There are thousands of stories about how things came back after Katrina. Here are four of them.
1. The Liquid Hydrogen Plant
Most people don't even know the hydrogen plant is out there, humming away
a few miles east of the Michoud plant where space shuttle external tanks
are assembled, out past Little Vietnam where highway 90 winds toward the
now destroyed old scenic route to the Gulf Coast. Most people don't know
it provides over half of the North American supply of this exotic fuel.
My company had barely moved back into our own building in Jefferson Parish,
spared the worst of the storm's wrath, when we got the call. The hydrogen plant
needed to be rebuilt ASAP. There was no time to do new engineering,
they wanted to rebuild everything just as it had been even though better
technology is available today. They had shipped almost ten feet of
water and everything below that mark had to be replaced. Money was no
object.
They built a city of FEMA trailers in the early going when FEMA trailers
were worth their weight in plutonium. They set up a free cafeteria
since there were no grocery stores or restaurants for miles. The food
was free even for us contractors. The place was a beehive of activity.
The power was restored early to this industrial park at a time when
hundreds of square miles of residential neighborhoods remained dark.
At one point we needed a commodity that's hard to come by on short notice.
The plant manager made a phone call and there were pallets waiting for us
the next day, which had been diverted from half-way across the world.
"We have the highest priority that has ever existed for this kind of work,"
he bragged. "Don't tell us we can't get it. Just tell us what you need
and we'll get it."
The workers who were rebuilding the plant lived there and worked 12 hour
days, 7 days a week, with overtime and doubletime. There was nothing
to do but work; there were no restaurants, clubs, bars, or anything
else open to tempt them. Many of them talked
openly of retiring on the proceeds from this one job.
If the work went on at a heroic pace, it went on with a notable absence
of long-term planning; nothing was raised or protected in the event of
another storm. "If that happens we may not reopen the plant," we were
told matter-of-factly. The government was only paying for repairs, not
improvement, so it was repairs, not improvement that they got.
The plant was producing hydrogen again, albeit at reduced capacity, by
December. It was at full capacity by February. At one point when we
were breathing a little more easily I wondered aloud just what the big
deal was. It's true that cryogenic hydrogen is so volatile you can't
keep it from evaporating, so it has to be constantly replaced, but their
biggest customer was NASA and the shuttle wasn't flying. In fact, they
had tapped NASA's sphere in Florida to temporarily meet some of their
own obligations while the plant was being rebuilt.
My contact looked at me and smiled. "NASA aren't the only guys who fly
rockets," he said. And suddenly it hit me; a bona fide Homer Simpson
D'OH moment. It wasn't the rockets flying astronauts and satellites and
research robots into space that had earned such a high priority. It
was the rockets that live in the ground carrying nuclear death in their
noses, the rockets that must never actually fly, which could not be denied
whatever the cost.
2. The Sugar Refinery
I have never met anyone who could remember when the sugar refinery wasn't
there on the bank of the Mississippi River in St. Bernard Parish; it
was moved there from some place up north in the 1910's. It had been
built not long after the Civil War, and eventually dismantled and moved
to Louisiana. It's a strange kludge of ancient cast iron and rivets and modern
computers, packed into buildings Charles Dickens would have found familiar.
The refinery has had four owners in the time I've been doing work there.
The same people always meet me at the gate, but the logos change and
the billing paperwork goes to different cities according to the investor
of the moment.
The refinery had six to eight feet of water, being on relatively high
ground. Since its production building is also one of the tallest structures
in St. Bernard Parish it also served as a magnet for survivors in the
chaotic days after the hurricane. Much of their equipment survived,
but a lot of the most important didn't -- all of their electrical
generating and distribution, and many of their computers were lost
along with thousands of motors, bearings, conveyors, and packing machines.
An entire warehouse full of packaged consumer goods -- everything from
boxes of sugar to little restaurant packets -- were reduced to a paste
of sugar and cardboard six inches deep on the bottom floor of their
largest building. And it was almost two months after the storm before
they had power and running water to properly clean it up.
The storms hadn't just hit homes and industries; they had knocked down
the nearly ready-for-harvest sugar cane crop. If the crop rotted on the
ground the USDA was obligated to pay billions of dollars in compensation
to the farmers. So as soon as the roads were clear tractors were
mobilized and the cane was gathered and milled.
The sugar refinery doesn't represent as much of our national production
capacity for sugar as the hydrogen plant did for hydrogen, but it does
represent more than ten percent. The Chalmette plant can melt six million
pounds of sugar a day; the next closest plant, upriver in Gramercy, had been
spared the ravages of the storm but it could only melt three million
pounds a day. And all the other comparable facilities were too far away.
The refinery had to be put back online, ASAP. Another FEMA trailer city
was planted, and money flowed. The refinery's insurance company opened
an entire office at the plant site. And by the turn of the year, sugar
was once again flowing through the plant. Over time they've gotten
most of their original packaging and production equipment back online.
Unlike the hydrogen plant, they've looked to the future; their new
controls are all elevated above the flood maximum.
Almost all of the refinery workers lost their homes, and they neglected
the task of rebuilding their own lives in order to get the plant back
online. They are only now turning to the task of gutting and cleaning
out their own ruined houses, and elevating them where possible. Some
have bought homes on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, but the
commute is brutal.
If you noticed the price of sugar inching upward at the grocery store
in January, it was the early effects of the lost production. They
got the plant online in time to save most of the storm-damaged crop
and avert a major price correction in the sugar market. And most of
them are still living in the FEMA trailer city.
(Oh, and if you're wondering what they did with the tons of sugar and
cardboard sludge, they sent it back to a mill to be reprocessed as if it
was raw cane, and then they took it back and refined it again.)
3. The Hospital Laundry
The hospital laundry had no fat government benefactors. Most of the
hospitals they serviced also went down after the storm, so there
wasn't much urgency, and in their New Orleans East industrial park
the water had been eight feet deep. They called us around the
beginning of April; they had lost every computer in the building,
including all backups of the system we'd built for them.
Industrial laundry equipment is pretty tough and most of their
big washers and dryers and irons were rebuilt on site. All of the
wiring and plumbing had to be redone (and the plumbing for an
industrial laundry is a wonder to behold, they have pipes dedicated
to chemicals you've never even heard of). At one point I solemnly
told my contact that I had no copy of their original customer file.
"That's all right," she said, "right now we only have three customers."
Before the storm, they'd had seventy.
The plant had power, but no phones or internet service. In order to
download a driver for their computer I had to go down the street to
the lumberyard, which had installed a satellite internet link.
Despite their late start they got things rolling; their business
isn't as large or complicated as the others I've mentioned. As
the hospitals come back there is a need for their service industries,
which are only awakening now. I can only wonder how many other
dependant industries of a similar nature haven't even begun to stir
yet. I do know that a lot of our customers simply shuttered their
buildings and moved operations to other cities.
4. The House on Virgilian Street
The first time I had a good excuse to be in New Orleans East, I
swung by my childhood home. My parents bought the house when I was
three years old, and I lived there until I moved out as an adult.
My parents had finally sold the place in 2000 to move to Picayune, MS.
The neighborhood was dead. Not in a figurative sense, but literally;
the grass was dead, and nothing moved. From outside the houses didn't
look too bad, but a peek through a window revealed the awful truth;
they'd taken seven and a half feet of water. Inside the furniture was
tossed like flotsam and mold ruled. And it was this way not just
for my childhood home, but for every home, every building, for miles
in every direction.
Nobody had even bothered gutting these houses and tossing the ruined
furniture and sheetrock out on the curb. These houses weren't even
worth trying to save.
In April I was in the neighborhood with a coworker and offered to
show him where I grew up. When I rounded the corner I was amazed
to see two FEMA trailers parked on the front lawn of my old house.
I stopped and introduced myself -- Hi, you don't know me but I grew
up in this house. They had gutted it, and had already replaced the
electrical wiring. They wanted to know who had built the cabinets
so they could hire them again. I smiled and said they wouldn't have
much luck; my father built them himself.
We talked for an hour or so. They said they had looked into moving
to higher ground, but they couldn't afford it. Construction prices
which were under $80 a square foot before the storm have surged to
over $130, and land prices where there was no flooding have doubled.
They decided their best shot was to fix the old place
up and hope for the best.
There are no government grants or supply priorities for them; they're
just a young family being forced to take a gamble with everything they
have. As we enter the 2006 hurricane season I think of them often,
and I hope they will be OK.
I hope we will all be OK.