[FONT=Verdana]New Orleans[/FONT][FONT=Verdana]' post-Katrina tab for debris removal is about to spike because the city failed to take steps that would have led to the demolition of irreparable houses entirely at the federal government's expense. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]After June 30, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will pick up only 90 percent of the cost of demolishing and hauling away hopelessly storm-battered homes. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]Nine months after levees and floodwalls failed, inundating most of the city, [/FONT][FONT=Verdana]New Orleans[/FONT][FONT=Verdana] has put about 2,100 properties on the demolition list, many of them houses that had toppled into streets and were blocking traffic. [/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana]But with little more than a month to go before the city would be forced to pick up part of the tab, the number cleared away stands at 119, all of them in the Lower 9th Ward. Another 1,500 sites there remain to be cleared. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]The 119 properties were nothing more than shattered piles of rubble, the worst of the short list for demolition. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]Another batch of about 114 shattered structures can't be touched until a 30-day notification period is up, which will be in two weeks. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]The Lower 9th remains a neighborhood transformed into ruins, part junkyard of homes and part burial ground. Axes in hand, firefighters last week made yet another round searching for human remains, a step that necessarily precedes demolition and debris clearance. Government-hired contractors have only scratched the surface of the staggering demolition problem facing [/FONT][FONT=Verdana]New Orleans[/FONT][FONT=Verdana]. In essence, they haven't even started. The soonest that the Army Corps of Engineers could start tearing down "imminent-danger structures," meaning homes either collapsed or about to, is the end of June, FEMA officials said. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]Notifying the owners [/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana]A federal lawsuit forced the city in January to follow strict guidelines in notifying property owners before they sent in the hard-hat crews. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]Several long lists of legal notices have run in The Times-Picayune. Another batch will be printed in the newspaper's classifieds section today. But crews can't touch those sites for 30 business days, just missing the June 30 deadline for full payment by FEMA. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]As the city slowly identifies more ruined homes needing removal, the clock ticks and the criteria set by federal law work against it. "There are structures that won't meet our criteria, and the city's going to have to bear those costs," said Barb Sturner, a FEMA spokeswoman for the demolition program in [/FONT][FONT=Verdana]New Orleans[/FONT][FONT=Verdana]. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]FEMA and the corps will clear away only homes that pose a danger to public safety. The misconception that the feds will perform wholesale demolition is a falsehood. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]"A lot of people think the government is demolishing houses for free," Sturner said. "That's not the way it works. The program we are funding is not designed to be a tool for people to clear their lots and start over. It's designed to remove imminent threats to public safety. It's designed to get rid of the danger." [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]FEMA must obey federal laws on what can be demolished. The agency already is going beyond its usual call of duty by taking on debris -- once homes -- on private property, Sturner said. [/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana]"We will allow private-property debris removal, which is anything on the outside of the property," Sturner said. "We don't go into people's houses." [/FONT]