Long haul, slow crawl

Cleaning up New Orleans—and other hurricane-ravaged cities—is a door-to-door job, and it takes a lot of bleach | Jamie Dean

NEW ORLEANS -- The New Jersey police officers pounding sludge-smeared pavement and searching water-logged homes each day had doubts about New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's plans for repopulating the city long before Hurricane Rita put an end to them.

"The scope and scale of this is unlike anything I've ever seen," said detective David Pereda of the Clifton, N.J., police department. Coming from Mr. Pereda, that's no embellishment: He is part of a 153-man law enforcement task force, all first responders to the World Trade Center attacks.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sent for the officers to help with New Orleans rescue, recovery, and cleanup just after hurricane waters overflowed the city and overwhelmed local law enforcement. Their experience and grit are well-known; members of the New Jersey unit were busy at Ground Zero with search and rescue when President Bush visited the rubble just days after the attack. Eyewitnesses to the country's worst man-made disaster in memory, the New Jersey cops find themselves four years later the daily patrolmen in its worst natural disaster.