Tell Hell and Back: New Orleans' Rebirth in the Superdome

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 25, 2006 — -- Raindrops hit the roof of the truck, each like a stick on a snare drum, collecting on the windshield and flowing down to Girod Street.

They add to the ones that fell before, the water rising. Billy Zacharie sits in the driver's seat, parked near the Superdome loading dock. Golf carts and forklifts move furiously, ignoring the tan Dodge pickup, getting the building ready for Sept. 25, for the future. He's quiet, the air filled with soft gospel music from the stereo, the rhythmic thumps of the wipers and the second line staccato of the rain. He's quiet because he's remembering.

This is where his life changed, a year ago. To his left, that's where he finally parked the church van by the concrete posts, starting his family's odyssey at the Dome. Right over there, that's where he walked outside and wept, a strong man, a preacher, who just couldn't take any more pain. He couldn't bear to see his mama and daddy suffer another second, couldn't listen to another frantic call into the radio station. Now they make it day to day, one foot in the future, the other in the past.

Like the rest of their city, and the tens of thousands of ordinary people with them inside the Superdome during Katrina, they're taking stock of their lives, looking for signs that things can be like they were before. Maybe, someday, this building can mean something different to them. That's what the people working night and day on the Dome are hoping for.

"When people come in here and see what's been done in less than a year's time," says Doug Thornton, general manager of the building and the driving force behind its revival, "they are going to say, 'If the Superdome can be rebuilt after that tremendous destruction, my house can be rebuilt, my neighborhood can be rebuilt and my city can be rebuilt.' So much of this recovery is about confidence and belief. You've got to want it to happen. You've got to believe it. This is symbolism."

Zacharie wants to believe. The history of his family is linked forever with the stadium, intertwined, their collapse and rebirth mirroring its collapse and rebirth. His wife hasn't been closer than the nearby streets since an Army truck took her away. When she and Billy drive by now, they look at it, then they glance at each other, and say, "That didn't happen."

"If this was a different time, especially this time of the year, we'd be all for the Saints," he says, "but you have to put all that stuff on hold and get your emotions together, your life together, the city back together. They're using the Superdome as a landmark, if you will, a: 'We're prospering again; there's hope; we're being revived.'"

He sighs. "It will never be what it once was," he says.

Zacharie puts the truck into drive. He looks up at three shades of gray clouds, an anvil sitting above his city. There's another hurricane out there somewhere. "The sky is looking familiar," he says. "It's staying with me for the rest of my life."

He makes a U-turn, pointing toward his home in New Orleans East. He'll do a little more work on it tonight. It's getting there. At least he's back. His family's scattered. So is his congregation. Everyone in New Orleans has a personal Superdome to rebuild. As hard hats rush in and out, Billy Zacharie heads off to his.

Billy Zacharie leaned over the steering wheel of his church van. It was about 2 p.m. that Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005. The sky was black. His brother and sister and niece looked out the windows, waiting nervously. His wife and 84-year-old mother prayed. His 82-year-old father moaned on a mattress in the back of the van.

Billy tried to figure out how to get them into the Dome. They'd been to the front and back two times. His father was too sick to stand in line with everyone else, and, if the military nurse was to be believed, too sick to come inside. That nurse, whose job it was to evaluate the "special needs people" being dropped off, had been the worst. She'd come to the back of the van, and coolly assessed the condition of Billy's father, James, a veteran who fought in World War II before she was born.

"He can't come in here," she told them.

"But he's special needs," Billy said. "You told us to come here. Please let us in."

"I'm sorry," she barked. "Get them away from here."

"What are we gonna do?" he pleaded. "The storm is coming."

Billy parked outside the loading dock, trying to figure out their next move as the rain began. They needed to be inside. Inside, that's where safety was. That's where Thornton and Dr. Kevin Stephens, head of the city's department of health, and the National Guard brass were working double-time to be ready before Katrina hit. They knew what it took to turn a football stadium into a shelter of last resort.

Thornton had been regional general manager of SMG, the facility management group that runs the Superdome, for years. He knew every nook and cranny. Usually, you'd find him in high-thread-count shirts, a tie that hung perfectly over the tip of his belt buckle, creased slacks that broke just so. A soft-spoken but insistent man with trademark bushy eyebrows, he had the respect of the state's power brokers. His wife had come with him to ride out the storm in his office.

Stephens and his staff had prepared the afternoon before in his City Hall office a few blocks away. On his dry erase board, they'd written, "WAR ROOM," and drawn a timeline, figuring out when to start triaging patients, when to start giving treatment. The storm, they calculated, was 446 miles away then. By Sunday, it was even closer.

A makeshift hospital had been set up. Supplies arrived by the semitrailer full, into the loading dock. There were lots of anonymous heroes. Catholic Charities had emptied their entire warehouse into the Dome. A man had driven from Texas, dropped off a trailer of oxygen, then hightailed it back.

The worrying had begun, too. Thornton told the National Guard engineers that they only had enough fuel to run the generator until noon on Tuesday, and that the diesel tank was underground. Rapidly rising water could send the Dome into total darkness and anarchy.

Still, it was better than the alternative, so people lined up, four and five blocks worth, standing in the rain.

"Everyone recognized this was a bad storm," Billy Zacharie says. "Meteorologists, I heard a young man on the TV. He was relatively new to the city. He was frantic, man: 'Get out, this is gonna be a bad one, worse than Betsy.' "

The stubborn, the poor and the homeless swarmed around the Dome. So did those with family members too sick to evacuate, like the Zacharies. Billy's brother, Michael, also a pastor, had gotten out of town, after futilely trying to persuade their father to go to a hospital in Baton Rouge, La. Billy stayed behind with Mama and Daddy, and now he was sitting in his van, his broad shoulders slumped a bit.

He saw a nursing home van unloading, and a line of wheelchairs going inside. He got two wheelchairs, eased his mom into one, his bedridden father into the other. Dad growled in pain but took it. They put a sheet over his lifeless legs, rendered impotent by a stroke a decade before, and wheeled their father inside.

Pretending to be with the nursing home patients, Billy snuck his family into the Dome. Right by the tunnel to the field, near the loading dock where they'd been parked, he set them up behind boxes of food and bottled water.

"Every minute was full of anxiety," he says. "I've never said this to my wife, but there were times when I was really getting scared. When I saw the wind coming, it started raining hard. We had just got in the Dome, and the water started getting higher."

The family tried to stay out of sight. He didn't want to get thrown out. One of the soldiers, who'd been with the nurse when she denied them entry, peered around the corner and made eye contact with Billy. The soldier recognized him. This was the moment of truth. Outside the wind roared. The storm was just 12 hours from shore. Waves pounded the South Louisiana coastland, strong enough to swamp monitoring stations in the Gulf. The hurricane refused even to be measured.

The soldier looked at the Zacharies, and he nodded. For the moment, they were safe.

It has been a year, though it's hard to tell. New Orleans East, a suburban neighborhood claimed from the swamp as the city made its rapid and arrogant post-World War II expansion, still looks like a war zone. The city's population sits at 1880 levels. The wind blew away a century of progress along with all those houses. Garbage trucks rumble up and down Gawain Street, past the leaning and missing road signs, carrying away the remnants. They'll be doing that for years.

The auto shop is deserted, the grass grown high. Some people have fixed their houses. Some have gutted them down to the studs. Others never came back. Entire blocks of families left town, lifelong neighbors never to speak to one another again. Cupboards still full of food, red beans waiting for a wash day that will never come.