X marks the spot outside BCS cheer

NEW ORLEANS -- Monday night, inside the giant eggshell known as the Superdome, a fun time was had by all.

OK, a bit more fun by Louisiana State fans, whose team won the national championship by beating Ohio State, 38-24.

This was college football’s showcase, the BCS title game. It was No. 1 Ohio State versus No. 2 LSU, one of the ultimate big deals in sports. There were flags and bands, exuberant fans dressed in reds and grays and purples and golds. Lots of attractive sights and sounds.

Outside the giant eggshell -- off the island, as they say here -- the sights and sounds are not quite as nice. Within minutes of all this pomp and circumstance is all sorts of pain and casualty.

Still. Twenty-eight months later.

The mark of Hurricane Katrina is a deep footprint, a wound whose healing time may be 20 years, probably more. The people who live here are fond of saying that New Orleans is a nice place to visit, but a tough place to live.

Inside the eggshell, there were heroes. Matt Flynn quarterbacked his Tigers back from a 10-0 deficit and a disastrous, error-filled start to 24-10 and control by halftime. Jacob Hester rushed for 86 yards and a touchdown; Chevis Jackson made a sensational interception to set up the touchdown that got the Tigers their 14-point lead at the half, and Richard Dickson caught two scoring passes.

Minutes away, other kinds of heroes struggle to find enough food to eat that day, or enough loose change to afford another slab of dry wall.

The story of the ravages of Katrina has been told often. But in the time since Aug. 29, 2005, the attention of the country, riveted on this for months, has understandably diminished. Now, the assumption is they are rebuilding and recovering.

Some, but not much.

Because there were lots of writers here, and because the newspaper has become the heart and conscience of this city, the Times-Picayune offered a tour they would narrate. The message was that New Orleans is happy that people are coming back, to football games, to the French Quarter. But they also need to know the reality; that Katrina was too big to bounce back from, that millions of lives will never be the same and billions of dollars in personal assets are gone.

The tour guide was James O’Byrne, longtime resident and features editor of the newspaper.

He told about trying to find his house the day of Katrina, which hit about 5 a.m. He told about riding a bike to a spot on a railroad trestle, looking toward his house and realizing he was looking down on 10 feet of water. We stood below the railroad trestle, from where he took a picture, and realized we would have been under 10 feet of water.

Three days later, he canoed to his house. Three weeks later, there was still seven feet of water inside and the mold was so thick he couldn’t see past the front room.

We stood within feet of where the break took place at the 17th Street Canal.

“Five hundred feet broke away,” O’Byrne said. “People in these houses probably went out about 7:45 that morning, thought it was over, and went back in their homes. We were told we had dodged the bullet. About 8:15, the levee broke, the water exploded through here and killed all those people.”

He said the best estimate for deaths was 1,600. He said the common perception that it was a disaster borne mostly by blacks was not true.

“It was about 53% black, 46% white,” he said. “It broke down more toward age. Old people didn’t want to leave or couldn’t. They died in higher proportion.”

An estimated 200,000 homes were lost. It is hard to tell what is counted in that number, because every neighborhood had more empty lots than homes, more boarded windows than not, more piles of junk than grass. Most places, lawns are a luxury. So is paint. More often than not, life goes on in boarded-up shells.

“One lady tried to rebuild three times,” O’Byrne said, “and every time she got her plumbing in, somebody stole the copper tubing. So she gave up.”

On some homes, there were big Xs still on the front doors. They were put there when the National Guard came through and searched homes for bodies. Underneath the X, they wrote a number that indicated how many bodies they had found. On one house, there was the number five; another two. People were living in the houses.

O’Byrne said that 45 people died in the Lakeview area where he lived.

“Some of the dead people were found six months later,” he said. “They died of exposure, in their attics. Remember, this was August, and it was 125 degrees in some of those attics.”

We saw the house where Fats Domino was trapped and pulled out of a second-floor balcony. We saw the project in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, where actor Brad Pitt is sponsoring a rebuilding project. All that is left are porches. Three little brick steps, four feet wide. The water blew homes off foundations. The steps were all that survived.

The eventual flooded area was seven times the size of the island of Manhattan. People here knew what kind of lowlands they lived in. That’s why they bury their dead above ground. But they thought the giant seawalls would protect them. They didn’t.

In the days immediately following Katrina, thousands found their way to the big eggshell. It was shelter, some measure of security. They ended up trashing the place, much as Katrina had, and it took $185 million -- $50 million more than it took to build in 1972 -- to get it back in shape for marquee events such as Monday night’s.

The big eggshell showed nicely. Nice event. People had fun. The devastation nearby was out of sight, and probably out of mind.

Well, not completely.

According to O’Byrne, his homeowners insurance premium was $2,000 a year before Katrina; now, in his new home of similar size, it is $5,900.

Many insurance payouts are still in litigation.

The presenting sponsor of this BCS title game was Allstate. When the company president was introduced to the crowd of 79,651 before the game, the response was mostly silence, then some boos.

People had lots of fun here Monday night. But then, that is understandable. They were mostly tourists.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.