The New Orleans Recovery Continues, Feds Welcome to Jump Aboard

This week, I got a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward. It was by no means my first visit to the area; virtually every time I return to New Orleans, I drive myself (and/or my visitors from out of town) around some of the vast flood-devastated real estate of the city, to see for myself how the grass-roots recovery is faring. Ever since last fall, when I drove through the Lower 9 with the producer of my Crescent City Stories series for MyDamnChannel.com, I've been amazed and inspired by the area's signs of life. But it took this week's tour, courtesy of the Preservation Resource Center, for me to realize just how false is the national media's depiction of the Lower 9 as dead, derelict and devastated. There are streets -- like the two blocks of Egania Street I happened onto last fall -- and neighborhoods -- like Holy Cross, where PRC is concentrating much of its restoration and rebuilding effort -- that astonish with rebuilt, re-landscaped and re-occupied little (and not so little) homes, mostly restored in the vernacular styles of the area. The Lower 9 shares with districts as undevastated as the French Quarter the curse of streets badly in need of repair (a major road-repair program in the city was announced just this week, nearly three years after the floodwaters were pumped out). And of course, there's the ever-present threat that the Army Corps of Engineers is still...the Army Corps. See this story on seepage at the 17th St. Canal for a real deja-uh-oh experience.

Yet the recovery by homeowners, assisted by dedicated organizations like the PRC, continues, blessed, as I tell my friends there, by the absence of the illusion of leadership. Speaking of which, Sen. Mary Landrieu has inserted in the new War Money Act (my name for it) some provisions for the Gulf Coast's recovery, including:

$6 billion for 100-year flood protection for the New Orleans area, with Louisiana's share reduced from $1.5 billion to $1.3 billion and the state given 30 years, instead of the usual three years, to make the payments.

-- $75 million to move public facilities from the Port of New Orleans to accelerate the closing of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and language directing the Corps of Engineers to look at more expensive options for permanent pumping of storm water in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

-- $75 million for criminal justice needs along the Gulf Coast.

-- $157 million to help six New Orleans area hospitals deal with post-hurricane health care costs.

-- $70 million for 3,000 supportive housing vouchers to help low-income workers find housing in the New Orleans area.

On that latter point, $70 million won't go very far when the rents in the city have doubled and tripled, due to so many rental units being taken off the market due to flood damage. Yet, there's still no federal effort to help jumpstart the renovation and rebuilding of rental units, the only sure way to "help low-income workers find housing." Rep. Barney Frank is head of the relevant committee in the House. How does he stand on helping the working class of New Orleans come home?

Leaky New Orleans levee alarms experts

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city's flood defenses.

Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm.

The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so far of the $14 billion set aside by Congress to repair and upgrade the metropolitan area's hundreds of miles of levees by 2011. Some outside experts said the leak could mean that billions more will be needed and that some of the work already completed may need to be redone.

"It is all based on a 30-year-old defunct model of thinking, and it means that when they wake up to this one -- really -- our cost is going to increase significantly," said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California at Berkeley.

The Army Corps of Engineers disputed the experts' dire assessment. The agency said it is taking the risk of seepage into account and rebuilding the levees with an adequate margin of safety.

"It's always a potential, so it is a design component for every feature," said Walter Baumy, the chief corps engineer in New Orleans.

The 17th Street Canal floodwall collapsed on the day Katrina surged over New Orleans in August 2005, and the failure severely damaged Lakeview. It was one of the biggest of about 50 levee breaches that contributed to the deaths of about 1,300 people.

Fixing the 17th Street Canal has been one of the most expensive and laborious repair jobs since the storm and has served as something of a test case for scientists and engineers, who plan to apply the lessons learned there to the city's other levees.

Among other things, they repaired the wall by driving interlocking sheets of steel 60 feet into the ground, compared with about 17 feet before the storm. The sheet metal is supposed to prevent canal water from seeping under the levee through the wet, toothpaste-like soil that lies beneath the city, which was built on reclaimed swamp and filled-in marsh.

Over the past few months, however, the corps found evidence that canal water is seeping through the joints in the sheet metal and then rising to the surface on the other side of the levee, forming puddles and other wet spots.

Engineers said the boggy ground is a more serious problem than the corps realizes. Bea said there is a roughly 40 percent chance of the 17th Street Canal levee collapsing if water rises higher than 6 feet above sea level. During Katrina, the water reached 7 feet in the canal.

John Schmertmann, a retired University of Florida professor and a consultant on foundations, agreed with Bea that the corps "may still be embedding some of these not-properly-considered factors, so the new walls may not do what the corps expects."

Reducing such seepage might require the driving of sheet metal far deeper into the ground than is done now, or some other solution, said Bea, who was part of a team of experts sent by the National Science Foundation to do an independent study of the levee failures during Katrina.

Donald Jolissaint, chief of the corps' technical support branch in New Orleans, denied the problem at the 17th Street Canal is serious.

"I personally do not at all believe that this little wet spot is anything that is going to cause a breach or a failure of any kind," he said. A newly installed floodgate could be used to cut off the flow of water into the canal and reduce pressure on the levee, he said.

Nevertheless, the corps is concerned enough that for weeks, workers have been analyzing the wet spots and digging a 160-foot-long, 10-foot-deep trench to zero in on the source. "We're doing everything we can to chase this down," Jolissaint said.

The corps is also spending about $100 million by taking more than 2,000 soil borings to find out what is under the ground and determine the best design.

Timothy Kusky, a geologist with Saint Louis University and an expert on the Mississippi River, said engineering a safe levee system in New Orleans will be very difficult because of the soil.

"You've got old riverbeds and floodplain deposits all interlayered and distributed laterally in a very complex way, and then you build a levee across them," Kusky said.

As a result, a levee sinks at different rates, and the sinking creates "little cracks in them that promote seepage, and also the old river channels and floodplain deposits have different potentials for underseepage," he said.

He said the corps understands a lot of the problems, but it takes a huge amount of data to map every weakness, and the agency does not have the manpower to see that every contractor is doing the job right.

Seepage was reported at the 17th Street Canal before Katrina. The corps denies that caused the collapse. Instead, the corps contends the floodwall flexed and finally cracked under the force of water piled against it by the storm.

Ex-Army Corps consultant indicted in bribery case

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A former Army Corps of Engineers consultant and a dirt subcontractor were indicted Thursday on bribery charges stemming from an investigation into levee work after Hurricane Katrina.

Durwanda Elizabeth Morgan Heinrich, a dirt, sand and gravel subcontractor, was accused of conspiring with two former corps workers to get confidential bid information for a $16.8 million levee project southwest of New Orleans in September 2006.

In exchange, the indictment said, Heinrich promised to give the workers, Kern Carver Bernard Wilson and Raul Miranda, 25 cents for every cubic yard of material used to build levees near Lake Cataouatche.

The arrangement would have funneled $299,375 each to Wilson and Miranda, the Justice Department said.

Heinrich was charged by a federal grand jury in New Orleans with one count of conspiring to commit bribery and two counts of offering a bribe to a public official.

Wilson, who was working for the corps as a consultant on the levee enlargement project, was charged with one count of conspiring to commit bribery and one count of demanding and agreeing to accept a bribe as a public official.

Each faces a maximum of five years in prison and fines if convicted on the conspiracy charge and a maximum of 15 years in prison and fines on each bribery charge.

The Justice Department did not return calls seeking information on lawyers for those indicted, and phone listings could not be found for the accused.

Maj. Timothy Kurgan, a corps spokesman in New Orleans, declined to comment Thursday but said his agency had turned over information about alleged wrongdoing to the Army's criminal investigation division.

Miranda, who pleaded guilty in September to bribery, was a construction manager for Integrated Logistical Support Inc., a New Orleans civil engineering firm hired to help the corps manage some of its projects.

Miranda, 50, of Spring, Texas, faces up to 15 years in prison and heavy fines at sentencing in October.

The investigation surrounding the Lake Cataouatche project has been the only case of criminal wrongdoing in levee work so far prosecuted by the Justice Department.

After Katrina hit the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and killed more than 1,600 people, Congress gave the corps billions of dollars to repair damaged levees and upgrade others.

The Lake Cataouatche levees protect an area of suburbs and small towns on the western side of the Mississippi River.

Road Home smooths way to appeals

The state Friday will unveil a new way to appeal Road Home grants, promising to lift thousands of disgruntled applicants out of a "black hole" of languishing complaints about lowball grants while putting the brakes on plans to collect overpayments.


The move is part of a larger effort by the newly combined Louisiana Recovery Authority and state Office of Community Development to assume direct control of certain procedures once left to Road Home contractor ICF International.

For example, LRA director Paul Rainwater has stepped in to stop ICF from hiring a collection agency for grant overpayments, which the state is required to recover under federal housing rules. A month ago, ICF moved to hire a subcontractor to retrieve excessive payments ICF believes it made to as many as 5,000 of the estimated 135,000 to 140,000 Road Home grant recipients.

But Rainwater now says he wants ICF to freeze collections work and wait for state officials to review each case. The LRA wants to make sure it's cost-effective to seek a repayment and to collect money only when it seems absolutely necessary under federal rules, using special caution in circumstances where the homeowner has already applied the money to rebuilding costs.

"We realize we can't get blood out of a turnip," Rainwater said.

He went a step further and said he didn't want liens placed on properties where overpayments have been made, promising instead that the state would set up flexible, no-interest repayment plans.

Rainwater also said he would abolish a policy of fining ICF the full amount of any overpayment and find another way to fine the company for mistakes made in bulk, hoping that will take away an incentive for the Virginia-based firm to aggressively pursue homeowners.

Rainwater, Gov. Bobby Jindal's recently empowered point man for recovery, said it was time for the state to "take ownership" of a Road Home process that ICF has driven since it was hired two years ago.

Rainwater said he recently replaced Office of Community Development officials who were too chummy with ICF, a process he called the "de-Baathization of OCD," in reference to bans on members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"It's been like hitting someone with an umbrella; what I need is a bat," he said.

Jindal gave him that figurative bat through an executive order in January, and he has responded by putting state officials in ICF's housing centers and by revamping the much-criticized appeals process.

According to protocols released early to The Times-Picayune, ICF will no longer use informal "dispute resolution," and any complaint not resolved within 60 days automatically gets a formal appeal review by a panel that will include three state officials, in addition to ICF employees. And state legislators will be allowed to sit on the panel, providing more transparency for the lawmakers who have been some of ICF's strongest critics.

Unlike in the past, when rules prevented Road Home from talking to a homeowner once he filed a formal appeal, an appeals adviser will be required to contact the applicant within 15 days to make sure the process is clear and that the applicant understands file details.

Some homeowners have expressed concern that they could lose the right to appeal by signing a new document to collect a $30,000 elevation grant. The Road Home Elevation Incentive Agreement, a document sent in recent weeks to about 115,000 applicants in flooded areas, says the home-raising grants can't be appealed and asks applicants to acknowledge that the elevation money is their "FINAL disbursement of Road Home funds" and "that all resolutions and appeals regarding my Road Home compensation have been concluded."

Rainwater said that language was never intended to quash pending appeals or to keep people from appealing other Road Home grant calculations. He said the section was put in the agreement to show that the elevation grant has to be the last dose of financial help provided, so the state can be sure it doesn't exceed the maximum of $150,000 in total Road Home money to each applicant.

Asked whether the agreement could be used to shut down some appeals, Rainwater said, "Over my dead body." But some homeowners say they still are afraid to sign a legal agreement until the language is changed. State officials said they would look into the possibility of sending an amended agreement or advisory to allay those fears.

FEMA parks closing June 1

BILOXI --Residents living in FEMA trailer parks are panicking about where they will live when the temporary housing program ends June 1.

Some residents have flooded a local mission group with phone calls, asking for help finding and moving into new homes. Roughly 6,800 families in South Mississippi still live in the temporary trailers, as the third anniversary of Katrina nears.

"There's just an outpouring from the community of people desperate to try to scrape together dollars here and there to pay deposits on rentals to move out of their FEMA trailers," said Dena Wittmann of Back Bay Mission. The United Church of Christ group is focusing on emergency housing assistance.

The residents, Wittmann said, have been told by their housing advisers that they will be evicted, and the trailers will be removed, by June 1. They want to know where they can get the money for a deposit on a rental, which usually is the cost of one month's rent.

"These deposits are the largest impediment to people moving into more permanent housing," she said.

FEMA has provided the residents with a list of rental properties available, and other resources, including nonprofit agencies that assist with deposits.

Back Bay Missions was on that list, but Wittmann said the group could not afford to cut families a check for more than $800 each - the average cost of a two-bedroom apartment.

"If we were to pay 10 families (the deposit), that would eat into our entire budget for the month," she said. "It's just gotten really scary for a lot of these families that are coming to us and are just desperate for help."