Lay of the Land

Just as NYC has continued to find remains of 9/11 victims more than five years after the Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Louisiana workers continue to find remains of victims of Katrina as they clear the rubble in the Lower Ninth.

The coroner's office has arranged to have volunteers from several city agencies search areas that have not been entered since Katrina, Gagliano said. The St. Tammany Parish search and rescue squad also will assist.

Coroner Frank Minyard told the City Council last month that the Michoud area of eastern New Orleans had never been searched for bodies since Katrina and should be investigated as soon as possible.

Minyard said he did not want a repetition in New Orleans of what happened in New York, where in October the bones of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were pulled out of a manhole near the World Trade Center that apparently had never been searched.

Firefighters on July 31 discovered one of the last Katrina bodies found in the city when they broke into a house in eastern New Orleans and removed skeletal remains. The house flooded after the storm.

Meanwhile, the Louisiana unit of Travelers Insurance is looking to cease issuing new business policies for New Orleans. There are a couple of angles to examine here. Insurance is a key part of any rebuilding in the region because the willingness to provide insurance is a gauge that businesses look towards to see how they can minimize their risk. If there are few insurers willing to do this, those businesses will look elsewhere to conduct their business.

St. Paul Travelers Cos. Inc., Louisiana's largest commercial insurance provider, plans to cancel all its commercial property policies in the New Orleans area next year, sparking fears that other insurers will follow and slow the region's economic recovery.

While the St. Paul, Minn., company refused to say how many commercial policies will be affected or specify where the cuts will be in South Louisiana, two insurance brokers who were briefed by the company this week say Travelers will not renew any property insurance for businesses in Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and eastern St. Tammany parishes. Cuts will also affect individual businesses in other parts of South Louisiana, including St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes.

"I said, 'May I tell anybody who asks that Travelers is withdrawing from the commercial property insurance market in southeast Louisiana?' " said Anderson Baker, president of the New Orleans agency Gillis, Ellis & Baker, who met with the company Wednesday. "The answer was, 'Yes.' "

Travelers spokeswoman Jennifer Wislocki said the company has "a high concentration of commercial policies in the hurricane-prone areas of Louisiana" and will not renew many commercial policies when they expire.

"To keep future losses to a more acceptable level for continued financial stability, we are reducing our exposure in some of these areas by non-renewing a number of small to mid-sized commercial properties," Wislocki said.

New Orleans has been operated incompetently for quite some time - even to the point of reelecting Whiplash Nagin over Landrieu because Landrieu was perceived to be even worse. That tells you something about the political situation in New Orleans and Louisiana in general.

The political leaders have failed to grasp this. It would also be instructive to examine what happened in Florida following Hurricane Andrew. There, political leaders recognized that the way the state approached natural disasters and disaster preparation had to change. Building codes needed to be improved in a big way. While there are still parts of South Florida that are deserted and show the scars of Andrew 10 years later, the areas that have been rebuilt are much more able to withstand storm damage.

The same cannot be said for New Orleans. Large parts of the city are still below sea level and reliant upon levees that are rebuilt but not strengthened past the levels they were when Katrina made landfall. A comprehensive levee management system has not been put in place because the locals don't want to cede their power and control to someone else. It will be at least four more years before the NOLA region will be able to deal with a storm like Katrina.

Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers expect New Orleans area levees to get higher and better every year, but they acknowledge four more hurricane seasons will pass before they can completely correct fundamental weaknesses responsible for much of the devastating flood -- and that timetable may be optimistic for the largest structures. Those long-term improvements include permanent pumping stations along Lake Pontchartrain to block storm surge from entering drainage canals, gates to keep surges out of the St. Bernard and eastern New Orleans area, and armoring the fronts and backs of levees and floodwalls with materials such as concrete to prevent scouring and erosion.

The biggest accomplishment to date is the installation of new floodgates along Lake Pontchartrain at the 17th Street, London Avenue and Orleans Avenue drainage canals in New Orleans. Floodwalls lining the 17th Street and London canals fell apart during Katrina, allowing a swollen lake to pour into the city for days.

The floodwalls are under repair where they breached, but federal officials feared that they simply cannot stand up to high water, and opted for gates to take all 22 miles of canal floodwalls out of play. The newly installed gates, stronger and anchored to far greater depths, are intended to prevent storm surge from ever again getting into the canals.

Had they been in place before Katrina, the gates could have reduced flooding in Orleans Parish by about 60 percent, according to Dan Hitchings, the corps' Task Force Hope chief, helping oversee Katrina recovery and system rebuilding.

So, instead of heeding the warnings by taking action to rectify the situation by improving the levees that a comprehensive management program would provide or taking steps that would minimize storm damage going forward, the politicians are likely to resort to the old tricks of imposing requirements on insurers or demand the creation of new government funded insurance programs to cover and spread the risk. A special session has been called to address this issue among others.

If Travelers does leave NOLA, other insurers may follow and premiums will rise as there are fewer options available to businesses.

Elsewhere, what has happened to those people who have been shed from the FEMA rolls for aid? That's not entirely clear as FEMA hasn't kept track of those people.

Finally, a special election to determine NOLA's Congressional Representative. It's a runoff election between William "Cold Cash" Jefferson and Karen Carter. Jefferson was found with $90,000 in cold cash stuffed in his freezer when investigators searched his premises in an investigation into fraud and other misdeeds. Will voters return Jefferson to Congress, or will sanity prevail and result in the election of someone who is not tainted by an ongoing bribery and corruption investigation where Jefferson was caught red handed with the cold cash? Given that Nagin was reelected, I'd put even odds on Jefferson being reelected.

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