Mopping New Orleans

By John Cloud

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How long will it be before New Orleans is itself again? You hear estimates: three more weeks before it's dry, at least two months for electricity, but a plausible answer is never. Vast tracts of the city--not just shanties but mansions, not just the morgue but the Southern Yacht Club--aren't salvageable. They all sit in what is called "floodwater" but is really a solution of oil, feces, battery acid, human and animal rot, burst containers of bug spray and paint thinner and nail polish and antifreeze. The primary sensory experience of New Orleans now is the smell, a gagging foulness of the charnel, of the hundreds of bloated fish pooled in the 17th Street Canal and a million other nasty things floating everywhere. The masterless dogs are so hungry and delirious in the 92DEG heat that they drink this mix, at least a lap or two, and then stagger away. The city smells dead, and although the French Quarter and a few other areas were blessedly spared, whatever exists in many neighborhoods here a year from now will be vastly different.

So, how long? It's best to answer this question by traveling to the city with the Army Corps of Engineers, the people the Federal Government calls when it wants to build something big. Some 1,580 Corps workers have come to the Gulf to fix what Katrina broke; it's the agency's biggest disaster response ever. During a visit to the New Orleans lakefront Thursday, the Vice President asserted after a short tour that "we're making significant progress." The engineers on the ground, those who work in the dross and stench every day, agree, but they also privately say they have barely begun. Not because they aren't working hard. Among the dozen Corps employees I spoke with, all said they were sleeping no more than four hours a night, mostly on the floor of the Corps' New Orleans office, which has reeking bathrooms and no running water. Rather, the simple immensity of the task has astonished even the most experienced Corps engineers. When Colonel Richard Wagenaar, the Corps' New Orleans commander, first tried to approach the flooded 17th Street Canal as the storm was subsiding, he couldn't get within half a mile of it because of all the water and downed electrical lines.

Even now, New Orleans has little power and undrinkable tap water, so supplies (generators, meals ready to eat, Doral cigarettes) must be delivered to the Corps each day--as often as several times a day--from a staging area 80 miles up the Mississippi. When I traveled with Thursday morning's eight-vehicle convoy, we started two hours late because the Corps workers each had to get tetanus and hepatitis shots before re-entering the suppurating city. Once under way, we had to stop twice: once to wait for a flatbed with a fan boat to join the convoy and again because a 55-gal. vat of Industrial Blue All-Purpose Cleaner was slipping and threatening to slide onto the highway.

Everything conspires against progress. "We're not so worried about the criminal element now, but the latest problem is the wild dogs," says Susan Jean Jackson, the Corps' spokeswoman in New Orleans. "Poor things. Just starving. But yesterday one of our rangers had to pull a gun on one." A plainspoken woman who corrals her long brown hair with both a headband and a ponytail clasp, Jackson says that even though the Corps is pumping hundreds of cubic feet of water out of New Orleans every second, "the expectation is the lower you pump, the more muck you're gonna get. And if the pumps get clogged, it's gonna slow us down." What's in the muck? She drags on a cigarette. "I think there's bodies out there."

Currently the biggest engineering challenge is plugging the London Avenue Canal, a long thin stretch of water leading south from Lake Pontchartrain toward the French Quarter. The overused term breach is too delicate to describe what happened to the canal's floodwalls. (A levee is an earthen mound separating man from water; a floodwall is a concrete-and-steel wall that stands atop a levee or sometimes in place of one.) Two long sections of the floodwall, which is a foot thick and 14 ft. high, were shoved over as though they had been upright graham crackers. In what looks in hindsight like utter foolishness, a whole neighborhood had been built just a few feet from this wall; now only the roofs are visible in the fetid lake Katrina made.

How do you get to this lake? The Corps has commissioned an eight-chopper fleet of Black Hawks and Chinooks, three of them from Singapore, that drop 7,000-lb. bags of sand where the floodwalls should be. Roughly 50 bags are dropped every hour, fewer when the choppers need repairing or when dignitaries fly in for photo ops. (The Vice President's visit last week cost an entire hour.) With all the choppers flying around the sandy lakeshore, "it's like Apocalypse Now," says Jackson. The force of the choppers' blades was so strong that it blew out the windows on at least two Corps SUVs parked in a bad spot.

Amid this only partly controlled chaos--I saw a pump begin to leak Thursday, and Jackson warned that "even a hard rain" now could further delay New Orleans' unwatering--you encounter, incongruously, tourists. Pam Boston, who turned 53 last month, came to view the lakefront tumult with her brother Lloyd Acree, his wife Robin and their boy Alex, 15. "We're never going to see anything like this so close to home," says Boston. "There's just the last few pieces of New Orleans we want to hold close to our hearts." The Corps workers thought the tourists were nuts. "It's a contaminated area!" said one in disgust. But Robin Acree described the Corps engineers as heroes. "For him"--she gestures toward her son--"to get to see the good part, see the military and everybody pulling together, that's something."

DRYING OUT

Stormdrains in nearly every city in the world work on the same principle: water flows downhill, usually to a river or a coast. But in New Orleans, the river and the coast are uphill. To get the water out, crews are racing to restart the city's elaborate pumping system

Plug the holes, power the pumps ... As repair crews descended on the inundated city, the first step was to plug the breaches that let Lake Pontchartrain pour in. Less than two weeks after the storm, the major breaches had been filled, primarily with sandbags dropped from helicopters. Next, workers began getting power to the city's electric pumps

1 Rain and floodwater flow through underground culverts and canals to low points in the city, where pumping stations push them onward

2 Larger pumping stations then lift the water into open canals

3 At some points in the city, water flows to final pumping stations at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, where pumps lift it over the levee

Vertical centrifugal pumps

Floodwall

Horizontal screw pumps

Outflow canal to Lake Pontchartrain

Underground drainage canal

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE? Working at full capacity, the city's pumps could drain an Olympic-size swimming pool in 1.9 sec. At the current reduced pumping rate, New Orleans could be drained by Oct. 8, and surrounding areas by Oct. 18, the Army Corps of Engineers estimates

... and the water slowly recedes At the height of the flood, about 80% of New Orleans was under water. By Sept. 10 it was about 60% under water. More than 30 of the city's 148 pumps were running at reduced capacity, pushing 90,000 gal. per sec. out of the city

NEW ORLEANS

Approximate extent of highest flooding

Shallowest flooding

Deepest flooding

Interstate 10

17th St. Canal

Orleans Ave. Canal

London Ave. Canal

38 portable pumps are also in use around the city

Pump Station #6 (The city's largest)

Station #1, #2, #3, #7, #17, #19, #20, #16, #5, #4

City Park

Audubon Park

Levee

Levee

Lake Pontchartrain

Garden District

Mississippi River

French Quarter

Downtown

NORTH

Where levees breached

11.7 miles

DRYING OUT The highest point in New Orleans is the levee along the Mississippi River. The lowest parts are closest to Lake Pontchartrain. As more pumps come online, the water will recede toward the northern parts of the city

Pumping stations in New Orleans

Size indicates normal pumping capacity

Proportion in operation as of Sept. 10

Gallons of water per second: 1,500 3,750 15,000 37,500 67,500

Capacity unknown

TIME Graphic by Ed Gabel and Joe Lertola

Sources: Army Corps of Engineers; National Register Evaluation of New Orleans Drainage System