[StBernard] Newspaper Article from The Morning News - Arkansas

[Westley Annis]

<http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2005/09/23/opinion/63editorial.txt>
St. Bernard Parish Searching For Answers

By Steve Barnes
The Morning News
CHALMETTE, La. -- It wasn't much of a secret. It wasn't a secret at all, not
if you had been here in the hours after Katrina. Or if you had watched the
helicopter pictures on television. But none of the 67,000 people who lived
in St. Bernard Parish, south of New Orleans, had yet been allowed to return.
Just Henry Rodriquez, Jr., the parish president, and his immediate staff,
and a company or two of National Guardsmen and a group of medical
volunteers, and the experts who had come to search for the bodies, the ones
still missing, and some reporters who press-carded their way in. We had
figured out the secret.

This is it, as whispered to me by Rodriquez: "There's nothing left, nothing
but those refineries," he whispered. And, he added, the refineries, one of
them belong to Murphy Oil of El Dorado, were leaking. That wasn't a secret,
either.

But nobody in a position of responsibility had told the people of St.
Bernard Parish. Surely some of them had figured it out for themselves, and
other had been afraid to do the math, even with the pictures staring at them
from their television screens and the newspapers.

A couple of days later, Rodriquez, who everybody calls "Junior," decided he
should not keep the secret any longer. So a meeting was called of St.
Bernard Parish residents who had evacuated, and they held it at the State
Capitol, in Baton Rouge. By one estimate, there were 5,000 people there.
Junior Rodriquez ferried from St. Bernard (his parish was still surrounded
by water) to "the mainland" and on to the building that Huey Long built. He
told his constituents they could go back soon, but that they would not want
to stay, probably, even if the authorities would let them, which they would
not. And that all they could do was pick up whatever they could drive out
with, and to be very, very careful about what they took out. And to wear
gloves and not touch their faces and wash carefully upon leaving.

"When you go back, you will not recognize" St. Bernard parish, Junior said.
"The only memories you are going to have are those you left with."

It could not have been easy for him, even though it was the easiest, and not
to mention, only, thing he could have told his townsmen. Better to give it
to them straight, they who had elected him, than offer them any hope that
things could somehow be the least bit different when they crossed the
Mississippi and found that their parish looked as though some alien force,
some faraway enemy, had used particle beams or an atomic weapon to blow St.
Bernard parish to bits. So he kept going.

"I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure that there is not a single
inhabitable structure in our parish," Junior said. "I'm ... I'm sorry. But
there it is."

Junior was not exaggerating. A drive through what was now an island reveals
not one surviving structure. Oh, the walls are up on some, but they are
missing their roofs. The houses and apartments that have roofs are missing
one or two walls. None has any windows. The streets are inches deep in mud,
and there is oil in the mud; oil, and whatever else. Junior told me that, at
the height of the flood, only one percent of his parish was not submerged.

"If we have to rebuild every house and apartment in St. Bernard, it's gonna
cost" -- Junior turned to an aide, who nodded -- "about $2.5 billion, at a
minimum. At a minimum."

Sure there was poverty in St. Bernard, but there were an awful lot of
high-dollar houses, too, McMansions. "Some of them would go a couple
million," Junior said, "so we're averaging a residential unit at about
$100,000. And these days, that's not a lot of house."

Junior and his team figure they were able to get "about" 80 percent of St.
Bernard's residents out before Katrina hit. Casualty counts move up and down
here, but at this writing it seems that at least 100 St. Bernard residents
were unable to evacuate. Thirty-four of them were in a nursing home, and it
was not their responsibility to evacuate themselves. The owners of the home
are charged with negligent homicide.

"I wanna know something," Junior tells me. "I want to know how it took the
feds five days to get here. But I also wanna know how we got a company of
Mounties here in two days. Two days! Mounties! From Canada!"