Parades in New Orleans for Mardi Gras
ROESGEN: Well, the crowds are a little smaller and the mood is a little more subdued, but the Mardi Gras parades are rolling through New Orleans just like usual this weekend. It would not be Mardi Gras down there without Arthur Hardy. He is considered the foremost authority on our annual party in New Orleans. He's also known as the voice of Mardi Gras. Arthur Hardy joins me from, where else, New Orleans. Hey, Arthur.</s>ARTHUR HARDY, VOICE OF MARDI GRAS: Hey, Susan, how are you?</s>ROESGEN: I'm doing just great. You and I know that New Orleans depends on Mardi Gras for an economic boost, a huge boost to the local economy, but if I were a tourist in Lincoln, Nebraska I would not think that this is a good year to come to New Orleans. What do you think? How would we get tourists to come down even next weekend for the last four days of the real big parades?</s>HARDY: Well, if you can get a flight and that's a big if, if you can find a room and that's a big if, I'd say come. It's a very historic Mardi Gras. It's the 150th anniversary of the first parade in New Orleans. Most of all, it's a comeback from hurricane Katrina. It's telling the world that we ain't dead yet. Instead of people in rowboats on Canal Street, we have people on floats in Canal Street so Mardi Gras is going to show the world we're alive and pretty well.</s>ROESGEN: Arthur, have you heard how many hotel rooms are open for the last four days, say next weekend on into fat Tuesday?</s>HARDY: Susan, it changes every day as FEMA workers and reconstruction workers check out and visitors check in. So I have not. We don't know. It's a moving target. You can bet it's not many, but there still are some rooms available. We expect a lot of day- trippers. Half of New Orleans is living in Baton Rouge and St. Tammany Parish and certainly they're going to drive in for a day's worth of celebration. So I think the crowds are going to be bigger than we first thought.</s>ROESGEN: I hope so because I know in my neighborhood just yesterday there were five parades that turned the corner at Napoleon and St. Charles in just one hour. I mean really short parades this year. Do you think the biggies Orpheus and</s>HARDY: They're almost at full strength. In fact, even today we had two parades uptown at the same corner that were four times as big as yesterday and the crowds are bigger, too, in spite of what for New Orleans is cold weather. We had wind chills in the 30s and for us, it's kind of cold. But the crowds are getting bigger and very enthusiastic so we're looking for a great celebration. It's a little bit smaller, but the big news is that we're doing it, not that it's a little bit tinier.</s>ROESGEN: You know, you can't ignore the debate that's gone on. I've said before that Mardi Gras is a date on the calendar just like Christmas or Easter. You can choose to celebrate it or not. How do you think things are changing now Arthur? Do you think evacuees have been displaced are accepting it any more than before? What's your take?</s>HARDY: I think they are, because it's not an either/or. Certainly if we canceled Mardi Gras and some of the levees would be rebuild, Mardi Gras makes money and the key point, Susan, as you well know is that the city could cancel it, but it can't make it happen. We choose to celebrate. The people on the floats are paying for this. It's their gift to us and to our visitors. So I think that debate is long gone. We're doing it and it's going to be -- not bigger and better than ever, but we're doing it. That's the main thing.</s>ROESGEN: You know, Arthur, I know that in a really good year, Mardi Gras is like a $2 billion boost to the New Orleans economy. Any thoughts on how much money we might take in this year?</s>HARDY: We don't know. Actually the record is a billion 56 million, which is an awful lot of money. Normally it costs the city about $5 million and brings in $21 million in direct tax. All of that will be down a bit, but it's certainly not going to cost us anything. We will make money on it, but the biggest thing for us I think is it's group therapy. We need to do something other than being in this Katrina funk where we're ripping out wet carpets and sheetrock. That's behind us. This is the new us and this tells the world we're on our way back.</s>ROESGEN: Yeah, I think what folks in the rest of the country don't understand is how could we be partying when we've got so much misery. I think you said something really nice in your magazine this month. You said, some cities hide their treasures in museums. New Orleans shares hers on the street. That's a nice line. That's a nice way of looking at it.</s>HARDY: Well, actually, I stole that from somebody else, but it is a good line and it's true. This is what we do. I think it's genetically encoded into our DNA when we're born. We celebrate; we come together. It's a remarkably culturally diverse festival. So many people just embrace each other, particularly now. We just need to come together and Mardi Gras is going to be the catalyst to bring people together back on the streets of New Orleans.</s>ROESGEN: All right, Arthur. I'll be looking for you on fat Tuesday.</s>HARDY: Happy Mardi Gras.</s>ROESGEN: Happy Mardi Gras. Well, as New Orleans does try to continue its recovery, the homeland security chief is telling CNN's Wolf Blitzer that it's time to look ahead. On CNN's "LATE EDITION," Michael Chertoff also acknowledged that his department fell short in its response to Katrina.</s>MICHAEL CHERTOFF, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: I thing first of all there was a failure to have real clear information at our disposal. There was a real lack of situational awareness. We didn't have the capabilities on the ground to give us real time accurate assessments of the physical condition of the city.</s>WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: But you knew that for days that this hurricane was coming towards New Orleans.</s>CHERTOFF: Wolf, putting these capabilities together is not a matter of putting them together in a few days. It's a matter of planning and preparing for months.</s>BLITZER: But there have been these tabletop exercises. There was this fictional hurricane Pam a year earlier in which they basically outlined all of these dire consequences that nobody seems to have paid any attention to.</s>CHERTOFF: I'm not excusing the fact that planning and preparedness was not where it should be. We've known for 20 years about this hurricane, this possibility of this kind of hurricane. So all during the '90s and for the first half of this decade, we've had opportunities to get evacuation plans in place, better communications in place, but rather than look backward, my obligation now is to make sure we do a lot of the work we need to do between now and June 1st.</s>ROESGEN: Now earlier this week, Secretary Chertoff told a Senate committee that his department's slow reaction to Katrina was in his words, unnecessarily prolonged and it unnecessarily prolonged the suffering of Gulf Coast residents. And yet all week, CNN has reported on a glaring example of the disconnect between homeland security and FEMA, the agency it oversees.</s>ROESGEN (voice-over): Welcome to hope, Arkansas, a small town with a huge problem. These are nearly 11,000 mobile homes FEMA has parked in Hope, more mobile homes than the town has people. But no one's living in these mobile homes. They're 450 miles from the Gulf coast and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu says FEMA just can't get it right.</s>SEN. MARY LANDRIEU, (D) LOUISIANA: Well, it's another example, Susan, of the mismatch in planning that has gone on, and it really is again to the point that even on FEMA's best day, they're not suited to manage this catastrophe.</s>ROESGEN: On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security which oversees FEMA released a report criticizing FEMA for buying so many mobile homes and allowing many in Arkansas to sink.</s>RICHARD SKINNER, HOMELAND SECURITY INSPECTOR GENERAL: Since they were not properly stored, as you can see from this second picture, the homes are sinking in the mud and their frames are bending from sitting on trailers with no support. Insofar as many of these homes fail to meet FEMA specification requirements or FEMA has no qualified, prearranged site location to place them, they may have to be disposed of.</s>ROESGEN: But FEMA Chief David Paulison told CNN Tuesday that the mobile homes have not damaged.</s>DAVID PAULISON, ACTING DIR., FEMA: The mobile homes are fine. There's not one mobile home that's been damaged. They're going to be usable. Mobile homes last a long time, 15, 20 years, so we are going to use them. I don't know where the information came from that the inspector general got, because somebody gave him bad information.</s>ROESGEN: On Wednesday, FEMA allowed CNN to see the mobile homes on the FEMA lot. In a two-hour driving and walking tour, we saw dozens of mobile homes, but nowhere near the full 11,000 and it was hard to tell from our vantage point what was going on with the mobile homes. FEMA managers at the site say the largest ones, about 1,600 of them, are sagging under their own weight and workers were bringing in jacks to prop them up, but FEMA denies that the mobile homes might not be usable. In your opinion, are these so badly damaged that they might have to be destroyed?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are no damaged trailers here, none?</s>ROESGEN: Why aren't they moving then?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You need to talk to somebody else about that.</s>ROESGEN: Richard Skinner, the Homeland Security inspector general has begun qualifying his earlier testimony that those mobile homes may have to be disposed of. He told CNN on Thursday that his bigger concern now is making sure that those mobile homes are properly stored and beyond that, not one of those mobile homes has left that lot, not one has been sent to a hurricane victim who needs a place to live. A new weapon in the fight against terror. Straight ahead on CNN LIVE SUNDAY, sure they sting. We'll tell you why the Pentagon is all abuzz about wasps. And the close encounter of a wannabe bandit with a stubborn defender of a gas station cash register.