Struggling to Survive

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In the parish council trailer, two engineers endeavor to explain why demolition is proceeding at a snail's pace. That day, in mid-July, more than 4,600 houses were on the demolition list; as many as 8,000 more will be added starting in September, when the parish begins to condemn abandoned houses. After most storms, cleanup means collecting debris and then repairing houses. After Katrina in St. Bernard, however, the houses are the debris. Thousands and thousands of them are unsalvageable, eyesores at best, hazards at worst. Removing them is the prerequisite to recovery. But, as of mid-July, fewer than 1,000 had been demolished.

Logan Martin, a parish staff engineer, and Stephen Bourg of All South Consulting Engineers, a firm that oversees demolition, lay a stack of files on the table, samples of their paperwork. They explain that the parish submitted a demolition plan in December, but state and federal environmental regulators took months to agree on an asbestos-removal protocol. That held up work until early spring.

Under the stringent protocol finally adopted, every house must be tested for asbestos, rather than just visually inspected. Visiting every house and sending samples to labs across the country takes time. The parish asked if it could speed things up by treating all properties as "hot," instead of testing each house, in developments where asbestos is known to be prevalent. The regulators said no.

FEMA's historic-preservation and archeological team had to inspect any property before local officials could clear it for demolition. This step, Martin and Bourg said, took anywhere from one to three months, even for recently built houses. One house, Martin said, had to go through historical and archeological review despite landing on its slab in the middle of an intersection. On private property, even debris—including, for example, 1,600 tree stumps—had to be reviewed for archaeological value before FEMA would pay for removal.

Before demolition, five different specialty crews visit each house (to disconnect gas, disconnect electricity, disconnect water and sewer, recover refrigerant, and remove appliances and toxic chemicals such as paint and bleach). If a house contains asbestos, a special demolition crew is called in.

Each procedure has its purpose, but with thousands and thousands of demolitions ahead of him, Martin closes a file folder and looks up with haggard eyes. "As soon as we get one hurdle cleared, there's another," he says. "Every day there's something staring you in the face and you say, 'I can't believe this. Another hoop I have to jump through.' "

Judy Hoffmeister remembers with particular anger the day FEMA took away the phones. After Katrina, cellphones and even satellite phones worked only sporadically, so FEMA brought in a mobile telephone system and connected it to a building (a refinery office) where the parish government was holed up. Then came word that Hurricane Rita was forging toward St. Bernard. FEMA's people evacuated, advising parish officials to do the same (they refused).

All of that, Hoffmeister understands. But she still recalls council members' dismay as they watched FEMA carry away the phones, leaving the parish's officials to weather Rita without communications. "I could not believe what I was witnessing," Hoffmeister says. "The feeling was, they didn't care." Told FEMA's rationale, she replies, "All I know is, we were already in distress, and it didn't help the situation any."

FEMA did have a rationale. Asked about the phone episode, Darryl Madden, a FEMA spokesman, said that the kind of vehicle-based relay system that the agency would have brought into St. Bernard—a communications trailer, basically—is not storm-hardened and requires a crew. FEMA couldn't leave its personnel in harm's way to operate the system, and the coming hurricane might have destroyed the vulnerable equipment. "If that's the only communications you have, you do normally pull back and reinsert after a storm," Madden said. "That's a call where you say, what if you leave it there and it's totally demolished?"

Asked about the parish's request to treat whole areas as asbestos-contaminated rather than inspecting every house, Barb Sturner, a FEMA public-affairs officer, said, "Asbestos debris removal is expensive. Asbestos demolition is expensive." It involves Tyvek suits, wetting procedures, and specially prepared dump trucks. To go through all of that unnecessarily would be irresponsible, she said.

In New Orleans, FEMA's cultural resources team confirmed that until July the agency conducted detailed historical and archeological reviews of every property to be demolished. House-by-house review was necessary because a parish-wide inventory of historic assets—"a long process requiring lots of manpower"—took time to complete. Now that the inventory is done, team members said, clearing most properties for demolition will take two weeks or less. "The process that's in place now is cutting-edge, streamlined compliance," said Fred Holycross, FEMA's group leader for cultural resources in the New Orleans area.

Even before the expedited process took effect, FEMA officials said, historical and archeological review was taking three to six weeks, not three months. "There is a time period needed to complete the historic-preservation review," said John Ketchum, FEMA's federal preservation officer. But, he said, "they haven't demolished anywhere near as many properties as have been reviewed for historic preservation." (True, said Bourg. But that is because historic preservation is only one of many bottlenecks—which is the whole problem.)

Yes, FEMA did require archeological review of debris piles and tree stumps, but those were cleared in a few days, according to officials. On one site, said Lydia Kachadoorian, the area team leader for archeology, uprooted trees exposed 300-year-old Native American pottery. "We have an issue with heavy equipment driving over really fragile resources," she said.

And FEMA employees say they cannot shrug off the requirements of federal statutes, such as the National Historic Preservation Act. "We have a mission. We need to carry it out as quickly and efficiently as possible, but we do have these federal laws that we need to adhere to while we're doing it," Ketchum said. "If at a certain point Congress decides to waive that law, that's their prerogative, but until they do that, these laws are on the books, and we're obligated to adhere to them."

FEMA points to one other important fact: As of late July, the federal government had spent $481 million in St. Bernard Parish, a major commitment by anyone's reckoning—with much more to come. Moreover, the federal government waived the usual matching requirements, paying a generous 100 percent of eligible costs.

"We're dealing with enormous amounts of money, and there have to be some kinds of controls," Madden said. "Bureaucracy is cumbersome, but its nature is to ensure accountability, so that we know at the end of the day where the money went."

Back in St. Bernard many people, presented with such arguments, will concede that every rule has its reasons. When a fire marshal told Voitier, the school superintendent, that she could not use an urgently needed mobile classroom because the doors were too close together, he was following a rule that may well make sense in normal times.

The trouble is that nothing—not anything—is normal in St. Bernard. The collective effect of all the rules and procedures has been to slow recovery in the early stages, when momentum was critical. Still more damaging, perhaps, is the psychological toll, a gooey mixture of anger and demoralization that drains energy and amplifies despair. It amounts to bureaucracy fatigue. Most welfare mothers know this feeling well, and many become used to it (or learn to game the system), but St. Bernard had always cherished its sense of independence. The parish was stunned by the hurricane, and then was stunned again to be pitched into a blizzard of pettifoggery, precisely when it felt too prostrate to cope.

"It just irritates my soul," says Joseph Di Fatta Jr., a parish council member. "There has to be a balance of the laws and the lives of the people. Right now, the emotional distress people are suffering is greater than the harm of inappropriately burying a can of spray paint."

Council member Mark Madary is standing outside his mobile home in the city government's trailer park, chatting with a visitor, when a car pulls up and a young man and woman emerge. The man is calm, but the woman, his cousin, is panicky. Between sobs, she tells Madary that someone from FEMA has shown up to take the trailer that she and her 8-year-old daughter are living in. Apparently another trailer was delivered for her grandmother, and FEMA says only one is allowed per property. "I talked to six different people and got six different answers," she says.

Madary reassures her: "They're not going to pull it with you in it." He gives her the name of a parish official. As the two go off toward another trailer, Madary is asked if there really is such a rule. No, he says, but adds, "It depends who you get on the phone."

It's not clear that St. Bernard will survive as a functioning community. Some, indeed, may wonder if it ought to survive, because it will eventually flood again. That question is academic, however, because people are coming back, struggling, rebuilding on land that in some cases is all they have. At 8412 Colonel Drive, Sandra and Bob Roberts are rebuilding. She is a receptionist at the medical clinic; he is disabled, with heart problems, prostate cancer, and a bad eye. He works on the house, but in his condition, at age 62, the going is slow.

"We don't know if it's ever going to come back," Sandra says, "but we're fighting." A neighbor across the street is living in a trailer. Another house across the street is being gutted. The neighbor next door has put up a new prefabricated home. Seven families live on the block, which has 22 homes. "My street is trying," Sandra says.

The house has drywall, electrical wiring, one working toilet, and not much else. For electricity, the Robertses plug an extension cord into the FEMA trailer in their front yard. Inviting a visitor in, Sandra points to a stack of boxes. "That's everything I have." She and her husband live in the half-finished bedroom, which is sealed off to give a window cooler a fighting chance against the summer heat. The bedroom is furnished with a $19.95 plastic dresser, a television, and, by way of a TV stand, the cardboard box that the toilet came in.

"We've been blessed," Bob says—incongruously, one might think, but he says they will emerge stronger in affection for each other and their friends. "We're not a suburb of New Orleans," he emphasizes. "No. We're St. Bernard. St. Bernard is not a parish; it's a family."

Daily life, Sandra allows, is a struggle. "It never ends. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. It's just another battle with the insurance company, with FEMA, whoever. Yesterday while I was getting dressed for work, I thought I heard the doorbell. I burst out crying. 'What am I thinking? We don't have a doorbell. That was the TV.' My husband said, 'Baby, we don't even have a door.'"

True: There is no door. But they intend to build one. Sandra's brother and sister, who lived on this block before the storm came, are not coming back, but she and Bob are staying. "That's one thing we won't do, is stop fighting," Bob says. He expects to have the house finished in a year and a half.

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Jonathan Rauch is an opinion columnist for National Journal. His most recent book is Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. This column appears in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.