Most disasters come and go in a neat arc of calamity, followed by anger at the slow response, then cleanup. But Katrina cut a historic deadly swath across the South, and rebuilding can't start until the cleanup is done. In much of New Orleans, the leafy coverage of live oaks is gone. Lingering in the sky instead is a fine grit that tastes metallic to the tongue. Everyone's life story is out on the curb, soaked and stinky—furniture and clothing, dishes and rotting drywall, even formerly fabulous antiques. Dump trucks come periodically to remove the piles, taking some to a former city park, now a heap of rubbish several football fields long, towering above the head. The smell is sweet, horrific.

They're still finding bodies down here 13 weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit—30 in the past month—raising the death toll to 1,053 in Louisiana. The looters are still working too, brazenly taking their haul in daylight. But at night darkness falls, and it's quiet. "It's spooky out there. There's no life," says cardiologist Pat Breaux, who lives near Pontchartrain with only a handful of neighbors. The destruction, says Breaux, head of the Orleans Parish Medical Society, depresses people. Suicides are up citywide, he says, although no one has a handle on the exact number. Murders, on the other hand, have dropped to almost none.

Mayor Ray Nagin opened up most of the city to returning evacuees last week, but only an estimated 60,000 people are spending the night in New Orleans these days, compared with about half a million before Katrina. The city that care forgot is in the throes of an identity crisis, torn between its shady, bead-tossing past and the sanitized Disneyland future some envision. With no clear direction on whether to raze or rebuild, the 300,000 residents who fled the region are frustrated—and increasingly indecisive—about returning. If they do come back, will there be jobs good enough to stay for? If they do rebuild, will the levees be strong enough to protect them? They can't shake the feeling that somehow they did something wrong just by living where they did. And now the money and the sympathy are drying up. People just don't understand. You have to see it, smell it, put on a white mask and a pair of plastic gloves, and walk into a world where nothing is salvageable, not even the mildewed wedding pictures.

Beyond an island of light downtown, most of Orleans Parish is still in the dark. Of the city's eight hospitals pre-Katrina, only two are open to serve a population that swells to 150,000 during the day. The public school system—destroyed by back-to-back hurricanes—is in limbo while the state considers a takeover and charter-school advocates vie for abandoned facilities. One lone public school for 500 students is set to open this week. The once flashy city has become drab. The grass and trees, marinated for weeks in saltwater, are a dreary gray-brown. Parking lots look like drought-starved lake beds, with cracks in the mud. Within a few hours, anyone working outside is covered in a fine layer of grit. The trees that gave New Orleans such character—the centuries-old live oaks with their grand canopies and graceful lines—are toppled, exposing huge root balls 10 ft. or more in diameter. It's all the more surreal because the Garden District, which survived the flood, is lush and beautiful once again.

[...]

Repair and cleanup are linked, to some degree, with planning what New Orleans should look like five years from now. The Louisiana Recovery Authority, appointed by Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, met in November with hundreds of New Orleans residents to develop priorities, brainstorm ideas with planners and businessmen, and present a unified voice. The Authority vice chair Walter Isaacson petitioned Congress last week for help in establishing a "recovery corporation" as a vehicle for the city's rebuilding neighborhoods. Donald Powell, the new hurricane czar appointed by George W. Bush, said his job is to listen and gather facts to help the President "understand the vision of the local people." The one-time banker, who admits he has a little boning up to do on levees, says he will spend the next few weeks shuttling in and out of the hurricane area, developing a blueprint for federal reconstruction help. Washington approved $62.3 billion to help hurricane victims after the trifecta of Katrina, Rita and Wilma. With an additional $8.6 billion in tax breaks and programs for the region, the total tab of nearly $71 billion is far beyond the $43.9 billion dedicated to emergency spending after the 9/11 attacks. But congressional Republicans are picking up strong signals from the White House that the Administration is not going to move forward with any grand coastal plan. "There's not a sense of urgency anymore," says a senior House Republican aide.

Louisiana's recent request for $250 billion, perilously short on details, got a contemptuous reception from Republicans ("Nonstarter," said a Senate aide), editorial writers (who dubbed it the "Louisiana looters' bill") and even a few Democrats ("They're thieves," said a House aide involved with budgeting for Louisiana relief). Michael Olivier, Louisiana's secretary of economic development, points out that Katrina devastated a far larger area—23,000 acres—than 9/11 did and destroyed nearly 284,000 homes. With 71,000 businesses shut down by Katrina and a further 10,000 by Rita, and with local governments short on tax revenues, he says, "We're looking at potentially the largest business insolvency since the Depression, and a government insolvency." FEMA continues to be a four-letter word in Louisiana. In Kenner and Metairie, suburbs west of New Orleans, blue tarps provided by FEMA dot the roofs of homes damaged by wind, but there are few in the worst-affected neighborhoods like Lakeview, the Ninth Ward and East New Orleans—a policy defended by the agency. "What's to protect?" asks FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews in Washington. [Emphasis added -- Ed]

The good news is that FEMA's decided not to throw Katrina victims into the street during the holiday season. Damn nice of them.

[via firedoglake]

BTW, with Bush's FEMA planning to act in such an uncharitable and decidely unchristian manner, where's the outrage from those who protest the phoney "liberal war on Christmas"? Christians haboring a persecution complex ought to take a look at what real religious persecution is.

Update: Via Josh Marshall, FEMA lists the Katrina response as one of its top accomplishments in fiscal year 2005.