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Help on Hold, Lives at Stake
Almost a month to the day following the devastating landfall of Hurricane Katrina, I made my third of many trips to the Gulf region of Mississippi. I was there to meet with members of the Operation Assist medical relief team who had been working nonstop to treat the unending flow of displaced and disoriented people who needed medical care. Operation Assist is the collaboration singer-songwriter Paul Simon and I organized between the Children's Health Fund and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health to bring emergency relief to people who had survived the storm. On the way from the Biloxi-Gulfport airport, I asked to be driven by some areas that had been particularly hard-hit. I had been to these neighborhoods before but was anxious to see what progress had been made.
We drove down I-90, heading into D'Iberville, a community of some 7,500 citizens, with a Wal-Mart, a Winn-Dixie supermarket, and a couple of dollar stores. The weather was balmy and slightly overcast. It felt like a normal day in a typical small southern town—until we looked out the window. In some neighborhoods, whole blocks had been flattened. Storefronts had been ripped off the buildings and overhead signs were left dangling from one corner of the store or had been blown away entirely. There were about 1,830 homes in D'Iberville before Katrina came crashing through town. In Katrina's wake some 1,250 homes had sustained wind or water damage. Nearly 400 had been destroyed.
In 2000, the median income for residents of D'Iberville was about $34,000 a year, about 20 percent under the national average of about $42,000. People were more or less middle class and mostly white, with fewer than one in five residents African American or Vietnamese. Many families were living at or below the poverty level; few had substantial investments or savings—in other words, little or no financial safety net was readily available. The storm damage, the disruption of the social networks, and vastly diminished public services were taking a toll on the community.
On my first visit, just days after the storm, I was overwhelmed by the extent of the damage, and perplexed and infuriated by so little evidence of any organized governmental response—or even presence. Now, just four weeks later, it seemed that nothing much had changed.
I saw high in the still standing trees of a destroyed middle-class community what seemed to be some toys and children's shredded clothes. Sifting through the wreckage of what had been a home, a family was looking for something to salvage. A few crews of Central American workers were beginning to reconstruct a roof or a house here and there, but in general, time seemed to have stopped altogether.
In a low-income housing project, children surrounded us and clamored for the bottled water and granola bars we had brought. I asked a mother if FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) or the Red Cross had been there. She said, "Not here. We have to send somebody out every day to find the closest Red Cross center, where we can get water for the community. It's usually a ten- or fifteen-minute drive from here. And we still don't have electricity or fresh water." When I asked if the children were going to school, she said, "Some days."
This visit and every subsequent one to the Gulf reinforced what we have now learned: the emergency response to the hurricane's damage in the Gulf was woefully, painfully insufficient. And as bad as things were in Mississippi, the situation was even worse in neighboring Louisiana, where, even six months after the storm, the news remained disheartening, an endless stream of unanticipated consequences and unresolved problems. Well beyond the acute emergency phase of the initial response, the services and relief efforts seem to be struggling as much as ever in New Orleans and throughout Louisiana. Information is faulty and incomplete. Issues that should have been thought about long before the disaster struck have become intractable barriers to meeting the needs of people who have been through a hellish combination of natural violence and bureaucratic blunders.
Gregory Kutz, the Government Accountability Office auditor who led an investigation into use of federal funds for relief, testified on February 14, 2006, before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that funds wasted in the Katrina aftermath will certainly amount to millions of dollars, and "it could be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars." And an audit by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led by Inspector General Richard L. Skinner and released on April 14, 2006, reaffirmed the chaotic squandering of taxpayer funds. No example better typifies this waste than the FEMA-administered debit card program that gave evacuees cards with $2,000 balances intended to purchase emergency provisions. The debit cards came with no oversight and no guidelines. As a result, the cards were used to purchase frivolous items unrelated to evacuation needs including adult entertainment, gambling, a $450 tattoo, and a diamond engagement ring for $1,100. Moreover, qualification for the cards required very little verification. Consequently, 900,000 of the 2.5 million cards distributed went to people with fake addresses and duplicate or fake Social Security numbers. A total of $24 million worth of cards were given out, with little hope that the total will ever be accounted for.
The basic challenge was finding housing for the estimated 300,000 families whose homes Katrina wrecked. As I write, the hard-hit neighborhoods of New Orleans remain virtually unchanged since the day after the floodwaters retreated. The 300,000 homes destroyed or made uninhabitable represent at least $67 billion in losses. This devastation surpasses the combined damage from the four largest hurricanes in 2004 (Charley, Francis, Ivan, and Jeanne), which ruined 85,000 homes. There are still blocks and blocks of irreversibly damaged houses, their interior walls covered with black mold, and thousands of metric tons of debris and garbage still filling the streets. So much of the mess remains frozen in time that a thriving new business has emerged: entrepreneurs, like the Gray Line bus tour that charges $35 a head, have been taking gawking tourists to see what Mother Nature has wrought and human beings cannot seem to fix.
At the very time when the federal government has begun to cut off funds supporting displaced families being sheltered in hotels throughout—and beyond—Louisiana, thousands of FEMA-purchased mobile homes languish in fields and empty lots in Florida and Arkansas, undelivered and unused. This fact came out in a CNN interview with a FEMA official in Arkansas. The backdrop was the surreal image of a sea of 11,000 empty, brand new white mobile homes.
The reporter asked, "Why aren't these trailers being used to house evacuees in Louisiana? Why are they still here?" The FEMA official replied, "It's hard to find places to put them in Louisiana where the right hookups—like electricity and water—are available." Later in the interview, the FEMA official, referring to New Orleans, offered, "Mobile homes can't be put in floodplains."
The need for temporary housing is still greatest in the neighborhoods that have been evacuated. Workers are needed to clean up and rebuild New Orleans. And employees are needed to restart the businesses struggling to regain their footing. But for workers to return, their families have to have somewhere to live and to go back to school.
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