Demolition of Homes Begins in Sections of New Orleans

By Adam Nossiter
The New York Times

Tuesday 07 March 2006

New Orleans - Shortly after noon Monday, in the ruined moonscape of the Lower Ninth Ward, a track excavator's giant teeth bit into the top of a broken, displaced house, and the process of clearing this city's most devastated area finally began.

It was a moment of fearful anticipation for New Orleans, the first demolitions of flooded homes in the six months since Hurricane Katrina. Three were razed on Monday after a process that was long delayed by legal challenges, physical obstacles and the difficulty in getting money to search for bodies that almost certainly still molder in some of the houses.

Army Corps of Engineers officials estimate some 12.5 million cubic yards of debris from demolished houses will have been removed in Orleans Parish alone when the process ends, roughly a year from now, representing perhaps as many as 25,000 houses. About 120 houses, nearly all in the Lower Ninth Ward, are set for immediate demolition.

Monday's work was a tiny step - barely 200 cubic feet of house. Yet when the crunching and biting began - mouthfuls of rafters deliberately chewed up, walls methodically crushed down - it was like a wrenching echo of the now-distant storm. The owner of the house, Herbert Warren Jr., a retired longshoreman, tried to remain stoic as the home he had lived in for 44 years was carted away.

"What can you say?" Mr. Warren said. "So many others got the same thing happen to them. It ain't just me."

His house - simple, white, wood-framed and one-story, where eight children grew - had floated off its foundation past a solid brick church and across a grassy expanse before coming to rest in an undulating heap in the middle of Winthrop Street. "She got up and walked," he said. "I really don't know how it got there, but it got there."

Mr. Warren had not bothered to retrieve anything from 2330 Roffignac Street, now at roughly the same address over on nearby Winthrop.

"It was so messed up," he said. "I just ducked my head in and ducked back out." All about him were the neighborhood's ruins: a muddy high-heeled shoe, a child's Barbie doll resting uneasily on a wooden beam, a lawn chair in a tree.

"It was so muddy, I didn't want anything in there," Mr. Warren said.

He drove off calmly in his green pickup truck even as the work continued, the machine's steel teeth stripping away his living room and exposing a family portrait on the wall.

No one was there to protest this first demolition among the thousands anticipated, in what has become the emblematic core of the city's destruction. The force of Hurricane Katrina is as vivid on these mud-drenched blocks of pancake houses as it was six months ago, seeming to dwarf the efforts of government contractors.

Before the work began, cadaver dogs sniffed around the edges of the house, the result of a renewed, federally financed search for bodies that coincided with the demolitions. Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state emergency medical director, would not speculate on how many bodies were likely to be found, but said some of the 400 to 500 people still missing were probably dead.

During random checks on Sunday, dogs found the body of a middle-aged man in an attic in Lakeview. Demolition teams have started in on that neighborhood as well, and the first house was taken down in Lakeview even as workers were setting up the equipment in the Ninth Ward. A third house came down Monday in the Gentilly neighborhood.

No remains were found around Mr. Warren's house Monday, but a body was found in the Ninth Ward two weeks ago, Dr. Cataldie said. The dogs are trained to stick their ears in the air and wag their tails when they smell a body.

Because of the sensitivity of the operation - a lawsuit was filed against the City of New Orleans over its failure to notify residents of the demolitions, and there were protests when contractors first began clearing streets in January - it took all morning to set up. And there were further delays when, for hours, no one from City Hall was there to give the final say-so, to the bafflement of corps officials.

A half-dozen black-uniformed Federal Protective Service officers were on hand to keep order, though the only hint of dissent was from three sleepy-looking youths from a community organization called Common Ground, who said they were there merely to observe.

The few neighborhood people who drifted through Monday morning had no objections.

"I have nothing against it, because of the condition of it," said Harold Broussard Sr., now living in a government trailer on the West Bank. "What else can you do?" Mr. Broussard said he would be willing to return to the Ninth Ward someday.

The federal officers on the site had joined a contingent from a private security service, Blackwater. The site had to be checked for asbestos, and the big equipment - the track excavator and a giant dump truck - then maneuvered through the narrow remains of streets.

The demolition in Lakeview was over in 45 minutes. Not so the one in the Lower Ninth Ward. The workers here took as much care as they could to peel away walls slowly, in order to look inside the house. It had been too dangerous to enter.

In late August, Mr. Warren carefully boarded it up against the storm, shutting the place up tight. The boards were still in place, on a house whose final resting place was 100 yards or more from where he had had it built.

The wind was a preoccupation on the morning he left for Houston ahead of the storm, but he was not thinking about the nearby levee on the Industrial Canal giving way.

"I sure didn't," Mr. Warren said. "And it did. And I was glad I was in Texas."