Not snow nor rain, but Katrina tests postal deliveries

04:14 PM CST on Monday, March 13, 2006

Michelle Roberts / Associated Press

The doorbell starts ringing as soon as postman Randy Ramie gets home from a long day of walking house to house delivering mail.

"Hey, what's going on, man?" a neighbor asks kindly, but what he really wants to know is: Hey, where's our mail, man?

A lot of people in New Orleans are asking the same question. Six months after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, mail delivery is limited and slow, even in the least-damaged New Orleans neighborhoods.

It is a source of frustration for people waiting for insurance checks, and a reminder of how badly the city's basic infrastructure was damaged by the Aug. 29 storm.

Only first-class letters -- no magazines or bulk mail -- are delivered to working addresses in much of the New Orleans area, and they can take days, sometimes weeks, longer than normal to arrive.

Letters to addresses uninhabitable since the storm are forwarded to new addresses, sent to general pickup points or left unclaimed.

The route Ramie walks near City Park, in New Orleans' Mid-City section, is full of houses mostly unscathed by the storm, but stacks of pipes and discarded wood are piled on street corners in places. Some homes still bear the spray-painted orange "X" that indicates a house was searched for people, dead or alive, after the storm.

Residents who have returned often greet Ramie, dark blue mail bag slung over his shoulder, as he makes his appointed rounds in the neighborhood of brightly painted homes and tree-lined streets.

Carmen Altamirano, 80, said she has seen mail delivery improve, but she is glad her Social Security checks are directly deposited with her bank.

"I don't blame them. It was a mess. Everything was a mess," she said, sweeping her stoop several steps above where the water reached its highest point.

Katrina flooded the basement at the U.S. Postal Service's main sorting center in New Orleans and knocked out its electrical systems. The place remains closed. As a result, all New Orleans mail has to be sorted at an overworked center in Baton Rouge, 80 miles away.

Delores Killette, a USPS vice president, said the post office hopes to have full service restored to New Orleans by the end of the summer. She said one major problem is that many postal employees were driven from their homes by Katrina.

Right after the storm, mail bound for New Orleans began piling up in Houston and Baton Rouge. In October, trailers labeled by ZIP code were set up in New Orleans so that residents could pick up their mail as they returned to the city.

Many residents concede that slow and inconsistent mail delivery is a relatively small problem in a city where roofs are still covered in blue tarps and homes were washed off foundations. But it still rankles many people.

Delayed mail often results in interminable waits on hold to talk about missed letters or bills from the government, banks or other institutions and late fees from credit companies and utilities. Many companies offered grace periods to customers during the first few months after the storm, but they are less willing to do that now.

"Sometimes, I can laugh, and sometimes I can understand why people go postal," said Judy Barnes-Cochran, a psychotherapist who has been waiting two months for paperwork sent by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Ramie said it is amazing how grateful New Orleanians are to get mail these days.

"When I first got on the route, they literally applauded," said Ramie, who was driven out of the city by the storm and did not resume making his rounds until December. His home is still uninhabitable.

He eventually swapped routes with another carrier so he could deliver to his own neighborhood, too. It was the best way to quiet the questions.

"I never knew how much you could miss the mail. It's something you become accustomed to," he said. "I found myself looking for mail -- and I deliver the mail."

(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)