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Bernice Mosely is 82 and lives alone in New Orleans
in a shotgun double. On August 29, 2005, as Katrina hit the Gulf
Coast, the levees constructed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers failed
in five places and New Orleans filled with water.
One year ago Ms. Mosely was on the second floor of her neighborhood
church. Days later, she was helicoptered out. She was so dehydrated
she spent eight days in a hospital. Her next door neighbor, 89 years
old, stayed behind to care for his dog. He drowned in the eight
feet of floodwaters that covered their neighborhood.
Ms. Mosely now lives in her half-gutted house. She has no stove,
no refrigerator, and no air-conditioning. The bottom half of her
walls have been stripped of sheetrock and are bare wooden slats
from the floor halfway up the wall. Her food is stored in a styrofoam
cooler. Two small fans push the hot air around.
Two plaster Madonnas are in her tiny well-kept front yard. On a
blazing hot summer day, Ms. Mosely used her crutches to gingerly
come down off her porch to open the padlock on her fence. She has
had hip and knee replacement surgery. Ms. Mosely worked in a New
Orleans factory for over thirty years sewing uniforms. When she
retired she was making less than $4 an hour. “Retirement benefits?”
she laughs. She lives off social security. Her house had never flooded
before. Because of her tight budget tight, Ms. Mosely did not have
flood insurance.
Thousands of people like Ms. Mosely are back in their houses on
the Gulf Coast. They are living in houses that most people would
consider, at best, still under construction, or, at worst, uninhabitable.
Like Ms. Mosely, they are trying to make their damaged houses into
homes.
New Orleans is still in intensive care. If you have
seen recent television footage of New Orleans, you probably have
a picture of how bad our housing situation is. What you cannot see
is that the rest of our institutions, our water, our electricity,
our healthcare, our jobs, our educational system, our criminal justice
systems – are all just as broken as our housing. We remain in serious
trouble. Like us, you probably wonder where has the promised money
gone?
Ms. Mosely, who lives in the upper ninth ward, does not feel sorry
for herself at all. “Lots of people have it worse,” she says. “You
should see those people in the Lower Ninth and in St. Bernard and
in the East. I am one of the lucky ones.”
Housing
Hard as it is to believe, Ms. Mosely is right. Lots of people do
have it worse. Hundreds of thousands of people from the Gulf Coast
remain displaced. In New Orleans alone over two hundred thousand
people have not been able to make it home.
Homeowners in Louisiana, like Ms. Mosely, have not yet received
a single dollar of federal housing rebuilding assistance to rebuild
their severely damaged houses back into homes.
Over 100,000 homeowners in Louisiana are on a waiting
list for billions in federal rebuilding assistance through the Community
Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. So far, no money has been
distributed.
Renters, who comprised most of the people of New Orleans before
Katrina, are much worse off than homeowners. New Orleans lost more
than 43,000 rental units to the storm. Rents have skyrocketed in
the undamaged parts of the area, pricing regular working people
out of the market. The official rate of increase in rents is 39%.
In lower income neighborhoods, working people and the elderly report
rents are up much higher than that. Amy Liu of the Brookings Institute
said “Even people who are working temporarily for the rebuilding
effort are having trouble finding housing.”
Renters in Louisiana are not even scheduled to receive assistance
through the Louisiana CDBG program. Some developers will receive
assistance at some point, and when they do, some apartments will
be made available, but that is years away.
In the face of the worst affordable housing shortage since the end
of the Civil War, the federal government announced that it refused
to allow thousands of families to return to their public housing
units and was going to bulldoze 5000 apartments. Before Katrina,
over 5000 families lived in public housing – 88 percent women-headed
households, nearly all African American.
These policies end up with hundreds of thousands of people still
displaced from their homes. Though all ages, incomes and races are
displaced, some groups are impacted much more than others. The working
poor, renters, moms with kids, African-Americans, the elderly and
disabled – all are suffering disproportionately from displacement.
Race, poverty, age and physical ability are great indicators of
who has and who has made it home.
The statistics tell some of the story. The City of New Orleans says
it is half its pre-Katrina size – around 225,000 people. But the
U.S. Post Office estimates that only about 170,000 people have returned
to the city and 400,000 people have not returned to the metropolitan
area. The local electricity company reports only about 80,000 of
its previous 190,000 customers have returned.
Texas also tells part of the story. It is difficult to understand
the impact of Katrina without understanding the role of Texas –
home to many of our displaced. Houston officials say their city
is still home to about 150,000 storm evacuees – 90,000 in FEMA assisted
housing. Texas recently surveyed the displaced and reported that
over 250,000 displaced people live in the state and 41 percent of
these households report income of less than $500 per month. Eighty-one
percent are black, 59 percent are still jobless, most have at least
one child at home, and many have serious health issues.
Another 100,000 people displaced by Katrina are in
Georgia, more than 80,000 in metro Atlanta – most of whom also need
long-term housing and mental health services.
In Louisiana, there are 73,000 families in FEMA trailers. Most of
these trailers are 240 square feet of living space. More than 1600
families are still waiting for trailers in St. Bernard Parish. FEMA
trailers did not arrive in the lower ninth ward until June – while
the displaced waited for water and electricity to resume. Aloyd
Edinburgh, 75, lives in the lower ninth ward and just moved into
a FEMA trailer. His home flooded as did the homes of all five of
his children. “Everybody lost their homes,” he told the Times-Picayune,
“They just got trailers. All are rebuilding. They all have mortgages.
What else are they going to do?”
Until challenged, FEMA barred reporters from talking with people
in FEMA trailer parks without prior permission – forcing a reporter
out of a trailer in one park and residents back into their trailer
in another in order to stop interviews.
One person displaced into a FEMA village in Baton Rouge has been
organizing with her new neighbors. Air conditioners in two trailers
for the elderly have been out for over two weeks, yet no one will
fix them. The contractor who ran the village has been terminated
and another one is coming – no one knows who. She tells me, “My
neighbors are dismayed that no one in the city has stepped forward
to speak for us. We are “gone.” Who will speak for us? Does anyone
care?”
Trailers are visible signs of the displaced. Tens of thousands of
other displaced families are living in apartments across the country
month to month under continuous threats of FEMA cutoffs.
Numbers say something. But please remember behind every number,
there is a Ms. Mosely. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands,
of people each with a personal story like Ms. Mosely are struggling
to return, trying to make it home.
Water and Electricity
New Orleans continues to lose more water than it uses. The Times-Picayune
discovered that the local water system has to pump over 130 million
gallons a day so that 50 million gallons will come out. The rest
runs away in thousands of leaks in broken water lines, costing the
water system $2000,000 a day. The lack of water pressure, half that
of other cities, creates significant problems in consumption, sanitation,
air-conditioning, and fire prevention. In the lower 9th ward, the
water has still not been certified as safe to drink – one year later.
Only half the homes in New Orleans have electricity.
Power outages are common as hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs
have not been made because Entergy New Orleans is in bankruptcy.
Entergy is asking for a 25 percent increase in rates to help it
become solvent. Yet Entergy New Orleans’ parent company, Entergy
Corporation reported earnings of $282 million last year on revenue
of $2.6 billion.
Health and Healthcare
Early this month, on August 1, 2006, another Katrina victim was
found in her home in New Orleans, buried under debris. The woman
was the 28th person found dead since March 2006. A total of 1577
died in Louisiana as a result of Katrina.
A friend of mine, a lawyer with health insurance and a family physician,
went for an appointment recently at 11am. The office was so crowded
he had to sit out in the hall on the floor to wait his turn for
a seat in the waiting room. Three hours later he met his doctor.
The doctor thought might have a gall stone. The doctor tried to
set up an ultrasound. None were available. He ordered my friend
to the emergency room for an ultrasound. At 4pm my friend went to
the hospital emergency room, which was jammed with people: stroke
victims, young kids with injuries, people brought in by the police.
At 5am the next morning, my friend finished his ultrasound and went
home. If it takes a lawyer with health insurance that long to get
medical attention, consider what poor people without health insurance
are up against.
Half the hospitals open before Katrina are still closed. The state’s
biggest public healthcare provider, Charity Hospital, remains closed
and there are no current plans to reopen it anytime soon. Healthcare
could actually get worse. Dr. Mark Peters, board chair of the Metropolitan
Hospital Council of New Orleans said within the next two to three
months, “all the hospitals” will be looking seriously at cutbacks.
Why? Doctors and healthcare workers have left and there is surging
demand from the uninsured who before Katrina went through now non-existent
public healthcare. There is a shortage of nurses. Blue Cross Blue
Shield officials reported, “About three-quarters of the physicians
who had been practicing in New Orleans are no longer submitting
claims.”
There is no hospital at all in the city for psychiatric
patients. While the metropolitan area had about 450 psychiatric
beds before the storm, 80 are now available. The police are the
first to encounter those with mental illness. One recent Friday
afternoon, police dealt with two mental patients – one was throwing
bricks through a bar window, the other was found wandering naked
on the interstate.
The elderly are particularly vulnerable. Over 70 percent of the
deaths from Katrina were people over 60 years old. No one knows
how many seniors have not made it back home. Esther Bass, 69, told
the New York Times, after months of searching for a place to come
home to New Orleans, “If there are apartments, I can’t afford them.
And they say there will be senior centers, but they’re still being
built. They can’t even tell you what year they’ll be finished.”
As of late July 2006, most nursing homes in the 12 parish Gulf Coast
area of Louisiana are still not fully prepared to evacuate residents
in the face of a hurricane.
The healthcare community has been rocked by the arrest of a doctor
and two nurses after the Louisiana Attorney General accused them
of intentionally ending the lives of four patients trapped in a
now-closed local hospital. The accusations now go before a local
grand jury which is not expected to make a decision on charges for
several more months. The case is complicated for several reasons.
Most important is that the doctor and nurses are regarded as some
of the most patient-oriented and caring people of the entire hospital
staff. It is undisputed that they worked day and night to save hundreds
of patients from the hospital during the days it was without water,
electricity or food. Others say that entire hospital and many others
were abandoned by the government and that is what the attorney general
should be investigating. The gravity of the charges, though, is
giving everyone in the community pause. This, like so much else,
will go on for years before there is any resolution.
Jobs
Before Katrina, there were over 630,000 workers in the metropolitan
New Orleans area – now there are slightly over 400,000. Over 18,000
businesses suffered “catastrophic” damage in Louisiana. Nearly one
in four of the displaced workers is still unemployed. Education
and healthcare have lost the most employees. Most cannot return
because there is little affordable housing, child care, public transportation
and public health care.
Women workers, especially African American women
workers, continue to bear the heaviest burden of harm from the storm.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports
that the percentage of women in the New Orleans workforce has dropped.
The number of single mother families in New Orleans has dropped
from 51,000 to 17,000. Low-income women remain displaced because
of the lack of affordable housing and traditional discrimination
against women in the construction industry.
Tens of thousands of migrant workers, roughly half undocumented,
have come to the Gulf Coast to work in the recovery. Many were recruited.
Most workers tell of being promised good wages and working conditions
and plenty of work. Some paid money up front for the chance to come
to the area to work. Most of these promises were broken. A tour
of the area reveals many Latino workers live in houses without electricity,
other live out of cars. At various places in the city whole families
are living in tents. Two recently released human rights reports
document the problems of these workers.
Immigrant workers are doing the dirtiest, most dangerous work, in
the worst working conditions. Toxic mold, lead paint, fiberglass,
and who knows what other chemicals are part of daily work. Safety
equipment is not always provided. Day laborers, a new category of
workers in New Orleans, are harassed by the police and periodic
immigration raids. Wage theft is widespread as employers often do
not pay living wages, and sometimes do not pay at all. Some of the
powers try to pit local workers against new arrivals – despite the
fact that our broken Gulf Coast clearly needs all the workers we
can get.
Public transportation to and from low-wage jobs is more difficult.
Over 200 more public transit employees have been terminated – cutting
employment from over 1300 people pre-Katrina to about 700 now.
Single working parents seeking childcare are in trouble. Before
Katrina, New Orleans had 266 licensed day care centers. Mississippi
State University surveyed the city in July 2006 and found 80 percent
of the day care centers and over 75 percent of the 1912 day care
spots are gone. Only one-third of the Head Start centers that were
open pre-Katrina survived.
Public Education
Before Katrina, 56,000 students were enrolled in over 100 public
schools in New Orleans. At the end of the school year there were
only 12,500. Right after the storm, the local school board gave
many of the best public schools to charter groups. The State took
over almost all the rest. By the end of the school year, four schools
were operated by the pre-Katrina school board, three by the State,
and eighteen were new charter schools.
After thirty-two years of collective bargaining, the union contract
with the New Orleans public school teachers elapsed and was not
renewed and 7500 employees were terminated.
For this academic year, no one knows for certain
how many students will enroll in New Orleans public schools. Official
estimates vary between a low of 22,000 and a high of 34,000.
There will be five traditional locally supervised public schools,
eighteen schools operated by the State, and thirty-four charter
schools. As of July 1, not a single teacher had been hired for fifteen
of the state-run schools. As of August 9, 2006, the Times-Picayune
reported there are no staff at all identified to educate students
with discipline problems or other educational issues that require
special attention.
Whatever the enrollment in the new public school system is in the
fall, it will not give an accurate indication of how many children
have returned. Why? Many students in the public charter schools
were in private schools before the hurricane.
Criminal Legal System
Consider also our criminal legal system. Chaka Davis was arrested
on misdemeanor charges in October 2005 and jailed at the Greyhound
station in New Orleans in October of 2005.
Under Louisiana law, he was required to be formally charged within
30 days of arrest or released from custody. Because of a filing
error he was lost in the system. He was never charged, never went
to court, and never saw a lawyer in over 8 months – even though
the maximum penalty for conviction for one of his misdemeanors was
only 6 months. His mother found him in an out of town jail and brought
his situation to the attention of the public defenders. He was released
the next day.
Crime is increasingly a problem. In July, New Orleans lost almost
as many people to murder as in July of 2005, with only 40 percent
of the population back. There are many young people back in town
while their parents have not returned. State and local officials
called in the National Guard to patrol lightly populated areas so
local police could concentrate on high-crime, low-income neighborhoods.
Arrests have soared, but the number of murders remain high. Unfortunately,
several of the National Guard have been arrested for criminal behavior
as well – two for looting liquor from a home, two others for armed
robbery at a traffic stop.
Criminal Court District Judge Arthur Hunter has declared
the current criminal justice system shameful and unconstitutional
and promises to start releasing inmates awaiting trial on recognizance
bonds on the one year anniversary of Katrina.  The
system is nearly paralyzed by a backlog of over 6000 cases. There
are serious evidence problems because of resigned police officers,
displaced victims, displaced witnesses, and flooded evidence rooms.
The public defender system, which was down to 4 trial attorneys
for months, is starting to rebuild.
“After 11 months of waiting, 11 months of meetings, 11 months of
idle talk, 11 months without a sensible recovery plan and 11 months
tolerating those who have the authority to solve, correct and fix
the problem but either refuse, fail or are just inept, then necessary
action must be taken to protect the constitutional rights of people,’
said Hunter.
In the suburbs across the lake, Sheriff Jack Strain told the media
on TV that he was going to protect his jurisdiction from “thugs”
and “trash” migrating from closed public housing projects in New
Orleans. He went on to promise that every person who wore “dreadlocks
or che-wee hairstyles” could expect to be stopped by law enforcement.
The NAACP and the ACLU called in the U.S. Justice Department and
held a revival-like rally at a small church just down the road from
the jail. Though the area is over 80 percent white, the small group
promised to continue to challenge injustice no matter how powerful
the person committing the injustice. Recently, the same law enforcement
people set up a roadblock and were stopping only Latino people to
check IDs and insurance. I guess to prove they were not only harassing
black people?
Finally, a grand jury has started looking into actions by other
suburban police officers who blocked a group of people, mostly black,
from escaping the floodwaters of New Orleans by walking across the
Mississippi River bridge. The suburban police forced the crowd to
flee back across the two mile bridge by firing weapons into the
air.
This is the criminal legal system in the New Orleans area in 2006.
None dare call it criminal justice.
International Human Rights
The Gulf Coast has gained new respect for international human rights
because they provide a more appropriate way to look at what should
be happening. The fact that there is an international human right
of internally displaced people to return to their homes and a responsibility
on government to help is heartening even though yet unfulfilled.
The United Nations has blasted the poor U.S. response to Katrina.
The UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva accepted a report from Special
Reporter Arjun Sengupta who visited New Orleans in fall of 2005
and concluded: “The Committee…remains concerned about information
that poor people, and in particular African-Americans, were disadvantaged
by the rescue and evacuation plans implemented when Hurricane Katrina
hit the United States of America, and continue to be disadvantaged
under the reconstruction plans.”
Asian tsunami relief workers who visited New Orleans over the summer
were shocked at the lack of recovery. Somsook Boonyabancha, director
of the Community Organisations Development Institute in Thailand,
told Reuters she was shocked at the lack of progress in New Orleans.
“I’m surprised to see why the reconstruction work is so slow, because
this is supposed to be one of the most rich and efficient countries
in the world. It is starting at such a slow speed, incredibly slow
speed.”
Warnings to the Displaced
Local United Way officials see the lack of housing, healthcare and
jobs and conclude that low-income people should seriously consider
not returning to New Orleans anytime soon.
United Way wrote: “Most of these people want to come
home, but if they do not have a recovery plan they need to stay
where they are. Some of these evacuees think that they can come
back and stay with families and in a few weeks have a place of their
own. But the reality is that they may end up living with those relatives
for years. Sending people back without a realistic plan may have
serious consequences: the crowding of families into small apartments/homes/FEMA
trailers is causing mental health problems – stress, abuse, violence,
and even death – and this problem is going to get worse, not better.
Also, when the elderly (and others) are those returning and living
in these conditions, their health is impacted and then the lack
of medical facilities and hospital beds is a problem. Again the
result may be death….Basically if an evacuee says they have a place
to stay – like with relatives – those communities will give them
bus fare back or pay for U-hauls. If an evacuee was a renter here
and they want to return they should be told to plan on returning
in 3-7 years, and in the meantime stay there, get a job, and be
much better off.”
FEMA officials in Austin are also warning people
about returning to New Orleans. They wrote: “Before you return….New
Orleans is a changing place…you should consider the conditions you
may be returning to. Many neighborhood schools will not be open
by August. Your children may have to travel some distance to get
to school…Grocery and supermarkets have been slow to return to many
neighborhoods. Sometimes there aren’t enough residents back in your
neighborhood for a store to open and be profitable. You may have
to travel a large distance to groceries. Walking to the store might
not be an option…If you or your family members require regular medical
attention, or if you are pregnant or nursing, the services you received
before the storm may be scattered and in very different and distant
locations. Depending on your medical needs, you may have to drive
across the river or even as far away as Baton Rouge…If you or your
family members have allergies, remember that there is lots of dust
and mold still in the city. While you may have suffered from allergies
before the storm, please consider that being in the city will only
worsen your allergies. If you have asthma, other respiratory or
cardiac conditions, or immune system problems, you would be safer
staying out of flooded areas due to the mold, particles and dust
in the air. If you must return to the city, wear an approved respirator
when working in moldy or dusty areas. …Additionally, police, fire
and emergency personnel are stretched to their limits…If you own
a car, gas and service stations are limited in many areas. You may
need to purchase a gas can in the event you cannot get gas near
your home…Public transportation (busses) are also limited and do
not operate in all areas….Available and affordable housing is extremely
rare. Waiting lists for apartments are as large as 300 on the list,
depending on how many bedrooms you need. Living inside your home
could be dangerous if mold has set in of if your utilities are not
in top working condition…Living in New Orleans may be easier said
than done until we have fully recovered from the storm.”
This is New Orleans, one year after Katrina.
Where Did the Money Go?
Everyone who visits New Orleans asks the same question that locals
ask – where is the money? Congress reportedly appropriated over
$100 billion to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Over $50 billion was allocated
to temporary and long-term housing. Just under $30 billion was for
emergency response and Department of Defense spending. Over $18
billion was for State and local response and the rebuilding of infrastructure.
$3.6 billion was for health, social services and job training and
$3.2 for non-housing cash assistance. $1.9 billion was allocated
for education and $1.2 billion for agriculture.
One hour in New Orleans shows the check must still be in the
mail.
Not a single dollar in federal housing rehab money
has made it into a hand in Louisiana. Though Congress has allocated
nearly $10 billion in Community Development Block Grants, the State
of Louisiana is still testing the program and has not yet distributed
dollar number one.
A lot of media attention has gone to the prosecution of people who
wrongfully claimed benefits of $2000 or more after the storm. Their
fraud is despicable. It harms those who are still waiting for assistance
from FEMA.
But, be clear - these little $2000 thieves are minnows swimming
on the surface. There are many big savage sharks below. Congress
and the national media have so far been frustrated in their quest
to get real answers to where the millions and billions went. How
much was actually spent on FEMA trailers? How much did the big contractors
take off the top and then subcontract out the work? Who were the
subcontractors for the multi-million dollar debris removal and reconstruction
contracts?
As Corpwatch says in their recent report, “Many of the same ‘disaster
profiteers’ and government agencies that mishandled the reconstruction
of Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for the failure of ‘reconstruction’
of the Gulf Coast region. The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton
are using the very same ‘contract vehicles’ in the Gulf Coast as
they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are ‘indefinite delivery,
indefinite quantity’ open-ended ‘contingency’ contracts that are
being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out
local companies. These are also ‘cost-plus’ contracts that allow
them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive
to overspend.”
We do know billions of dollars in no-bid FEMA contracts went to
Bechtel Corporation, the Shaw Group, CH2M Hill, and Fluor immediately
after Katrina hit. Riley Bechtel, CEO of Bechtel Corporation, served
on President Bush’s Export Council during 2003-2004. A lobbyist
for the Shaw Group, Joe Allbaugh, is a former FEMA Director and
friend of President Bush. The President and Group Chief Executive
of the International Group at CH2MHill is Robert Card, appointed
by President Bush as undersecretary to the US Department of Energy
until 2004. Card also worked at CH2M Hill before signing up with
President Bush. Fluor, whose work in Iraq was slowing down, is one
of the big winners of FEMA work and its stock is up 65 percent since
it started Katrina work.
Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota has raised many protests and
questions over inflated prices. “It is hard to overstate the incompetence
involved in all of these contracts – we have repeatedly asked them
for information and you get nothing.” Republican U.S. Representative
Charles Bustany, who represents an area heavily damaged by Hurricane
Rita, asked FEMA for reasons why the decision was made to stop funding
100 percent of the cost of debris removal in his district. FEMA
refused to tell him. He then filed a Freedom of Information request
to get the information, and was again refused. When he asked to
appeal their denial, he was told that there were many appeals ahead
of his and he would have to wait.
If a US Senator and a local U.S. Republican Representative cannot
get answers from FEMA, how much accountability can the people of
the Gulf Coast expect? There are many other examples of fraud, waste
and patronage.
How did a company that did not own a truck get a contract for debris
removal worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The Miami Herald
reported that the single biggest receiver of early Katrina federal
contracts was Ashbritt, Inc. of Pompano Beach, FL, which received
over $579 million in contracts for debris removal in Mississippi
from Army Corps of Engineers.
The paper reported that the company does not own a single dumptruck!
All they do is subcontract out the work. Ashbritt, however, had
recently dumped $40,000 into the lobbying firm of Barbour, Griffith
& Rogers, which had been run by Mississippi Governor and former
National GOP Chair Haley Barbour. The owners of Ashbritt also trucked
$50,000 over to the Republican National Committee in 2004.
How did a company that filed for bankruptcy the year before and
was not licensed to build trailers get a $200 million contract for
trailers? Circle B Enterprises of Georgia was awarded $287 million
in contracts by FEMA for temporary housing. At the time, that was
the seventh highest award of Katrina money in the country. According
to the Washington Post, Circle B was not even being licensed to
build homes in its own state of Georgia and filed for bankruptcy
in 2003. The company does not even have a website.
FEMA spent $7 million to build a park for 198 trailers in Morgan
City Louisiana – almost 2 hours away from New Orleans.
Construction was completed in April. Three months later only 20
of the trailers were occupied. One displaced New Orleans resident
who lives there has to walk three miles to the nearest grocery.
Hurricanes are now a booming billion dollar business. No wonder
there is a National Hurricane Conference for private companies to
show off their wares – from RVs to portable cell phone towers to
port-a-potties. One long time provider was quoted by the Miami Herald
at the conference that there are all kinds of new people in the
field - 'Some folks here said, `Man, this is huge business; this
is my new business. I'm not in the landscaping business anymore,
I'm going to be a hurricane debris contractor.' "
On the local level, we are not any better.
One year after Katrina the City of New Orleans still does not have
a comprehensive rebuilding plan. The first plan by advisors to the
Mayor was shelved before the election. A city council plan was then
started and the state and federal government mandated yet another
process that may or may not include some of the recommendations
of the prior two processes. One of the early advisors from the Urban
Land Institute, John McIlwain, blasted the delays in late July.
“It’s virtually a city with a city administration and its worse
than ever…You need a politician, a leader that is willing to make
tough decisions and articulate to people why these decisions are
made, which means everyone is not going to be happy.” Without major
changes at City Hall the City will have miles of neglected neighborhoods
for decades. “We’re talking Dresden after World War II.”
Signs of Hope
Despite the tragedies that continue to plague our Gulf Coast, there
is hope. Between the rocks of hardship, green life continues to
sprout defiantly.
Fifteen feet of water washed through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Elementary School for Science and Technology in the lower 9th Ward.
When people were finally able to get into the building, the bodies
of fish were found on the second floor. Parents and over 90% of
the teachers organized a grass-roots effort to put their school
back together. Their first attempts to gut and repair the school
by locals and volunteers from Common Ground were temporarily stopped
by local school officials and the police. Even after the gutting
was allowed to resume, the community was told that the school could
not reopen due to insufficient water pressure in the neighborhood.
But the teachers and parents are pressing ahead anyway in a temporary
location until they can get back in their school. Assistant Principal
Joseph Recasner told the Times-Picayune: “Rebuilding our school
says this is a very special community, tied together by more than
location, but by spirituality, by bloodlines, and by a desire to
come back.”
New Orleans is fortunate to have a working newspaper again. The
Times-Picayune won a well-deserved Pulitzer for its Katrina coverage.
Its staff continues to provide quality documentation of the Gulf
Coast region’s efforts to repair and rebuild.
The New Orleans Vietnamese people continue to inspire us. They were
among the very first group back and they have joined forces to care
for their elders, rebuild their community church, and work together
in a most cooperative manner to resurrect their community. Recently
they took legal and direct action to successfully stop the placement
of a gigantic landfill right next to their community. Their determination
and sense of community-building is a good model for us all.
The only Republican running for Congress in New Orleans is blasting
President Bush over failed Katrina promises. Joe Lavigne is running
radio ads saying, “Sadly, George Bush has forgotten us. He’s spending
too much time and money on Iraq and not enough living up to his
promise to rebuild New Orleans. His priorities are wrong. I’m running
for Congress to hold President Bush accountable.” Maybe other Republicans
will join in.
Tens of thousands of volunteers from every walk of life have joined
with the people of the Gulf Coast to help repair and rebuild. Lawyers
are giving free help to Katrina victims who need legal help to rebuild
their homes. Medical personnel staff free clinics. Thousands of
college, high school and even some grade school students have traveled
to the area to help families gut their devastated homes. Churches,
temples, and mosques from across the world have joined with sisters
and brothers in New Orleans to repair and rebuild.
Despite open attempts to divide them, black and brown and white
and yellow workers have started to talk to each other. Small groups
have started to work together to fight for living wages and safe
jobs for all workers. Thousands came together for a rally for respectful
treatment for Latino and immigrant workers. Seasoned civil rights
activists welcomed the new movement and pledged to work together.
Ultimately, the people of the Gulf Coast are the greatest sign of
hope. Despite setbacks that people in the US rarely suffer, people
continue to help each other and fight for their right to return
home and the right to live in the city they love.
On Sunday morning, a 70 year old woman told a friend where her children
are. “They are all scattered,” she sighed. “One is in Connecticut,
one in Rhode Island, one in Austin.” When he asked about her, she
said, “Me? I am in Texas right now. I am back here to visit my 93
year old mother and go to the second line of Black Men of Labor
on Labor Day. But I’m coming back. Yes indeed. I will return. I’m
coming back.”
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola
University New Orleans. You can reach him at [email protected].
For more information visit www.justiceforneworleans.org |
