Mopping New Orleans

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How long will it be before New Orleans is itself again? You hear estimates: three more weeks before it's dry, at least two months for electricity, but a plausible answer is never. Vast tracts of the city--not just shanties but mansions, not just the morgue but the Southern Yacht Club--aren't salvageable. They all sit in what is called "floodwater" but is really a solution of oil, feces, battery acid, human and animal rot, burst containers of bug spray and paint thinner and nail polish and antifreeze. The primary sensory experience of New Orleans now is the smell, a gagging foulness of the charnel, of the hundreds of bloated fish pooled in the 17th Street Canal and a million other nasty things floating everywhere. The masterless dogs are so hungry and delirious in the 92° heat that they drink this mix, at least a lap or two, and then stagger away. The city smells dead, and although the French Quarter and a few other areas were blessedly spared, whatever exists in many neighborhoods here a year from now will be vastly different.

So, how long? It's best to answer this question by traveling to the city with the Army Corps of Engineers, the people the Federal Government calls when it wants to build something big. Some 1,580 Corps workers have come to the Gulf to fix what Katrina broke; it's the agency's biggest disaster response ever. During a visit to the New Orleans lakefront Thursday, the Vice President asserted after a short tour that "we're making significant progress." The engineers on the ground, those who work in the dross and stench every day, agree, but they also privately say they have barely begun. Not because they aren't working hard. Among the dozen Corps employees I spoke with, all said they were sleeping no more than four hours a night, mostly on the floor of the Corps' New Orleans office, which has reeking bathrooms and no running water. Rather, the simple immensity of the task has astonished even the most experienced Corps engineers. When Colonel Richard Wagenaar, the Corps' New Orleans commander, first tried to approach the flooded 17th Street Canal as the storm was subsiding, he couldn't get within half a mile of it because of all the water and downed electrical lines.

Even now, New Orleans has little power and undrinkable tap water, so supplies (generators, meals ready to eat, Doral cigarettes) must be delivered to the Corps each day--as often as several times a day--from a staging area 80 miles up the Mississippi. When I traveled with Thursday morning's eight-vehicle convoy, we started two hours late because the Corps workers each had to get tetanus and hepatitis shots before re-entering the suppurating city. Once under way, we had to stop twice: once to wait for a flatbed with a fan boat to join the convoy and again because a 55-gal. vat of Industrial Blue All-Purpose Cleaner was slipping and threatening to slide onto the highway.