Waiting in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS -- Marshall Plummer is waiting.

Waiting for the keys to the trailer that FEMA put in his front yard a few days ago.

Waiting for his insurance company to decide what they are going to pay for.

Waiting for somebody to decide if he is going to be able to live in his quiet section of New Orleans East ever again. Waiting to see if he is going to spend the rest of his day in the city of his birth, or in Forth Worth, Texas, where he and his family found shelter and comfort after the storm.

"This is my shack," he says, inside the gutted single story house in the Warwick East section of the city, which is without power, without water, without people. The traffic lights are out and life seems to have stopped when the water receded.

Plummer, 61, and his wife of more than 30 years, Emelda, have begun trying to put the rubble of their lives back together. They are waiting for carnival to be over so they can get on with business. “I’m a Zulu, but I'm not riding this year," says Marshall, a small diamond stud glistening in his left ear, "I need the money for this. He gestures toward his shell of a house, which sits about a half mile away from the levee on the lake side of the city. "I was afraid to come back in here," says Emelda.

What they found was total devastation. Now they make the eight hour drive back from Fort Worth, with gallons of bleach, pressurized jet-cleaners and protective masks. They have gotten the house down to its shell. The studs and beams likely have to be replaced, but that requires city permits, and no one here is quite ready to deal with that yet.

This is a city in limbo, a place caught somewhere between rebirth and disintegration, and answers are hard to come by. "It's in a holding pattern," says Jim Thorns, a real estate appraiser and housing expert in the city. “People are waiting to see what the powers-that-be are going to do. Their government has abandoned them; their insurance companies have abandoned them."

While they continue to battle mold and move truck debris to the curb, the Plummers must wait for the city to decide if they can rebuild where they are. They must wait to see which of the competing rebuilding plans wins out. Will it be Gov. Kathleen Blanco's, the Baker plan, named for the senior GOP congressman, Richard Baker, or the recent White House proposal to spend $4.5 billion -- less than the other two -- on rebuilding?

Thorns sits in an old turn-of the century house on North Claiborne Street, where he once employed six people. They are all gone. "They're in Texas," he says. He could only move back into the house a few weeks ago. He has no phone service, no gas, and so, no heat. The power is finally back on. "What bothers me most is the reaction of the federal government to this one town that is older than America," says Thorns.

For example, after going through the many months of paperwork to get a FEMA trailer, the Plummers came home from Texas to find one in their yard, but since no one told them it was going to be delivered, they were not there to get the keys. The process of getting the keys, they expect, will take another few weeks. So the trailer sits empty alongside their gutted house, a small sign of both progress and a deep source of frustration.

But that uncomfortable mix is the coin of the realm here.

"It's beginning to fell like it going to be one big do-it-yourself project," says one native, "People are beginning not to expect help any more."

But there are issues that even to most intrepid people can't address with their bleach, and sledgehammers and vacuum cleaners. "Fixing the levees is the most important decision in trying to decide if people are going to be able to live here anymore," say Thorns. The Army Corps of Engineers is working diligently to repair and upgrade the levees on Lake Pontchatrain, and has promised to have a levee system in place that will be at least as sturdy as the pre-Katrina levees.

Emelda Plummer is waiting for more: "They are not giving us anything substantial go on about the levee situation," she says. The one thing not on hold, of course, is the next hurricane season which begins June 1. "Nervousness will be the order of the day," predicts Thorns.

"We can deal with it," says Marshall Plummer, "We just won’t be here for it. As soon as I hear hurricane, I won’t need [Mayor Ray] Nagin or anybody else to tell me to evacuate."

The Plummers had planned for hurricanes before. They had food in the attic, a hatchet to break through the roof if necessary, and they shared an attitude common in New Orleans before Katrina: that the big storm almost always missed them; that it always, at the last minute, turned in some other direction. So, often, people waited until the last minute to leave. “We left fore-day morning Sunday," Emelda says.

Not the next time. "I think this changed our perspective on hurricanes altogether," Marshall says. "We are going to be somewhere else when we hear that it turned. There will be no more of that attic sh-t."

There will no more waiting.

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