns repeatedly suffer for it. To survive such storms, early residents quickly learned that they would have to build carefully, particularly in low-lying New Orleans. Eighteenth century settlers established the famed French Quarter on some of the highest ground they could find, one of the reasons it remained relatively dry last week. As the Gulf, the lake and the river periodically overflowed, the growing city retreated behind an ever expanding web of soil, concrete and metal levees. Today there are 350 miles of those barricades snaking through the city and 22 massive pumping stations that are supposed to kick into action whenever the water sloshes over the walls. Having constructed that elaborate system, New Orleans was not inclined to abandon it. "The city built the levees to protect itself," says Craig Colten, L.S.U. geographer and author of the book An Unnatural Metropolis. "Now there's a huge investment in drainage." Geology has only made things worse. Gulf land is squishy stuff, made mostly of silt deposited by eons of free-flowing rivers and periodic floods. When the high water recedes, the sedimentary layer remains, growing heavier and heavier and ultimately subsiding under its own weight. The only way to keep the land from sinking altogether is to let the soil replenish itself with each flood. Human beings have done just the opposite, walling off New Orleans and re-engineering the Mississippi River to flow around the growing metropolis, effectively choking off the silt supply. In addition to allowing the unreplenished coastal marshlands to sink, that tampering eventually kills the wetlands that do survive, as salt water intrudes deeper and deeper inland, killing vegetation that helps hold the soil together. The elimination of natural flooding also causes barrier islands, which line the Gulf and protect the coast, to shrink. The Mississippi in its naturally flowing state spilled silt into an intricate delta, spreading sediment east and west and fortifying the islands. Walled and dredged all the way to the Gulf, the river now dumps that silt right over the edge of the continental shelf. Geologists report that the Chandeleur Islands--a healthy necklace of sandy barriers about 70 miles from New Orleans--appeared to have been wiped out by Katrina, leaving one more stretch of the city's coast dangerously exposed. The Gulf's busy oil-and-gas industry doesn't help matters. Extracting those resources below the Gulf floor is like sticking a straw into the ground and sucking out all the liquid: ultimately you pull up the very material that's holding up the surrounding terrain. One study found that the greatest loss of Gulf wetlands coincided with the greatest extraction of oil and gas in the 1970s and '80s. Houston is thought to be sinking for much the same reason. In Louisiana, the shrinkage is most dramatic. The state has lost 1 million acres of coast--11/2 times the area of Rhode Island--since 1930, nearly half of that vanished land lying between New Orleans and the Gulf. The city proper is estimated to be sinking 3 ft. per century. And while the whole world is struggling with rising sea levels, New Orleans and its environs hurt more than most. The State of Louisiana is estimated to be losing land at the alarming rate of about two acres every hour. The forces that have caused the coast to subside are pretty well understood. What's far less clear is the possible role of global warming. That rising temperatures heat the ocean and melt ice caps is undisputed. Most climate models also predict that turning up the worldwide thermometer will lead to more extreme weather patterns--hotter hots, colder colds, harder rains. Hurricanes would seem to be especially sensitive to climate changes, since warm ocean waters are the fuel that drives the storms. But while that is an easy argument to make, it's a hard one to prove. There were a record 33 hurricanes in the Atlantic between 1995 and 1999, and that doesn't take into account blockbusters like Katrina or 1992's Andrew. But the period from 1991 to 1994 was one of the quietest in history. And while the Pacific has seen an increase in hurricanes and typhoons in recent years, the southwestern Indian Ocean has remained stable and the northern Indian Ocean has actually seen a drop. Around the world, all that amounts to a statistical wash. "It's an unresolved issue," says atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "but we do not see any increase at all in the frequency of hurricanes globally." Emanuel and others believe that even if greenhouse heating does not spawn more hurricanes, it may make the ones that do occur more powerful. In an extensive study published this summer in the journal Nature, Emanuel surveyed roughly 4,500 storms brewed in the North Atlantic and western north Pacific since the middle of the 20th century. He found that the average power of the storms increased 50% in those 50 years. It's a change that, he has little doubt, is linked to global warming. A slightly weaker Katrina may have made all the difference to New Orleans, where the levees were made for withstanding a Category 3 storm but not the more powerful Category 4 (like Katrina when it made landfall) or Category 5 (like Katrina the day before). As the city staggers back to its feet, fixing those broken levees will be a first priority. But such gap plugging is just triage in a woefully outdated system of ramparts that need extensive rebuilding and modernizing. The failed 17th Street levee had been strengthened not long before Katrina hit--an upgrade that obviously did not do the job. Now merely pumping the city free of the water the levees let in may take as long as nine weeks. Just as important as fixing the artificial barriers will be replacing the natural ones: the protective wetlands that have been stripped away from the city's perimeter. In 2000, federal and state officials initiated proposals to spend $14 billion over the next 30 years for wetlands restoration along the Gulf Coast. But Congress balked at the initial outlay of $1.9 billion, and only $540 million has so far been allocated. As for measures to combat global warming, the Bush Administration has consistently resisted any legislation or global treaty that would hurt the energy industry or require sacrifices from American motorists. In the face of the lives lost last week and the billions of dollars it will cost to rebuild the devastated cities and ports, those policies seem tragically shortsighted. --With reporting by Daren Fonda/ New York and David Thigpen/ Chicago Billion Dollar Blowout From oil and gas to coffee and cars, the Gulf Coast plays a vital role in supplying the U.S. economy. Katrina's price tag may reach $100 billion, and here's how that affects you By DAREN FONDA Sep. 12, 2005
Several days before Katrina
struck, John Walker shut down production and evacuated crews from the
oil and gas fields that his company operates in the Mississippi Delta.
The CEO of EnerVest, a Houston energy-asset-management firm, was luckier
than most. Katrina spared four of his fields, though the damage to a
fifth was ugly. The storm blew a barge five miles down the bayou from
its moorings in marshy Garden Island Bay. Nearly every piece of oil
equipment was destroyed, and Walker estimates it will take several
months to get that field running at full capacity. "When there's this
much damage, there are only so many spare barges, compressors and
generators out there," he says. "We're losing 1,000 barrels a day."
Katrina didn't just fling barges across bayous--it ripped a hole in the nation's economy. The storm crippled oil and gas production in the Gulf, idled refineries and chemical-processing plants and devastated New Orleans' $7 billion tourism industry. The city stands to lose more than $500 million a month in visitor dollars. J. Stephen Perry, head of the Convention and Visitors Board, says the empty and damaged hotels "are like Baghdad on a bad day." But for the national economy, what's more critical is that Katrina disrupted a vital node in the country's transport network. You name the commodity--coffee, fertilizer, lumber, steel, wheat--it ships through the Gulf's ports, rails and riverways. All told, Katrina knocked out a region that contributes $130 billion to GDP, roughly 1% of the national total, according to Economy.com Risk Management Solutions, a leading risk-assessment firm based in Newark, Calif., estimates that damages will run up to $100 billion. Insurance companies are on the hook for some $25 billion. Our guide to the fallout: How high will energy prices go? America's energy infrastructure was running at full capacity before Katrina hit, and the fact that so much of that capacity is concentrated in Hurricane Alley means more pain at the pump--especially if another big storm hits or events in the Middle East disrupt supply. Katrina sidelined nine refineries that account for about 12% of U.S. capacity. By the end of last week, the storm had prevented production of 547 million bbl. of crude, a 25-day supply. Offshore oil production in the Gulf accounts for nearly 10% of U.S. daily consumption. Worse yet, natural-gas production also shut down, costing us about 8.3 billion cu. ft. a day, which is 13% of what we consume, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service. Although the U.S. Energy Department says Katrina didn't damage production as badly as Ivan did a year ago, one energy executive, trading private e-mail, fretted that "the oil industry might be impacted for a year by Katrina." Several days after the storm, the price of gasoline moved above $3 per gal. in cities from New York to Los Angeles, and the government reported receiving more than 5,000 calls to its price-gouging hotline. But that doesn't mean we're running out of gas and oil. The U.S. consumes about 21.5 million bbl. of crude a day, and with inventories of 321.4 million bbl., stockpiles are above average for this time of year, according to the Energy Department. The major Gulf Coast pipelines were up and running by the end of last week, albeit at reduced capacity. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the nation's only deep-water tanker port, unloaded its first cargo since Aug. 27. Still, some analysts predict that disruptions in the supply chain mean motorists will be in for several more months of $3 gas or worse. "The only thing we can hope for is an amazing amount of conservation," says Houston oil analyst Matt Simmons. Optimists say the situation could stabilize relatively quickly. There have been no reports of major damage to Gulf refineries. The problem is there isn't enough electricity to power them. Demand for gasoline typically tapers off after Labor Day. And thanks to a presidential directive, the crude is flowing; 30 million bbl. from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is being loaned to companies like Exxon. In addition, foreign producers in 25 countries have pledged another 30 million bbl. of crude and refined product. The EPA is allowing sales of less stringently refined fuel, and President Bush is permitting foreign vessels to ferry oil and gas between U.S. ports (suspending a law prohibiting such transport). Cars, coffee, cement--what's happening to industry? Katrina dealt another knockdown punch to Detroit. Ford and General Motors rely heavily on full-size SUVs for profits, and sales of those vehicles were softening even before the latest surge in gas prices. "We have some dealers we haven't been able to contact," says Ford spokesman George Pipas, who estimates that 40 Ford and Lincoln-Mercury dealerships in southern Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana were affected by the storm. Katrina forced Nissan to close its assembly plant in Canton, Miss., 211 miles north of New Orleans. When the plant reopened, employees reported they were having a hard time finding enough gas to make the commute, says Nissan spokesman Fred Standish. The only nugget of good news: Katrina doesn't appear to have disrupted supplies of critical material like steel. The airlines are in a precarious spot. They may have to pass on the cost of jet fuel--up more than 20%--to ticket holders, which could depress air travel. Northwest, for one, warned that higher fuel prices could tip it into bankruptcy. Homebuilders are eager to start reconstruction--some 200,000 homes in New Orleans alone need to be rebuilt--but supplies may be tight as the city is an import hub for cement and other building materials. Plywood will probably cost more for a while; after Hurricane Andrew, the price shot from $222 per 1,000 sq. ft. to $321. Consumers can expect to pay more for basics such as coffee, bananas and paint (made at idled chemical-processing plants in the Gulf). New Orleans is the second largest coffee port in the country, after New York, and stores 27% of the nation's beans. "Right now those supplies are off the table," says Joe De Rupo of the National Coffee Association. Imports are being rerouted to Houston, Miami and Jacksonville, but no one knows whether the 211 million lbs. sitting in bags in New Orleans is salvageable or whether the roasting equipment, possibly submerged in contaminated water, can be saved. That's troublesome for small roasters and for giants like Procter & Gamble, which closed its Folgers plant in New Orleans just before the hurricane. Bananas destined for Gulfport, Miss., are being diverted to other ports, with Chiquita sending boats to Freeport, Texas, and Port Everglades, Fla. "If volume is affected, our customers will have to raise prices," says Chiquita spokesman Michael Mitchell. At least hot-sauce fans can rest assured: Avery Island, La.--based McIlhenny, maker of Tabasco sauce, claims production is running smoothly and all its employees are safe. How will this affect the price of cornflakes? Katrina hit just as the farm belt was gearing up for the fall harvest, and exporters may be forced to find ways around the blocked shipping channels in the lower Mississippi--a critical conduit for agricultural products. The U.S. exports about $600 billion in cargo through ports that were hit by the hurricane, and some 2,000-ton barges are literally stuck in the mud, says Larry Daily, president of Alter Barge Lines. "It's like you've clogged the pipeline for a week." Archer Daniels Midland, a major grain exporter, operates four grain terminals in Louisiana. Several hundred of its barges are stranded in the lower Mississippi, some grounded and waiting to off-load. The firm is studying rail alternatives and considering diverting some shipments to Galveston, Texas. But shipping grain by rail or truck isn't feasible on a large scale; it's too costly, and freight lines are already booked solid. It would take as many as 60 trucks to transport the 55,000 bu. of corn that would fit on a barge, says David Feider, a spokesman for the grain exporter Cargill. "We're not diverting cargo," he says. The prospect of corn being dumped on the domestic market has already depressed spot prices. But don't expect a break in the price of cornflakes. The corn in a 1-lb. box costs cereal makers just 3¢, a tiny part of the total cost, according to Robert Wiser, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. Higher energy costs more than offset any cuts in the price of corn. Will insurance rates go up? Not necessarily. Last year the global insurance industry paid out a record $49 billion in claims, including $23 billion for U.S. hurricane damage, according to the reinsurance firm Swiss Re. There is plenty of money sloshing around the global- insurance pool to handle Katrina claims, and the Federal Government will pick up the tab for flood damage. One concern for consumers is that many insurers, facing hurricane-related claims, may pull out of the state, setting off a homeowner scramble for new policies. Only a month after state regulators approved a 21% rate hike, Nationwide Insurance announced that it wouldn't renew policies for more than 35,000 homeowners in Florida. Whether rates will ultimately rise is a matter of debate. Premiums are set according to a state's loss-data history, not a single event. Insurance firms developed more sophisticated modeling techniques after Hurricane Andrew. Now they are able to predict with greater accuracy the frequency and potential damage of storms like Katrina and spread their risk across the country accordingly. While residents in hurricane-prone areas can expect rate hikes, "people in Alaska won't be paying for this," says Robert Hartwig, chief economist with the Insurance Information Institute. Kevin McCarty, Florida's insurance commissioner, disagrees. He believes that homeowners across the board will pay more because of the storm. "The insurance companies are out there saying Katrina won't affect rates in their states, but that doesn't make sense," he says. "Demand for reinsurance is going to rise, supply is down, and that cost will be passed on to consumers." All this is academic, though, for the thousands of poor homeowners who did not have federal flood insurance and may have to rely on low-interest loans in order to rebuild. Can the economy take the hit? For the most part, yes. In the near term, economists say, Katrina may shave half a point off GDP growth over the next couple of quarters, largely because everyone from homeowners to truckers to airlines will be paying more for energy. But the U.S. economy can withstand some big blows. The nation was emerging from recession on 9/11, and that event did not ruin the recovery (thanks to billions in tax breaks). A slowdown may give the Fed reason to suspend its interest-rate hikes, a prospect that has already sparked a bond-market rally. While Katrina's impact on the Gulf economy is devastating in the near term, an infusion of federal disaster-relief dollars should stimulate industries from homebuilding to appliances and help lift the economy in 2006. And never underestimate the indefatigable American profit motive. One Houston contractor, Bert Screen, hopes to make his fortune rebuilding New Orleans. He was packing up his Ford pickup last week, rounding up a crew and planning to head east. "In a twisted way, I'm looking forward to it," he says. "I've always felt New Orleans was my second home, so I will help rebuild it, and make a pile of money." The recovery has already begun. --With reporting by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, Jyoti Thottam, Dody Tsiantar and Deirdre van Dyk/New York, Wendy Grossman/ Houston and Douglas Waller/Washington
A Family's Path from Ruin to Rescue By NATHAN THORNBURGH Sep. 12, 2005
The floods hit the St. Bernard
housing project in New Orleans' Seventh Ward with a determined fury. In
desperation, says Randy Nathan, 20, trapped residents screamed at
passing helicopters and set off firecrackers to attract attention. But
no rescuers came. "We had to make a move," he says. "The water was
rising. We had too many babies and my grandma."
In a week that heaped torment on top of tragedy, the deck seemed especially stacked against the Nathans. The 20-member extended family, including a newborn, a great-grandmother and a pregnant 22-year-old, fought its way out of the swamped housing project, only to languish for days on dry ground. A harrowing bus ride took the Nathans to Texas--and more disappointment. But when all seemed lost, grace arrived in the form of a stranger who offered her home, and with it, the space to be a family again. To save their family, Randy, his brother Laurence and cousin Rydell, both 18, had to jump from a third-story window into the 8-ft.-deep waters of the flooded city. The cousins, none of whom are strong swimmers, swam several blocks to get an abandoned boat and then spent nine hours ferrying family members to higher ground, helping others when they could. Surviving the flood was just the first challenge. The Nathans then spent two days searching for food and water and being turned away from checkpoints. When they finally boarded a bus for Houston, one of them was threatened at gunpoint by a thug from a rival housing project. They arrived at the Astrodome 16 hours later, only to be told they might not be able to stay. But in the milling crowd, Cheryl Graves, 47, stepped forward to invite all 20 of them to stay at her three-bedroom house in northwest Houston. Why would she take in total strangers? "Humanity," she says. "They can be here as long as they want." --By Nathan Thornburgh. With reporting by Deborah Fowler/Houston How to Bring the Magic Back By WALTER ISAACSON Sep. 12, 2005
All of us from New Orleans have
savored that Proust-bites-into-the-madeleine moment when a stray taste,
sound, smell or sight brings remembrances of things past. It happens
whenever I hear the badly rhymed but beautifully mournful--now even more
so--first few bars of "Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?"
It can even happen with a single chord. A friend gave me a CD of a local
band called Jonas Rising, and at the sound of the very first Neville
Brothers--inspired piano chord, I was back inside Tipitina's, where
Napoleon Avenue meets the Mississippi, listening to Professor Longhair.
The taste of a particularly pungent garlic sauce can evoke similar remembrances. What makes New Orleans eating so joyous is not just classic restaurants like Antoine's or Commander's Palace. It's the neighborhood places like those just up Napoleon from Tipitina's: the pan-roasted oysters at Manale's and the fried ones at Casamento's, nestled between a costume store and a building-ornament supply shop. My family home was, and I hope still is, on Napoleon Avenue as well. It's a raised West Indian cottage, at merely 100 years old not historic by local standards, yet part of the distinctive mix that makes even the uncelebrated neighborhoods of New Orleans so seductive. It was in neighborhoods such as these, more than the famous ones, where people lost their lives and cherished communities were washed away. I glimpsed on CNN our avenue under water and felt like crying. I was just in Venice, a city of masks and decadent grace that New Orleanians are genetically encoded to find enchanting. Because it's a world treasure, there is an international Save Venice movement. I hope New Orleans will evoke the same response. But saving New Orleans will require not merely re-creating the French Quarter. It will involve nurturing back to health the genuine and distinctive neighborhoods that serve as an incubator for the city's music and food and funkiness. A friend of mine, Stephanie Bruno, has run an organization that restores old shotgun cottages, the long and narrow houses built of old barge planks that dominate in the older areas. A New Orleans rebuilt with tract homes rather than shotguns would no longer have the same soul. The best writers to have lived in New Orleans were William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. But my other favorites were two who knew the neighborhoods better. Walker Percy wrote about the savory malaise emanating from middle-class enclaves such as Gentilly and Elysian Fields. And Lillian Hellman recalled wandering up Esplanade Avenue below the French Quarter. Hellman titled her second book of memoirs Pentimento, meaning the brush strokes and old images that struggle to emerge from a repainted canvas. You see that a lot in New Orleans: advertisements for defunct brands of beer and coffee poking through the fading paint of old brick buildings. Indeed, it has always been a city of masks and painted faces, with past mysteries and glories lurking faintly visible underneath. After disasters such as last week's storm, it's commonplace to extol the fierce determination of the afflicted as they rise like a phoenix. But indomitable energy is not what earned New Orleans the sobriquet the Big Easy, and it has never been a Phoenix in any sense. The evacuees I know talked about wandering to visit far-flung friends for a few months before heading home. It's probably not in the nature of most New Orleanians to roll up their sleeves and quickly build a grander city. They're better at making things akin to Creole gumbo and Cajun jambalaya--which involve a variety of ingredients and spices that are blended slowly. You start by making a roux, the mix of hot oil and flour that can hold the tastes together, a process that ought not be rushed. This easygoing lethargy might actually serve New Orleans well as it rebuilds. The city needs to restore itself authentically rather than produce a theme-park re-creation. It needs shotguns, not cold condos. Its talented preservation and community-planning experts should be offered the chance to devise a land-use approach that revives charming old neighborhood patterns rather than producing alienating cul-de-sacs or artificial quaintness. It has the opportunity to rebuild itself in a way that emerges from its rich heritage while guarding against any projects that would sap its soul. Like a pentimento, New Orleans has long been a canvas repeatedly repainted. Paint well, my artistic homeboys and girls, and carefully. Preserve the previous layers, and let them guide your brushwork. One false stroke, and the magic could disappear. Walter Isaacson, a New Orleans native and a former managing editor at TIME, is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute The City Tourists Never Knew By SONJA STEPTOE Sep. 12, 2005
Through the recounting of the
legions of conventioneers and hearty partyers who have flocked to the
city to frolic at Mardi Gras, jazz festivals and Sugar and Super Bowl
games over the decades, New Orleans has come to be thought of as the
place to forget your cares. It has been years since I've held that view.
Growing up in a town some 40 miles upriver, I saw overwhelming evidence
that the more accurate image is that of a city that care forgot. Now the
rest of the world is getting a shockingly graphic and unsettlingly
intense introduction to the forces that created the New Orleans I know.
I keep hearing people say on TV and in print that they don't recognize "this New Orleans." Perhaps they closed their eyes or didn't pay close attention when they were there. While I understand the temptation to wax nostalgic about the architecture of the Ninth Ward homes, the beauty of the Garden District, the charm of the French Quarter and so on, such musings perpetuate a romantic notion of the place that doesn't track with reality. Sure, there are isolated spots dotting the tourist maps that are well stocked with pristine prettiness and antebellum hospitality, but like A Streetcar Named Desire's Blanche DuBois, the real New Orleans hasn't possessed much beauty or charm for nearly 30 years. The deep wealth and class divisions, the decayed infrastructure, the lax civil-engineering management, the depleted city coffers, the lawless depravity, the history of political corruption by a long line of city and state officials, and the incompetent governance that television viewers are discovering are, to use the local vernacular, the roux of a long-simmering pot of gumbo that finally boiled over when Hurricane Katrina turned up the heat last week. Now the city is drowning in it. Although I have never lived in New Orleans proper, I have worked and spent much time there, experiencing firsthand the city's glory days during the late 1960s and early 1970s and its depressing decline since then. I remember childhood shopping trips with my parents inside the big, bright, block-long department stores that once lined Canal Street. My parents did their monthly grocery shopping at the cavernous Schwegmann's supermarkets in the city and treated my younger sister and me to movies and a few Mardi Gras parades there. Without us, my mother and father enjoyed frequent weekend excursions there, taking in shows and having dinner at Dooky Chase's and other eateries around the city. But by the time I hit my teens in the late '70s, New Orleans was hardening, and so was my father's attitude toward it. Crime was rising, white citizens were fleeing, conditions deteriorated in the public schools and hospitals, garbage littered the streets and the economy and tax base were beginning to falter. Our family trips became far less frequent, limited to the pursuit of necessities that couldn't be obtained in suburban shopping malls, medical appointments at the downtown offices of specialists and our annual trek to the Superdome for the Bayou Classic football game. When asked, my father declined to articulate precisely what made him grow so uneasy about the Big Easy, beyond his stock response: "New Orleans is changing. It's gotten so dirty and dangerous down there." It's true that he was a black Mississippi country boy raised to be suspicious and fearful of the big, bad city and had grown into a conservative, law-and-order school administrator, but clearly Daddy had started to sense that real trouble was festering down in the Crescent City. The passing years have proved him right. Those cheery tourists need only have peered out of their French Quarter hotel-room windows to see the ugly and abject poverty on full display at the squalid Iberville housing projects (average annual income of its 833 households: $7,279), sitting just next door to the Vieux Carré off Canal Street. If the visitors had taken a few steps beyond Tulane University and the nearby Garden District mansions, they would have found themselves smack-dab in the middle of a ghetto choked with rudimentary shotgun houses, dilapidated housing projects and living conditions that seem only slightly better than those in Port-au-Prince, Bangladesh or Baghdad. I reached my father on his cell phone the Monday night after the storm spared our house and left him and my mother unharmed but without power and conventional phone service. When I told him about the rising floodwaters throughout New Orleans, the rain coming in through the torn Superdome roof, and the lack of air conditioning and lighting for the evacuated multitudes inside, his reaction was predictable. "What a shame. I'm sorry to hear about all that suffering," he said, before adding, "But I am so glad to be living out here in the country, far from that mess of a city." TIME PRESS RELEASE TIME: ‘SPECIAL REPORT: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY’TIME PUBLISHES 52-PAGE HURRICANE PACKAGE Posted Sunday, Sep. 04, 2005 Highlights from TIME's Issue on newsstands September 5, 2005: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (p. 44) “It may be weeks before the lights come back on and months before New Orleans is mopped out, a year before the half a million refugees resettle in whatever will come to function as home, even without anything precious from the days before the flood. But it may take even longer than that before the nature of this American tragedy is clear: whether the storm of ’05 is remembered mainly as the worst natural disaster in our history or the worst response to a disaster in our history. Or both,” writes TIME's editor-at-large Nancy Gibbs, in the opener to TIME's 52-page package on Hurricane Katrina. “Canal Street lived up to its name. As the temperature rose, the whole city was poached in a vile stew of melted landfill, chemicals, corpses, gasoline, snakes, canal rats,” writes Gibbs. “Many could not escape their flooded homes without help. Among those who could, only a final act of desperation would drive them into the streets, where the caramel waters stank of sewage and glittered with the gaudy swirls of oil spills.” As the floodwaters rose, EMS technicians told TIME they were left stranded at the downtown Hampton Inn by panicking cops who jumped into their private cars to flee the city. When Dr. Greg Henderson, a pathologist turned field medic, arrived at the Convention Center on Friday, he was the only doctor for 10,000 people. “They’re stacking the dead on the second floor,” he told TIME by phone. “People are having seizures in the hallway. People with open running sores, every imaginable disease and disorder, all kinds of psychiatric problems." He tells TIME, "The crowds here have gotten a bad rap. There are not many human beings you could cram into a building with 10,000 others, in 105° heat, that wouldn’t get just a little pissed off.” Henderson went in with New Orleans police. He tried to tend to the sickest and the babies first. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101276,00.html TIME’s in-depth 52-page cover package also includes a gallery of photographs, information on how you can help, graphics and vignettes from survivors. TIME.COM: Turn to www.time.com for daily analysis from our reporters in the stricken region. Check in regularly for the latest photos, more on the health crisis and updates from TIME’s Washington bureau. BROADCASTERS: TIME’s correspondents and photographers in the region are available for interviews. Call Jennifer Zawadzinski at 212-522-9046 to book guests. HOW THIS HAPPENED
(p. 52) “Who’s running things? Nobody, as far as I can tell,” Colonel
Timothy Parchick of the Air Force Reserve 920th Rescue Wing told TIME’s
Brian Bennett in New Orleans. Early Monday morning, Parchick had told FEMA
and Northcom that he and his men were ready to go. But his helicopter
wasn’t ordered to deploy until Tuesday afternoon -- an “unacceptable”
delay, he says. In 72 hours, his men rescued some 400 people. He wonders
how many more he could have saved. Louisiana Representative Jim McCrery,
chair of a powerful Ways and Means subcommittee, told TIME: “I’ve talked
to the White House staff. I’ve talked to FEMA. I’ve talked with the Army.
And of course, I’ve talked with the state office of emergency
preparedness. And nobody, federal or state, seems to know how to implement
a decision, if we can get a decision.” However, Patrick Rhode, the No. 2
at FEMA, told TIME: “I am actually very impressed with the mobilization of
man and machine to help our friends in this unfortunate area. I think it’s
one of the most impressive search and rescue operations this country has
ever conducted domestically.” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101278,00.html
REBUILDING A DREAM (p. 64) For a long time, before it can become a city of construction cranes, New Orleans will be a city of bulldozers, writes TIME’s Richard Lacayo. That’s what could do the most damage to the things that gave the city its character-the center-hall cottages with their columned porches, the rows of single-file shotgun houses with their carved brackets supporting deep overhangs. . . Once they are gone, will flavorless 21st century tract houses replace them? Rebuilding the city, however, will open opportunities to do things better. Hospitals could be redesigned to provide parking on the lower floors so that any future flooding would not reach the floors where patients and medical records would be kept. BILLION -DOLLAR BLOWOUT (p. 80) Katrina disrupted a vital node in the country’s transport network. You name the commodity-coffee, fertilizer, lumber, steel, wheat-it ships through the Gulf’s ports, rails and riverways, reports TIME’s business writer-reporter Daren Fonda. Consumers can expect to pay more for basics such as coffee, bananas and paint (made at idled chemical-processing plants in the Gulf). Everyone from homeowners to truckers to airlines will pay more for energy. But the U.S. economy can withstand some big blows, reports TIME. The nation was emerging from recession on 9/11, and that event didn’t ruin the recovery (thanks to billions in tax breaks). While Katrina’s impact on the Gulf economy is devastating in the near term, an infusion of federal disaster-relief dollars should stimulate industries from homebuilding to appliances and help lift the economy in 2006. THE FRAGILE GULF (p. 72) As for measures to combat global warming, the Bush Administration has consistently resisted any legislation or global treaty that would hurt the energy industry or require sacrifices from American motorists, writes TIME science writer Jeff Kluger. In the face of the lives lost last week and the billions of dollars it will cost to rebuild the devastated cities and ports, those policies seem tragically shortsighted, he argues. VIEWPOINT Walter Isaacson: How to Bring the Magic Back (p. 71) The soul of the city of New Orleans was in its neighborhoods, reflects New Orleans native and former TIME managing editor, Walter Isaacson. “Saving New Orleans will require not merely re-creating the French Quarter. It will involve nurturing back to health the genuine and distinctive neighborhoods that serve as an incubator for the city’s music and food and funkiness,” Isaacson writes. “The city needs to restore itself authentically rather than produce a theme-park re-creation. It needs shotguns (cottages), not cold condos. Its talented preservation and community-planning experts should be offered the chance to devise a land-use approach that revives charming old neighborhood patterns rather than producing alienating cul-de-sacs or artificial quaintness. It has the opportunity to rebuild itself in a way that emerges from its rich heritage while guarding against any projects that would sap its soul.” IN THE ARENA WITH JOE KLEIN: Listen to What Katrina is Saying (p. 27) “Government cannot prevent hurricanes, of course, but the prevailing haplessness reflected 25 years of distorted priorities,” writes TIME’s political columnist Joe Klein. “In a civilized community, there is a need for collective thinking and preparation-not just for immediate risks like a natural catastrophe but also for more abstract concerns like the environmental issues that worry Robert Kennedy, as well as for eternal problems like poverty. Having celebrated our individuality to a fault for half a century, we now should pay greater attention to the common weal.” ESSAY: The City Tourists Never Knew (p. 116) “The real New Orleans hasn’t possessed much beauty or charm for nearly 30 years,” argues TIME’s senior correspondent Sonja Steptoe who grew up in a town 40 miles upriver from New Orleans. “I saw overwhelming evidence that the more accurate image is that of a city that care forgot. Now the rest of the world is getting a shockingly graphic and unsettlingly intense introduction to the forces that created the New Orleans I know. I keep hearing people say on TV and in print that they don’t recognize ‘this New Orleans.’ Perhaps they closed their eyes or didn’t pay close attention when they were there.” FOUR LEADERS SHARE THEIR EXPERIENCES (p. 85) Leaders whose communities were devastated by natural disasters share their experiences and counsel with their counterparts on the Gulf Coast. “It’s very important that local authorities be given every opportunity to provide input and that local authorities be regarded as the local experts,” says Kate Hale, director of emergency management of Dade County during Hurricane Andrew. “I have to admit that I was one of the first people to break into grocery stores the day after the tsunami,” Mawardi Nurdin, mayor of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, tells TIME. “I did it because help had not arrived and people were hungry. I guess it was natural that people started looting to look for food. But if looting gets out of hand, then it’s time to call the army for help…One major difference between Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami is that we in Banda Aceh were totally caught off guard. We didn’t even know that water could rise that high.” “Citizens are looking for leadership that will bring immediate solutions: they need potable water, they need shelter, they need food, in many cases they need medical attention,” says Pete Wilson, California governor during the Northridge earthquake. “They don’t necessarily know what level of government provides these things—and they don’t care. They want the response.” “In a time of disaster, you’re the citizens’ leader, more so than any other time. You’re their counselor, their coach, their cheerleader, their security giver—you’re all those things,” says Joseph Riley, Charleston, S.C. mayor during Hurricane Hugo. “There’s a grieving process after a disaster, and you have to get the spirit up and keep it up. You’re helping people get to the rebuilding stage.” |
