Not Again
A battered Gulf coast and a storm season for the ages
For every lesson learned, however, there seemed to be three more questions without answers. Operators of refineries and natural gas facilities in Rita's path had wisely battened down, well in advance of Rita's arrival. The break in production alone, never mind a knockout punch, will put further pressure on gasoline and heating-oil prices, stretch an infrastructure that had already been operating at close to capacity, and have untold consequences on the nation's economy (Page 26). Other unknowns include the near- and long-term impact on shipping on the Mississippi River, the nation's economic lifeline, vital to farmers and agribusinesses in the upper Midwest and carmakers in Detroit. The impact on fragile marshlands along the Gulf Coast, now contaminated by thousands of barrels of oil and other petrochemicals, also remains to be examined. And, heartbreakingly, so does the future of New Orleans. Still digging out and drying out after Katrina, the Crescent City took a hard glancing blow from Rita, as its outer bands dumped still more rain, reflooding some portions of the city that had already begun mopping up and raising water levels in others, like the devastated Lower Ninth Ward.
Rebuilding the Big Easy. About New Orleans, there are many more questions than answers. "We don't have consensus on how to rebuild," says Louisiana State Sen. Derrick Shepherd. That lack of consensus and fears of the brokering that has come to be associated with New Orleans politics were in painful relief after a meeting between New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and local business leaders earlier this month in Dallas. Many of the city's black leaders, who heard about the meeting after the fact, felt shut out. "It wasn't a very diverse crowd," says Shepherd, who attended the meeting and is African-American. The leaders offered the mayor "money, workers, computer systems to sit down and formulate his plan" for putting the city back together, says Shepherd, who added that it was a positive meeting in which musician Wynton Marsalis phoned in to speak about the need to preserve the city's cultural heritage. The meeting fueled criticism that the mayor is beholden to white business leaders who supported the candidacy of the former cable executive. "If you seriously want to have a meeting about rebuilding," says Diana Bajoie, a Louisiana state senator, "you can't have it without black leadership." When the mayor said he planned to appoint a rebuilding commission that would be half black and half white, critics including Bajoie responded that the panel wouldn't mirror the racial makeup of the city, which is about 70 percent black. Leaders, too, remain divided about what to do with areas of the city like the Ninth Ward--predominantly poor and black. Suggestions to turn some low-lying neighborhoods back into wetlands that would offer greater natural protection from storm surges have been met with charges that the city leadership is simply trying to discourage the poor--and black--from returning to their neighborhoods. Last week, Nagin said that he initially sees the city losing 250,000 people, half of its population. "The ones we lose," says Jim Thorns, president of the New Orleans Black Economic Development Council, "will be the ones without the economic means to come back to New Orleans."
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