Flooded in doubt

Yvonne Birdsall’s house at 5200 Warrington DSamantha Clemensrive, in the Gentilly section of New Orleans, hadn’t changed much in the past year. A moldy stuffed bunny still lies abandoned on the living room floor. Washed-out family photos rested in their broken frames. Plates and cups stood in the dish rack by the sink, dirtier than they had ever been.

Only one thing had changed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: the mud. Dry now, it cracked under the feet of the volunteers from Columbia’s First Presbyterian Church, who entered 5200 Warrington Drive on a Monday morning in September for the first time since it was flooded.

In the next few days, the house would have to be cleared out, gutted and boarded up. But that did not necessarily mean it would be saved. In April, the city of New Orleans passed an ordinance aimed at reducing the number of derelict, unsafe and unsanitary properties that have been left untouched since the flood. The new law mandated that every damaged house be gutted and boarded up by Aug. 29, 2006, the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

In Gentilly, the streets have been cleared of sand and water, and of the 213 residential lots on Warrington Drive, most have been gutted and secured. The residents, however, have been slow to return. Only 36 families have come back to the neighborhood, most of them to live in a government trailer parked in front of their devastated houses. Only one property seems to have been renovated.

The ordinance is also an attempt by city officials to halt the decline of property values for returning residents, many of whom now live near homes that have been abandoned. Property owners must show a good-faith effort toward cleaning or demolishing their houses, or risk losing not only the structures, but their lots as well. For volunteers like Kathy Montgomery, the outspoken organizer of the Columbia Presbyterians’ mission trip, the work they’re doing in New Orleans buys time for homeowners who do not yet know if they will ever return to Gentilly. But, Montgomery says, the uncertainty is frustrating.

“Are our labors thrown away, dispensable? Maybe so,” she says. “At least she keeps her property. ... In the ultimate end, we’ve helped her.”

Faith-based groups like the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, the national organization overseeing the work of the Columbia volunteers, have played a huge role in the relief and reconstruction of areas affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This was the third trip to the Gulf Coast by the Columbia group. Many of the volunteers on the recent trip had been there less than a year before, in November 2005. “I was prepared better this time, but it’s still shocking,” Montgomery said. “I was amazed, astounded and very much appalled because there’s been so much of nothing.”

Though they seemed overwhelmed by the devastation, the Columbia group, like all the volunteers who have descended on the city since Katrina, recognize that its work was vital to the future of New Orleans. So after arriving at 5200 Warrington Drive, they grabbed nose masks and wheelbarrows, chased away the wasps that had taken over the residence, and started their work.

“They see the need and the purpose,” Montgomery said of the rest of the group, “and that’s what it’s all about.”

Yvonne Birdsall, who lived in the house on Warrington Drive in the 1960s before turning it into a rental property, called Presbyterian Disaster Assistance for help in June. She sought the help of volunteers to avoid losing her property under the city’s new ordinance — even though she does not know what the future holds for Gentilly.

“It might have to be demolished, but I’m hoping that it can be repaired,” Birdsall said. “If it builds up around here again and people come back, I might end up living back here again.”

When doomsday arrived

Tears well up in Gary Hayes’ eyes when he recalls Katrina’s devastation, which he says reminds him of his time in Vietnam. By the time the storm reached New Orleans on Aug. 29, most of the residents of Warrington Drive had evacuated Gentilly. Gary and his wife, Brenda, a minister, stayed.

She was sitting in her Bible room, pointing a video camera at the horizontal rain and the wind tearing at the branches of the trees. He was standing in their front yard. By 9 a.m., the walls of the London Avenue Canal, just west of Warrington Drive, had begun to bend and water was leaking into the neighborhood. Gary went inside, grabbed another beer and walked to the end of his driveway to inspect the progress of the water.

“Clear water kept on coming,” he said. “Then I saw this black shadow.”

The shadow — a wall of mud and sand — engulfed Gentilly when floodwall panels on the east side of the London Avenue Canal, about a block from the Hayes’ house, collapsed.

The failure of the floodwall started with a 10- to 20-foot-high “scourhole,” a gap caused by the erosion of the clay and silt that typically covers a levee, in the banks of the canal near the Mirabeau Avenue bridge. As water seeped through the sand beneath the sheet pile that supports the floodwall, the canal started bursting at the seams. The surge of water coming from Lake Pontchartrain into the canal increased the pressure on the entire structure, and the clay, silt and sand supporting the floodwall were pushed away.

The scourhole on the wet side and the loss of material on the dry side weakened the levee until the floodwall was standing in equilibrium with almost no support. Around 9:30 a.m., a 450-foot section collapsed, releasing torrents of water, sand and mud into the Gentilly neighborhood.

Two weeks after the storm, only one pump — known even before Katrina as the “doomsday pump” — was able to start draining the neighborhood.

Al and Gwen Bierria’s house, at 5286 Warrington Drive, is just north of the south breach in the London Avenue Canal. Al likes to speak in metaphors, comparing New Orleans to a beautiful woman who is unkempt and the Corps of Engineers to a drunk driver whose negligence has cost lives. Pessimistic about the state of the city and its future, he is angry at local and federal officials who have not taken responsibility for what happened and residents who have not made their feelings known.

“The people in New Orleans should be very angry,” he said. “When you have a government agency responsible for a certain task, you don’t have it fall apart. I can understand if a storm would come, and the water would come over the levees. But when you build it and it collapses, that’s a whole other story. ... Negligence and purpose of killing, to me, are the same thing.”

Bierria’s anger is accompanied by fear. He and Gwen are the only residents who have returned to their block of Warrington Drive; they have been living in a trailer since last October while Al, a contractor, rebuilds their house. He says the Corps of Engineers’ work on the floodwall where it collapsed is almost complete. But, other sections, including the one just behind his backyard, have not been improved.

“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” Al said. “You still have the same chain, the same levee. What’s stopping it from breaking down here?”

Frederick Young, project manager for the Corps of Engineers in New Orleans’ East Bank, said that the levees that did not fail do not need to be improved because the conditions that contributed to the breach at the Mirabeau Bridge were unique; engineers kept the existing I-panels after finding that there were no other scourholes along the structure.

The breach in the floodwall was repaired to pre-Katrina strength before the start of this year’s hurricane season, and the Corps has continued to improve it. The new section of the floodwall was constructed of T-panels, which add a 3-foot concrete base to the standard I-panel. The T-panel is also supported by three sheet piles instead of one, which go 52 and 74 feet into the ground, instead of the usual 16 feet. When the work is completed, the levee will be covered with plastic to protect it from erosion.

The new section looks undeniably safer than the unimproved sections. But the Corps of Engineers’ confidence in the structure is not matched by that of the residents, many of whom still blame the agency for failing to protect their homes.

“A wait-and-see game”

For others who, like the Bierrias, decide to return to Gentilly, the journey will be full of obstacles.

“Everything that you’ve got to do is a hassle right now,” Birdsall says. “A big bureaucratic problem.”

The city government’s immediate worry is cleaning up and rebuilding. Many essential city services have been given a lower priority. Recycling pick-up, for instance, has not yet resumed. Instead, there is a special pick-up for “white garbage”: the old appliances and food-filled refrigerators that, 13 months after Katrina, homeowners are just now putting to the curb.

The lack of recycling worries Jo Ann Foriester and other Columbia volunteers, who can’t fail to notice that they are adding to the city’s trash problems. The 15 volunteers consumed an average of two bottles of water a day for six days, which contributed about 200 water bottles to New Orleans landfills.

Some people have made the cutback in city services work for them. After traveling around the U.S. and Canada doing construction work for two years, Alberto Mejilla arrived in New Orleans three months ago. He drives around the city and rummages through debris to find semi-precious metals. He said he gets 60 cents a pound for aluminum and 80 cents to a dollar for a pound of copper. While the Columbia volunteers worked on Birdsall’s house, he sorted through an enormous pile of wood and drywall and came away with a handful of aluminum bars, probably the remnants of an appliance. Birdsall was glad; at least it wouldn’t end up in a landfill, she said. She then suggested Mejilla look in the backyard for anything else of value.

Since Katrina, Birdsall has lived on her savings and monthly Social Security check. She received about $20,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but very little from her insurance company because she did not have flood coverage. Her own home, on the other side of the canal from her rental house at 5200 Warrington Drive, was so damaged it had to be demolished. The Corps of Engineers is purchasing an easement on her land to repair another breach in the levee, but the agency has not paid her for the property yet.

The fluctuations in the New Orleans real estate market since Katrina add to the uncertainty. Birdsall cannot afford to buy another house: Prices have increased dramatically in areas that weren’t damaged. After the storm, she moved into an $800-a-month apartment that went for $500 before Katrina.

“It’s like a state of limbo, of not knowing exactly how soon this area will develop and how many people will come back, how many people will build back up,” she said. “There’s so many ifs and buts and whys to consider. It’s not a cut-and-dried deal.”

Meanwhile, property values have plummeted in Gentilly and other damaged areas.

“(My) house is worth over $300,000,” Bierria said. “How many people are going to give me $300,000 when they look at this next door and that next door?”

The city of New Orleans has contracted with various architects to plan the rebuilding of the city. In Gentilly, the firm Hewitt-Washington and Associates is responsible for working with neighborhood associations and coming up with a plan that would restore the neighborhood’s residences, businesses and institutions. Visioning meetings have already taken place, but the residents said they were never invited to attend them.

“We don’t get any information, I hate to say it,” Birdsall said. “I think homeowners should be appraised, should get bulletins to keep us abreast with what’s going on, but we don’t get anything.”

To some residents, it seems utopian to think about building parks and restaurants when their most basic needs are still going unmet. They need a place to live and a job. Their neighborhoods are marred by rusty cars, giant heaps of debris and water pooling into giant potholes on every street.

In the meantime, many homeowners are reluctant to rebuild until they know whether their neighbors will. They can’t afford to pay a construction company to gut and repair their homes, so they turn to volunteers, who see contradictions everywhere they go.

“That’s when you begin to run around chasing your tail,” Montgomery said, adding that, like the residents, the volunteers are waiting to see what happens.

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is committed to participating in the relief effort for seven more years, but Montgomery said the organization is having a hard time finding volunteers. Its five villages are only filled to a quarter of their capacity, and the 15 volunteers from Columbia were the only guests in the Luling, La., camp the week of Sept. 18. Montgomery, a former village coordinator for the Presbyterians, said the last significant influx of volunteers was last spring, when college students on break flocked to the Gulf Coast to do relief work.

The city can’t continue to rely on volunteers alone, she said. Not only are their numbers shrinking, but they cannot do more specialized work like plumbing and electricity, which requires licensed professionals.

“Will it last seven years?” Montgomery wondered one morning as she sat on a porch on Warrington Drive. “The structures might, but I don’t know that the villages will be filled,” Montgomery said. “People still go to Appalachia, and there’s so much work there. And there will be another hurricane.”

Moving in or moving on

The residents of Warrington Drive are reminded of the reality of Hurricane Katrina in the most benign and mundane ways. Watermelons started growing in Birdsall’s front yard; floodwaters had displaced seeds, and they grew into odd floral arrangements all over the neighborhood.

Across the street from 5200 Warrington Drive, Joan Baldo now has several clusters of baby’s breath instead of roses. The Columbia volunteers made sure to preserve them when they started gutting her house.

Baldo is an elegant woman who likes to keep a good home and a beautiful garden. She has a sense of humor, although tears come to her eyes when she finds in the pile of debris in her living room a favorite black-and-gold beaded gown, which she feigns to model for the volunteers.

“I’m sorry you had to see my house the way it is,” she said, adding that at least it looks better now than it did when Warrington Drive was covered in 5 feet of sand. “It looked like beach-front property.”

Joan Baldo has bad knees. So when a new city ordinance required all houses in Gentilly to be raised by 3 feet. She and her husband, Edward, applied for a demolition permit and bought a house in nearby Metairie, which sustained significantly less damage.

“It’s sad, but I said I’m over it and I am,” Joan Baldo said. “I really am.”

Others are not so willing to leave. Leroy Smith is an on-site construction specialist for the Corps of Engineers, in charge of building the new floodgates at the entrance of the London Avenue Canal. He has a personal stake in the project: He lives in Gentilly, too, and he does not want to see his house under five feet of water again. He said he spent so much time working on the canal that he has yet to start work on his own house.

“It still looks like a ghost town in the neighborhood,” Smith said. “We got a long way to go, but we can’t give up the fight. We’re not going to let it die. She will not die.”

For all its flaws, residents like Smith take pride in their city. It’s home. Even those like Bierria, who said “that ‘home’ thing is kind of a cop-out,” New Orleans is hard to turn their backs on, despite its many problems. Bierria mentioned a 2004 quality-of-life poll conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of New Orleans, which found that 40 percent of residents were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their quality of life; that six out of 10 voters thought public elementary education was poor; and that more than one in three thought the city’s problems had gotten worse over the past five years.

“At least Katrina did one thing,” Bierria said. “It got people away from here to see how the rest of the country is doing.”

Today, 13 months after Hurricane Katrina, only half of the city’s pre-storm population has returned. Bierria acknowledged the beauty and culture of the city but said that, given better opportunities, anyone would leave, just as they would if Haiti or Cuba were their home.

Yet he remains.

“New Orleans is a very, very, very beautiful woman, and you’ve got a bunch of people that just sling mud in her face,” he said. “It makes you wanna cry, it’s sick. That’s all I gotta say about this place.”

The house at 5200 Warrington Drive had changed by the time the volunteers from Columbia Presbyterian Church left New Orleans on Sept. 23. The evidence of its sad demise had been cleared out and put to the curb, and a bare structure of wood and concrete stared at a mirror image of itself across the street, and another one and another one again down the road. Each appears naked, except for the X hastily spray-painted on the facade, the only apparent sign that this was once a place called home.