Do the collapse

Turns out they have to blow more stuff up. Terrific way to ring in the New Year. Don't worry. The football and tourism related events will still happen, of course.

City officials presented a timeline for when the implosion of the failed Hard Rock Hotel construction site would happen shortly after they announced the demolition of the building would move forward at a press conference Tuesday evening.

Fire Superintendent Tim McConnell told media the building should be imploded in nine weeks, with recovery of the bodies of two still-missing workers and further investigation to follow. A three-month cleanup will also take place after the planned implosion.

The only factor that could move the demolition past the nine weeks is the College Football Playoffs and New Year's Eve events, McConnell said. "We will not let it interfere with CFP," McConnell said.

This also says they're going to stabilize the "Alpha" crane that has been dangling over Canal Street since the last time they set off explosions down there.  That one collapsed into the now-condemned building while the other broke in half and nose-dived into Rampart Street where it punctured a sewer line.

This result was different from the elegant "umbrella closing"  effect officials said they were going for beforehand. Nonetheless, we were all told immediately afterward that the crashing and dangling was, in fact, exactly what they meant.  McBride also noticed this discrepancy and points us to this video where the contractor continues to say that it happened just like they planned.  McConnell even said at the time that after the demolitions, the dangling Alpha crane was "very stable." It's weird though that the thing they did on purpose just left something that still needs to be stabilized hanging off the side of the building for a month. Sounds fishy to us. But it was good enough for the sages at Georges Media where the moral of the story was, as usual, everyone in charge is doing a great job.

For a different take on that, please see this month's Antigravity where Jules Bentley offers this counterpoint. 

It’s not surprising that Mayor Cantrell now wants to raze the whole structure to the ground, since this murder monument indicts her entire political class. What a towering tribute to its enablers the Hard Rock Hotel presents, a great slumping sundial whose gnomon points to their collective moral lodestar, unquenchable greed. It celebrates the greed not just of its developers but all who collaborated on, encouraged, profited from, and rubber-stamped this deathtrap. The list of the guilty is long, and every name on it is written with the blood of the building’s laborers—for Mammon, whose temple this is, desires human sacrifice.

Yeah you are going to want to read the rest of that. Jules is probably the only writer in town who can so, um, lovingly pull together the threads of New Orleans power, politics and exploitation that run through this story.  (Others who lack the patience and craft can only blurt stuff out into the void.)

I do feel compelled to add one bit, though.  In this passage, where Jules is describing one of the Kailas family's several scandalous entanglements with the corrupt polity, we learn what became of their Bayou St. John home.

Because the Kailas family is one of metro New Orleans’ biggest landowners and developers, almost everyone’s in bed with them, including former Governor Jindal, whose various campaigns they provided with tens of thousands of dollars of donations, monetary and in-kind.

In just one year under Jindal’s tenure (2011-2012), the Kailas-owned Lago Construction firm got more than $1.5 million of taxpayer money through state contracts—contracts which, thanks to the hard work of WWL’s investigative team and David Hammer, we now know were variously improper and fraudulent. On dates they charged taxpayers for long days of public service work, Lago employees were instead laboring on the Kailas family’s multi-million dollar Bayou St. John mansion. You won’t find them there now, alas. In 2016, they sold that property to Metro Disposal CEO Jimmie Woods for ten dollars.

Woods immediately put the Kailas house to use as a venue for political fundraising events. This one was for JP Morrell who was considering a run for mayor at the time.  Look at all the folks who showed up.

In addition to Gov. Edwards, the $250-per-person fundraiser at businessman Jimmie Woods’ home on the bank of Bayou St. John drew a host of other Democratic officials — U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond and Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, who is running for U.S. Senate, as well as City Councilman Jared Brossett and current and former members of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration. The packed event suggested an unusually strong coalition around a term-limited state senator, and Morrell acknowledged there is widespread speculation around who will run in New Orleans’ upcoming mayoral race.

Not long after that Woods hosted a similar event for Karen Carter-Peterson.  She didn't run for mayor either. But that's not the point here so much as it is that, politically speaking, New Orleans is a small town where the money does seem to go around and around in a very tight circle. You can get a pretty good glimpse of it behind just about any building you knock over.