Flood-ravaged New Orleans doesn’t inspire the kind of optimism that followed the Chicago fire or San Francisco’s great earthquake.
“A lot of talk at the time was, ‘Well, there goes the wooden city. Now we can build something grander and more permanent,”‘ said Lawrence Vale, head of urban studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But it is precisely the old wooden city of New Orleans that people love.”
Few expect the reconstruction of New Orleans to result in something grander than the original. And the obstacles to make anything rise from the muck are a monumental mix of technical challenges, philosophical differences and the hard reality of cost.
Building codes can be toughened, levees redesigned and strengthened, neighborhoods moved from flood plains, zoning made stricter, historic neighborhoods spruced up. But blocks of ruined homes will have to be leveled and rebuilt; more buildings, many of them historic structures, will have to undergo major repairs; and communities will have to be resettled.
The problems go beyond the brick-and-mortar reconstruction. Despite all the high-rolling tourists who visit, New Orleans is really a city of the poor, where 27.9 percent of the population survives below the poverty line.
“People say the city will recover, and the question is, whose city? Is it the city that the tourists see or is it the broader city that really only came to the nation’s consciousness after the hurricane?” Vale said.
But calamitous hurricanes do offer opportunities to build a stronger city, said Joe Riley, mayor of Charleston, S.C.
Riley, who has been mayor since 1975, was in office when Hurricane Hugo struck the South Carolina coast in 1989, claiming 21 lives and costing $7 billion.
Much of Charleston’s antebellum architecture was restored to a pristine beauty that would not have been possible before Hugo slammed the town, Riley said. “In a hurricane, everybody gets popped, so in the rebuilding there is a very substantial reconstruction and sprucing up.”
The Crescent City’s rebirth is already beginning. Pumps are sucking up floodwaters spiked with sewage, industrial waste and the decayed remains of animals and humans.
“After you get it pumped dry, there is debris removal, and when the snakes are gone and the alligators and the mosquitoes start to die down, you have to get the infrastructure back in shape,” said Mark Swatek, president of municipal services for Broomfield-based MWH Global, a company that works with New Orleans and other cities on water projects.
Utility workers will bring electric, sewer, water, gas and telephone lines and other vital infrastructure back on line as they can. Some parts of the city may be dark for months.
“Every pipe, every pumping station in that area is going to have to be repaired or replaced,” Swatek said.
There will be pressure to rebuild quickly to get tourist dollars flowing, the oil business up and running, and dislocated populations resettled.
“On one side will be people who want to rebuild quickly and inexpensively, and on the other will be those who say, ‘We need to do something different. We need to build all these homes up higher and make them more resistant to wind,”‘ said Robert Hartwig, senior economist at the Insurance Information Institute.
Much of New Orleans was built before modern building codes were on the books, said Edward Pasterick, senior adviser with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. New buildings will have to meet modern codes that may be stricter in Hurricane Katrina’s wake.
After Hurricane Andrew hammered Florida’s Miami-Dade and Broward counties in 1992, the state and counties adopted the nation’s toughest wind- speed codes. In Homestead, which was devastated by the storm, buildings that replaced those lost to Andrew are stronger, said City Manager Curtis Ivy.
In some cases, though, areas are just too prone to flooding to make rebuilding wise.
After severe flooding in the Midwest in 1993, for example, FEMA bought more than 10,000 properties and relocated residents and businesses.
“The reconstruction is an opportunity to push more houses out of the flood plain,” said P.J. Crowley, spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute.
It’s one of the many points where cost becomes a factor, and it could lead to a smaller city.
“If you decide you can’t afford to protect 500 square miles but you can protect 200 square miles, is the French Quarter going to be one of them? Of course,” said Michael Holleran, associate professor of architecture and planning at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center.
Less significant neighborhoods may have fewer advocates fighting to save them.
Engineering changes also could make the city safer, said Richard Weingardt, chief executive of Denver engineering firm Richard Weingardt Consultants.
Instead of duplicating the levees that broke, turning the city into a bowl where water could collect, the Army Corps of Engineers could design a system of individual cells. When the wall of one cell ruptured, water would be trapped by those around it and damage minimized, Weingardt said.
An effective reconstruction plan will have to take the region’s wetlands into consideration, as well, said Holleran.
To protect settled areas along the Mississippi, the Army Corps of Engineers constructed a network of dams, levees and canals that stripped away some of the natural protection from floods provided by wetlands.
“Letting the river have some of its flood plain back would serve people well,” Holleran said.
Historic preservation and the city’s reliance on the tourism industry are apt to further complicate the effort.
Riley, the Charleston mayor, remembers that different interest groups had sometimes competing ideas of what a renewed city should look like. “We said we are not going to lower our standards,” he said.
There will be some who want to keep the historic facades that grace New Orleans and eliminate some of its edgy character, pushing the poor and small-business owners from the urban core, said Elliot Sclar, professor of urban planning and public affairs at Columbia University.
Homes built strong enough to comply with modern housing codes also will be more expensive than those they replace, limiting housing opportunities for many.
But a New Orleans stripped of its character would be a loss to the entire country, Sclar said. “If you keep the architecture and style and take away the edginess of it,” he said, “Bourbon Street becomes Disneyland.”
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-820-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
