New Orleans: One Year Later

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans a year ago this Tuesday, and CBS News national correspondent Byron Pitts has been covering the story ever since.

As Pitts notes, it is once again the heart of hurricane season. Yet for people who live along the Gulf Coast, it's the hurricane past that still causes sleepless nights.

Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,300 men, women and children. Many of those who died, died in New Orleans.

One year later, New Orleans is still struggling to recover.

The man in charge of bringing the city back to life is Mayor Ray Nagin. But there are questions: Is he up to the job? And what if there's another direct hit.

"I think we're ready for another hurricane like Katrina," Nagin says.

"There's a headline," Pitts says.

"Absolutely," Nagin says.

"How is that possible?" Pitts asks.

"When Katrina hit us, our highest levees were 12 to 13 feet. The ones they're building now, as high as 20 feet," Nagin says.

The failure of those levees was the signature event behind the flooding that left 80 percent of New Orleans underwater after Katrina.

Today, in one of the few visible signs of recovery, the 220 miles of the levees damaged by the storm have been repaired or restored by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Visiting one of the repaired levees, Pitts asks Nagin how it compares to the old levee wall.

"Oh, it was a third of that. Maybe. It was just dirt," Nagin says. "And that was part of the problem. When the water was overflowing, it came and started digging. It dug holes on this side of the levee. And this is the anti-scouring part. So now if the water flows over, it won't dig a hole and when it dug a hole, it weakened the whole levee and it just kinda caved in."

And will it hold in the face of a Category 3 or Category 4 storm?

"Look at this man, where's this gonna go?" Nagin asks, standing at the base of the wall.

If New Orleans is prepared for a hurricane today, that was not the case a year ago. Nagin helped make a bad situation worse by not ordering a mandatory evacuation until the morning before the storm made landfall.

His delay and indecision almost certainly cost lives.

"That was heart-breaking," Nagin says. "Seeing dead bodies in the water and watching babies and old people, elderly people, really suffering. That was very, very tough."

Nagin says that about 600 people died in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. Pitts asks if there are private moments when Nagin blames himself for those deaths.

"Absolutely," he says. "I think about whether I could have ordered a mandatory evacuation earlier. I think about what we could have done differently and better with the Superdome and with getting more people out of the neighborhoods. I contemplate and think about that a lot."

How would Nagin evacuate people differently in the event of another storm?

"We're getting everybody out. And we're gonna use every medium available," Nagin says. "No shelter of last resort, buses, trains, planes. Everybody's gotta go."

Under the mayor's new plan, no Superdome, no convention center. When a Category 3 or higher hurricane threatens New Orleans, everyone leaves.

Planning for the next disaster seems simple compared with fixing what was broken by the last one.

One year later, parts of New Orleans look the way they did days after the hurricane. There's tons of debris still scattered about. Six of the city's nine hospitals are still closed.

Before Katrina, some 65,000 children attended public schools here. This fall, that figure could be down to 21,000. Thousands of families remain in government trailers.

Neighborhoods are still deserted - block after block of deafening silence.

"Everywhere you see a home or a slab, there were people who lived here. And it just kind of keeps me sad from the standpoint that they're somewhere around the country," Nagin says. "They're stressed out, they're confused and they're trying to figure out a way to come back home. When you look at this, they won't be back for a long time. So it's really tough."

Pitts says: "You hear it all the time, 'Why can't you clean this area up faster than you have?' People blame you for that."

"This is the cleaned-up version. I hate to put it in those terms. But right after Katrina, this was absolutely - you couldn't drive up this street," Nagin says. "We've cleaned up just about everything except for things on people's personal property. We have to contact a lot of these individuals and get their permissions to go here and demolish these properties."

"But you can't get the cars out yet; you can't get this demolished?" Pitts asks.

"That's all right. You guys in New York City can't get a hole in the ground fixed. And it's five years later. So let's be fair," Nagin says.

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Sunday, Nagin apologized for his remark to Pitts about the World Trade Center site. Read the story.

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Pitts asks Moore what Nagin has to do going forward to reclaim New Orleans, rebuild New Orleans?

"I think that day has come and gone," Moore says. "I don't think Nagin - at this stage of the game, I think he's too damaged to be an effective politician."

Moore believes that Nagin failed as a leader during Katrina and has continued to fail in the year since: especially when it comes to the city's black residents.

"You are mayor of this city. You control the jobs, lot of money flowing through here. Grab hold of the reins and do something to help these people come back to their city. Or do something to help these people get on with their lives," Moore says.

And what is Nagin's plan for New Orleans?

"We have to get our infrastructure together," Nagin says. "That's still a little strained. The water system, for example … "

"A little strained?" Pitts asks.

"A little strained," Nagin says.

"You're being generous, aren't you?" Pitts asks.

"Well, it's all relative," Nagin says.

Speaking of the city's water system: 85 million gallons of fresh water has been leaking away every day since Katrina hit.

As for the master plan for rebuilding: It won't be finalized before May of next year. Only then can the real work begin.

But Nagin remains stubbornly optimistic.

"At the end of the day, I see the city being totally rebuilt," Nagin says. "I see us eliminating blight, still being culturally unique with a new school system that's probably state of the art and a much more diversified economy where creative people come to live, love and play."

"And cake and ice cream for everybody?" Pitts asks.

"Cake and ice cream? Well we can work on that. Beignets ...," Nagin says.

"I mean your painting an awfully ...," Pitts says.

"Cafe au lait," Nagin interjects. "You know, that's what I see."

"Is that realistic?" Pitts asks.

"Now from point A to get there it's gonna take a lot of hard work. We're into a five- to seven-year build cycle," Nagin says. "The next six months to 12 months is going to be very hard."

"We don't have a lot of time," says Oliver Thomas, president of the New Orleans City Council. "And we don't have, we won't have, a lot of opportunity to get it right if it's not."

Thomas believes Nagin has made mistakes, but he won't give up on him.

"This was the equivalent of a bomb falling in New Orleans," Thomas says. "Should things have happened quicker? Yes. But everyone has their own style of leadership, and right now our political leader, our political father is Ray Nagin. So for the next four years we're gonna sink or swim with him."

Another sign that things are not close to normal in New Orleans: the presence of the National Guard. Nagin called them in this summer to deal with a sharp rise in murders. At the earliest, those 300 Guardsmen won't be leaving until the end of the year.

"We've had some very … high-profile events … as far as … multiple murders that have happened. So it's very … it's unnerved the community in a big way," Nagin says. "But all the crime statistics that we look at on a per capita basis are down with the exception of the rising murder rate."

"That's a big one, though," Pitts notes.

"It's a huge one," Nagin says.

"Right? I mean … if people don't feel safe in New Orleans … tourism is your bread and butter," Pitts says.

"Rarely is there an issue with a tourist. This is happening in the inner city, where most tourists don't go," Nagin says. "And it's basically turf battles, primarily over drug activity."

"New Orleans is a violent city. I'm gonna say this: If I could deputize King Kong and Godzilla, I'd do it tomorrow." Thomas says. "And people would be uncomfortable watching King Kong and Godzilla walk around the streets, right. But if they can fight these thugs and stop crime while we're rebuilding, I'm gonna put a blue uniform on them."

This struggle with crime is happening with half the city's population still displaced. The half that hasn't come back is mostly poor and predominantly black.

Before Katrina, nearly 13,000 residents lived in public housing projects. Some of those projects are going to be torn down and replaced. That will take at least three years.

So a city that was once 67 percent minority faces a change in color and culture.

The mayor insists he's committed to preserving New Orleans' diversity.

"What I do have a problem with is some entrenched interests that are looking and salivating over certain sections of the city," Nagin says. "And want to say to me as Mayor, 'Mr. Mayor we want you to tell people they can't go back there. Because we have some development ideas that we want to push.' I don't think that's right."

Nagin claims he's looking out for the poor, yet he's made more progress lining up developments that appear to cater to the rich.

One example of one of those developments?

"Trump Towers," Nagin says. "We're gonna have a Trump International Tower in the city of New Orleans - a 68-story condominium. High, high-end … definitely will happen."

"I think you're looking at basically a town that will be a playground for the rich for the next 40 years," says LSU's Moore. "Around the perimeter of the city, what you'll find are private luxury condos, million-dollar mansions. This will be probably the Las Vegas of the south."

And the old New Orleans?

"The old … all gone, completely," Moore says. "The culture's completely gone."

That charge may be extreme, but Jim Carvin has similar concerns. He's been political advisor to every winning mayor in the Big Easy since 1969 - including Nagin.

"We're talking as though blacks and whites are all the same," Carvin says. "In this city, they're not."

He points to one of the symbols of society, the debutante balls last December, just four months after Katrina. While the city's black social clubs cancelled their events largely because of diminished ranks, most of the white clubs held theirs as planned.

"With all the catastrophe, the debutante parties went on," Carvin says. "They didn't miss a beat. Every day you picked up the paper and there was the debutante ball, as though there had never been a Katrina. That's why the white establishment looked at the exodus of the black community, or a large segment of the black community, and said, 'We could make this a white city again.'"

"I look at the post-Katrina piece as a game of musical chairs. The music is going, everybody's dancing, everybody's having a good time," says Moore, who is black. "Once the music gets turned off, the white folk have a place to sit down, a place to sleep, a place for their children to go to school. We're going back to a trailer."

Nagin insists all are welcome in the new New Orleans. But for now, one year later, that remains a dream deferred.

Discouraged by the slow recovery, many have taken matters into their own hands -taking back what they lost.

At least $15 billion in federal aid has been set aside to rebuild the Crescent City, but very little has been delivered.

Just give us money, Nagin says, and give me more time.

"We've got some challenges. This is pioneering work," Nagin says. "This is not for the faint of heart."