Words Whispered in Water. Sandy Rosenthal
But the Business Council of New Orleans had lumped them together as one giant cohort of corruption.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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