Читать книгу Words Whispered in Water - Sandy Rosenthal - Страница 10

Chapter

3

The Fairy Tale

October 1, 2005, was a day of celebration! My husband, my son, and I moved into a little one-story house at the westernmost edge of Lafayette. At the grocery store, I bought ingredients for our first glorious, home-cooked meal in what seemed an eternity. While my husband prepared dinner, we realized we didn’t have an important condiment: salt. I ran to the house next door to introduce myself and borrow some. An hour later, Stanford, Steve, and I sat down in a real kitchen, like normal people do, and savored the most delicious chicken and garlic à la Mosca with rice. It was so good to be out of a hotel room! But we were aware of how lucky we were, and we continued to reach out to friends and invite them to stay with us if they were having trouble locating a place to live until they could return home.

Since we had a high-energy dog who needed multiple daily walks and since we were gregarious New Orleanians, we managed to meet every neighbor within a half mile. And when Steve made some of his famous homemade pralines and gave them away as gifts, that sealed the deal. We all became friends.

This was how we met Mr. Bouillon, our neighbor and savior for Stanford. The first question he asked my son was what sport he played in school. (Mr. Bouillon was the local high school’s physical therapist.) Stanford explained that he had not played any sports for two years due to a case of shin splints so severe that even walking was painful. Excused from all sports and physical education classes, Stanford had made the best of the extra time by teaching himself computer skills.

Mr. Bouillon listened and said, “But you’re missing your childhood! You should be running and jumping!”

Then Mr. Bouillon asked me if he could examine my son. For a few seconds, I recalled the three orthopedic physicians whom I had already brought Stanford to see. And then I responded, “Of course, you may!”

And off they went to another room. Fifteen minutes later they returned, and Mr. Bouillon asked me if he could take Stanford’s orthotic inserts back to his home and adjust them. After all the doctors and physical therapists we had seen already, I replied that if he thought waving a chicken bone over Stanford’s head would help, I would say yes.

Mr. Bouillon smiled in apparent understanding and took the inserts to his home. He returned an hour later and gave them almost ceremoniously to Stanford. In my mind’s eye, I saw a cloaked wizard handing Stanford a pair of magical shoes.

“Wear your inserts to school tomorrow,” he said. “When you get home, try running. Just try it and see what happens.”

The next day went like all other days. We got up at 6:05 a.m. I fixed Stanford his favorite sandwich for lunch—smoked turkey on a toasted roll—and Steve drove him to the bus stop. I read and read and read all day. Promptly at 3:45 p.m., I picked up Stanford at the bus stop.

When we got home, he said, “Well, Mom, I’m going to go outside and try running.”

I smiled and said, “Okay!” I stayed inside, so he wouldn’t see my look of disappointment. I did not expect anything to be any different.

A moment later, Stanford burst back into the house, shouting, “Mom! I can run! And it doesn’t hurt!”

I leaped up, and together, we ran out into the bright sunshine. And Stanford ran! And then he laughed! And then ran some more! And laughed some more! And then Stanford, who at that time was a shy fifteen-year-old, ran up to me and hugged me!

***

Later that afternoon, after sharing the amazing good news with every family member I could reach with our still-intermittent phone service, I bought some stationery and a small box of chocolates. I suggested that Stanford write a note to Mr. Bouillon, and then I would deliver both. When Stanford brought the note to me, I asked him if I could read it. He nodded. Here’s what it said:

Dear Mr. Bouillon,

I did exactly what you told me to do. I wore my inserts to school, and then when I got home I tried running. I could run, and it didn’t hurt! I have been dreaming about this day.

Thank you very much,

Stanford

If you talk to any survivor of the 2005 flood, most will share a tale of a silver lining, a way in which the survivor’s life was improved in some way. For me and my husband, our lives were made better because the 2005 flood put us on a straight-and-narrow path to Mr. Bouillon’s doorstep. Our son was no longer in constant pain, and the world of sports would soon open back up for him.

***

The Millers also needed medical care. Their daughter Beth continued to worry and urged both of them—especially Harvey—to see a trauma counselor.

***

Away in Washington, DC, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), an elite engineering trade group, was working out an arrangement with the Army Corps. Larry Roth, the ASCE’s executive deputy director, was doing most of the deal-making. The agreed-upon arrangement was that the ASCE staff would handpick a group of experts to perform an external peer review for an Army Corps-sponsored levee investigation, which was yet to be announced.85 This arrangement would guarantee the trade group a “place at the table” and a two million dollar fee from the Army Corps.86 Worded differently, the Army Corps was making its self-investigation appear to be “independent” yet all the while had chosen its peer-review team and was paying them, too. Both were a conflict of interest. And no one knew anything about it yet.

***

On the other side of Washington, DC, firefighters from New Orleans testified about what they saw on August 29, 2005. Captain Joe Fincher and rookie Gabe King had witnessed floodwaters flowing through the breach of the 17th Street Canal.87 They had firsthand knowledge and Captain Fincher had videotape.88 As soon as the winds died down enough, they had swum out to find a boat to commandeer. Captain Fincher had hot-wired it, and they made life-saving trips into the neighborhood near the breach. The rescues continued for four days, from sunup until dark. Their testimony was riveting, but they were ordered to be quiet until the Army Corps’ investigation was completed.89

***

In New Orleans, after being rebuffed multiple times, the Berkeley team—led by Drs. Seed, Rogers, and Bea—was finally allowed into the field. But there was a caveat: they had to be escorted by a team from the Army Corps led by Dr. Mlakar. According to Dr. Seed, Mlakar’s role seemed to be to “keep the Army Corps personnel from speaking too openly with the rest of us and thus potentially spilling any beans.”90

Almost three hundred miles of levees had to be examined. The urgency on the part of the Berkeley team was intense because data continued to disappear daily. In response, the now-formed ASCE team announced that they would cooperate with the Berkeley team to prevent redundant work and maximize efficiency. This move made sense since most of the experts had known each other for years.

The Berkeley team cochairs and the ASCE team members prepared a semi-formal outbriefing for the Army Corps press conference, which was scheduled at the 17th Street Canal. A problem arose, however, because it seems that, because of a deal between the ASCE and the Army Corps, the field teams were not permitted to discuss with the media what they had learned. They could only discuss what they had “measured.” Since the Berkeley team had already agreed to work with the ASCE team, they were muzzled as well.

As expressed by Dr. Seed in his forty-two-page ethics complaint filed in 2007, “It was ethically and professionally offensive to the two assembled teams of experienced experts to be told that they were to simply wave, say that they had measured things, and that they had learned nothing. And at a time when a distraught population and the government (both local and federal) were in desperate need of some small sense that engineers were performing a straightforward, honest investigation and were making some progress.”91

***

Six weeks after the 2005 flood (October 11), the City of New Orleans was officially dewatered.92

Seven weeks after the 2005 flood, despite multiple investigating teams, the surface had yet to be scratched on the who, what, where, and why of the levee-breach event. If one were to count the breaches on a graphic map created by the Army Corps, they would find a total of fifty-two breaches in the region.93 It was impossible at this point for any human being or group of human beings to draw conclusions on what happened in so complex a scenario. Communication lines were still down, and breaches needed to be plugged.

Yet, just seven weeks after the levees broke, the Business Council of New Orleans had decided where the fault lay. On the day the floodwalls broke, this small group had no phone number, no staff, no meeting minutes, no list of expenses, and no membership list. But, with the city barely dewatered, they had already decided that blame belonged to the Orleans Levee Board—people whose chief responsibility regarding floodwalls and levees was maintaining them after the Army Corps built them. By October 20, while some souls were yet to be discovered in their attics, this group had already submitted a bill to the Louisiana legislature. It was sponsored by State Senator Walter Boasso in St. Bernard Parish and it would change the way members of the Orleans Levee Board were selected.94

Up until 2005, all Levee Board members were selected by the governor. Boasso’s bill would take control of who selected the Orleans Levee Board members out of the governor’s hands and give it to a small group of people with life terms, a so-called “blue-ribbon committee” that would select its own people.

Seven weeks is far too soon for anyone to wrap their heads around what had happened, let alone figure out a way to fix the problem. For example, the investigation of the I-35 bridge collapse over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis took eighteen months in a situation where the bridge was completely closed down. The Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident took more than four months to complete in the face of intense national pressure.

But here, just seven weeks after fifty-two levee breaches flooded forty-eight square miles of a metropolis, a bill was crafted and ready to go without one single completed levee investigation. It would appear that plans to change the way the Orleans Levee Board was selected were discussed long before the 2005 flood. As noted by Naomi Klein in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, changes to policy are often pushed through while citizens are in shock from disasters, upheavals, or invasion.95

The business community was loud in its condemnation of the Orleans Levee Board but named no names. The many dozens of men and women who had served for decades on the board had no faces. Looking at the list of eighty-four men and women who had served on the Orleans Levee Board since 1925, one would see all kinds of upstanding people: city mayors, city councilpersons, and philanthropists. One Levee Board member who served from 1997 to 2001 was a Catholic nun: Sister Kathleen Cain, a provincial with the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady.96 But the Business Council of New Orleans had lumped them together as one giant cohort of corruption.

***

The media, aware of what stories get the most eager readers, began to focus on Jim Huey, who was acting president of the Orleans Levee Board on the day the levees broke. The opening line of a Los Angeles Times story on October 28, 2005 hollered: “The president of the Orleans Levee Board, who played a key role in decisions about the construction of levees that failed during Hurricane Katrina, resigned Thursday.”97 The article criticized a no-bid contract that Huey gave three days after the levees broke. Huey had leased three thousand square feet of office space in Baton Rouge from his wife’s cousin. His explanation was that the board’s lakefront headquarters were damaged by storm surge and the state government had failed to provide an operation base. Eyebrows were further raised when it was revealed that, three weeks before the flooding, Huey had applied for back pay that he was owed for nine years of service. All Levee Board presidents, including the post-storm president, receive a stipend, but the news report, which went viral nationally, claimed wrongly that he took his earned back pay “illegally.”98

Years later, Huey and I had coffee to discuss the accusations. Together, we recalled the Wild West days after the flood when finding office space was paramount. Quite possibly, immediately leasing space from his wife’s cousin saved the state a lot of money as space was being snatched up at lightning speed. Huey also told me that his big mistake was returning the back pay to the state. Had he instead turned it over to a lawyer and undergone legal scrutiny, he would have been vindicated. But the damage was done. Huey told me that he resigned on October 27 because he didn’t want the issues, which were irrelevant in the flooding, to become a “circus sideshow.” In his exit, he defended both the lease and the back pay, and welcomed investigations into their legality. No wrongdoing was ever found.

More important than the claims about the nepotism and the back pay is this: Jim Huey’s role as president of the Orleans Levee Board was overseeing maintenance. Only the Army Corps made decisions about levee design and construction.

***

In October 2005, “that corrupt Orleans Levee Board” was fast becoming a household phrase. Still perplexed by an onslaught of conflicting and illogical data, I continued to read and read. I did not yet know that the flooding was due directly to mistakes that engineers with the Army Corps had made in the 1980s.99 But I did know that focusing on the maintenance folks seemed wrongheaded.

That same month, Congress designated twelve million dollars for a coastal Louisiana hurricane protection study.100 But there was a stipulation: some members of Congress wanted Louisiana to establish a single state entity to, going forward, act as local sponsor for hurricane projects in coastal Louisiana, which included New Orleans.101

Before the 2005 flood, nearly two dozen different levee districts operated as local sponsors for the federally built floodwalls and levees in south Louisiana. In the Greater New Orleans area, there were five: Orleans, Lake Borgne, Jefferson, West Jefferson, and Algiers. The Army Corps is the federal sponsor for all of them. To receive the twelve million dollars, Louisiana was forced to agree for local sponsorship power to be placed in the hands of a single state agency that would report to the governor. It is not stated why this stipulation was placed on the twelve million. It is possible that the members of Congress did not understand that contracts for designing and constructing the hurricane levees are 100 percent controlled by the Army Corps. It is possible they did not understand that the local levee districts only do maintenance of completed floodwalls and levees. (The local officials also must collect local taxes to pay for the maintenance as well as pay 35 percent of new construction by the Army Corps.) It looked as though Congress thought the local levee districts were not paying enough attention to flood protection and were therefore partly responsible.

While this twelve million dollars was being withheld until Louisiana created the new state agency, no money was set aside for homeowners to come home and rebuild. No money was set aside for businesses to reopen. Congress held a decidedly suspicious view of the people of New Orleans. The idea that New Orleanians had brought their misery upon themselves was easy to accept and did not require reshaping one’s world view. Washington, DC, kept a continuous focus on possible local corruption.

***

But one can work and stress only so much. I needed to stop poring over news stories twenty-four seven and get some exercise. I needed to find an environment that felt normal or as similar as possible to life back in New Orleans, so I applied for a job at the City Club at River Ranch in Lafayette. The manager hired me on the spot because I was a certified fitness instructor with fifteen years of teaching experience and because their membership had swelled to bursting with evacuees just like myself. They were doubly pleased that I agreed to teach a senior class of ladies.

“When can you start?” they asked.

I started the next day. How good it was to be doing something that made me feel—even for just sixty minutes—like I was back home! The music was the same, and the room was similar with its mirrored walls and shining wooden floor. For one splendid hour, I could exercise and not stress and worry. And I made a little money, though not much.

I had also brought my tennis racket and gear and had no trouble finding other ladies who wanted to play tennis. Lafayette was a “tennis town.” Whenever I called someone and said that I was an evacuee wanting to play, they would ask when and where. They didn’t care what my husband did for a living or where my kids attended school. Touchstones to reality, like teaching fitness and playing tennis, were important to keep me sane during those long days of reading and research.

I also woke up each day and asked myself how I could be a better mother or a better wife. Each day, I tried to do something special for everyone around me. I even tried to be a better master for my dog. Focusing on those around me took my mind off the naked realization that my world had been turned upside down. All my plans for the coming autumn were not going to happen—perhaps not for the entire year.

Focusing on family and friends also kept my anger from boiling over since I had determined that the 2005 flood was not a surprise natural disaster. Every day, I managed to speak to at least one girlfriend, which was not easy to do with so many inactive cell-phone towers. It took at least ten tries to reach someone by cell phone. To make contact, you tried, again and again, until you got through.

I finally reached my friend Debbie Friedman, who owned a clothing boutique on Magazine Street. She related how she was distraught that she had to devote her time to taking inventory of any items that could be salvaged instead of helping her friends get through this difficult period. Another close friend told me that she had moved with her two sons to her parents’ home in Dallas, but she was also separated from her husband, a doctor who remained in New Orleans to work. Yet another close friend confided that, in mid-October, her mother had passed away in a nursing home in Baton Rouge. She was convinced that her mother had died from the trauma of being relocated away from her home.

Few days went by that I didn’t say out loud how fortunate we were. I could be with my husband, my son, and my dog every single day. Our home and my son’s school didn’t flood. Both sat atop the same stretch of natural Mississippi River levee that had been built over thousands of years. My husband’s business was virtually uninterrupted by the 2005 flood due to meticulous planning long before the wind and storm surge arrived.

After the 2005 flood, everyone in New Orleans revised or created their hurricane plan. Too many people bitterly regretted their decisions to shelter in place, like my friend Jack Davey, a mechanical engineer who lived in a region of New Orleans that historically didn’t flood.

Jack had told me, “My wife and I had always stayed. We had a generator that was supposed to last a month. But the generator didn’t last a week. It was the stupidest decision I ever made in my life.”

Jack and his wife survived. But, just like Renee and Harvey Miller, they survived because they were lucky.

***

The Millers went to counseling together the first time. Renee didn’t feel that she needed any more counseling after that, but Harvey continued to go every three days. FEMA denied payment for the sessions.

***

On November 4, the Army Corps issued a press release, announcing that the chief of engineers, Lieutenant General Carl Strock, had commissioned an Interagency Performance Evaluation Taskforce (IPET) to study the performance of the hurricane protection system in New Orleans and the surrounding areas.102

The White House did nothing while the Army Corps—the organization responsible for the flood protection’s performance—convened and led an investigation of its own work. Inexplicably, neither Louisiana’s governor Kathleen Blanco nor the Louisiana congressional delegation protested such a clear conflict of interest.

All was quiet even while Steve Ellis (Taxpayers for Common Sense) and Scott Faber (Environmental Defense) howled in protest. They wanted “to see some sort of independent federally authorized commission look into the levee breaches, in addition to the [Army] Corps.”103 And, with 500,000 families displaced from their support base (family, neighborhood, and place of worship), citizens could not collectively recognize the travesty or do anything to stop it.104 They were literally consumed with worrying over life’s most basic things.