City permit director helps others begin the rebuilding process, even as he works to fix his own damaged home.
Automating the city of New Orleans’ permit department after Hurricane Katrina and setting up a new damage-assessment team was full-time work for Michael Centineo, the city’s director of safety and permits, but he had another full-time job waiting for him when he got off work: rebuilding his home.
Centineo lives in the Lakeview section of the city, two blocks from the 17th Street Canal levee, which broke, inundating the neighborhood with 8 feet of muddy water and rendering his house unlivable
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Furniture on the first floor of the building had drifted from the dining room to the living room. The floors were ruined. The family’s Mercedes — used only rarely for long road trips — was totaled. When the water finally drained, it revealed yards littered with cars, boats and uprooted trees. The concrete roads are anything but flat after water lifted some sections and undermined others, so they no longer fit together to make a smooth surface.
The front doors of houses were sprayed with orange paint identifying the damage-assessment team that inspected the house, the date of the inspection and the number of bodies found inside, a grim reminder of the toll of the storm.
Ten months later, Centineo’s house sported a spanking new front door, one of the few in his neighborhood. In fact, his was the only occupied home within two blocks. A firefighter who owns the house next door and the owners of two homes over Centineo’s back fence have not returned, at least not while Centineo was around. Their yards were still littered, felled trees leaned against them and windows were smashed. “The older people have given up,” he says. “They’re all gone.”
The white walls of Centineo’s home were still marked with a dingy horizontal line — the high-water mark. But his yard was cleaned up, the mud removed and a well- tended vegetable garden thriving. His wife even planted two ornamental trees just off his home’s new deck.
| Michael Centineo, director of safety and permits, New Orleans, leans on the rebuilt 17th Street levee, which gave way during Hurricane Katrina, flooding Centineo’s Lakeview neighborhood. |
After work and on weekends during the months after the storm, Centineo returned to the neighborhood, one of the very few who did, to gut the first floor of his house. He pulled out the wallboard and wiring, stripping the rooms to naked studs, then began the arduous task of finding contractors who could do repair work. With all the damaged buildings to repair in the area, construction workers and tradesmen have more work than they can handle, so they pick and choose the jobs they want.
One afternoon earlier this summer, he hustled home at lunchtime to see carpenters installing crown moldings along the ceiling of the first floor. The living room was stacked with hardwood flooring that would finish off the major repairs and make way for the new furniture.
Until last February, Centineo and his wife called a stateroom on the Carnival cruise ship Sensation home. There, docked in the port, they lived on a corridor packed with other residents driven from their homes with children who gathered in the passageways bored and looking for something to do.
In February, he upgraded to a trailer dropped in his front yard by FEMA. By summer, he was preparing meals and showering in it, but the upstairs of the house was in good enough shape so he could sleep there.
The neighborhood still lacked wired phones, but he used his cell phone, and his laptop had a broadband wireless card hooked into a Verizon BroadbandAccess service.
During his personal ordeal, Centineo saw his city department manage the largest workload it had ever seen and cleared 130,000 damage assessments in six weeks. “People forget that everybody working on rebuilding the city are working on rebuilding their own lives,” he says.
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| In June, a damaged boat still littered Centineo’s neighborhood. |
