By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 25, 2006
BATON ROUGE, La. -- When Hurricane Katrina walloped New Orleans, this quiet capital city 80 miles to the northwest suffered only minor damage from howling winds. There were inconvenient power outages. Townsfolk felt fortunate.
It was, however, a cruel mirage. Things turned chaotic and challenging quickly, as tens of thousands of New Orleanians fled up Interstate 10, taking refuge here. That was nearly one year ago, and thousands of those evacuees are still here.
If the hurricane forever changed New Orleans, it has also permanently transformed Baton Rouge. Katrina has demanded realignments, shaken this city's sense of order and left it struggling to cope with a range of new, daily problems.
A population boom has led to Los Angeles-like traffic jams. A housing crunch has escalated home costs, angering longtime residents. A surge in school enrollment -- there are 3,704 displaced New Orleans students in the local system -- has overburdened teachers, many of whom had already felt overworked. And increased crime has led to daily discussions about race and class.
Baton Rouge -- a formal city, home to the state's government -- had long seen itself as an antidote to the laissez-faire goings-on in New Orleans. But now, after a year of new realities and soul-searching, Baton Rouge has found itself frightened of what the hurricane has thrust upon it, worried that its sense of order has been forever altered.
"Be honest with me," says Cora Nixon, who works as a health-care aide for the elderly and has lived here most of her life. "These New Orleans people aren't going back, are they?"
At times it can feel like a brew of every ill that has flummoxed major American cities in recent decades has come to land in Baton Rouge.
Local officials wake up each morning wondering what crisis might toss their day into turmoil -- a shooting at one of the FEMA-run trailer parks, a car accident that ties up traffic for miles, a neighborhood skirmish over gang turf. A "What next?" feeling is pervasive.
"Yesterday," says JoAnne H. Moreau, director of homeland security and emergency preparedness for East Baton Rouge Parish, "I had five people from my staff over in Alexandria in meetings about Amtrak service. Katrina has stretched our resources to its limits. And it's not anything we'll see an end to soon."
Moreau loathes traveling across the city. A trip that took 20 minutes pre-Katrina can now stretch into hours. "There was an accident yesterday on the highway coming to work," she says. "It added two hours to my getting into work."
Few will deny that there are not many cities the size of Baton Rouge that can cope easily with the arrival of more than 100,000 people. (In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, the parish surrounding Baton Rouge saw its population of 417,000 double. "For about the first 30 days, we did look like we were going to hell in a handbasket," says Sgt. Don Kelly, a police spokesman. "There was fear here. If we did not, from the very beginning, stay on top of things, there was a good chance our city would be overrun.")
While local and federal officials cope with the challenges from behind desks -- or inside trailers with makeshift offices -- a swelled populace has had to learn to cope with one another as neighbors. It has not been easy.
On a recent morning, Cora Nixon was fussing around in the front yard of her aunt Dorothy Hamilton's home on America Street. A native of New Orleans, herself black, Nixon scrunches her face when talking about the Katrina effect in Baton Rouge.
"I hate to say it -- we're all black Americans -- but I had to bolt up my house. Ain't nobody ever tried to break in my house before."
She is talking about before the Katrina evacuees arrived.
"They done gave so much to the storm people," she says. "It's not all just money. I'm talking about housing, too."
She points to the padlock on her aunt's gate. "You see this big old padlock? My aunt needs it. They done stole her barbecue pit from the backyard."
Before the storm, the police department here was averaging about 500 calls a day. That number has jumped to about 800.
And while crime, except homicides, is up across the board, police spokesman Kelly says the department lacks hard statistics on the increase on a percentage basis because the city doesn't have an accurate enough count of its population. "To measure crime increases, you need a yardstick in counting the population," says Kelly. "And right now, our yardstick is still broken. We just don't accurately know how many people are in Baton Rouge."
The population estimates given are based on garbage pickups and traffic patterns.
Moreau, the homeland security official, says the city's sense of being overwhelmed persists because it has had to take responsibility for many roles the state and federal government would have usually played. "We've had to do things that were actually state functions -- such as sheltering, long-term care, feeding people," she says. "All those things that would normally be provided by another government agency."
A year ago the Baton Rouge Police Department had 592 officers; that number is now up to 632. But 38 of those officers, says Kelly, are still in the training academy.
Jeff LeDuff, the city's no-nonsense police chief, was credited by many with keeping order in the city. There was aggressive policing, officers rolling en masse to reports of crimes. "I'm willing to be my brother's keeper. That's what I said at the time," says LeDuff now, referring to the immediate aftermath of Katrina. "And I also said, 'While my brother is in Baton Rouge, he must behave.' "
Some assailed LeDuff, who is black, and his police force, saying they were too aggressive. But Mayor Melvin "Kip" Holden, who appointed LeDuff and who also is black, lauded his chief's stewardship of the department during the crisis.
In 2005 Baton Rouge's population was 43 percent black, a figure that has surely risen after Katrina, city officials say.
Blacks here especially have viewed themselves and their city as different from New Orleans, which they see as a rough-and-tumble poorer relation. Baton Rouge's blacks are proud of their middle-class roots, their jobs at the state Capitol, and the reality that many were former New Orleanians who made good and were able to move here.
Sharon Hebert, 50, works as an administrative clerk at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church. A black woman, she has listened over the months to the black-on-black chatter regarding the fallout from the hurricane. "You wanted to speak up," she says. "There were things, being black, you dared not say. We all knew it, but we're afraid to openly admit there is a class problem. There is an element we had to say to: 'We're not going to allow you to cause anything to happen to us just because you're black.' "
There also were sharp concerns about what additional challenges the new arrivals might place on the Baton Rouge school system, where the increase in students could fill three new elementary schools. Hebert says she and many other blacks quietly fretted that the influx of students could overwhelm teachers and dampen learning.
And there were times she felt that her candor might be taken as denigrating other blacks, especially Katrina arrivals.
When she would broach the subject of high standards in the schools with other blacks, Hebert says, some felt she was "selling out," a criticism that stung her. "No, you're not selling out. You are so connected that you want your community to keep improving."
Many blacks across wide swaths of the South point to education as paramount to their advances in society. Baton Rouge is home to Southern University, a historically black college, as well as Louisiana State University.
Shortly after the hurricane, Southern had upwards of 1,000 student evacuees from New Orleans on its campus.
"We opened our doors," says Lynn Dickerson, Southern University's assistant vice chancellor for student affairs. "We fed them, we housed them." And, she adds: "It put a complete hole in our budget. Historic black schools don't ever get enough money anyway."
It wasn't long before Southern administrators noticed that students from New Orleans had company in their dormitory rooms. Many had told their homeless New Orleans families to join them.
"We just looked the other way," says Chancellor Edward R. Jackson. "They bought Mama, Daddy, some grandparents."
Jackson noticed the changes loosed across the landscape when blacks and whites discussed the hurricane and the government's responsibility to help the afflicted. He said few denied that the government needed to play a stronger role in hurricane relief.
"It redefined the relationship between class and structure," he says. "Everything was on the table for redefining."
ValaRay Irvin is a psychologist in the counseling center at Southern. She says she was amazed by how well the students seemed to cope in the beginning. They had youth on their side, she says.
"For a long time afterwards," she says, "there was this illusion by people that they were going to return to New Orleans. A lot of people stayed frozen for a long time."
But then another reality came into view for the students, she says: The deeper into the school year it got, the more anti-depression medication she prescribed. "There was a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder," she says.
One of the effects of Katrina was that it brought plenty of job applicants to Baton Rouge, even if the city didn't need them.
William Dickerson runs Plank Road Cleaners, and he quickly hired a New Orleans evacuee. It was not a pleasant experience. "She came in with these slick New Orleans ways," he says, standing in the shade in front of his shop. "We started missing things, clothes. I noticed her father and sister always hanging around.
"It was awful," he says. "I finally fired her."
But he did not want to prejudge all the evacuees. His most recent hire is Diana Johnson, 46, a presser from New Orleans. "She's a true professional," he says. "Works very hard."
Dickerson, who spent years as a Baton Rouge detective, said it galled him when some New Orleanians, arriving after the hurricane, judged him as being "slow and country," as he puts it.
"Hey, I may have been born in the woods -- but not the backwoods," he says. "I wrote the book on crime here."
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