Rebuilding A Dream

By Richard Lacayo

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

With reporting by Reported by Amanda Bower/ San Francisco, Terry McCarthy, Jeffrey Ressner/ Los Angeles, Maggie Sieger, David Thigpen/ Chicago