Slowly, city starts recovery

As residents trickle back to New Orleans, they find a ravaged landscape without water or electricity

BY JOHN RILEY | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

September 30, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - One month to the day after Hurricane Katrina hit this city with savage fury and stranded thousands in the Superdome and adjoining New Orleans Arena, Paul Kowalenko stood in its shadow yesterday morning and got his crew of about 15 ready to go in and begin cleaning 300 toilets jammed and overflowing with feces.

Kowalenko, an official with Summit Environmental Corp., had a big suction truck and coils of green tubing to snake into the arena, and he and his men were equipped with Darth Vader-style blue filter masks. The building, he said, was foul. Toilets were "shimmering with maggots" on top, mold and mold spores were everywhere, and there was concern about tuberculosis because the arena had been used to house the sick.

And the stadium next door, Kowalenko said, was in even worse shape. Although its owners are still assessing damage, he toured it and thinks it needs a full gut job. "The Superdome is hatched," he said. "The owners of the Superdome contributed the building for the good of the people of New Orleans. We can't remediate it."

As it prepares to open the French Quarter, the Garden District and other key east bank neighborhoods to residents today for the first time since the panicked Katrina evacuation, New Orleans and its inhabitants - like the Superdome - face a long, glum road to recovery.

A month after the storm, vast swaths of the city are still deserted wastelands, with boats sitting atop fences, hanging wires, and muck and debris lining the streets. Most of the city remains without power or streetlights. The water isn't drinkable. The sewage system isn't fully functional. There's little gas, few stores and minimal health care.

"You are entering the city at your own risk," warned Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who has predicted that half of the city's population may not return.

Despite the problems, however, most New Orleanians trickling back into the city yesterday said they are glad to be finally coming back. At Igor's, a bar and lounge on St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District that suffered little damage, the owners opened for business at 9 a.m. and hung a banner out front reading, "Laissez le bon temp roule." Translation: Let the good times roll.

"The heartbeat of New Orleans lives on," insisted Helena Margan, tending bar inside and promising red beans and rice by 6 p.m. "Too many bloody naysayers."

A few blocks away, the scene was more subdued. Eleni Torres returned to her family diner, the Please U Restaurant, for the first time since Katrina hit to find the front door shattered, cash registers rifled by looters, half the ceiling collapsed into the dining area, a hole in the roof and no power.

"Katrina changed everything," she said, holding back tears. "Future, future, nobody knows about the future. I hope we'll get our customers back."

In the Central Business District, businessmen worried about low-income workers more than customers. "Most of them lost their homes," said hotel manager Nasir Ali. "They have no place to live."

To the east, in the Bywater neighborhood, Allyson Gordin, a makeup artist lugging detritus from her St. Claude Avenue house, said she feared the same dynamic would change her mixed-income, mixed-race neighborhood.

"The artists and the professionals will come back," she said. "I'm not sure the lower income will come back. I think the city that's left will be more gentrified."