Everything in New Orleans is just fine. Perfectly, absolutely fine.
That's the message from the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. The city's official boosters have put together a series of web videos designed to reassure wary tourists and business travelers that BP's catastrophic oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico hasn't had the slightest effect on the Crescent City.
"Our hearts go out to all of our cousins and family down there that are fighting this catastrophic oil leakage," narrates J. Stephen Perry, the Bureau's president. "Here in New Orleans, it's another story." Over a montage of Big Easy clichés – revelers on Bourbon Street, musicians playing jazz, shrimp sizzling in a pan – viewers are told that no oil has reached New Orleans and that the disaster is taking place far away from the city.
It's hard to fault Perry for trying to spin things this way. Tourists are the life-blood of the city's economy, and it's his job to keep them coming. In 2008, tourists spent an estimated $5.1 billion in New Orleans; the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates that tourism generates between $200 and $225 million in direct tax revenues for the city each year. And approximately 70,000 New Orleanians are employed in the hospitality industry.
Unlike the rural parishes to the city's east and south, which have been visibly transformed by the closure of fisheries and a moratorium on deepwater drilling, daily life in New Orleans appears mostly unchanged so far. But the city is intimately linked to the Gulf and the network of rivers and waterways that connect it to the sea. It’s New Orleans’ historical reason for being. The four pillars of the metropolitan area's economy – tourism, oil and gas, commercial fishing, and shipping – all rely on that connection.
AND NOW, THIS
"I've been likening it to a horror movie, where you can't see the monster, but you know it's there," said Father Anthony Bozeman, the pastor of St. Raymond and St. Leo the Great Parish. On a recent afternoon, the priest had come to eat at Lil’ Dizzy's Café in the Treme neighborhood, which at lunchtime offers a cross section of New Orleans: musicians, cops, tourists, community organizers. In the past few weeks, "the oil" has been the main topic of conversation at the Creole restaurant. "Right now, it's still out at sea a little bit – but they're afraid," Bozeman said of the parishioners at his church in Gentilly, a middle-class black neighborhood that was badly flooded when the levees failed.
At a nearby table, Wally Taylor and his colleague Tom Moss were enjoying gumbo and fried chicken. But the oil was on their minds. "I feel overwhelmed, I guess," said Taylor, who works for a kitchen-cabinetry company. "I feel like I'm the victim of forces vaster and more powerful than I am."
"25 percent of our kitchen jobs are still Katrina rehabs," added Moss. "Still, it felt kind of like the city was really coming back. And now, this."
A REBIRTH UNDONE?
These common laments suggest the painful way in which the city's much-promoted narrative of rebirth and recovery has been undermined by the oil disaster.
2010 was shaping up to be New Orleans's best year since Katrina. In February, the beloved Saints overcame their underdog status and triumphed in the Super Bowl, bringing the city together. A day before their victory, the city elected a new mayor in a landslide hailed by some as a sign of increasing unity in a racially polarized city. (Mitch Landrieu, who is white, won more than 60 percent of the African-American vote.) The metro area is defying the recession with a relatively low unemployment rate of 6.1 percent. And every week, hundreds of thousands of Americans are becoming invested in the city's recovery and its unique culture by watching Treme, David Simon's critically acclaimed new HBO series about New Orleans.
All those gains, whether real or perceived, are now threatened. For the past few years, Amy Liu, an urban policy expert at the Brookings Institution, has tracked the recovery of New Orleans and published an influential periodic report called The New Orleans Index. When the BP blowout occurred, Liu was midway through preparing this year's update. "It put quite a damper on what would have been a very positive outlook,” she said.
Like many other expert observers, Liu believes the biggest threat posed to New Orleans by the oil disaster is the potential for further damage to Louisiana's already-decimated wetlands, which serve as the city's natural defense against hurricanes and floods by absorbing storm surges. The wetlands are many miles from the city – "down there," as the president of the visitor's bureau put it. But New Orleans needs them in order to remain a habitable, economically viable city.
Last week, Liu met with elected officials and civic leaders in New Orleans to share her most recent findings and recommendations. “What I told them is that all of the things you're doing to repair and restore the economy -- they're all great," she recalled. "But they’re all moot if you don't have your coastal wetlands.”
level – it's as if the earth itself has sprung a leak that can't be controlled."
-Tom Piazza
The threat to the wetlands is emblematic of the sheer complexity of the crisis, which has fostered a sense of helplessness. "With Katrina, there was a way to fight back, if you had the strength left and the resources," said Tom Piazza, a New Orleans-based writer whose book, Why New Orleans Matters, is part of the growing canon of post-Katrina literature. "You could rebuild. You could find other survivors. There were people to get angry at. At this point in this situation, there's not much that an individual can do. So there's a sense of futility. And there's something frightening about it on an almost primal level – it's as if the earth itself has sprung a leak that can't be controlled. "
But there's a deeper form of resentment that is emerging, as well. Garland Robinette, who hosts a popular morning show about politics and policy on the radio station WWL, noted that many of his listeners are beginning to feel angry at the rest of the country, for exploiting Louisiana's natural resources and then failing to come to the region's aid in a crisis. "If you want cold hard proof that we are not thought of as important to this country, or even part of this country, just listen to the intelligentsia on the East Coast," he complained in an interview. They want us to keep taking all the risk while the rest of the country benefits." Of course this is a no-win situation, since 30,000 local residents are employed by big oil, which in 2008 accounted for 6.5 percent of Louisiana’s total revenue.
But others are placing the blame closer to home. "We have to look in the mirror and see our own complicity in this," said Wendell Pierce, the New Orleans actor best known for portraying "Bunk" Moreland on the HBO series The Wire, and currently starring in Treme. Pierce has also played a leading role in the recovery of New Orleans, founding and running a nonprofit development corporation that is rebuilding Pontchartrain Park, the neighborhood where he grew up.
Pierce faulted decades of local political leaders for being far too cozy with the oil industry and for failing to adequately gauge the risks of giving it almost unfettered access to the region's resources. "We've had a 50-year relationship with the oil companies," he said. "But we weren't prepared for this?"
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