Night and Day in New Orleans

And then there are the lawyers, dozens of them, their signs touting class-action lawsuits over levee breaks.

"This is going to be one of the biggest lawsuits in history," said Daniel E. Becnel Jr., a suburban New Orleans lawyer involved in other major national cases.

Preventive Measures

Strengthening the levees that proved so fallible in Katrina has become the singular obsession of the city's business leaders and the national experts they have brought in to help plan a rebuilding effort that will probably take 15 years or more to complete.

Brenda Ohrabka, a hairdresser, is thinking of selling her house. "Why won't they build the levees to Category 5?" she said while waiting to see a doctor in the cavernous city convention center, which has been taken over by Charity Hospital. "People who lived here don't want to rebuild because of that. . . . Half the people in my neighborhoods have trailers in front of their houses. It looks like a trailer park."

Perhaps the best advice for Ohrabka and others came from Irvin Mayfield, a 26-year-old jazz prodigy who unveiled a post-hurricane composition during an emotional performance before a crowd that spilled out onto the steps of Christ Church Cathedral. "People in the city," one of Mayfield's compositions declared, "better get to higher ground."

Which is exactly what James Green did, fleeing to Mississippi for 2 1/2 months after Katrina before returning to his wrecked corner of New Orleans straddling the Gentilly and Fairgrounds neighborhoods. Green's house is ruined, but "that's God's will," he said while unloading sacks of lye that he plans to spread "in case anything's hanging around."

"That's why I'm coming home," Green said. "You can't run from God."

Green, like almost everyone here, carries a packet of snapshots, chronicling his personal disaster -- the mold in his computer room, the ring of floodwater halfway up his door. Collectively, these photo albums illustrate a city trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

But the Greens will sleep in New Orleans tonight, joining other relatives at their son's old Craftsman-style home. They cannot imagine being anywhere but New Orleans, despite the hardships. They are not alone.

Down in the Faubourg Marigny, Ellis Marsalis -- patriarch of America's first family of jazz, father of Branford and Wynton and Jason and Delfeayo -- is back behind the piano for his regular Friday-night gig at Snug Harbor. Fred Kasten, the cool voice of jazz on radio station WWOZ, introduced Marsalis one night recently -- two days before his 71st birthday -- declaring this "is the best place on the planet." It was a curious thing to say, here amid the shards of a battered city struggling to right itself.

But then the old man placed his big hands on the ivories, and the liquid notes came pouring forth, and for a few precious moments, no one in that cramped space could disagree.

Staff writer Jonathan Weisman in Washington contributed to this report.