'Will New Orleans ever be the same?'
Colossal reconstruction effort to cost tens of billions
By Bill Walsh, Katherine Lewis and John McQuaid
Washington bureau
WASHINGTON – The flood waters swamping New Orleans ultimately will recede, but Hurricane Katrina's destructive legacy is certain to be felt for years to come as the city contemplates rebuilding after one of the worst natural disasters in the nation's history.
Not only does the city face a massive reconstruction estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars, but it must rebuild a tourist industry that is New Orleans' life blood and an economy that was stagnant even before the storm plunged 80 percent of the city under water.
“Will New Orleans ever be the same?” asked Bernard Weinstein, a professor of applied economics at the University of North Texas in Denton. “You’re talking about a major city that has been made uninhabitable and large parts of it have been destroyed. What do you compare it to? Dresden? Berlin? Those cities came back but it took a long time. It took years and that was with a lot of American aid.”
Gov. Kathleen Blanco has left no doubt that the 287-year-old city beloved for its quirkiness and old-world charm plans a comeback. She vowed: “We will recover. We are a strong people.”
That fortitude will be put to the test as soon as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers figures out how to get the water out.
One expert on rebuilding after disasters estimated it likely would take five years before the region attains a semblance of normalcy.
“All the past (major U.S.) disasters, they have hit suburban areas, not the central urban areas of major cities,” said Mary Comerio, author of “Disaster Hits Home,” a book on post-disaster reconstruction. “Here we have a significant hit on the entire urban area - not just the core, but everything. It is going to be an incredibly complex staging operation.”
Comerio compared it to the 1995 earthquake that struck Kobe, Japan, killing 6,000 people and running up more than $150 billion reconstruction costs. More than 100,000 buildings were destroyed and 300,000 people were left homeless. Kobe took up to 10 years to rebuild, she said.
Although it’s smaller than Kobe, New Orleans has a different set of problems. It is isolated, meaning that it will be hard to house people near their homes and jobs. That will lead to people leaving permanently, she said.
Housing will be a long-term problem – especially for New Orleans’ sizable low-income population, which will find it harder to secure resources to rebuild. Apartments are always the last to be rebuilt, Comerio said, and low-income housing lags behind that. The result could be an explosion in the homeless population.
“In Japan people lived in temporary housing for eight years. They finally closed the last of the temporary housing sites before the 10th anniversary,” she said.
In New Orleans, neighborhoods submerged to the rooftops may have to be rebuilt from the ground up. If floodwaters prove to be a polluted "toxic stew" that some fear, those areas could be rendered uninhabitable.
“The thing about water is, even if the frame of your house looks OK, corrosion and the smell could make it a total loss,” said Larry Griffis, president of structural engineering at Walter P. Moore & Assoc., in Houston. “Sometimes, you just have to start all over again.”
Fortunately, New Orleans has learned from its flood-prone past. Many homes are built on pilings sunk deep into the ground, protecting foundations from lasting water damage. Most of the office buildings in the city’s financial center were built to withstand severe flooding.
An immediate challenge will be a shortage of contractors, some of who fled the city along with the rest of the population. If the experience in Florida is any judge, some residents may simply throw up their hands.
“It’s amazing how many buildings we still have abandoned. Some of the strip malls are vacant,” said Tony Palermo, a planner in Fort Myers, Fla., which was hit with four hurricanes last year. “Some people decided they didn’t want the stress and moved back up north.”
Once the city is dried out and infrastructure rebuilding begins, officials will have a better idea of the magnitude of the job ahead. Louisiana’s importance as a national energy supplier and commercial hub will put pressure on a quick recovery for certain sectors.
Oil refineries could be up in a week, industry experts said, followed by the resumption of oil and gas drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, notwithstanding floating platforms swept away in Katrina’s fury.
There will be similar pressure to restore New Orleans as a critical junction for the nation’s commerce. The Port of South Louisiana is the busiest port in the nation and New Orleans’ port ranks fifth. Commodities such as crude oil, rubber, metals, coffee and lumber come travel up the Mississippi River, while grains and petroleum products go out to the world.
The ports will be out of commission longer than oil and gas production, but eventually should return to pre-hurricane levels of economic activity, Weinstein said.
“Because of the railroads and the pipelines that converge in and around New Orleans, I can’t believe they’re going to suffer any long-term business loss,” he said.
Tourism is another matter. Conventions often are arranged years in advance so many planners may decide in the coming years to skip New Orleans, which is among the top four U.S. convention destinations. A plunge in visitors would send a shudder through the local economy, hurting business such as restaurants, bars and the city’s many tourist attractions.
One potentially bright spot is that the aesthetic heart of New Orleans, the French Quarter, may have escaped the severe damage seen in other parts of the city because of its elevation, a whole 3 feet above sea level. St. Charles Avenue, where in better times streetcars rumble beneath ancient oaks past stately mansions, also appears to have avoided the heaviest damage.
Still, the possibility of lasting damage to the city’s historic buildings has preservationists, not to mention business leaders, worried.
When Kobe, Japan’s reconstruction was finished, the city looked a lot different.
“The commercial stuff is rebuilt, but usually it’s somebody else - it’s not the same businesses that were there before,” Comerio said. “And a lot of the housing in areas where it was rebuilt, it’s a lot more gentrified, upscale than what was there previously. The low income population was pushed out.”
For now, businesses are vowing to reopen even as they wait to see how bad the damage is. According to a statement, Pinnacle Entertainment intends to rebuild its Boomtown casino in suburban New Orleans and Casino Magic Biloxi. The Hyatt Regency New Orleans, whose blown-out windows and fluttering curtains became a lasting image of the hurricane’s ferocity, is still sheltering guests, said Katie Meyer, spokeswoman for Global Hyatt Corp. in Chicago.
“We’re absolutely committed to New Orleans, and our owners are too, but we have to assess the damage,” Meyer said. “A lot of what happens looking in the future will depend on what happens with the infrastructure of the city.”
A critical question for any rebuilding is whether business, bank and municipal records are salvageable, said Colleen Woodell, a managing director at the Standard & Poor’s rating firm in New York. After the Sept. 11 attacks, firms housed in the World Trade Center struggled with the loss of payroll and other business records, if they didn’t have backups at another location.
“Were the city’s records lost?’’ Woodell asked. ``It would make what’s already a really horrible situation that much more horrible.”
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