Another Brick in the Wall

Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans is dumber than a bag of hammers. He's called on former residents to come on back to the city - twice - and the first time the federal government gave him a smackdown because it wasn't safe to do so.

Well, guess what, it still isn't exactly safe for folks to return home. I'm not even counting the beatdown administered by some of the NOPD on Robert Davis. No, I'm looking at the critical basic services that any community needs to make sure that its residents don't get themselves sick, injured, or dead.

One of those critical basic services? Trash collection. Which is minimal at best. Considering that there are thousands of residences that need to throw out most all food products, can you tell me what Mayor Nagin is doing to prevent disease and pestilence by not committing more resources to trash collection or having a better plan to make sure that trash collection is prioritized due to the huge amounts involved?

"As we're bringing up new zip codes they're targeting those areas, so at this point in time we're not able to give you specific collection days," Landry said, adding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency had agreed to take over garbage collection because the hard-hit city does not have "a ready source of operating funds."

A spokeswoman for the corps, Mary Beth Hudson, said it had removed 1,948 tons of household waste since the hurricane struck and that trash was being collected on Fridays.

But in neighborhoods such as Uptown, where residents have been allowed back for about two weeks, garbage has not been picked up since Katrina hit on August 29.

"I know the city's having trouble, but it looks like they forgot about us," said an 83-year-old woman who declined to be named because her son is a police officer for the city.

"I've been bitten by stuff from that," she added, sticking out a swollen left foot as she pointed toward a mountain of garbage buzzing with flies.

Residential neighborhoods are not the only place where garbage removal has been slow. Nagin said on Monday that 26,000 tons of decaying chicken carcasses were sitting at the city's port.

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals said adequate trash collection would be a key consideration in its inspections of restaurants and other businesses that wish to reopen in New Orleans.

"They have to have an appropriate way of getting their trash picked up and removed from the facility," department spokeswoman Kristen Meyer said.

It seems that Nagin's every last move is poorly conceived, and even more poorly executed.

Elsewhere on the Gulf Coast, people are busy picking up the pieces. Bay St. Louis is reopening its schools November 1. Reconstruction of US 90 is proceeding, but there are some snags:

Getting sand out of the system actually is the least of the problems. That's relatively easy to get rid of with high-powered vacuum trucks and pressurized sewer hogs blowing 2,000 pounds per square inch of water to rinse out the drain pipes.

But they've also found sinks, toilets and carpet - items that have to be removed. While riding around Thursday, Seyfarth got a 10th call about an alligator being found in a pipe. The gators have been up to 7½ feet, but this one was the smallest, a babe only about 18 inches long.

There was also a tree.

"I don't know how that got there," Seyfarth said.

Drainage, surprisingly, has been the biggest problem in the first phase of restoration of U.S. 90, which should be complete Oct. 18. The eastbound lanes will be available for head-to-head traffic, although municipalities are expected to continue to restrict the highway's use to emergency, recovery and debris-removal vehicles.

"It's just taking longer than we anticipated," Seyfarth said. "But nobody knew how long it was going to take going in."

Three contracts have been awarded to South Mississippi contractors for this emergency work. One section starts at DeBuys Road on the Gulfport-Biloxi border and runs east, the middle extends to Shadow Lawn Avenue in east Pass Christian, and the third goes west to Henderson Point.

The repair and repaving of the road is pretty standard fare. The first phase has been aimed at getting at least asphalt everywhere along those two lanes, along with rudimentary traffic signals. The westbound lanes should be done on Oct. 25.

Complete rehabilitation of U.S. 90 will probably tie in with the completion of the two bridges in July 2007. MDOT plans to use ground-penetrating radar to help find voids in the underlying roadbed that could cause future problems.

Urban planners are having a field day in trying to figure out what should be rebuilt, and where and how communities should rebuild. Meanwhile, the local papers continue to heap praise on Gov. Barbour and his wife for leading the state's recovery. That's a far cry from the way that Gov. Blanco, Mayor Nagin and other Louisiana officials have been slammed for their ineptitude.

FEMA is acquiring mobile homes faster than it can distribute them. Go figure. They contracted with cruise ships for temporary housing, which was largely refused by NOLA residents, and now we have stories that FEMA's temporary housing isn't getting distributed fast enough. There's something wrong with this picture, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

But the delays are frustrating to storm victims who are tired of waiting for the government to fulfill promises of housing six weeks after the storm.

"We applied for (a) FEMA trailer, but we have no result yet," said Ben Truong, 34, who is living with his elderly parents, aunt and a couple of dogs on their shrimp boat docked on the bay at Biloxi, Miss. "You just want to pull out your hair."

The government ordered 125,000 campers and mobile homes for use as temporary housing after Katrina, FEMA spokesman James McIntyre said Tuesday. About 6,716 of the campers, which are smaller than mobile homes and also known as travel trailers, already are occupied in the three states hit by the storm.

But no one is living in FEMA mobile homes, even though 239 are ready for occupancy and another 2,514 are stored at staging sites in Selma, Ala.; Purvis, Miss.; Baton Rouge, La.; and Texarkana, Texas, according to McIntyre.

Another 6,497 travel trailers are parked at the same staging sites awaiting delivery, he said. In Selma, row after row of the white campers fill a grassy field as trucks pull new ones onto the lot, about 180 miles north of the devastated Gulf Coast.

McIntyre said no mobile homes are occupied because they require more space and permits from local officials, whom he said are directing federal employees when it comes to determining who gets the first homes.

For an organization that is supposed to be in the business of coordinating activities between federal and state counterparts, someone is not doing the job.

Debris removal is slow in Mississippi too as the debris haulers are forced to wait for crews to weigh the loads before heading to the waste disposal sites. We saw some problems in NYC with the removal of 1.6 million tons of debris from Ground Zero - including fraud and some items that were taken to illegal dumping grounds - so making sure that the waste is measured properly is a good thing. That it should take days to go through this process is not. There has to be a way to streamline the process.

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