I didn’t do much to prepare for my recent trip to New Orleans for the second weekend of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, May 4-6. I didn’t study up on which acts were playing, because I knew they’d all be good. And I didn’t become very well versed in the many issues the city continues to struggle with in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which struck on August 29, 2005 with an estimated force equal to a 20-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes—wiping out 200 miles of Gulf coastline, killing 1,800 people and leading to the displacement of 1.3 million Americans.

I figured I’d have a chance to learn a little about those things once I got there. So instead, I spent my spare time reading Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain. Published in 1883, the book is a great reflection by the author looking back on his days as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot. It’s also characteristically funny, and has some of the most charming descriptions of 19th century river life that you will ever read.

It struck me that as he wrote about New Orleans in the book, the city was already 165 years old—nearly 60 years older than the Declaration of Independence. The French ceded the city to Spain for forty years prior to 1801, when Napoleon regained control and sold it and the rest of the Louisiana Purchase to the US in 1803, doubling the nation’s size.

A port situated at the bottom of the Mississippi, Thomas Jefferson considered New Orleans a crucial, strategic part of the growing country. It turns out Jefferson was right, as he was about a lot of things. Every year more than 6,000 vessels move through New Orleans, importing steel, rubber, coffee and other products from around the world and exporting every kind of grain on barges that float down from the breadbasket of America. It’s also a major cruise ship port, and the entire region also plays a key role in domestic petroleum production. The major sponsor of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is Shell Oil.

As you approach the city from Atlanta, the plane descends over the huge, watery mirror of Lake Pontchartrain. Flying above the 24-mile long Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is a great way to experience this engineering marvel—the longest bridge in the world. The big jet seems to drift slowly, like a balloon, across the vast expanse.

Looking south, you can see on the horizon some of the signature south Louisiana wetlands that historically helped form a buffer against gulf storms. These are the marshes and barrier islands that have been disappearing at the rate of 34 square miles per year for the past 50 years. Scientists widely agree that this unintentional, man-made phenomenon helped wax the alley for Hurricane Katrina.

The levees and canals that harnessed the Mississippi also worked to channel the muddy silt from the river’s watershed—which carries dirt from as far away as New York and Montana—straight on through to the deep water of the gulf, where it slips off into the abyss. Stop river flooding and you stop building river delta. The land that remains begins to sink. New Orleans, you see, was built on ground that used to be in Pennsylvania. Or Ohio, or Illinois, or Missouri, or Arkansas...

This process, called subsidence, occurs as the tiny particles that make up delta soil continually compact under pressure, unreplenished by seasonal river flooding. Half of New Orleans is below sea level, and subsidence claims two inches every decade. Meanwhile, the ocean is rising due to global warming. It doesn’t take an engineer to comprehend the challenge this presents.

It sounds like the plot sketch to a sci-fi thriller, but part of the story seems to be this: Over the course of 300 years, men have tinkered with the flow of the river and upset the natural balance to such an extent that only further tinkering—on a massive scale, and soon—can hope to restore that balance and save the city.

The New Orleans area is one of the most intensively engineered places in the country. Plans are out there that would begin to rebuild wetlands by diverting some muddy river water to areas that have been lost. The problem is, it’s not a cheap solution. An estimated $14 billion would be required, or about what Boston’s Big Dig cost, and that’s not something the state can afford. By comparison, costs for rebuilding after the 2005 hurricane season are placed around $200 billion. Just ask the insurance industry.

It was also pointed out to me that in the 19 months since Katrina hit, the country has spent approximately $80 billion on the war in Iraq. Meanwhile in Louisiana, the longer nothing is done the more the sea will encroach, and the more forceful the storm winds will be when they make landfall again.

I talked to several people who offered that they felt stung by President Bush’s failure to mention New Orleans in this year’s State of the Union address. And I could see how they could feel that way as I drove down residential streets where small FEMA trailers still sit on front lawns of houses being rebuilt, or being raised up onto columns, more than a year and a half after the cataclysm.

I could understand feeling stung by it if I were in the lower Ninth Ward working as a volunteer with Common Ground (www.commongroundrelief.org)—a grassroots collective working to rehabilitate one of the most severely damaged areas of the city. The place sits in the shadow of the concrete Industrial Canal levee and flood wall that broke during Katrina and unleashed powerful currents that ravaged the huge neighborhood, smashing entire blocks of houses and washing others off their foundations.

I could understand it if I were one of the people who’d decided to return, rebuild, and raise a family in New Orleans. And I could understand how the President’s sin of omission would break the heart of a family torn apart and scattered across the country, trying to imagine a road home. I could see feeling forgotten.

Granted, it’s hard to understand everything that’s going on in New Orleans, and sometimes things aren’t what they appear. We were listening to WWOZ on the way from the airport to get a dressed oyster and catfish po’ boy at the Parkway Bakery and Tavern, when I naively asked about all the graffiti I noticed that had been spray painted on abandoned houses. On top of everything else you’ve got to deal with senseless vandalism? Or was this evidence of gang activity?

No. The marks were left over from the flood. The various symbols let emergency workers know if there were surprises like dead bodies or abandoned dogs lurking inside the house. The level of my ignorance was enough to stop me in my tracks.

These are some of the things I picked up during my stay in New Orleans. I’ve never visited the place without feeling sad to leave. This time it was hard because you know the place is still hurting and haunted—not only by what has occurred there—but also by the feeling that the rest of the country doesn’t know, or doesn’t understand, or doesn’t care enough to give all the help required. As Harry Connick Jr remarked from the stage, closing this year’s Jazz Fest: “We have a long way to go to bring our beloved city back.”

The Industrial Canal wall that broke, inundating the Lower Nine.

THE CITY THAT CARE FORGOT

New Orleans, or N’awlins as some like to say it, has several nicknames. Chief among them must be “The Big Easy,” which was musician’s slang because it was easy to find work there. It’s also called the “Crescent City” because of the shape the Mississippi makes as it snakes around, girdled by levees. Another nickname that seems to have ironic resonance these days is “The City that Care Forgot,” so-called for the carefree, laissez-faire vibe given off by many of the residents. Up until Katrina, it was quick shorthand to think of the place as a hedonistic playground, home to Mardi Gras parades, great music, food and drink—all the ingredients for fun-loving decadence that Americans crave.

It wasn’t that the residents were unaware of their city’s precarious location. I can remember being told over a decade ago how the place sits like a teacup surrounded by levees. This wasn’t told to me by an expert—it was just common knowledge. I never heard people obsessing about it, but then, who obsesses about massive structures put in place by the Federal Government? When you drive over a bridge on the interstate, don’t you assume it’s not going to collapse? If we didn’t have faith in these things it would be impossible to get on with daily life.

What happens when that faith is lost? Last Thursday, May 10, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation published the results of an unusual study conducted in the fall of 2006. Eschewing telephone interviews because displacement is still the rule in many areas, the foundation sent 41 interviewers into Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes and spent a minimum of half an hour talking face-to-face with 1,504 randomly selected adults. Keep in mind the survey only includes the impressions of New Orleanians who’ve managed to return after the storm.

The portrait that emerges is one of a community with an overriding sense of optimism and resilience in the face of great adversity. Fully 63 percent said recovery is going in the “right direction” while 29 percent said it’s going in the “wrong direction.” A majority of subjects reported a deterioration of their financial circumstances, 37 percent have experienced disruption in their housing or social network, and 36 percent report compromised access to health care. Meanwhile, 15 percent reported “a deterioration in their physical or mental health, loss of a job or a decline in quality of work, or other effects on their temper, marital relations or use of alcohol.”

On top of this, the displacement severed the connections between many patients with chronic mental illness and their psychiatrists. Some of these people have become rootless and exist in a state of freefall until they endanger themselves or others, get arrested, diagnosed and treated by the relatively few psychiatrists who’ve thus far returned to practice.

Noting that problems didn’t end when the waters subsided, the new report begins to put a human face on the scars left over from the deluge. It’s planned as an ongoing project that will examine, at 18-month intervals, the recovery process in social terms.

BEFORE THE FLOOD

Thursday night, May 4, I anxiously watched the news with friends. We were talking and drinking beer and looking forward to the next day at Jazz Fest. Now, the weatherman was calling for a few inches of rain from some heavy thunderstorms moving in from the west. A flood warning was issued, and we all crossed our fingers. As I fell asleep that night, the moon was framed in the window like a giant pearl. It was quiet. I slowly drifted off, watching the thin, frilly clouds hanging around it like Spanish moss.

About three in the morning I awoke to a thunderclap that seemed to roll on unabated for an hour or so. I sat up and watched out the window as the rain came down past the streetlight like nails at a sharp angle. The lightning was wildly powerful, and constant enough to read a book by... until the streetlight flickered. With the next explosion, the electricity went out for good.

Now the streets of the Broadmoor neighborhood where I was staying were in total darkness. As the rain beat down, I began to wish I’d recharged my cell phone before losing electricity. I lay back down, listening to the rain.

When I awoke, the electricity was back on. I later discovered it had gone out for thousands in the city. It was another hot, humid morning, and the threat of more rain hung in the air. Unprepared, I picked up a raincoat and some sandals from Walgreens (one of the few drugstores still operating in the city), and off we went to hear some music.

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival takes place at the Fairgrounds Racecourse, an old racetrack that becomes home to eleven music stages and more food vendors than anyone can comfortably visit. It is situated in the northern part of the city, and to get there we parked on a narrow side street and walked through part of the beautiful Garden District. Here, the stately homes of the well-to-do appeared to be in very good shape.

Then the wind picked up. About three blocks from the entrance a sheet of hard rain as clearly defined as a curtain raced up the street toward us. We ducked into a crowded bar to wait it out. The place filled up fast, and few people seemed to mind the delay. When the rain let up, we made our way to the entrance gate and found ourselves wading knee-deep toward the turnstiles.

Once inside, we headed for the Blues Tent. These “tents,” by the way, are roughly the size of an aircraft hangar. People were pressed inside, trying to get out of the rain. Inside, Louis “Gearshifter” Youngblood was tearing it up. From our place near the back you could see the stage lights reflecting off the ankle-deep water in the aisles as girls danced around in wet sundresses. Clearly nothing was going to stop this party, and it was still the afternoon.

Nothing except the cell phone call my friend received from his daughter’s daycare. They were telling all the parents to come and collect their children. Streets were filling up with water, and they were trying to get everyone home so they could close.

The next day, the New Orleans Times Picayune reported that the storm had dropped 5 inches of rain on the area—and there were problems with the city’s storm water pumping system for the second time in six months. An elderly woman was rescued from her car before it was inundated beneath a bridge.

Common Ground headquarters. The owner of the "blue house" is coming home soon.

FIX THE PUMPS

Flooding has always been a fact of life in New Orleans, and little storms like this are taken in stride. But the kind of flooding that nobody wants to revisit is the kind that happens when levees and storm walls collapse. How and why did the city become inundated after Katrina? Who’s responsible? Increasingly, fingers point at the Army Corps of Engineers.

Critics of the Corps include 250,000 individuals, who are seeking damage claims in excess of $278 billion for negligence in building and maintaining navigable waterways.

There’s no telling how these cases will play out, but one thing is clear: The Corps will have a hard time making the kind of monumental repairs and improvements required away from public scrutiny. Lawn signs urge residents to hold the Corps accountable, and a guy I was introduced to named Matt McBride is an engineer whose blog (fixthepumps.blogspot.com) is devoted to holding their feet to the fire.

An ongoing controversy centers on faulty pumps that were sold to the city after Katrina for $32 million by Moving Water Industries (MWI), a company that employed Florida Governor Jeb Bush in the 1980s and remains a big contributor to the Republican Party. Before the bidding process, the Corps is alleged to have copied specs from an MWI catalog (including typos), and inserted them into the contract request. Turns out MWI had the exact pumps they were looking for, and won the contract. Many of the pumps subsequently exhibited catastrophic failure during limited testing.

So where does the city stand as Hurricane Season kicks off for 2007 on June 1? For once, independent critics are in agreement with officials from the Army Corps of Engineers when they say that even a smaller hurricane could cause the levee system to fail on its eastern and southern borders this year. A strong Category 2 storm could even do the trick. Another Katrina, forget it.

Grammy winner Irma Thomas returns home to salute Mahalia Jackson.

(photo: Douglas Mason)

HIGHER POWER

By Saturday, the storms had passed. The streets and the fairgrounds were dry, and the sun came out in tropical fashion. The crowds at Jazz Fest were back. (Over two weekends, the attendance was pegged at 375,000—the highest figure since 2003.) And walking around, eating a Cochon de lait po’ boy and some andouille pheasant and duck gumbo with a cold herbal tea to wash it down, I knew I was nowhere else but New Orleans. On the big Gentilly stage we caught Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste & Zigaboo’s Funk Revue Band—the original drummer for the Meters.

We made our way back around to the Gospel Tent, where Irma Thomas, the “Soul Queen of New Orleans” was performing her tribute to the great Mahalia Jackson. Thomas, who’d recently won the first Grammy of her 47-year career, had recently returned to her home, and the crowds spilling out from the giant tent were testament to her popularity. I managed to ride the current of the crowd long enough in the blistering sun to make it inside, where something wonderful was going on.

In an immaculate white robe, Thomas, with a little piano accompaniment and three backup singers, was laying it down old school. After each song, the audience erupted in shouts of praise. People who were clutching fans or beverages couldn’t clap and instead thrust their free hand up so she could see them. This wasn’t church, but the electricity being exchanged in that place was palpable. She thanked the crowd, and explained that the little Grammy trophy she’d recently won was for all of them, in New Orleans. Then, she insisted upon a lyric sheet because “there may be somebody out there today who is ready to be touched, and I want to make sure I get the words right.”

Then she sang:

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross

The emblem of suffering and shame

And I love that old cross where the dearest and best

For a world of lost sinners was slain

There was such passion in her voice, like the tone struck by a person who’d been through it all and was now simply going to tell it like it is.

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross

Till my trophies at last I lay down

I will cling to the old rugged cross

And exchange it some day for a crown

And exchange it some day for a crown

The place erupted, and I saw people of all ages and races smiling and shouting and waving with tears on their faces. In the 90-degree heat, it gave me the chills.

There were other high points, too, like the Allman Brothers, Steely Dan, Alan Tousaint, Stephen Marley featuring Jr. Gong, Taj Mahal & the Trio, Pin Stripe Brass Band, and native son Harry Connick, Jr. At Jazz Fest, the list goes on and on, and it’s too much for any individual to take in.

Sadly, on Sunday came the news that clarinetist Alvin Batiste, a patriarch of New Orleans music, had died in his sleep just hours before he was to be celebrated in the Jazz Tent with the Branford Marsalis Quartet and Connick on the piano. Instead of canceling, the performance was turned into a jazz funeral, where dirge gives way to an ecstatic celebration, releasing the soul of the departed. I also heard people respectfully mentioning Ed Bradley, the recently departed 60 Minutes correspondent who was a great champion of Jazz Fest.

A typical house-raising, NOLA style.

BIG WHEEL KEEP ON TURNIN’

On Monday afternoon following Jazz Fest, I made a quick visit to the French Quarter. It was a quiet, overcast day, but I was struck by how clean it looked. A new sanitation plan is making the place friendlier than ever before for tourists—who are a huge component of the city’s economic well-being. The spell of the place is as powerful as ever, as you walk through the old streets listening to the enchanting sound of the steam calliope piping up from the Riverboat Natches, moored a half-mile away.

But the New Orleans I visited just over a week ago was a different place than the one I used to visit before Katrina. The friends I have there have had to make very tough decisions, pretty unexpectedly, in the middle of their lives. Should I stay or should I go? That’s a big one.

Schools are a huge issue. While I was there, a new superintendent was named. Paul Valas, who has headed school districts in Philadelphia and Chicago, will pick up the task of running an understaffed district still working in damaged or temporary facilities with a fluctuating student base due to departures and returns.

Meanwhile, charter schools seem to be picking up steam there. Some are up and running, some are in the works. I was introduced to a guy named Hal Roark, who sits on the Broadmoor Charter School Board. Residents of the Broadmoor neighborhood, where I stayed, are working tirelessly to improve their quality of life. They’d like a charter school to go into a public school building that has been stripped by looters and left unused since Katrina. Like everything else, it’s been hard.

Those who decide to leave wind up missing the place, while those who remain struggle not only with the daily routine of work and rebuilding but also with the sense of loss and loneliness provoked when any friend leaves town for good. In New Orleans, it’s common for people to have lost several close friends this way over the last 19 months.

Evacuation itself is a complex, stressful task. I was told of a man my friends know, whose wife turned to him as they were driving north during the flight from Katrina. She told him she loved him, and that she was leaving. With that, she expired in the passenger seat of the car. There was nothing to do but drive on, keeping the desperate procession moving. The disaster affected so many, in so many ways.

I also think that New Orleans, post Katrina, will go on to teach the rest of the country some valuable lessons in how we deal with issues as far flung as race, poverty, the environment, corporate wealth, social services, governmental corruption, and a lot of other things that are probably yet to present themselves.

The only thing more heartbreaking than the collapse of the levees may have been the miserable failure of the Federal government to react in an effective way to help its own citizens. The level of ineptitude was surely visible on the global stage, as foreign governments who wanted to send aid following Katrina were stymied.

According to an April 29 Washington Post article, “Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to US officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.”

Furthermore, why not accept the expertise of the Netherlands? There, after major flooding in 1953 caused the deaths of 2000 people, they moved to protect their low-lying country by building 2,190 miles of dams, dykes and dunes. The cost is high, but what are we saying by not doing the same? That the gulf coast isn’t worth as much as Holland? Please.

It’s all a question of priorities. On a warming planet, where rising tides and stronger storms are likely, we need to learn from New Orleans. There are lessons there for other low-lying coastal places like Manhattan, Baltimore, Charleston and Miami.

The great American dream of owning oceanfront property suddenly isn’t what it used to be. Stronger and more frequent storms are going to cause problems. Again, don’t take it from me, take it from Allstate. Or take it from author Mike Tidwell, whose book The Ravaging Tide expands upon his previous one Bayou Farewell. These works place the whole south Louisiana wetlands issue in a national and global context.

And in our violent world, where our leaders routinely prophesy terrorism striking at home on a nuclear scale, it is decidedly not reassuring to see that they’ve learned so very little about caring for the survivors of this catastrophe that has already happened right here in our own front yard.