[Dixielandjazz] Big Easy= Limbo Land

[tcashwigg at aol.com]

An update on the SITUATION IN NEW ORLEANS FOR THOSE HOPING TO GO THERE 
THIS YEAR:

READ BEFORE BOOKING THOSE FLIGHTS or filling up those gas tanks.


Tom "not going this year"  Wiggins



   The Big Easy? Now It's Limbo Land
Slow-Moving Bureaucracy Leaves New Orleans Stuck in a Cycle of Waiting

 By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 9, 2006; A01




NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 8 -- When Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco 
told a special legislative session Monday night that "It's time to play 
hardball, as I believe it's the only game that Washington understands," 
she was speaking with the fervor and frustration of someone living in 
Limbo Land.

  Mayor C. Ray Nagin has also been wrestling with ways to break the 
bureaucratic logjams that he says are preventing New Orleans from 
rebuilding. He recently met with officials from foreign countries, 
including France and Jordan, looking for help. "We had a little 
disappointment earlier from some signals that we're getting from 
Washington," Nagin told a local television station, "but the 
international community may be able to fill the gap."

  Officials here are resorting to strong words -- Blanco is threatening 
to try to block federal sales of leases for gas and oil off the 
Louisiana coast -- and pleas to foreign nations because they say they 
need more money to rebuild New Orleans. They are trying to appeal to 
the federal government and also minister to impatient constituents. New 
Orleanians are angry that President Bush did not devote more of his 
State of the Union speech to the city and are concerned that 
Washington's attention is no longer trained on them. They feel as 
though they are living in the mean in-between.

  You hear some version of that everywhere in New Orleans. You can't do 
this till that happens, and you can't do that till this happens. In the 
air there is a scent of temporariness. Gone is the putrid aroma of 
post-Katrina mud and sludge, yet the sour stench of stale French 
Quarter libations has not fully returned. On the calendar, the city 
sits at a midway point between hurricane seasons.

  Women of the Storm, a group of about 140 concerned citizens, flew to 
Washington recently to try to get Congress to pay attention to the 
tragic lives and landscape of the Gulf Coast region; Blanco (D) wants 
the Washington powers to tour the devastation. That straight shot from 
there to here, from the Beltway to Bourbon Street, is the road to Limbo 
Land.

  With calliope music blaring from a tour boat on the nearby Mississippi 
River, ticket seller Suzi Cobb, 59, provided a tragicomic description 
of the puzzling purgatory that post-Katrina New Orleans has become: 
"We're caught in a circle."

  Tourists aren't coming to New Orleans, she explained, because they 
can't find a place to stay. They can't find a place to stay because the 
hotels are full of federal relief workers, construction crews and 
evacuees, many of whom have no homes. Evacuees who do still have houses 
can't begin to fix them up because they have no jobs or income. And 
until they get out of the hotels so that tourists will have a place to 
stay, Cobb said, there will be no tourists and therefore no jobs for 
the workers.

  "We are in limbo and on hold," Nagin told the Senate Homeland Security 
and Governmental Affairs Committee last week.

  There are so many symbols of Limbo Land: Vast sections of the city are 
still without utilities. Without electricity, businesses can't open 
their doors; without open businesses, electric bills can't be paid. 
House-gutting companies advertise everywhere, but many homes are too 
far gone for gutting. Of an estimated 50 million cubic yards of 
hurricane and flood debris, about 6 million has been picked up, the 
city's Web site reported. Countless cars litter the landscape, rendered 
useless by the floodwaters. Ridership on buses and streetcars operated 
by the Regional Transit Authority has fallen from 855,000 rides per 
week before Katrina to 60,000 or fewer, according to a mid-January 
situation report by the Bring New Orleans Back commission. Only 17 of 
122 public schools have reopened.

  And 11,000 of 15,000 people working in the city's cultural positions 
lost their jobs, the commission noted. Without musicians and chefs, 
there will be no traditional music and food; without music and food, 
there will be no distinctively New Orleans culture.

  New Orleans is a Gordian knot of complications that has tied up just 
about everyone. Like most of her constituents, state Sen. Ann Duplessis 
lives in a holding pattern: "I am also a Limbo Lander," she said.

  At 44, Duplessis represents the Lower Ninth Ward. She said she tells 
her home-owning constituents in this wait-and-see world to line up all 
of the contractors they think they will need, get all of the necessary 
permits and arrange all of the financing so that when word does come 
down about whether a neighborhood will be eradicated or rebuilt, the 
homeowners will be prepared to act swiftly.

  Jerry Deroche, 72, and her husband, Every, 78, are living temporarily 
-- as if there is any other way in New Orleans these days -- in a FEMA 
trailer in the front yard of their Chalmette home. "It's a hell of a 
thing to be going through at our age," she said. "I can't even get into 
the tub."

  Harry Anderson, magician and former star of sitcoms "Night Court" and 
"Dave's World," also lives in Limbo Land. Anderson opened a speakeasy, 
Oswald's, in May 2005. Crowds were flowing in, and so was the money. He 
was really looking forward to the Labor Day weekend. Then Katrina hit. 
Now Oswald's is dark most nights because there are just not enough 
tourists for his original scheme. "We are bleeding cash," Anderson said.

  The city is anything but the Big Easy, he said. It is small and 
struggling.

  "Nobody is doing any business," said Charles Nelson, a 
commercial-transactions lawyer. "We don't have a lot of commerce." 
Nelson has an office in the Central Business District. But clients are 
not able to come and go freely. And without clients, a lawyer has a 
tough time.

  And everyone is waiting for the FEMA maps like they were oracles at 
Delphi. The maps will tell residents and businesses where and how they 
can rebuild. "Those maps will tell people whether or not they can get 
flood insurance," Nelson said. And if they can't get flood insurance, 
they may want to sell. But there may not be a market for the house. Or 
the government may swoop in, raze the house and build a park.

  Preliminary FEMA maps are scheduled to come out in the spring, but 
final federal guidelines for rebuilding may not be released until 
August, when New Orleans will already be several weeks into the 
hurricane season. "People are afraid to do the wrong thing, to put 
money into a home that may or may not be insurable in the long-run, and 
this is causing a tremendous amount of paralysis," Blanco told the 
Associated Press not long ago.

  Maurice Moore, 54, said his house in Lake Terrace, near Lake 
Pontchartrain, did not flood, though many of his neighbors' homes did. 
The businessman said he could move back right now, except the schools 
are closed and his son, Matthew, is in the 10th grade. Moore's 
paint-coating business took a hard blow.

  Moore's family is living in Alexandria, La. He and his wife, Dianne, 
are not sure they want to go through another hurricane. "We'd like to 
move back," he said, "but the future of New Orleans is so uncertain."