Life Among the Ruins

By Cathy Booth Thomas, Tim Padgett

The abandoned houses are marked with crude red Xs, their windows spray-painted with the number of bodies found inside. The French Quarter and the Garden District lie dark and deserted, a wasteland of downed power lines, cars with flat tires, massive Spanish oaks toppled at their roots and scattered reminders of the city's former self--a cookbook open to a recipe for ham croquettes, strings of Mardi Gras beads. What little life remains in New Orleans is largely devoted to counting the dead, a task so vast and grim that even the city's coroner, Frank Minyard, doesn't hazard a guess at what lies beneath the receding waters. "We don't really know what's in the houses," Minyard says, sitting on an overturned fishing skiff in the shadow of the Superdome. He stares down an empty street as two ambulances creep through brackish waters toward Tulane University Hospital and its morgue. Near him, five men in white haz-mat uniforms wait on dry ground to collect bodies. Minyard extends his hand by way of introduction to his city. "Tough place," he says.

For those too loyal, stubborn or unlucky to find a way out of New Orleans in the days after Katrina hit, nothing could prepare them for what the hurricane left behind. With the city all but emptied, it is no longer the party town of popular imagination. Nor is it the teeming mess of violent desperation it became in the storm's wake. Much of it remains under water, stewing in a putrid mix of chemicals and corpses. But in parts of the city, the floodwaters receded sufficiently last week to reveal something strange and new: part frontier outpost, part fetid deathscape, where the drowned and the saved coexisted for days because neither had any other place to go.

The smell of bloated bodies and swamp rot permeates the air, especially in the suburbs to the north and east, as sewage laps at the doors and windows of homes, hospitals and amusement parks. In the hardest-hit area, St. Bernard Parish, to the east, searchers navigated the floodwaters looking for submerged bodies, often coming up empty, then finding horror: of the 67 known dead there, 27 perished in one nursing home. In one hospital, a single doctor was found caring for 57 patients in 10 ft. of water. Eleven patients had died. "You don't need dogs or detection devices to find bodies," says sheriff Jack Stephens. "You can smell it."

It's all the more remarkable, then, that rescuers believe the death toll may be much lower than initially feared. In the early days of the crisis, Mayor Ray Nagin predicted that New Orleans and its environs would see 10,000 dead. But by Saturday fewer than 200 bodies had been found, leading retired U.S.M.C. Colonel Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland-security director, to declare that "the numbers so far are relatively minor compared to the dire predictions" of Nagin and others. Ebbert says it will take authorities two weeks to make a reliable estimate of the casualties, and the precise figure will take longer. Minyard says identifying each and every corpse may take as long as five years.

The survivors face uncertainty of their own. The city is too quiet for some, who fear their neighbors won't return. Told that it may take the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 80 days to "unwater" the rest of the city and as much as six months to clean it, most residents had no choice but to leave and take jobs elsewhere. But across the condemned city last week, there were moments of fleeting defiance, staged by those unable to imagine life outside the Big Easy--or perhaps unwilling to ponder the possibility that it might not come back. On Bourbon Street in the French Quarter last week, slightly sauced survivors sat on the bar stools of Johnny White's, a tavern they say has never closed in its 14-year history. "Why are they making us leave? Did they evacuate Iraq?" asks Greg Rogers, known as Squirrel. "Why didn't they just give us a job? Say, 'Here, dude, if you're going to stay, get busy'?"

The first of the dead--26 bodies--arrived six days after Hurricane Katrina, in refrigerated trucks at a temporary mortuary set up in the tiny town of St. Gabriel, to the northwest of New Orleans. Fearing the worst, Nagin ordered 25,000 body bags. By then, most of the 1.3 million who lived in New Orleans and its suburbs had been bused or airlifted out. But a week after the levees broke, at least 10,000 were believed to be still in the city--some determined to stick it out, others inaccessible to rescuers. Health officials tested and found E. coli bacteria in the floodwaters, raising fears that diarrhea could spread. Fires set off by broken gas mains raged untamed, and hooligans controlled some zones. City officials--stung by criticism of their failures to clear the city before the storm--took no chances this time. On Tuesday, Nagin instructed police and the National Guard "to compel the evacuation of all persons" from the city.

By Wednesday, National Guardsmen went door to door, banging on mansions on historic St. Charles Street and shotgun shacks in Uptown, rousting the holdouts. TIME went along with a Louisiana narcotics officer as he led a team of Texas National Guardsmen and Michigan cops on a search-and-evacuate mission through postbellum homes gussied up by modern-day gentrifiers. "Police! Police! Open up," one officer yelled as another stood nervously in the street, holding his gun at the ready. They busted in the door on several clapboard homes after smelling something foul, fearing that bodies were inside. "One lady told us to go to hell," says Staff Sergeant Vincent Rodney of the Oklahoma National Guard, "but they're all gonna have to leave."

For some, the arrival of the cavalry did little to ease anxieties. Wealthy evacuees hired private-security companies, their agents bristling with snub-nosed automatic weapons and polarized sunglasses, to guard the perimeters of their flooded neighborhoods. An officer of one such firm, Black Ice Security Services, told TIME's Nathan Thornburgh that his company made a run into New Orleans to pick up sacred texts from a Hindu temple and that he promptly received e-mails from India thanking him for the rescue. TIME's Kim Humphreys accompanied a team of customs agents from Tampa Bay, Fla., as well as Chicago, Dallas and San Diego on a mission to safeguard the 27-story Hibernia National Bank headquarters on Union Street. Wearing heavy camouflage uniforms, black vests and helmets, they carried Steyr-AUG rifles equipped with flashlights that allowed them to work in the dark. In stifling heat, the teams checked each room for looters and squatters, using a series of rhythmic chants to inform other team members of what they had found, as well as to indicate when backup was required. No man entered a room alone. "We expect [the looters] are gone by now," says special agent Marcus Custer of the San Diego division, "but we're trying to be cautious."

Having survived the storm and the chaos that followed, those who remained in the city absorbed the evacuation orders with a mix of resignation and rage. Tom Drummond, a bassist with the alternative rock band Better Than Ezra, performed on the CBS Early Show two days before Katrina hit. Although his home in the Garden District survived, his wife's new clothing store was looted in the hurricane's aftermath, only days after her fall collection had arrived. Drummond plans to tour while his wife stays with her family in McComb, Miss. "Got to go where I can be of some use and work," he says. His radiologist father-in-law James Boothe, who drove in from out of state to help them pack, seems dazed to be in a deserted city with armed military making noisy house calls in the distance. "You don't think of a city of 1 million evacuating permanently," he says, shaking his head.

Not all the survivors are going quietly. "Why are they doing this?" demands Mario Holly, 32, who refused to leave behind his pit bull Irene until Guardsmen relented and took both aboard their huge halftrack truck. "I had enough food. I had enough water. I'm straight [meaning O.K.]," he says, dragging along a plastic bag of belongings. Robert Sanford, 62 and retired, sits on his porch in Uptown, drinking a soda and vowing to defy the evacuation order. "I don't need much," he says. "I got 12 gallons of water in the house. I got those Army meals they handing out--pork and beans, Cajun beans. I got Chef Boyardee too. This city will be better when they rebuild because they'll be rid of a lot of them knuckleheads that was causing the problems here before."

But rebuilding New Orleans is still a distant ambition at a time when merely cleaning it up remains a Sisyphean endeavor. The Guardsmen, flying above the city in their Black Hawks to rescue survivors, have seen what residents stranded without electricity could not--the utter devastation out east in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, where the Gulf of Mexico has played no favorites, inundating millionaire McMansions and modest homes alike. In the middle of an intersection sits an abandoned wheelchair, water lapping at the handlebars, its occupant carried who knows where by the floodwaters. Cars line another roadway, their doors open as if the drivers thought they could outrun the 20-ft. surges.

In a heavily guarded, nondescript warehouse in St. Gabriel, a team of 150 medical examiners, coroners, forensic pathologists, dentists, radiologists and funeral directors is running an around-the-clock operation to prepare bodies for identification. They are men of few words, like Terry Edwards, 47, a veteran funeral director from Eastland, Texas. Although he has volunteered for 11 disasters' aftermaths, including cleaning up the Columbia shuttle crash, he says New Orleans is the worst. In teams of two, Edwards and his comrades open each body bag, inventory the contents, decontaminate for chemical waste, then assess the victim for gunshot wounds or a shattered skull that might indicate murder, not accidental death. Each victim is photographed, with attention given to such identifiers as long-healed scars, birthmarks and tattoos. Fingerprinting and dental imaging follow before the forensic specialists collect samples of DNA, preferably a sliver of bone. Then the dead are returned to their body bags to be stored in a refrigerated receiving vault until the Federal Emergency Management Agency can get the remains back to Louisiana for the formal process of identification.

Standing in the floodwaters last week, his cowboy boots muddied, New Orleans' coroner was philosophical about the future, talking death one minute, jazz and grilled oysters the next. Minyard claims that his re-election, eight times in a row, is attributable mostly to his trumpet playing at Preservation Hall, where they call him Dr. Jazz. "I'm native born in New Orleans, live in the French Quarter, been here all my life," he says. "We've recovered from the Civil War, from yellow-fever epidemics, from hurricanes--the hurricane of 1915, and the hurricane of 1947 that like to have wiped out the city. Then Betsy in 1965."

Katrina's floodwaters nearly swept him to his death, but he holds out hope in the midst of an awful job: "This will occupy me for probably five years, but I think New Orleans will rise up and be better than before. I can't wait to come back." Minyard pauses, thinking about his office--now under water, his papers ruined--and the lawsuits that will inevitably be filed. Then he smiles and says, "I've needed a new office for a long time. I'm going to con somebody into giving me one." New Orleans will need plenty more of that old, enterprising spirit if it is to recover all it has lost. --With reporting by Steve Barnes/St. Gabriel and Kim Humphreys/St. Bernard Parish

With reporting by Steve Barnes/St. Gabriel, Kim Humphreys/St. Bernard Parish