The Contractor Who Came Back to Ninth Ward

When Earl Thibodaux retired from thirty-two years of commercial construction in Baton Rouge, his wife expected him to finally sit still. Instead, Earl loaded his truck and drove south to New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, where houses still sat rotting a decade after Katrina. He didn't start a nonprofit. He didn't launch a crowdfunding campaign. He just knocked on Miss Velma Washington's door — a seventy-eight-year-old woman living in a house with a collapsed back wall covered by a blue tarp — and said, "Ma'am, I can fix that."…