Las Urbanistas

Lee Celano for The New York Times

Linda Holmes, second from right, is comforted at the scene of her son’s killing in the Iberville housing project.

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 4 — When the body was brought out, the two little boys did not stop chewing their sticky blue candy or swigging from their pop bottles. The 18-year-old mother wheeling her baby came to watch, and the teenager with the spiky hair and the bulky duffle coat was laughing up on the worn stoop.

Lee Celano for The New York Times
LaKendra Brown cries at the scene where a neighbor of hers, Ronald Holmes, was killed in the Iberville housing project of New Orleans.

Lee Celano for The New York Times
The Rev. John C. Raphael Jr., right, arriving at the project with his son, the Rev. John C. Raphael III, says people in New Orleans are “living in tremendous fear.”

Only the cries of Linda Holmes — “Oh, Lord, have mercy on me, Jesus, oh my baby!” she said, over and over — were a tip-off that this was her teenage son Ronald the man in the lab coat was laboring to pull out of the empty apartment in the Iberville housing project.

It was another death in New Orleans — violent, casual, probably drug related and, by the time the sobbing and the laughter had faded, covered over in the silence that is the only resolution of many such killings here. The gurney holding Ronald was pushed into the coroner’s van, the gawkers stepped back from their balconies and the police furled their yellow tape. “It’s messed up around here,” said the mother with the stroller, Ariane Ellis.

There has been no arrest.

There were 161 homicides in this city last year, and there have been 18 so far this year, making New Orleans by most measures the nation’s per capita murder capital, given its sharply reduced population. Many of the victims and the suspects are teenagers. About two-thirds of the deaths have gone unsolved: the killers, in many cases, continue to walk the streets and are likely to kill again, the police say.

Other cities have plenty of murders. But only in New Orleans has there been the uniquely poisoned set of circumstances that has led to this city’s position at the top of the homicide charts. Every phase of the killing cycle here unfolds under the dark star of dysfunction: the murderers’ brutalized childhoods, the often ineffectual police intervention, a dulled community response, and a tense relationship between the police and prosecutors that lets many cases slip through the cracks.

Hurricane Katrina’s devastation loosened the fragile social restraints even further, making the city perhaps more dangerous than ever.

The storm also pushed a teetering criminal justice system over the edge. The evidence in hundreds of criminal cases was lost, and the flood destroyed the police crime lab, which has not been rebuilt. Often, drugs cannot be tested at other locations before the deadline for bringing charges. Yet the police are trying to stop the violence by arresting more drug users and street dealers, many of whom are quickly released, spinning the jail door faster than ever and fueling the carnage.

In the Central City neighborhood last June, five teenagers in a sport utility vehicle were killed in a drug feud. The police said the 19-year-old suspect had been arrested 11 times in the previous 30 months. But he had been acquitted on an attempted murder charge, the district attorney’s office had dropped some of the other charges for lack of evidence, and he was out on bail on drug and gun charges at the time of the killings.

Last year, about 3,100 people who were arrested, mostly for drug offenses, were released from jail or their bail obligation when the deadlines passed for charges to be filed, records show. That was nearly three times the rate before the storm. More than 500 others were released in January alone, including one in a murder case and two arrested for attempted murder.

In some neighborhoods, people refer to “misdemeanor murders,” or “60-day murders,” the length of time suspects can be held without charges. The police superintendent, Warren J. Riley, often blames prosecutors for refusing other cases and the courts for letting violent suspects out on bail. Though Mr. Riley declined to be interviewed for this article, he recently told Gambit Weekly, a local newspaper, that he was tired of having to re-arrest the same people who had been let out of jail.

“We can’t be as successful fighting crime as we would like to be until the rest of the criminal justice system works like it’s supposed to work,” Mr. Riley told the newspaper. “We have to keep hard-core felons in jail.”

But the district attorney, Eddie Jordan, and several judges say that shoddy police work, and a general mistrust of officers by witnesses and jurors, doom many cases. Witnesses also fear retaliation on the street.

“It’s an insurmountable problem,” Mr. Jordan said. “By the time the investigative report is presented to our office, a good number of witnesses are no longer available or have gotten afraid to testify. That’s the biggest problem in murder cases.”

And even as city and federal officials announce new anticrime measures, doubts persist.

Terry Q. Alarcon, a longtime criminal court judge, said, “The criminal justice system has always had two major problems: a lack of funding and a lack of cooperation.”

A Legacy of Mistrust

The Police Department’s history of brutality and its emphasis on minor arrests have fed the mistrust and alienated many people who might be witnesses. Prosecutors and judges have criticized police officers as failing to investigate cases sufficiently, taking too long to write arrest reports and ducking subpoenas to appear in court.

As a result, the district attorney’s office has typically been able to go forward with only half to two-thirds of the cases the police have brought. With most assistant district attorneys earning only $38,000 a year, the turnover in Mr. Jordan’s office is high, and the experience level is low. Several studies by the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a local nonprofit group, show that as few as 12 percent of homicide arrests end in jail sentences.

Mr. Jordan said he had not been to the Police Department’s weekly crime statistic meetings for three years, ever since an argument had broken out at one of them over whether he was prosecuting enough cases.

More recently, he and Superintendent Riley have pledged to work more closely together. But tensions shot up again after a grand jury, at Mr. Jordan’s direction, indicted several police officers on first-degree murder charges stemming from the shooting of a retarded man in the chaos after Hurricane Katrina.

City officials recently announced a host of actions, including the mounting of more cameras in crime-ridden areas and the increasing of foot patrols to rebuild community trust. The city is raising pay levels to attract more police officers and better prosecutors, including several who will focus on convicting the most violent repeat offenders. (In a few months, most prosecutors will be earning $50,000.)

Federal authorities have put up $5 million for a new crime lab, and they are sending more prosecutors and undercover drug agents to help.

But even in criminal justice circles, there is a recognition that arrests and convictions alone will not break the killing cycle.

“You can put a cop on every corner, and you will not stop the murders,” said Eric E. Malveau, who has worked as a prosecutor and a public defender. “As long as you have a large population that is uneducated and has no job and no hope, what else is there to do but sell drugs? Until you fix that, it’s hard to see the problems getting much better.”

‘Killing Is In’

The killing is integrated deep into the community. Residents say the routine nature of the violence stifles a sense of outrage, for reasons of physical and mental self-preservation.

“Last week I buried one on Tuesday, and the one who killed him was buried on Wednesday,” said the Rev. John C. Raphael Jr., a burly former policeman turned minister who has campaigned against the violence here. “And I buried another one on Friday. And the one I buried Friday, somebody shot part of the family later that night.”

Mr. Raphael posts signs on telephone poles that say “Enough!” at murder scenes; often, neighbors are reluctant to let him do so.

The police blame drugs — drug debts, or drug deals gone bad, or grabs for drugs, mostly crack. Many of the drug gangs dispersed after the hurricane and have since regrouped, ending the brief lull with a greater intensity of infighting now concentrated in fewer neighborhoods.

On the street, a 10- or 12-year old can get up to $30 for being a bicycle lookout, and teenagers can get up to $1,000 for helping to move drug stashes.

But apart from the drug trade, those living with the culture of violence say that often all that is needed to set off a deadly shooting is a misdirected look, an epithet or a turn down the wrong block into an alien neighborhood.

“They killing each other on, whatever,” said Terrol Wilson, 40, a lifelong Central City resident and a former convict who is now a truck driver and a member of the New Hope Baptist Church. “People right now, they’re not scared to kill now. That’s how they rockin’ right now. Killing is in.”

Mr. Wilson served 15 years in prison for burglary and drug-possession convictions, beginning at age 15. He says he has seen people shot in the street in New Orleans since he was a child, and he has known people who have pulled the trigger. But now, he says, the killings are coming faster, and residents have little interest in helping investigators.

Miming an aggressive look, Mr. Wilson suggested that that posture alone might be considered a pretext for killing on the rough blocks of Central City. He described how successive killings became easier, once the first was accomplished, for some of the teenagers with guns.

“I’m not worrying about my shooting my second person, because I’m bucked up right now,” Mr. Wilson said. “It’s like, that’s what’s up. For some of them, it doesn’t matter — my second killing, my third killing.”

The killings have spilled into the city’s suburbs, which last year recorded 78 homicides, the highest tally in more than two decades. The police said evacuees from Hurricane Katrina had been involved in many of them.

“They get their first hit, it’s like, they can do anything,” Mr. Wilson said. “It’s like shooting marbles for them.”

There was Ivory Harris, for instance, known as B-Stupid in Central City, twice arrested for murder before the hurricane and twice let go. “A quiet little boy,” said Mr. Wilson, who had grown up with the boy’s mother.

B-Stupid logged his first arrest on murder charges at 16, for a killing in the C. J. Peete housing project.

“He was trying to gain respect on the street,” another Central City acquaintance, Lyle Mouton, said. The police re-arrested Mr. Harris, now 20, in March on new murder charges.

A Wall of Reserve

Arrest hardly means conviction, however. And in this city, with its codes of neighborhood silence, both are the exception.

At the murder scene in the derelict Iberville housing project, where Ronald Holmes was pulled out of the apartment, several people told a reporter they had seen a young man run across the courtyard, then heard a shot. But as the police were doing their work, going in and out of the abandoned apartment — officers said they had found drugs inside — the residents, several dozen at least, hung back.

A wall of reserve separated them from the police: nobody could be seen offering up evidence. The Iberville tenants were as oblivious to the men in uniform as they were to the exhortations of a preacher droning steadily through a microphone at the back of the courtyard.

“Without witness testimony, we’ve got nothing,” Deputy Chief Anthony Cannatella, a senior police official on the scene, observed pointedly.

Three teenage girls sat on a stoop, watching the detectives. “They kill people every day back here,” said one of them, a half-smile playing on her face. She ran off when asked her name. In an apartment adjacent to where Mr. Holmes had been shot, another young woman ducked inside rather than give her name.

Most of the violence involves black men killing other black men. Out of the 161 homicide victims last year, 131 were black men. Most of the suspects were also black men.

When the pattern of black-on-black violence is occasionally broken, white fear and outrage are redoubled. This happened earlier this month after the killing of a white filmmaker, when thousands of people marched on City Hall to demand change, a majority of them whites.

The small showing of black marchers saddened Mr. Raphael, the minister. In the 2006 murders, he said, “99 percent of them were black-on-black, and we did not march. As a community, we could not bring ourselves to respond to that.”

In New Orleans, Mr. Wilson said, “the motto is, beef or barbecue.” If you “beef” — go to the police — then do not expect to be enjoying barbecue anytime soon.

Distrust of the police and fear of the gunmen make the motto nearly beside the point. Few people beef.

Annie Randolph’s daughter and nephew have both been lost to the violence. Nobody was arrested, said Ms. Randolph, a resident of Central City. She called the police once, but warily. “I said, ‘Don’t come to my door.’ Because if they come to my door, whoever did the killing is going to see it.”

Bessie Minor’s son and grandson have both been killed; the police and the prosecutors showed minimal concern, she said.

“In that time, they didn’t really worry about who did the killing,” said Ms. Minor, who is also a resident of Central City.

In this view, the police are part of the problem, not the solution — “an occupying force,” Mr. Raphael said. Meanwhile, people in his neighborhood and elsewhere in the city are “living in tremendous fear,” he said.

“I mean, most of these murders are in front of people,” Mr. Raphael said. “When some of these murders happen, it’s really a disrespectful thing to the entire community. You have children out there, older people, and this person will come into the community and shoot an AK-47.

“That’s saying to the community, ‘I don’t care nothing about y’all, you better not say nothing about it,’ ” he said. “In broad daylight. To me, it’s demeaning to black men.”

Determined to pinpoint what kind of pollution is swirling in the air around the region’s ports, a crew of scientists this week will begin cruising Southern California streets and freeways in a one-of-a-kind mobile research lab.

In a car equipped with $450,000 worth of the world’s most sophisticated air monitors and a wind sensor protruding like a giant metal claw from the roof, researchers Tuesday will begin sampling the air in several South Bay communities, examining exhaust from cars, trucks and other sources.

“We want real-life conditions, and if real-life conditions means people in traffic, then that’s what we want,” said Kathleen Kozawa, 28, a UCLA School of Public Health doctoral student who was at the wheel of the mobile lab on a recent weekday.

Chasing pollution in a laboratory on wheels helps fill gaping holes in data about what we breathe in sprawling Southern California, which has just 35 fixed air-monitoring stations spread across 10,743 square miles.

The scientists, from the California Air Resources Board, completed a similar study a few years ago, showing how much bad air we breathe in our cars.

The publicly funded researchers learned that commuters on the Harbor and Long Beach freeways ingested half of their daily pollution while on the road — even though most people spend just 6% of their day driving.

“We’re taking the instruments to where people live and where people spend their time — in their cars and their neighborhoods,” said Scott Fruin, an air resources board pollution specialist who helped design and build the mobile lab and is now a USC assistant professor.

For the latest experiment, Fruin and other air board staff borrowed a discontinued model of an electric Toyota RAV-4 (so they wouldn’t be measuring their own exhaust), ripped out the back seats and sawed, nailed, clamped and bungee-corded to the innards a dozen sophisticated monitors, a police “stalker vision” video camera, five marine batteries weighing a combined 400 pounds and a tangle of extension cords. On the roof they glued the giant claw to locate wind direction and plumes and a jumbo antennae to track humidity and temperature.

For the first study, completed in 2004 in a nearly identical lab, the scientists drove and re-drove a 75-mile freeway loop between Pasadena and Long Beach.

They learned that the air in a moving vehicle can change dozens of times in an hour, even if the windows are closed.

Drivers breathe four to eight times as much of the carcinogen benzene as found in normal air levels, five to 15 times as much choking diesel soot and 50 to 100 times as much butadiene, which is used in automobile tires and has been linked to cancer, especially in women.

On a hazy afternoon last month, with the downtown skyline and San Gabriel Mountains looking like they’d been rinsed in dirty dishwater, Kozawa and Fruin took a reporter on a portion of the route used during the first study.

The research vehicle, with two large dryer hoses affixed to the back windows to catch outside air, merged onto the Harbor Freeway near USC. Inside, the needles on a laptop monitor began jiggling upward, measuring black carbon from diesel trucks, nitrogen oxide from hot rods and other toxins. The chemical levels climbed inexorably as the vehicle headed under the four-level interchange. When a dingy white panel truck lumbered by in the right lane, a black carbon meter jumped from 430 to 7,608 micrograms per cubic meter.

“That’s a pretty good one,” Kozawa said.

Black carbon is a strong indicator of fine particles, or soot, which lodge deep in the lungs and can lead to premature death from heart attacks, strokes and other diseases.

The scientists say their own chests grow tight and their throats sore after a typical 150-mile day in traffic, but they shrug it off as the cost of research.

The meters spiked upward as a wide Chrysler sedan with a stained tailpipe pulled in front.

“That’s pretty gross,” Kozawa said.

The needles danced in the medium high range as traffic flowed sluggishly under Stadium Way, then through four tunnels. Trucks lined the onramps, traffic idled at the exit for the Golden State Freeway.

It was difficult to maneuver the heavy, equipment-packed vehicle, which drew the occasional obscene gesture from fellow motorists, but also curiosity. One pickup truck driver honked loudly after Kozawa unintentionally cut him off, scowled as he pulled alongside, then gaped in amazement.

As the mobile lab reached the historic, leafy section of the highway past Via Marisol, the glut of traffic opened up. The needles drooped as the air freshened.

Near Avenue 60, a Chevy Trailblazer zipped past in the fast lane. The nitrogen oxide sensor leaped from 27 to 108 parts per cubic meter. A key component of smog, nitrogen oxide can cause asthma and other respiratory problems.

The drivers of such cars don’t have to breathe their own fumes, Fruin said. It’s those downwind who catch the noxious stream.

Keeping your windows closed won’t help, he said. Cars are not designed to be airtight. They leak around every joint, especially at high speed. Using recirculation blocks some soot, but then carbon monoxide can build up, making drivers sleepy.

The monitors barely murmured as the test drive concluded on a quiet Pasadena side street. The PAH carcinogen needle was at 1.8 nanograms, the lowest level of the day.

That night, at a community meeting in Wilmington, Kozawa paints a different picture for poorer neighborhoods south of the city. She has already zeroed in on a side street that hugs the truck-laden Long Beach Freeway. On a preliminary prowl, she found astoundingly high levels of ultra-fine particulates. It is well-known that sooty fine particles wreak havoc in our bodies, but now ultra-fine particles one hundredth the size have been uncovered and are considered “even more potent,” Fruin said.

They are a hot new research area, intriguing because they billow up quickly to staggeringly high levels, then dissipate just as fast. No one knows why.

Kozawa, for example, recorded 228,000 ultra-fine particles per cubic meter one morning, but by the next day, the levels had sunk to 20,000.

At the meeting, she shows graphs of the sharp peaks and dips to the audience, asking for help. Representatives of refineries and shipping firms sit mum. But longtime residents and community activists shout out ideas.

“What day of the weeks were they? You can find out which days the ships come in … and the trucks will be going nonstop to move the cargo out,” pipes up Jesse Marquez of Wilmington.

“I think the Santa Ana winds were blowing one of those days,” offers John Cross from West Long Beach. “Did you check?”

It is exactly the sort of information that may help solve the mystery. Fruin and Kozawa urge the audience to e-mail other clues.

“It’s exciting, and a little scary, too,” she says of the community meetings. “We stay in our little scientific bubble most of the time … but you hear how passionate people are, and you realize it’s not just numbers. These are people’s lives.”

Anne Sherwood for The New York Times

As many as 720 snowmobiles would be allowed to enter Yellowstone National Park each day under a new plan, which has fans and critics alike.

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. — The latest installment in the long-running debate over the use of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park is a proposal to allow as many as 720 to enter each day, nearly three times as many as permitted in the last several years.

The plan, which could be adopted by the end of the year, has drawn fire from environmentalists and praise from snowmobile advocates and some businesses in the communities around the park.

The plan is described in a preliminary draft environmental impact statement that was released to agencies and governments near the park for comment in December. The Park Service could change the plan before releasing a final version to the public next month for comment, but so far it is favoring greatly expanded winter use. About 250 snowmobiles a day use the park now. The historical average in the 1990s was 795 a day, before access was banned by the Clinton administration.

Critics say that snowmobiles will be detrimental to the park’s pristine air, wildlife and quiet. Michael Finley, who was superintendent of Yellowstone for more than six years, and who oversaw the plan that banned snowmobiles, said the Park Service was skirting its responsibilities under the new plan.

“The facts and science gave them a direction to take, then they softened, twisted and contorted the science,” Mr. Finley said. “The plan deserves to be challenged. It deserves burial in deep snow.”

In late 2006, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne reaffirmed the parks’ commitment to policies emphasizing the conservation of natural and cultural resources over recreation.

But Tim Stevens, Yellowstone program director for the National Parks and Conservation Association, said the proposed standards were misguided.

“Instead of meeting the bars they set for themselves, they lowered the bars,” Mr. Stevens said.

John Sacklin, a management assistant at Yellowstone who has worked on the issue since the 1990s, said that the park had not abdicated its responsibilities and that the new plan still protected the park’s natural assets.

“We can achieve those goals,” Mr. Sacklin said, “with a managed program that allows limited snowmobile and snow-coach use.”

Mr. Sacklin said snowmobile technology had gotten much cleaner and quieter. And all snowmobiles must travel with a guide, who enforces strict rules. The new plan also requires noise reduction technology on snow-coaches.

As far as increasing the limit from current use, he said, “It’s hard to know what the real demand or desire might be.”

“We were comfortable with a middle ground of 720,” he added.

Before 2000, snowmobile use was unregulated. Hundreds of vehicles with roaring two-stroke motors entered the park daily, and noise, pollution, harassment of wildlife and moving violations became serious problems. A lawsuit by a wildlife group, the Fund for Animals, forced the park to take a hard look at the issue.

The first study, in the late 1990s, found that banning snowmobiles and allowing only snow-coaches — buses or vans on large skis or treads — would protect the park the best. In 2000, near the end of the Clinton administration, the Park Service adopted that recommendation.

That decision was reversed after the Bush administration took over. Two subsequent studies, in 2002 and 2003, found that snowmobiles were compatible with park values. A lawsuit has followed each study and forced another.

Critics say the latest preliminary draft is faulty in three major areas, including its effects on air quality and on wildlife. Perhaps the most evident is the noise levels it would allow.

In the winter of 2003-4, a study by the Park Service looked at whether snowmobiles were audible more than 50 percent of the time at Old Faithful. Even the new, quieter snowmobiles, numbering about 250 a day, exceeded that threshold, creating “major adverse effects.”

The last two environmental studies raised the threshold. Major adverse effects were considered to exist if visitors to Old Faithful heard snowmobiles more than 75 percent of the time. This relaxed standard was still exceeded with 250 snowmobiles a day entering the park.

“People go to Yellowstone one time in their lives with a few hours at Old Faithful,” said Jon Catton, an independent environmentalist who has worked on the issue for eight years. “You can hear the hiss and splash of Old Faithful, the howl of a wolf, or the persistent buzz, whine and roar of snowmobiles.”

Filed at 8:34 a.m. ET

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A Philadelphia official wants the city council to look at whether the city’s sidewalks should be made of rubber.

City councilman Jim Kenney recently toured Chicago to see environmentally-friendly city projects there. He came back with a number of ideas on which he plans to hold hearings.

One is using rubber for sidewalks.

No, don’t expect to see people bouncing down the street. Kenney says the rubber is very solid — probably harder than a running track.

He says rubber sidewalks are made from recycled tires. They don’t crack, and they last longer than concrete.

Kenney says rubber sidewalks could also reduce the number of slip-and-fall accidents and the resulting lawsuits.

——

Information from: Mike Dunn/KYW-AM, http://www.kyw1060.com

By Mark Singletary, Publisher
2007-02-05 10:58 AM CST

NEW ORLEANS - Laissez les poubelles rouler (Let the trash cans roll).

Let’s make this a safe, fun and clean Carnival season.

On Jan. 13, I saw firsthand that New Orleans residents and visitors don’t want to be as messy as they appear to be. Sometimes, it’s beyond our control.

I joined thousands of Saints fans on that delightful Saturday afternoon walking down Poydras Street toward the Superdome and a victory over the Philadelphia Eagles. But I couldn’t help but notice the trash — and the lack of trash cans.

The fans were as nice as they could be under the circumstances. People were drinking and eating, laughing and talking, walking and visiting. As they finished their drinks or their food, they naturally looked for somewhere to dispose of their trash.

The few trash receptacles along the street were all overflowing. Fans tried to dispose of the garbage appropriately. Time and time again, I noticed people looking for an empty trash container.

In most instances, however, the disposing party, after finishing their drink or tasty treat, would pause, look around to spot a garbage can, then mosey over to throw their trash away.

But none of the trash cans could hold another scrap of garbage. Fans then tried to balance the refuse on top of the pile, and finally in frustration they simply started placing the garbage on the sidewalk beside the overflowing city trash cans.

While some observers see the accumulation of garbage outside trash containers as a negative sign, I prefer to view it as an attempt to follow the rules. Furthermore, I feel it’s time to take the necessary steps to accommodate similar behavior this year during the Mardi Gras season.

If we generally have 5,000 trash cans downtown and in the French Quarter, then we ought to have 25,000 cans available for the parades and Fat Tuesday.

Since there is a Lowe’s Home Improvement store near my home, I did a little shopping.

For $21.38 I can buy a 45-gallon, Mighty Tuff trash can with locking handle and wheels. Without even asking for a quantity discount, the total acquisition cost to buy the extra cans would be $427,600 plus tax, I guess.

Given the fact the city would have to pay overtime to set out the cans, let’s spend another $500,000 on labor to place the cans, empty the cans during the celebrations and then remove the cans on Ash Wednesday.

For less than $1 million, the French Quarter and the Central Business District might stay clean during the entire Carnival season. For an event that brings in several hundred million dollars each year, that doesn’t seem like a lot of additional expense.

We might even get some donations to offset the cost and then the exercise really makes sense. I’ll personally buy five cans, if someone in the city administration will contact me and buy into my plan. I bet I can get some friends to match my offer, too.

For too long and for too many bad reasons, we measured the success of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras by the amount of trash we had to pick up from the streets of our city after all the party animals went back home.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin has ended that practice and encouraged all the celebrants to pick up after themselves. But picking up after oneself is an exercise in futility if there isn’t a place to place the garbage.

The fans tried to do the right thing the day the Saints beat the Philadephia Eagles. It convinced me my friends and neighbors are willing to do their part and pick up after themselves.

Let’s make it easy; Let’s laissez les poubelles rouler.•

Publisher Mark Singletary can be reached by e

NEW ORLEANS - A “trash force” will work overtime during Carnival to keep the French Quarter clean.

SDT Waste and Debris Services, the city’s new contractor for sanitation pickup in the French Quarter and downtown, announced the plan today, four days before the first big weekend of Carnival.

Carnival ends with Fat Tuesday Feb. 20.The company’s sanitation contract with the city began Jan. 1.

“Our trash force will be mobilized at the corner of Canal and Bourbon streets after each parade and will begin cleaning up Canal Street first,” SDT owner Sidney Torres said. “Then at 4 a.m. each day, our crew will begin cleaning up Bourbon Street and interior French Quarter streets. We are deploying an additional 50 workers for Mardi Gras weekend for a total of 80 personnel dedicated to keeping the Quarter clean.”

SDT’s contract with the city includes a team of street sweepers who work days and nights picking up trash in the French Quarter.

“SDT is giving French Quarter residents what they paid for and more under our contract with the city of New Orleans. We’re committed to keeping the streets clean throughout the Carnival season so we can all enjoy a pleasant French Quarter during Mardi Gras,” Torres said.

Tourists and expats are flocking to the city’s favelas for ‘authenticity’ while fearful middle-class Brazilians stay away.