Text Box: Reporter's Notebook Watching Rita from Katrina Land By KEN WELLS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL September 24, 2005 8:00 p.m. NEW ORLEANS -- Rita's still hanging around here, in the late afternoon, with her low-scudding clouds, sticky heat and blustery winds banging around loosened metal signs and blowing traffic cones into the middle of the roads. People here, most of them with a serious case of the hurricane blues, are wishing her gone -- long gone -- but nobody's optimistic about that. It's one thing to be under tornado warnings well through the evening. The people filtering into Molly's and Johnny White's, the French Quarter's two reliably open bars, are simply ignoring the danger under the standard that bad weather ought never get in the way of cold beer. But the forecast is for three days of rain, rain, rain -- precisely what a city longing to dry out and finally get on with its business doesn't need. And you can drive a few miles east from the Quarter, through the empty, garbage-strewn streets, to the dead-end of a disabled drawbridge and see another of Rita's unwanted gifts: a huge breach in the Industrial Canal, cascading like a white-water river, and reflooding the soggy ghost neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward where thousands of homes lay in silent ruin. The city got only moderate winds from Rita's outer bands -- maybe 50 knots -- but they drove tides kicked up by stiff southeasterly winds through a patch in the Industrial Canal levee. The water is purported to have run east and south all the way to the flood-weary lands of St. Bernard Parish and -- just a few days after the place had finally dried out. About 66,000 people used to live in St. Bernard, but only a few hundred parish workers, National Guard troops and rescue workers inhabit the place now, where essentially every habitable house and much of its retail sector is in ruin. Wondering how parish officials were coping with the new flood, we drive toward the parish seat of Chalmette, past a dozen miles of wrecked and abandoned neighborhoods, malls and car dealerships, as far as the freeway would take us. But we get turned back at Parish Road, five miles from our destination, by a sprawling lake before us. At least three feet of water covers the road. Baitfish are splashing in the brackish tides and a garter snake has crawled up out of the water on to the freeway. St. Bernard has been cut off from the world yet again (and we later can't reach folks there by phone). Several others have arrived at this impromptu dead-end: a Entergy power worker hoping to help restart a water plant; a fireman hoping to visit his flood-stricken home, which -- until Rita, at least -- had been drying out. Person after person after person utter the same thing: "Unbelievable." * * * The worst of Rita's winds and squalls actually blew through the French Quarter in the darkening skies of late afternoon on Friday. Sheeting rain and blustery winds are no stranger to this town, of course. On any given afternoon in August or September, you can get downpours that look just like this one. But Rita had everybody spooked. Well, not quite everyone. A man in Army fatigues, but clearly not regulation Army, walked down Bourbon Street with his beggar's cup raised -- a lone panhandler in a city down to about 500 diehard regular residents and not one of them on Bourbon Street. (A cop later tells us the man had no idea another hurricane was coming.) His only company was an Oregon National Guardsman trying to take a picture of himself in front of the lighted sign of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club with his cellphone while keeping the phone dry. The upper Quarter, near Canal Street, seems to be regaining power. Mr. Flynt's establishment wasn't back in business but there were persistent rumors that Deja-Vue, another Bourbon Street fixture offering similar entertainment, would be opening in the late evening. Opinions at Johnny White's, an implacably run-down bar on lower Bourbon with a sign declaring itself "Always Open," varied as to the benefit of this. "If it opens, I'm going for the air conditioning," one drinker declared from his bar stool. But another, wearing a black NYPD T-shirt, said he'd heard that the girls dancing at Deja-Vue weren't entirely as advertised -- some might not even be girls. This drew a number of raucous comments, none of them printable here. Most of the talk, though, was of Rita dancing out in the Gulf and, at this time, still a Category 4 hurricane. An elderly couple who had just returned to the Quarter after a few days on the outside were convinced the storm would make a radical right turn in the Gulf during the night and sneak up on New Orleans while they slept. One fatalist even thought this might be a good idea. "Why wreck another part of the coast?" he said from his bar stool at Johnny White's. "Just bring it on here." This was definitely a minority opinion and the speaker was hooted down. He rose from his bar stool, picked through a box of MREs that had been left behind, and walked out into the rain. * * * It will never be easier than it is now to park in downtown New Orleans or the narrow streets of the Quarter because you can pretty much park anywhere you please: on the sidewalk, in front of a fire hydrant, in an alley, against traffic. And if you want to drive the wrong way down a one-way street, and plenty people seem to want to, nobody's going to stop you or give you a ticket unless you drive recklessly or you give the cop or Guardsman at the corner the internationally recognized obscene sign. It's a bit jarring to get used to these Katrina Rules or lack of them. There's something thrilling and unsettling about the placid anarchy of this stricken city. There are so many empty, forlorn neighborhoods here that the places where people cluster attract other people like bees. Even the Quarter, though it may hold 100 people, is a spooky walk on a darkening, rain-scudded afternoon. Hardly anyone's about but you can tell where people are living by listening for the thrum of gas generators in brick-fenced courtyards. The people you do see are warily friendly. Which is why, with Rita looming, Molly's on Decatur Street, loomed as a welcoming sight. The bar got up and running just a few days after Katrina passed, though it enforces a 6 p.m. curfew (which is, after all, the official police curfew but is blithely ignored by Johnny White's and pretty much the police as well.) There were 20 or 30 people milling on the sidewalk and inside, including Kate, the winsome bar girl who, in the tradition of the Big Easy, calls everybody "baby." The beer was cold and cost $3. Inside, we ran into Harry Anderson, the star of the 1980s sitcom "Night Court," who makes New Orleans his fulltime home and also owns a night club here. He had stayed through Katrina until the constabulary retreated from the looters but returned, with Rita bearing down, after a hiatus in Austin, Texas. He'd wearied of his price-gouging landlady charging him a fortune for a tiny Texas apartment and hectoring him with statements like "you refugees have to understand…" And, anyway, he missed his home and favorite city and thought this was as good a time to return as any. Mr. Anderson said he wasn't worried much about Rita but he was worried about New Orleans and how it would be rebuilt. He came here in the first place because he loved the city's funky feel, its historic architecture and its gumbo ethnicity. But with such big chunks now in ruin and possibly up for grabs, he worried it could be rebuilt as a kind of Disneyland. His worries were interrupted by the glad arrival of a huge pot of jambalaya, donated by a Molly's regular with a jambalaya-cooking relative in a nearby Cajun parish. Mr. Anderson helped himself to a plateful, tucked into his jambalaya, sipped his beer and got back to his worries. "Montreal, then, might look pretty good," he said.

The streets were deserted before Rita blew in.        

    Photo by Ken Wells © 2005