New Orleans is mending, but scars remain 10 years after Katrina

NEW ORLEANS – A decade ago, the nation reeled in horror as if Hurricane Katrina were the end of times.

My take, from reporting in New Orleans then and now, is that the city has so much history, exuberance and sense of place that it has swallowed one of the nation's deadliest storms as no more disagreeable than crawfish late in season.

Obviously that's not entirely so. Many died, and most of the living haven't returned.

Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, breaching canals and leaving 80 percent of the city flooded, survivors riding rooftops and the dead tangled in trees.

Helicopters thumped through nights blackened by total outages. Cops slashed through the neighborhood, spraying headlights everywhere but stopping nowhere.

My stories described a haunted city, alleged rapes and bold looting. Now the city's population is rebounding. Murders are down and tourism is up.

But a tourist with patience can tease out Katrina despair.

"If you talk to somebody for 15 minutes, it will come up," said Brian Alexander, 33, a professional canvasser. "There's definitely before-Katrina and after-Katrina narrative."

A visual reminder of Katrina is a post-storm phalanx of monster pumps at the edge of Lakeview, a white, middle-class enclave. Now, the diesel guardians are standing by to blow floodwaters back into Lake Pontchartrain.

It's peace of mind for those returning to Lakeview, which is below sea level and, in its demolished state, had been proposed to be a park.

"With its very existence in peril after Katrina, this neighborhood thrives 10 years later," proclaimed a recent headline.

The Lower Ninth is something else. The city within a city suggests a wrecked car in a junkyard. Of 1,500 killed by Katrina in Louisiana, hundreds were in the Ninth.

On a recent muggy Sunday, I drove past some of more than 100 homes by the Make It Right foundation, a group founded by actor Brad Pitt to help rebuild the Lower Ninth.

The homes were designed to be climate-adapted, eco-friendly and compact. They are striking, with swooping roofs and Euro-styling. They cost $150,000 each to build.

More than 4,000 homes were destroyed in the Ninth. A lot of the mess has been hauled off, but a small fraction of its 15,000 residents returned.

I pulled over to a pair of homes erased but for foundations of concrete block.

A man hollered: "Could you move your car down the street? My kids are racing here."

He was a good guy. His name was K. Gates, a musician also known as the Wave and as Kwame Nantambu, with three kids and a fourth coming.

They live in a Make It Right home. "It's a good place, no violence, no nothing, no trouble," the rapper, 32, said.

Gates hopes to move to Miami. In an online promo for his music he says, "I'd just like my piece of the American pie."

Can't blame him. The Crescent City skyline is a glance away, but the Ninth Ward still feels forgotten.

You want to root for the Rev. Charles Duplessis.

He and his extended family got out of the city to escape the hurricane and weren't allowed to return for months. His home and church had been given Katrina's iconic treatment: structurally mauled and marinated in nasty water.

"It was unbelievable, devastating. It took our breaths away," he said.

Mennonite Disaster Service rebuilt the pastor's home but unknowingly used contaminated drywall from China. It was ripped out.

I stopped by his home as he readied for service in the temporary Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church.

At 64, he's a Vietnam vet, welcoming but unflappable. You can see him as a neighborhood anchor.

There is so much the Ninth hasn't gotten back, he said.

"But there is hope."

Ten years ago, I came across Dolores Putman at "Camp Causeway," a landfill of refugees on high ground at Interstate 10 and Causeway Boulevard. Refugees there had been plucked by helicopters from roofs. They waited and waited.

Dolores, then a Lakeview resident, tossed it off as a joke when she offered me $100 to drive her and a friend away.

I thought to myself that there were thousands at Camp Causeway and I had a small car and how would I explain going AWOL to my boss?

I muttered an apology. But Dolores is strong. She reopened her gallery on Royal Street after Katrina, but it couldn't survive the next storm: the recession. At 60, Dolores now studies fashion.

She is devoted to an adult son with Down syndrome and last year remarried the man she divorced before Katrina.

They live west of the city and are considering where to live more permanently.

"It's been a wild ride," Dolores said. "But we've moved on."

In the days after Katrina, I also encountered Howard Brown and his family on Napoleon Avenue near floodwaters they had just slogged through.

They had sheltered at Memorial Medical Center, where his wife was a nurse. A lot of patients died waiting for evacuation. It was several days of nightmare for the Browns.

On that cloudy but sweltering afternoon, Guardsmen wouldn't let the family on a truck because their dog, Little Bear, was with them.

They moved out of the city two years later. "The city was getting a little scarier," he said in a phone call.

They moved to Denver. He describes the Mile-High City as "high and dry" and isn't being flippant.

Katrina memories are receding, but there is another emotion. "Tremendous guilt," said Howard, 50. "We feel kind of like traitors." The Big Easy is not so easy, loaded with stress and inconvenience.

Schools still struggle. Costly storm repairs continue. Fears of another disaster persist. Residents on public streets are taxed for private security.

Even with all that, tourists line Magazine Street. It's where locals eat and drink —an antidote to Bourbon Street.

A locksmith shop, H. Rault, was rebuilt after Katrina to continue its 160-year run on Magazine. It's a museum of sorts of antique locks and related hardware. Tourists streamed in, including teenagers and folks you wouldn't think of as the least bit interested in old skeleton keys.

That's New Orleans before Katrina and after: seductive.