Posted on 08/17/2006 6:55:42 PM PDT by blam
Bouncing back: Hurricane hero rebuilds his life in time for Katrina's birthday
By Alec Russell
(Filed: 18/08/2006)
One of the few undisputed heroes of Hurricane Katrina, a one-time bouncer turned teacher, still lives in a trailer a year after he rescued survivors of the great storm.
Chris Baker, a 38-year-old barrel of a man, borrowed his Uncle Jimmy's boat and, drawing on his training in the Coast Guard Reserve, joined the hunt for stranded fugitives.
Left: A weary Chris Baker ferrying a police officer through flooded streets. Right: With his girlfriend Amy
His stirring experiences allowed him to forget that his own home and classroom were flooded. But 10 days after the hurricane, as the rescue operation died down, Mr Baker's dispiriting new life as a refugee began.
He and the forgotten ones, whose plight became known internationally as the "shame of America", are still struggling to make sense of what happened during and after Katrina.
While George W Bush's lacklustre performance during the disaster shattered his reputation for decisive leadership, the president does not tend to top the local list of "shamed" leaders. Instead, state officials, police and the hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) face most of the recriminations.
Despite his failure to confront the crisis until far too late, Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, managed to bounce back, and win re-election last spring. He trumpets that the French Quarter is "back in business". But for the hundreds of thousands of evacuees who did not live in the touristy areas, the anniversary stirs poignant memories of the day their life changed. Mr Baker spent six months "bunked" on a couch in a cousin's house. Morale sagged and he went for counselling. Shrinks and builders are possibly the only two occupations to be enjoying a local boom.
"The whole Katrina thing was starting to hit me," Mr Baker said. "I went on the back burner."
He is now slowly rebuilding his life. In March, Fema gave him a trailer home in the town of Shreveport, 350 miles from New Orleans. In yet another reminder of the millions the agency has misspent on the relief effort, he inhabits one of only two occupied trailers out of 12 in the lot. The rest are empty, costing Fema £300 each a month.
Yet bit by bit, his new life is taking shape. He has a new job at a local school. He has a new girlfriend, Amy, an actress who is also an evacuee.
There are even signs that Mr Baker's old life in Jefferson Parish, on the outskirts of New Orleans, is not irredeemably lost. His mother has rented a dump truck and is filling it with rotting roofing and furnishings from the mildewed house they shared. They may yet live there again.
But his friends are scattered across America, and notwithstanding a rambunctious Mardi Gras festival in February, New Orleans is a city that has lost its soul.
"There is so much tension," Mr Baker said. "Everyone is so irritable. People are just not pulling together. I love New Orleans but I hate to see what it is turning into. I see a smaller city not nearly as friendly. And I hate to say it but it has a lot to do with racial tensions."
It is a deeply sensitive subject but New Orleans remains riven by race. Traditionally it had a black majority. Now the black-white ratio is just about even or there is a slight white majority. Black evacuees dream of returning from their ghettoes in exile in cities such as Houston. For many, including families that The Daily Telegraph has traced over the past year, exile in white middle class suburbs in the Rockies and Great Lakes area has become increasingly unhappy.
Many suspect that some of the city's white power brokers would rather their rundown old neighbourhoods did not spring up again. A dispute still rages over the fate of the Lower Ninth Ward, a black slum flattened by the storm. Mr Baker cites St Bernard Parish, one of the two worst hit areas, as a lone beacon of hope. Just outside the city limits it is - or rather was - a blue-collar, mainly white community of about 70,000. Now most of it looks as if it was hit by an atomic bomb. Houses are levelled. There is no one in sight.
Sheriff Jack Stephens has not given up hope. Unlike the police in New Orleans, many of whom infamously left the city to its fate, he and his men stayed at their posts. The Daily Telegraph last saw them two weeks after the storm, punch drunk with exhaustion but glowing with pride at having saved dozens of lives.
But progress is slow. Sheriff Stephens's best guess for the population is based on the 9,700 applications for electricity. Many requests are for Fema trailers. "During daylight hours it's very busy, all kind of reconstruction in the industrial areas," he said. "But if you went into areas of Chantilly [a prime residential area] you could shoot a cannon at high noon and not hit anybody.
"Bank executives tell me there is more money on deposit in Louisiana banks than ever in history, maybe something like $20 billion. A lot of people have banked the money from their insurance companies and are waiting. "I wonder: how do you put this thing back together? Lyndon Johnson said you've got to slice the salami thin. And that's what I do.
"How do you put Humpty Dumpty together? It is overwhelming."
And that is the view of one of Louisiana's optimists. Others feel their future can only be elsewhere, far from the bitter memories of the emergency response.
It has taken a lot to sap Wayne Compton's fiery spirit but the approaching anniversary on Aug 29 is almost too much for him. He has faced down his share of challenges, including a stint in the Vietnam War and a spell on the streets, but as he sits in a nursing home, hundreds of miles from New Orleans, and recalls his experiences he breaks down in tears.
"I lost everything: my dignity, my fight, my independence and my freedom. And it wasn't Katrina that took it. It was the mayor of New Orleans, the police and the governor of Louisiana for failing to do what they should have done."
The Daily Telegraph last saw Mr Compton as he was rescued more than five days after the hurricane hit. He was in a terrible state, filthy and struggling to breathe. And his ordeal was not over.
"They [soldiers overseeing the evacuation] wanted me to leave my wheelchair behind. They fought me over it for two days and they didn't tell us where we were going."
He was flown hundreds of miles west to Lubbock, Texas, and is now critically ill from what he went through in those terrible days a year ago.
His bitter-sweet experiences of the past year, his still bubbling anger at the ineptitude of the authorities, and his decidedly mixed views of the "new" New Orleans are sadly emblematic of the mood of the city's evacuees on this sombre anniversary.
So is he going back?
"I wouldn't go back to New Orleans. My daddy had a saying: 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me'."
Here's praying for a calm season!!!!!!!!
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