/ Katrina Recovery

Capitalism stirs in Big Easy as contractors allowed in

12:29 AM EDT on Tuesday, September 13, 2005

By PETE SLOVER / The Dallas Morning News

NEW ORLEANS — It could have been any day for a crew of roofers working in New Orleans. Then came a convoy of FEMA vans and Army Humvees that swarmed in to remove a corpse that had laid out for two weeks on a porch bench across the street.

The hammers didn't miss a beat.

Such is the surreal post-Katrina juxtaposition of death and irrepressible economic life: Contractors and business owners are returning in growing numbers to clean up and demonstrate persistent free-market survival instincts.

Monday was the first day that business operators and contractors were officially allowed back into New Orleans. They jammed the phone lines for access permits and clogged the highway into the city.

"We're just waiting, doing some patching, until we can get into downtown and do some real work," the roofing foreman, Don Baldwin, shouted from a second-story perch.

Meanwhile, hazmat-suited pallbearers carried away a bagged body.

His name was Alcede Jackson, and he was 83. His makeshift tombstone was a glow-in-the-dark green poster board tacked over his resting place on the porch.

Someone scribbled Mr. Jackson's name, date of death – Aug. 31 – and a verse from the Book of John.

"Rest in peace in the loving arms of Jesus," it read.

A piece of torn cardboard left at the foot of Mr. Jackson's bench had his Social Security, driver's license and telephone numbers, and his address, 4734 Laurel St.

The people who took Mr. Jackson away left behind a bouquet of flowers and a baby-blue blanket that had covered him. His shotgun-style house, in the Uptown section, remained high and dry.

Down the levee toward the fabled French Quarter, a pair of security alarm contractors embarked on an exploratory mission to their headquarters. They were the first employees to do so since a sales manager used a boat to haul their business computers out a second-story window – lifesaving heroism in the business arena. The move allowed the firm, Pratt Landry Associates, to survive.

"We're visiting clients, letting them know we're still up and operational," said Garrett Richards, who was displaced from his home in nearby Harahan.

He and colleague Byron Francis Jr. have been flying the company flag to clients, including hospitals, large downtown hotels and government offices.

"Until they get the electricity, there's not much we can do," said Mr. Francis, though limited components can be inspected and repaired without juice.

One by one, clients are getting some form of electricity and need to have their fire and security systems inspected and repaired.

The two spoke in the lobby of one of the few hotels in the area that has remained open. It's a working laboratory of business recovery methods. The Best Western Park St. Charles has juggled air conditioning, generators, water pressure and cleaning capability since Aug. 29.

Maintenance supervisor Yancy Brown is the field general, relating with some relish how he has nursed services along, draining water heaters to flush toilets, rationing cool air and shifting power around the hostelry's internal grid.

"The major hump was finding ways to turn on the light switch," he said.

Now, the elevators are working, the lobby and some floors are cool, toilets are flushable without hauled water in the lowest three floors – a relative oasis.

The recovery area is a zone with its own protocols, which the business types have picked up from the first wave of rescue and recovery workers. Two of them: There are no one-way streets. And always, always have hand sanitizer around.

The sheer filth of a swamped city without potable water has presented real challenges to hotel workers: They must move air and maintain sanitation in a building with sealed windows, limited toilets and no-guaranteed-safe showers, and which is packed with recovery workers and others who have tromped through the most fetid muck imaginable.

Mr. Brown said he was driven to work nonstop by his loyalty to job, city and colleagues. He said that attitude is indigenous and will ultimately spell an economic comeback.

"Most New Orleaneans are loyal – until they get put in an insane situation," he said.

Insane situation. That described what Rocky Carriles found at his Ninth Ward furniture shop: a storefront cracked open like an egg, with a scrambled pile of broken, upended and worthless furniture scraps. It's in one of the city's most economically depressed and worst-flooded areas, one where rebuilding is not a given.

Yet, Mr. Carriles said, he'll open up as soon as authorities let him, without power if needed, to sell replacement furniture to the displaced, mostly poor clientele.

He's been looted before since opening Imperial Furniture in 1973, and he always reopened. The money's just too good, he said.

Next door, he has a loan agency, which he said will probably eat more than $800,000 in furniture loans to flooded residents who paid higher finance charges because they were credit risks.

"I make the money on the furniture, and then I get the interest, too," he said in a thick Cajun patois. "My daddy always said, you can be happy or you can be sad. Sad ain't no good. What does that get you?"

E-mail pslover@dallasnews.com