News Article

Recently, Jonathan Groner worked on the Womble Carlyle New Orleans Pro Bono Project. Mr. Groner is an attorney who now works as a Senior Communications Counsel for the Firm.

The city that I visited for a week in July is still struggling to get back on its feet. More than a year after Katrina, New Orleans remains a long way from normality. Dozens of Womble Carlyle lawyers -- and several lawyers from the General Counsel's Office of our good client Wachovia -- lived there and worked with Southeast Louisiana Legal Services to help some of its low-income homeowners take a few steps toward normal by assisting them to clear title to their homes. With clear title in hand, these pro bono clients will be eligible for insurance and other funds needed to repair or rebuild their homes but otherwise unavailable to them. These lawyers continue their much-needed work from our offices this fall.

The city's plight wasn't at all obvious from my uneventful 30-minute drive from the airport to our hotel in the so-called "Warehouse District," near the Mississippi River. That's partly because the funky, artsy warehouse area did not flood during the hurricane. As any New Orleans resident will tell you, about the only thing that went right during Katrina was that the Mississippi levees held just fine. That's why the famous French Quarter, much of the charming Uptown neighborhood, and some other upscale areas seem calm, placid, and livable these days: they are closer to the river than to the canals or to Lake Pontchartrain. Although 80 percent of the city was under water at the height of the flooding, many of the city's best-known tourist sites suffered little or not damage.

The central business district -- in which the Womble Carlyle lawyers and staff spent most of their time this summer -- was fairly hard hit. A major shopping mall closed and there's no date for its reopening, and several high-rise office buildings still have gaping holes where blown-out windows used to be. To a large degree, however, most everything else downtown seems basically normal: Cars fill the streets, people go to work. We Womble Carlyle volunteers worked in a quaint old building on Carondelet Street that houses the Stone Pigman law firm.

A friend of mine was fortunate enough to be out of town with her family when the hurricane hit. She didn't return to New Orleans to see her Uptown home till a few months later. She was relieved to find that the house was still standing and had not flooded but needed about $40,000 worth of roof repairs because of wind and rain. She counted herself one of the lucky ones. It took six months for her to find a contractor and get him to do the work, but she and her family are back.

Another friend of mine told me something I will never forget: If you look at a map of New Orleans from a century ago, the crescent-shaped area that was populated then was pretty much identical with the area that did not flood after Katrina. The city's early settlers lived on high ground. Then, as the city expanded, people began to fill in the swamps and the lower-lying areas -- the ones that flooded.

One of the lower-lying areas is Lakeview, a predominately white-collar neighborhood along the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain about ten minutes from downtown. Lakeview bore the brunt of the catastrophic failure of the 17th Street Canal, and thousands of homes were inundated by six to 14 feet of water within hours. A Stone Pigman attorney who wanted to show us Womble Carlyle volunteers what really happened after Katrina included this area, his once and future neighborhood, in our tour of areas devastated by the storm.

Most of Lakeview was built on swamp land after World War II. The homes are a mixture of styles -- colonials, split levels, large ranch houses. The canal looms just across the way, in many people's back yard. We walked the hundred yards or so to see the canal. There, mosquitoes buzz and the water is calm. The levee that broke and sent lake water bulldozing into the neighborhood is a mile away. Along the canal's placid waters, there is no hint of what happened nearly a year ago.

Block after block of empty, gutted houses tell the story: Where teenagers once played basketball in driveways and families gathered for barbecues, rebuilding and mold remediation have begun for some residents, and other residents have pledged to rebuild and return. While surveys suggest that between 75 and 90 percent of Lakeview residents intend to come back, for now, weeds grow wild in many front yards, carports and driveways are empty, and the neighborhood feels like a ghost town.

The first floor of the house we visited was completely destroyed. Reduced to sheetrock, insulation, and open wiring, the house is far from livable. A chandelier hangs incongruously from the foyer ceiling. The second floor was not touched by the storm surge, and the walls, carpeting, and bathroom fixtures remain, but no one lives there and no one will for some time.

Lakeview residents were fortunate in some ways: Most of them have the resources, either through savings or insurance, to rebuild. On our tour, however, I made the rough estimate that only about one of ten houses in Lakeview was inhabited nearly a year after Katrina. In a way, it was more shocking to me to encounter this bleak landscape than to see the totally devastated Lower Ninth Ward. Perhaps my repeated viewing of news photos of the Ninth had made that sight too commonplace for me, perhaps the human scale of people clawing back against emptiness made the storm's impact more immediate and understandable. In any case, Lakeview was where I saw how far away New Orleans still is from itself.