Dodging Bullets

When my husband and I returned Wednesday morning to our house in the Garden District, our power was still out, but four blocks away, at the famed restaurant Commander's Palace, chef Tory McPhail was heating up turtle soup, braised short ribs, and andouille sausage grits on grills set up out front, handing them out to first responders and a few hungry neighbors. That night we watched Sarah Palin address the Republican Convention on a wide-screen TV in a bar on Magazine Street (the thirty or so folks inside all gave her a thumb's up), drank martinis (without olives), and became the first in our neighborhood to get power the next morning, though it has gone out again a few times since.

Indeed, the power-or continuing lack thereof in many neighborhoods-has been the largest post-Gustav glitch, followed closely by Nagin's insistence on not letting citizens back into the city until Thursday. Many people had evacuated to places like Baton Rouge and Lafayette and Alexandria, all of which were walloped by the storm, and preferred to come home and be without electricity, rather than endure the same fate on someone else's borrowed couch in cities where the food is not nearly as good. When Nagin urged citizens to leave, he employed his usual inflammatory rhetoric, predicting that Gustav would be "the mother of all storms" and "the storm of the century," and telling folks to "get your butts moving out of New Orleans now." The fear is that by barring the citizens' return he will discourage them from doing just that the next time a possible mother of all storms is headed our way. Motorists turned away at checkpoints were furious-especially after cell-phone calls to friends inside, who were enjoying the post-Gustav holiday. Worse was the predicament of folks who had run out of money for motels and food and had just enough gas to get back inside and had no choice but to wait in parking lots near the checkpoints.

Councilwoman Stacy Head, who frequently tussles with the mayor, delivered him a peace offering of barbecue and urged him to change his mind on Tuesday to no avail. "I don't want us to be Big Brother," she said. "If people want to fuss, let them fuss at Entergy." By Wednesday afternoon the checkpoints were all but abandoned and as people poured in, Entergy was indeed the target of their ire. While Katrina's top villain-FEMA--was operating relatively smoothly, already opening up centers where people could get paid back for their motel evacuation bills, Entergy had become public enemy number one, with the governor hollering the loudest. Dr. Brobson Lutz, who sat out the storm in his French Quarter house, and who keeps chickens in a chicken house close to downtown, said, "The amazing thing to me about this is that a plywood chicken house is fine, yet thirteen out of the fourteen Entergy transmission lines went down. Somebody isn't building something right."

While the levees held far more successfully than the power lines, Gustav served as a reminder that the Corps of Engineers still has a long way to go. One of the most threatened levees this time, the wall protecting the Upper Ninth Ward from the Industrial Canal, is still unfinished on one side, and it remains unclear how it would have fared if the surge had been higher, or the pounding had lasted longer. Further, Gustav highlighted the crucial need for wetlands restoration, as they serve as much-needed buffers to these powerful storms. James Carville, who with his wife Mary Matalin recently moved to New Orleans, and who serves on a board called FriendsofNewOrleans.org. called Gustav a "teachable moment." His fellow board member John Barry, author of the bestseller "Rising Tide," agrees and points out that "the problem on the industrial canal [which is a man-made navigation channel to benefit shipping; the gulf pours directly into it] is a perfect example of how serving interstate and international commerce from which the entire nation benefits, has made New Orleans more vulnerable to storms. Hence, protecting it is a national responsibility."

Until that protection arrives-in the form of restored wetlands and fully strengthened levees-New Orleanians continue to be jittery, but hopefully still ready to evacuate, especially as two other storms in the Gulf, Ike and Josephine, could well head our way. So far Ike appears to be following the same track as Betsy, the powerful Category 3 storm that killed 58 here in 1965. Bob Rue sat out Betsy on an upper floor of his dorm when he was a student at Tulane. When I visited him in his shop Friday, he had still not unbundled his rugs, just in case. "It happens," he says, referring to repeat episodes, even back-to-back ones. "I've been through more than 30 hurricanes and tropical storms since I've been here," he tells me not without a touch of pride. In the meantime, he has added an addendum to his plywood: "Bowl of Dog Gumbo $1; Fried Snake $3. We buy dogs and snakes."

© 2008