You're On Your Own

By Cathy Booth Thomas / New Orleans

You don't have to ask Alicia and Eric Hansen if they are ready for the next hurricane to hit New Orleans. Visit them in their sunny yellow bungalow, which took on 3 ft. of water after Hurricane Katrina. The house now sits high and dry on concrete columns that soar 11 ft. into the air. The first time Alicia walked up a ladder into her living room, she stomped on the floor to make sure the whole thing wouldn't collapse like a wobbly flamingo. Now, she says, nothing but the "perfect storm"--a Category 4 or 5--will budge her. "I'm not planning on leaving," she says, peering down from her home in the treetops. "Flooding isn't any issue anymore."

With the hurricane season starting June 1, flooding is on everyone's mind in New Orleans these days. Downtown last week, government officials, military men in desert gear and private suppliers ran a tabletop exercise against a fictional Category 4 hurricane named Oscar. Next up: the exercise goes live, with role players posing as residents fleeing a Category 3 storm by bus from the Earnest N. Morial Convention Center, the scene of real-life tragedy after Katrina. Along Lake Pontchartrain, meanwhile, contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers are rushing to finish new floodgates on the city's perimeter, working even at night under klieg lights. New levees replacing those wiped out by the hurricane are nearly finished. The result, ironically, is that the Katrina-ravished Ninth Ward, lying devastated behind its new, higher, fortified levee, may now be one of the safer places to live in the city.

Still, New Orleanians learned a valuable lesson from Katrina: Trust no one and nothing. They're not counting on the levees to hold or the government to rescue them this time. Neighborhoods like Broadmoor are recruiting block captains to canvass residents who have returned, noting which homes are occupied, who lives in flimsy trailers and which elderly residents might need help. In Gentilly, where many senior citizens died, residents are looking into their own text-messaging system for emergency alerts. Self-sufficiency is everyone's mantra, from civic associations to city hall. "We have purchased jet boats and sandbags," says Glenn Stoudt of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association, before trying out a joke. "There are several arks being constructed, and the rats and mosquitoes are pairing up." That's called hurricane humor in these parts.

Ask people in New Orleans about their hurricane plans, and they will give you a sad smile. These are people who saw the dead floating in the street, heard gunshots down the block and had to paddle their way to safety on a dinghy or a mattress. Dr. Dwayne Thomas, CEO of Charity Hospital System--the little left of it, that is--went through five hellish days after Katrina waiting for someone to rescue 367 patients at the flooded facility. He was siphoning gas from National Guard trucks to run generators to sustain the critically ill; eight patients died. "Our experience in Katrina taught us the same thing our parents taught us--to be self-sufficient, self-responsible, disciplined and organized," he says, a look of humor mixed with pain in his eyes. His staff members kidded him when he showed up the night before Katrina with a "hurricane box" containing a sledgehammer and life jackets. They laugh no more, he says. This year Charity, which can barely sustain an emergency room in a defunct Lord & Taylor store, plans to shut down and evacuate for anything greater than a tropical storm.

Forecasters at Colorado State University believe there's nearly a 50% chance of a major hurricane hitting the coast between Florida and Texas this year, up from a normal 30% chance. New Orleans officials are assuming the worst in planning for a big storm, having learned the hard way that commercial phone lines will fail, cell-phone towers will topple, repair teams could take days (or, more likely, weeks) to show up and the National Guard will come packing guns but no walkie-talkies. "In the end, you can only count on yourself," says deputy mayor Greg Meffert, the city's chief technology officer and a onetime tech entrepreneur. Like every other city employee, from the mayor on down, Meffert is worried that the "rookie levee system"--untested since repairs began--could fail again.

The truth is, New Orleans, if hit, will flood. How badly depends on the hurricane. In his book The Storm (Viking; 320 pages), out this week, Louisiana State University researcher Ivor van Heerden argues that Katrina wasn't the mythical Big One, a frightening conclusion for a city entering a new hurricane season. The storm made landfall east of New Orleans as a fast-moving Category 3, he notes, but the winds that lashed the city--weakened by wetlands and miles of subdivisions--registered only as a Category 1. Van Heerden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center in Baton Rouge, warns that a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane passing west of the city would flood levee to levee--including the historic French Quarter, which was spared last time--even without the embankments breaking. Another man-made disaster, like the levee breaches after Katrina, could turn New Orleans into a "Cajun Atlantis," Van Heerden fears, crippling the coastal economy along with it. "The uneasiness is not just in New Orleans. It's right across the southern part of the state," he says.

On a tour of the city's earthen and floodwall defenses last week, Van Heerden said levee problems could endanger areas that were not flooded after Katrina, including the west bank of the Mississippi and the western suburbs of New Orleans, most notably near the airport, an area crucial to every evacuation plan.

As he talks, Van Heerden takes a sample of shell-studded sand, maybe 6,000 years old, that Katrina dumped all over houses next to the London Avenue Canal--one of three drainage canals built to carry water out of the low-lying city. As part of Team Louisiana, the state group investigating why the city flooded, Van Heerden has been walking the entire levee system, and has come to the conclusion that the Corps' design was largely to blame. According to Van Heerden, the team's report, set for release May 31, will show that 87% of the water that flooded New Orleans came through breaches in the floodwalls, not over the tops of levees. That's key because a storm surge topping the levees would have lasted but a few hours, leaving at most 3 ft. of water in New Orleans, he calculates. The breaches, by comparison, let water pour in for days, inundating houses up to their rooftops.

o TRYING TO MAKE THE LEVEES READY

DAVID DANIEL, HEAD OF THE AMERICAN Society of Civil Engineers team reviewing the Corps' work, has also criticized the nation's chief engineers for playing it "too close to the margins" of safety in the past. He gives them kudos for getting the city's levees "back to where we were" before Katrina--but that's also what worries him as the city prepares for a new storm season. Every levee, says Daniel, is still too low by a couple of feet because the Corps didn't calculate for the ground subsiding. "If they find other areas that were a hairline away from failure before, they need to fix those right away," he says.

The hopes and fears of the city are, for now, concentrated on a tall, rangy Corps veteran, Lieut. Colonel Lewis Setliff, head of Task Force Guardian, the group charged with repairing the levee system. Setliff's team has been given an $800 million pocketbook to repair more than 200 miles of levee damage and construct three unique floodgate systems to stop storm surges from riding into the city via the three drainage canals breached after Katrina. The Corps admitted last week that two of the three floodgates it was building for the job would not be finished on June 1, as promised. The anticipated delay--a month in the case of one gate structure--has made people in New Orleans nervous, if not downright angry.

Setliff is soothing and honest, admitting that the Corps is "struggling" with designs never before built. Engineers, he notes, had to start construction before finishing the designs in hopes of beating the first storm. Though they'll miss the deadline, he says, "there is really little risk [from hurricanes] in June." Just in case, the Corps has a backup plan: pilings already stacked at the scene can be driven into the canal bed to stop storm surges--a job that would take three days to complete in the "worst case," Setliff promises. That plan, put into effect along Lake Pontchartrain before Hurricane Rita, worked well--though it was little solace for the unprotected Ninth Ward, which flooded for a second time.

The Corps' standard line of defense in answering critics is that the levees around New Orleans will be "better and stronger" than they were before Katrina and that Congress has not authorized an all-out rebuilding of the entire system. Setliff believes the system is generally capable of handling a slow-moving Category 2 or a fast Category 3. "We know we're making important decisions [that affect] people's livelihoods. We are their engineers. But Congress tells us how to build," he says, refusing to address criticisms that the Corps should be more proactive. People in New Orleans "should know the chances of a catastrophic failure are significantly reduced," says Setliff. "They also need to know there's a risk."

Finding out about the risk is often tricky. Mechanical engineer Matt McBride and eye doctor Joe Thompson turned into part-time detectives to see what was going on with the pumping system that keeps the "bowl" New Orleans sits in dry. Thompson, 42, went snooping at local Pump Station No. 1, inviting himself in for a tour (so much for security). He soon found that five of the station's seven pumps had been submerged by post-Katrina floodwaters. One, turned on after the waters receded, caught fire. He got a similar report at Pump Station No. 6: six of nine pumps were submerged, and three later caught fire. The Corps last week outlined $40 million in work needed to repair more than 60 city pumps, a number of them made at the beginning of the 20th century. But the process takes so much time--35 days--that the repair work won't be finished until fall, toward the end of the storm season.

In investigating the fires, Thompson and McBride realized that the city was--revise that: is--losing its ability to pump water out. "If there's not enough pumping power and they close the new floodgates at the end of the drainage canal, that means water is going to back up into the neighborhood," says McBride, 33. As fellow members of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, he and Thompson are supposed to advise residents about rebuilding. "But Joe and I realized we had a real pickle on our hands," says McBride. "No matter what we recommended to residents--raising their houses or putting air-conditioning up on blocks--it might not matter at all. Our question is, Are they going to be able to pump enough water out to prevent flooding? We don't know."

o PREPARING FOR THE WORST

GIVEN ALL THE UNCERTAINTIES, THE CITY'S evacuation plan is simple: Get out of town before a bad storm strikes. Vera Trippett, 34, stood in her three-bedroom ranch house in Gentilly last week, contemplating the rapidly approaching hurricane season. Her house stewed for weeks in 10 ft. of nasty water after Katrina. She's reluctant to put her trust in the levees, but, she says, "I do have faith in the Corps' need not to be embarrassed again." As a result, she and her husband John are finishing repairs. They have gutted their house, put in hurricane-resistant windows and listened, yes, listened, to make sure every roofing sheet got the required six nails. But that doesn't mean they're not prepared to leave if they have to. Trippett was once blase about hurricanes. Not anymore. "Even if it's a Category 1," she says, "we're out of here."

That is precisely what the city and state want. In announcing evacuation plans in early May, the city's embattled Mayor Ray Nagin, who won re-election Saturday, pointedly noted that there would be no shelter of last resort like the Superdome or "vertical" evacuations to hotels downtown. He said the city would be calling more readily for evacuations, ordering everyone out for a hurricane as weak as Category 2. The state last week geared up shelter plans, identifying places for 55,000 evacuees--more space than was available last year after the Superdome closed. In addition to Red Cross facilities, the state said it would open up its own shelters and has called in advance for help from the Federal Government.

While stressing that residents should arrange for their own evacuation, Nagin has promised that buses and trains would take those without transportation, as well as the elderly and people with special medical needs, to out-of-town shelters before a storm hits. The state, which has responsibility for transportation, has already contracted with private coach companies and school districts for an unknown number of buses. State help is key since the Regional Transit Authority, which runs public transportation in New Orleans, has only about 100 operating buses that survived Katrina. A new system of processing evacuees at two locations in New Orleans--the convention center and Union Passenger Terminal--gets its first real test during this week's hurricane exercise.

Complicating matters for city hurricane planners is the current state of the city's emergency workers, with police and fire employees largely working out of trailers--about the worst place to be in a hurricane. Unlike the police, which had scores of defections in the aftermath of Katrina, the fire department had none. But of the 600-plus firefighters, 100 are out sick on any given day, much of it ascribed to Katrina-related illnesses, says Superintendent Charles Parent. To avoid a repeat of last year's looting, Police Superintendent Warren Riley has promised that the city's cops will be on the streets patrolling with National Guard troops and enforcing a 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. curfew on those who don't leave. He has already asked for 3,000 Guardsmen for the next storm, whenever it comes.

Communications are expected to be a huge headache yet again. During Katrina, New Orleans overnight lost $500 million worth of telecom structure--fiber-optic and copper wire--leaving the city's emergency-operations center at city hall with a superfast T1 line as useless as a set of tin cans. Deputy mayor Meffert ended up handing out Nextel walkie-talkies for all the out-of-town help and cobbling together a voice-over-Internet communications system out of old computers, which still serves the city.

To avoid being caught again "with our britches down," Meffert says, he not only has Plans A and B for emergency communications but also Plans C, D, E and F. He has moved the backup generators to higher ground; installed a wi-fi system downtown and backed up "hot spots" like city hall, emergency operations and the police command center with solar chargers; brought in wi-fi-compliant phones that allow emergency management to text message as well as make calls; and wrangled four vans with satellite uplinks in the event all else fails. Finally, he got what he jokingly refers to as "footballs," suitcases like the one that contains the President's supersecret nuclear codes, except Meffert's provide superportable communication with the outside world. Total cost: less than $5 million. The weak link remains the 911 system, he says. All three stations were flooded by Katrina, and a new structure capable of surviving a Category 4 storm is still under construction. For now, New Orleans 911 is operating out of a temporary trailer, relying on landlines that could be downed by high winds.

Out in Broadmoor, Alicia Hansen is feeling pretty satisfied that she took $30,000 in flood-insurance money and raised her house. She has taken all the funds Red Cross offered and plans to use a tax credit on her new solar paneling. Neighbors now want to raise their houses too but find prices for the job have skyrocketed 50% in the past few months. Hansen added another story as she repaired the house. "And below, it's all patio--party city," she says.

Some days Hansen admits getting depressed after arguing with the city over her request for an electric permit, which was turned down because her brother, who is not licensed in Louisiana, wired the house. She doesn't have air-conditioning or a refrigerator. When friends e-mail her pictures of the giant steel structures protecting London and Amsterdam, she gets riled, contemplating the "crappy" earthen mounds that shield her own city. But she's staying put. Her husband has a great job as an underwater diver in the Gulf, and she loves her friends and her work as a music librarian. "We didn't want to cop out. This is history. This is a great city." She's facing storm season, ready or not.

With reporting by Russell McCulley / New Orleans, Adam Pitluk / Fort Worth