April 30, 2010

Sucker Punched Very Slickly

Filed under: Politics,Science — PolitiCalypso @ 10:27 am

As any writer of Southern literature would tell you, the central Gulf Coast is a tragic place. It is the final destination of many terrible hurricanes, including Katrina, Ivan, Camille, Betsy, Audrey, Andrew, and a plethora of unnamed hurricanes in the early 20th century that caused devastation equivalent to that of their named brethren. It has been and continues to be the laboratory for the experiments of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, which incidentally are at least peripherally to blame for the damage from Katrina in New Orleans. The Gulf of Mexico itself has had a biological “dead zone” for several years from chemical runoff in the Mississippi River. Coastal wildlife, too, is constantly under threat, with various birds and seashore creatures perennially on the endangered species list and the coastal wetlands under assault. The threat of inundation from sea level rises from global warming looms in the future.

And yet, the coast has managed to maintain a certain charm. Visiting some areas is like living in a Jimmy Buffett song. Taking a tour of historical sites—those that have survived the onslaught of hurricanes—brings one into a bygone era of simplicity, a certain kind of elegance (even for the more rustic historical sites), and closeness to nature. Visiting one of the many wildlife sanctuaries on this coast and observing the unique plants and animals that live there can make an environmentalist out of anyone but the most hardened plutocrats, even though (or especially since?) such jaunts are darkened by the inevitable signs indicating that some creature is critically endangered. And anyone who has ever taken a walk on the white beaches of Alabama or far western Florida at night can attest to the subtropical marine beauty of the Gulf. The coast is its own travel advertisement.

Were it not for the hurricanes, and the fact that they have a much higher tendency to make landfall at devastating intensities on the Gulf Coast (and southeast Florida) than the subtropical Atlantic coast, I would consider living as close to the shore as I could manage.

But once again, the Gulf Coast has been sucker punched.

I’m not going to go into depth about the science of this oil spill or the technological requirements of damage control. Mechanical engineering and petroleum engineering are not my specialties, nor have I read much of anything about them in my life, and unlike many bloggers, I’m not inclined to make an ignorant-sounding fool out of myself by pretending that I know something about a topic when all I’ve done is to read about it on the news and maybe check a Wiki article or two. Not to mention that I, quite frankly, no longer believe one word coming out of the mouths of anyone protecting BP, the various supporting industries such as Halliburton (though I haven’t believed them in eight years), or the White House. You simply cannot believe any source except scientists if it has an agenda to protect that relates to the topic at hand, and sometimes even certain scientists lose sight of the fact that they are supposed to accept the truth even if it is not what they wanted. This is going to be an absolute disaster; bits of information are trickling out now to indicate just how thoroughly these entities tried to lie to the American public about the scope of this, and like the spill itself, the trickles are only going to get worse.

It is incredibly hubristic to imagine that one could prevent the truth from getting out about something as large-scale and catastrophic as this, but power knows no boundaries in its arrogance. Though history is littered with the figurative corpses of former power-brokers who thought they could get away with massive lies, each new set thinks it is invincible until put to the test. BP’s reputation is shot. And the White House may well try to do damage control by implementing a temporary ban on offshore drilling, but that does not erase the fact that the president broke a major campaign promise by getting out there and supporting this type of thing in the first place and then sent a spokesman to say that the spill didn’t change his mind. (The time to act like George W. Bush is when you are trying to get a piece of legislation passed in a non-watered-down form, not when you have just witnessed the American Gulf Coast experience a disaster on your watch that could have been either mitigated or entirely prevented. Heck of a job.) People will pay a price for dishonesty.

As for the “progressive” South-haters who will say in so many words that the people of the Southern coast (we’ll ignore the innocent wildlife for now) got what they deserved for voting for politicians that support offshore drilling, well, to dignify this bile with a response is beneath me.

The only remotely positive outcome I can think of is that of disaster-as-catalyst. It is far past time for the world’s economy to get away from fossil fuels. If I believed that God destroyed innocents on Earth in order to teach the survivors a lesson, I would say that the oil spill and the recent tragic coal mining disaster are one heck of a message. As it is, I think it’s just a terrible coincidence. Still, we can always choose to take a lesson from it even if the events themselves have no greater meaning. We are in the 21st century. We should not have our civilization so utterly dependent on the compressed or liquefied remains of prehistoric life forms. Do I think that this will serve as a catalyst to finally get away from the intravenous drip of oil and the crack pipe of coal? Not really. But then, I’m a cynic and a pessimist. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, both about the impact of the spill and about our future.

I do love the Gulf Coast, after all.

February 26, 2009

Landrieu Gets Angry Over FEMA Report

Filed under: Katrina — PolitiCalypso @ 9:47 pm

This just gets better and better. Allow me to pat myself on the back for this observation from the previous blog post:

“[T]hese Congresspeople really didn’t listen to their constituents or care that much about their problems. But when the media does its job, it sure can be a pain in the rear for them, can’t it?”

In the wake of the explosive CBS report on management incompetence and possible corruption in the FEMA office in New Orleans, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has shown her fire. This is a stunning change over the course of exactly seven days, which is when it became public that the stimulus didn’t do anything for Katrina-ravaged areas and several members of Congress were quoted rather nonchalantly saying that the money was tied up. Now that CBS has revealed the origin of at least part of this tie-up, it looks like things may—be still my heart—actually be done about it. Thank you, Katie Couric and Armen Keteyian.

As that story link shows, Landrieu has made it no secret that her fiery reaction today is owing specifically to the CBS report. She has called for the resignation of the manager named most prominently in that report, who has been accused by employees several dozen times of varied ethical violations, including racial discrimination, cronyism, intimidation, and sexual harassment. I think that, despite how bad it looks (and probably is), the guy is entitled to an impartial investigation. But Landrieu covers that ground too, calling for exactly what I have been calling for on this blog:

Landrieu said she expected Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano do complete a comprehensive review of FEMA leadership, and fire incompetent employees.

See, this is how it needs to be done. FEMA can’t be trusted to investigate itself in an honest manner. No government agency can, because there is the obvious conflict of interest. But the department it is a part of can do that. The Secretary has a personal interest in doing it correctly, in fact; it reflects badly on her for there to be ongoing corruption and malfeasance in such a prominent agency of her department.

I must admit that I am astounded that this kind of storm has erupted so quickly. It is rapid intensification to rival that which actually occurred in the hurricane itself, and it’s stunning to those of us who live in the Gulf region relatively close to the damaged areas and have witnessed little but delays and slow motion for three and a half years. CBS may have been looking into this FEMA office long before the news broke a week ago that there was no Katrina money in the stimulus, but not necessarily; the type of research that is spoken of could have been done relatively quickly. Interviewing employees and looking into complaint records wouldn’t take that long. Even if it was a long-standing project for CBS, the timeline of all this is amazing.

A few more stories like this, and I might even drop of some my Katrina-related cynicism.

February 25, 2009

CBS Investigates Katrina Money Bog-Down

Filed under: Katrina — PolitiCalypso @ 6:55 pm

CBS has a long history of tackling controversial news stories. They seem to regard themselves as an investigative outlet, something that cable news sources (which seem to specialize in stenography, propaganda, and vacuous entertainment) don’t quite get. Evidently the recent news that the stimulus bill does not include money specifically earmarked for Katrina recovery got their attention, as did the (in my opinion) ridiculous and unacceptable explanation that this money was tied up in bureaucracy. Props to them for that. Tonight they ran a story about the particulars of that bureaucratic tie-up. It’s about as ugly as anyone could imagine, including me—and that should say something.

A major part of the problem, as might be predicted, lies in the FEMA office in New Orleans. It has apparently been going on ever since the hurricane, and (again, as might be expected), the George W. Bush administration never saw fit to do anything about it, nor did the Democratic Congress see fit to call for investigations into it. If CBS’s discoveries are to be believed, what is going on is a form of disaster profiteering—in this case, an upper-level manager with a six-figure salary who wants to keep that cushy job for as long as possible and who is taking actions to lock up the recovery process to accomplish that. Almost $4 billion of the New Orleans money that this man was in charge of is still tied up, and in the meantime, the infrastructure decays and turns into a skeleton. His employees allege that he is stonewalling on purpose because he wants to keep looting the federal government for his plush salary, and apparently he has assumed (correctly, so far) that he can get away with it because no one really cares about New Orleans except for New Orleanians and a few others.

This man, Doug Whitmer, was a Bush-era choice. They had a real knack for picking people who existed in their jobs to warm seats and cover for each other when something actually happened, but Whitmer is likely even worse than a mere self-centered lump. You usually don’t get dozens of staff complaints against you over the course of two months unless you are either a very draconian manager but nonetheless very effective at your job, or you actually are the creep that the complaints allege you to be. Considering the outrageous, reprehensible three-plus-year bog-down of the Katrina money, I’d say that the former is probably ruled out. Whitmer has been accused of threatening, bullying, intimidation, racism on the job, and sexual harassment by FEMA-New Orleans employees who work for him. I guess he has “better” ways to spend his time than actually, you know, doing his job.

Naturally, his Washington boss defends him, says that “[he] has lived in New Orleans” (as if that has anything to do with it—plenty of people have lived in New Orleans and not all of them are interested in the well-being of the area), and curtly informs the CBS reporter that if there are problems in the New Orleans office, actions will be taken. Yeah, that sure convinces me. FEMA officials are well-known for the sterling quality of their promises. If positive actions were on FEMA’s agenda, you’d think something might have been done already. The hurricane was three and a half years ago.

But it is not just high-level federal bureaucrats who are to blame for this. The very Congresspeople who, last week, proclaimed to the news media that the reason the Gulf Coast got nothing for recovery was that the existing funds were just “tied up in planning,” must have received some notice of the true situation. I used to work for a U.S. Senator, and the offices constantly get mail from constituents. This little fiasco is more evidence to support my earlier suspicion, which was that most of these Congresspeople really didn’t listen to their constituents or care that much about their problems. But when the media does its job, it sure can be a pain in the rear for them, can’t it?

Since this office is designated “FEMA,” it should be under federal jurisdiction, specifically that of the Department of Homeland Security. This monstrous Big Brother bureaucracy has been widely criticized since its creation, and rightly so. Former Secretary Chertoff should’ve been “asked to resign” (read: fired) in the wake of Katrina, because although former FEMA chief Michael Brown was certainly incompetent, part of the problem was that Chertoff had not authorized FEMA to do all that it needed to do. Now that a new administration is in place, I hope that they will overhaul the chain of command for this bloatfest of a division. I also hope that Secretary Napolitano launches a departmental investigation into these allegations coming out of New Orleans, because if she has the authority to do so and fails to do it, the blood of 2005 (and, unfortunately, some year in the future) is on her hands as well as those of her predecessor. Her boss, the President, seems interested in the Gulf Coast, in contrast to just about everyone else in Washington. Any reforms of the Katrina recovery process will almost certainly need to come directly from the White House.

Update 2:20 A.M.: The Scurrying for Cover Begins!
Looks like some folks got wind of what would be on the news today. This adds an extra layer of meaning to my comment earlier that when the media does its job, Congress tends to act—but that it often takes such things to get lawmakers off their duffs. Some members of Congress are going after FEMA-New Orleans for that office’s incompetence and possible corruption. There’s also talk about an internal investigation in FEMA of this particular office, which is (I suppose) a start, but not a good one—and one that I do not think should be conducted, because it will be a waste of taxpayer money. I still think this will require an independent investigation of FEMA, because agencies in general are notorious for being unable to investigate themselves honestly. Joe Lieberman, chair of the Homeland Security Committee, has said in the last session of Congress that he wouldn’t do such a thing. Again, most likely this will have to be spearheaded by the executive branch, either Obama or Napolitano. But it needs to be done and it needs to be done right. That means independently.

Now if only they would turn their eyes to the Mississippi coast’s “recovery” as well, and consider that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to let insurance companies deny claims to homeowners who had paid in and lost everything they owned in the hurricane. These (ex-)residents were, if they didn’t have money saved elsewhere, then forced to sell their land to Big Industry in order to walk away with something, anything, with which they could start over.

Guess you have to start somewhere, though. We’ll see.

August 29, 2007

Two Years

Filed under: Katrina — PolitiCalypso @ 4:10 am

Two years ago at this exact day and exact minute, Hurricane Katrina made its first Gulf landfall on the Louisiana coast.

I would like to mark this day by providing a series of links to recent news about the recovery, or what passes for it. First is my series of blogs about the hurricane:

No Environmental Reviews
Disaster Profiteering (highly recommended)
The Working Class
Global Warming
Insurance Malfeasance
Blaming the Victims
Faith-Based Recovery, I
Faith-Based Recovery, II & III
Faith-Based Recovery, IV & V
Faith-Based Recovery, VI

Next, I have rounded up external links to news sources that have pertinent stories.

Katrina: A Reality Check for All Towns — Focuses on aftermath in New Orleans
New Orleans Still Struggling Two Years After Hurricane Katrina — Focuses on health care
Survey: Post-Storm Mental Health Worsens — Gulf Coast in general
FEMA suspends use, sales of ‘toxic’ trailers — However, just so no one forgets the stonewalling they did prior to this:
House Panel Probes Toxic FEMA Trailers

In the midst of all the 2-year anniversary coverage by the media, some of which will be disgustingly smarmy and positive to the point of being an outright lie, let’s not forget about anything attending the tragedy. I intend to mark the occasion later today by viewing An Inconvenient Truth again and considering the environmental aspects of the disaster, both those which followed it and those which I am convinced led up to it (i.e., global warming). The best way to observe the day is to consider what we might be able to do to prevent it from happening again.

March 13, 2007

Why Does This Not Surprise Me?

Filed under: Katrina,Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 7:12 am

Have they learned nothing from New Orleans?

The Bush administration will allow some development in flood plains without formal environmental reviews.

Predictably (and rightly), the move has enraged environmentalists, who have been advocating for the disappearing wetlands for decades now, mostly in vain. This move allows developers to build on small tracts of land, and it places minimal restrictions on what can be built. Types of buildings to be permitted include residential homes, shopping venues, hospitals, prisons, and schools.

If you were a resident of low-lying Louisiana who had experienced Hurricane Katrina (or evacuated and returned to find your community in ruins), wouldn’t it make you feel nice and cozy to know that your kids’ new school could be built on a filled-in marshland that had flooded before–as long as the school was small and the entire development didn’t take up over half an acre? (In some parts of rural Louisiana, that’s not out of the question.)

(Oh, and is due to be reclaimed by the sea in a few decades because of global warming-induced rising seas, another problem that is not being addressed in the coastal “recovery.”)

And if you were, perhaps, a researcher of endangered species–maybe even the elusive Ivory-billed Woodpecker–wouldn’t you be pleased to know that developers could pull the same sort of stunt that the timber industry did in the 1940s, when it completely stripped clear the last confirmed habitat of Ivorybills?

Oh, sure, the Endangered Species Act would provide protection for areas where the birds are known to roost. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? They are hard to find, and with recent potential sightings in Arkansas and Florida, there’s a possibility that they might be in pockets all over the Gulf states. However, those two sightings are increasingly being called into question since the scientists involved have not produced good video or photography yet. If other potential areas are wiped out before the birds could even be found, it opens the floodgates for the areas in Arkansas and especially Florida to be given similar treatment.

And, from the same article, this is just disgusting:

Another part of the regulations, approved in coordination with other federal agencies and the White House, waives the formal environmental reviews entirely for coal companies when they bury or reroute streams with their mining wastes.

So okay, if your friendly neighborhood coal company decides to dump waste product in a stream, completely cutting off the flow of water with the trash, no one has to run it through any sort of review process.

I’ll make sure to drink bottled water when I am in Louisiana.

This bit of news was certainly a very unwelcome addition to my e-mail inbox this morning.

I have made this blog mostly about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, yes, but frankly, I’m tired of having so much material to write about.

February 28, 2007

Buying Up the Coast for Fun and Profit—LOTS of Profit.

Filed under: Katrina — PolitiCalypso @ 8:48 am

As readers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed, I’ve been focusing heavily on the recovery process of Hurricane Katrina lately. Much attention has been devoted to the initial response and its shortcomings, but critiques of the reconstruction are harder to come by.

And now… we come to an issue that is not only being overlooked, but appears to have a very strong public relations effort underway to spin it a certain way.

This is a multi-pronged issue, but in a nutshell, it’s this: Big industry is getting free rein to buy up anything it can get its hands on, with encouragement and aid from the government at several levels. In the meantime, coastal residents and local businesses are having to rely on private charities (as well as an Attorney General who will fight for them against people trying to ruin them financially) to get back on their feet.

It’s fairly common knowledge that war profiteering on a truly grand scale is taking place in Iraq while the Iraqis and our own soldiers watch the country degenerate into total anarchy and civil war. This same type of corporate profiteering, often by the same companies, is taking place on our very own Gulf Coast as well, while the residents of the coast are left to fend for themselves.

This issue deals with the great divide between the haves and the have-nots, and as such, it is intimately related to the housing and insurance problems associated with the Katrina recovery. This story is likely to have some overlap with previous entries.
Private charity is a great thing, and it’s stories like this that restore some of my faith in humanity when it falters. However, these stories are deeply, deeply sad. The extent of the devastation in these communities is so great that these organizations, despite their heroic efforts, are swamped. (Read more…)

February 27, 2007

Two Responses, Two Recoveries

Filed under: Katrina — PolitiCalypso @ 11:24 am
UPDATE (4:20 PM EST):
I discovered this report from the Institute for Southern Studies’ “Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch.” It gives an overview of a number of problems facing the Gulf Coast and proposed solutions to them. Unfortunately, it neglects to mention global warming’s impact on sea levels, including the inundation of the barrier islands and the low-lying wetlands that would take place under these conditions. However, the rest of it is sound.

The problems have been identified, and solutions have been proposed. It is time to act. Enough is enough.

It’s no secret that the response to Hurricane Katrina was a fiasco, wherein no one got really suitable treatment but the level of recovery was still dramatically divided by race and class boundaries. Based on some of the stories in the news, which speak glowingly of Mardi Gras or the rehabilitation of the Superdome, you’d be led to believe that these disparities only surfaced during the immediate response attempts, and that things have been hunky-dory since then.

Well, you’d be wrong. The recovery of Hurricane Katrina is plagued with problems, the first of which I have already touched on–it does not consider the coming rise of the sea levels or the inundation of the coast’s natural defenses, which global climate change is predicted to cause. As I’ve said, there are several others: environmental damage, the domination of the rebuilding process by big industry, and the class-based inequality of personal property recovery. Although they are all closely related, today’s blog will only look at the last one. (Read more…)

July 18, 2006

The Faith-Based Recovery on the Hurricane Coast, Part VI

Filed under: Katrina — PolitiCalypso @ 5:31 pm

Part VI: A dire situation

Somehow, emergency management for the Coast—America’s “Hurricane Coast,” incorporating the Atlantic and Gulf—has missed the boat, and badly. As of mid-July 2006, thousands of hurricane victims along the totally devastated Gulf Coast are living in various unsafe forms of housing: damaged homes, FEMA trailers, tents, RVs, etc. If the Katrina and Rita evacuations were a nightmare and, arguably, a failure, one does not really want to consider evacuating thousands of displaced and basically homeless people during a 2006 Gulf of Mexico hurricane—which will almost certainly occur once again. This is much more than ignoring the small businesses and residents of the coastline in favor of big industries, although that has been going on as well. This is a disaster waiting to happen.
Hurricane Katrina formed east of Florida in the Bahamas, entered the Gulf of Mexico, and exploded in both size and intensity. Katrina was a product of the Gulf Stream Current and Gulf of Mexico, which have been—along with the Caribbean Sea—considerably warmer in April and May 2006 than they were in April and May 2005. They were actually below average for April and May in 2005, but in spite of that, heated to temperatures that could support three of the six strongest Category Five hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic. With summer fast approaching, these waters will not cool off anytime soon. Most of the Atlantic Basin is warm enough to support a major hurricane, and wind steering patterns are thought to place the entire Atlantic and Gulf Coast in danger this year.

Hurricane season is upon us, with the strong possibility of a repeat of the past two years. Along the coastline from east Texas to the Atlantic coast of Florida, there are few communities that have not been impacted by one hurricane or another since August 2004. Some areas have been struck repeatedly, such as the central Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Pensacola, Florida (struck by four hurricanes since 2004), and the southern half of the Florida peninsula (struck five times with an additional close shave from Hurricane Rita). That’s a lot of damaged or destroyed homes. That’s a lot of people in unsafe housing, unable to obtain a safe place because their insurance—if they had any in the first place—has denied their claim or stalled paying, and the government is more interested in helping multibillion-dollar industries get “back on their feet.” America’s Hurricane Coast cannot afford a faith-based recovery.

July 12, 2006

The Faith-Based Recovery on the Hurricane Coast, Parts IV and V

Filed under: Katrina — PolitiCalypso @ 8:25 pm

Part IV: A Warning Shot in 2003?

Victims of Hurricane Isabel, a large storm that struck the East Coast in September 2003 as a Category Two, had been neglected and given short shrift by the insurance industry, and had not been compensated for damages a full year after that storm made landfall. Fortunately, that part of the coastline has not received a blow of comparable intensity since then. However, had such a thing happened, their damaged houses would have been much less stable in a subsequent storm, especially if they had experienced significant roof damage. Once breached, a roof is significantly less structurally sound against winds—which have a way, once they reach hurricane strength, of finding gaps and entering the house through the spaces. A strong wind to a damaged roof could easily tear it off the walls, and when it came time to assess damages, the insurance would have records to indicate that the roof was already damaged, and could use that as justification for denying claims. Clearly, the housing problem for hurricane victims after the storm is not easily solved by simply putting something over their heads.

Hurricane Isabel was the first hurricane to significantly impact the United States since Hurricane Floyd in 1999. (Hurricane Lili struck a relatively uninhabited part of Louisiana in 2002 as a Category Two, but it did less than $1 billion in damage and was a small storm that was weakening rapidly even as it made landfall.) One could say, then, that Isabel was the Bush Administration’s first significant test for hurricane recovery. Obviously it didn’t do so hot, especially for an administration whose byline and claim to fame was how well it supposedly was able to handle disasters.

Part V: Fiasco in Florida

The Administration continued to fall down with the 2004 season. Although this did not receive very much press, the state of Florida, which got battered repeatedly in 2004, received the “ignore” treatment as well for its recovery. The president and his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, were more than willing to photo-op with victims for campaign purposes, but when it came to doing much to help, they failed badly. As of October 2005, victims of Hurricane Charley—a small hurricane that struck the Florida Gulf Coast on August 13, 2004—were still living in FEMA temporary housing, although that hurricane was very small and did only localized damage (as compared with a large storm such as Katrina). It does not take fourteen months to build a house, but Charley victims were still living in trailers after that long.
One woman was quoted in the news as being concerned that her FEMA trailer would not stand up to Hurricane Wilma, which was threatening the Florida coast at the time. She had good reason to worry: Mobile homes are considered unsafe during thunderstorm winds of 50-60 mph. They have been known to flip and literally fly to pieces during strong thunderstorms, which is why they are so frequently death traps in hurricanes and tornadoes. Weather forecasters actually advise mobile home residents to abandon them and lie in a ditch if they are in the path of a tornado; that is how unsafe they are. Hurricane Wilma ended up making landfall well south of Charley’s impact point, but it struck Florida as a Category Three hurricane with 120 mph winds and exited on the east side of the state as a Category Two with approximately 100 mph winds. The trailers would not have stood up.

Florida’s southern coast is wealthier than the parts of Louisiana and Mississippi that were damaged by Katrina and Rita, which is an obvious advantage. Also, Wilma moved across Florida very rapidly and was primarily a windstorm, rather than Rita and Katrina, which did most of their damage with massive amounts of water. However, even without these complications, reports from after the storm indicated that emergency management was mishandling the cleanup. As an example, storm victims reported being denied access to clean bottled water because the officials “guarding” the water had not been given official permission to dispense it… after 24 hours of sitting there. Although it received much less coverage than the Katrina aftermath, Florida apparently received similar treatment to the central Gulf Coast.

A cursory search of weather-enthusiast Floridians’ personal websites uncovers that many victims of Hurricane Wilma (and some whose homes were damaged in the 2004 Florida hurricanes), like their counterparts in Louisiana and Mississippi, still have not received payment for damages to their homes. They have what they call “blue roofs,” referring to wind-damaged roofs covered with blue plastic tarps. Roofs that, were another strong hurricane to strike, would be much more vulnerable than before to wind, because they had been breached and the holes not patched.

Later:
Part VI: A Dire Situation: What might 2006 hold?

July 10, 2006

The Faith-Based Recovery on the Hurricane Coast, Parts II and III

Filed under: Katrina — PolitiCalypso @ 6:27 pm

Part II: "Nothing Left" — A Volunteer’s Perspective

During Spring Break 2006, thousands of college students went to the Gulf Coast to help with recovery of communities and small businesses. Church groups and charitable organizations have been sending groups of volunteers since last September. One volunteer, “Jake,” who went to the devastated town of Waveland, Mississippi, says the following:

It’s only church and private groups there [in Waveland] now. No FEMA, no federal government workers to speak of. They’ve left. The entire population of this county [Lauderdale County, MS, which has a population of approximately 100,000] could go down there to work and it’d still take months. These people are living in tents and FEMA trailers. They have nothing and feel abandoned by their government.

Jake’s account is typical of volunteers who see the devastation, and apparently his statement that the hurricane victims feel abandoned is true as well. This is far from the first time that they have expressed that emotion. Along the destroyed coast, there is a feeling of being overwhelmed, of being ignored and left to pick up their lives and communities. No doubt this is an example of the Bush Administration’s “faith-based services” that Bush promoted in his campaign in 2000. Private charity is a great thing, of course, but in a situation like this, leaving a completely devastated community to its own devices only results in a “faith-based recovery,” in a wholly different sense of the term “faith.” A sense that actually means something like “wishful thinking” or “fool’s hope.” That is not good enough. The hurricane relief and recovery problem is tremendous in scale, much bigger than people realize until they see it firsthand, and it will need more than can be provided by the resources of private altruistic groups.

Meanwhile, “big industry” gets the aid packages.

Part III: The Priority List

It is noteworthy that within days after Katrina struck, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour pushed for, and got, legislation allowing the gambling casinos to move inland, whereas before, they had been required by law to anchor themselves offshore. The casinos bring in billions in tourist revenue, and that tourist revenue was his priority.
At the same time that Barbour was pushing to legalize onshore gambling, the insurance companies (with the exception of one, Farm Bureau of Mississippi, which later filed for bankruptcy when other divisions of the company did not pool money to help out the MS division) decided that they didn’t want to pay off the coastal homeowners and refused to pay anyone who did not have a flood insurance package. These homeowners had been sold something the companies billed as “hurricane insurance” and believed that they were covered. The state’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the companies on behalf of the victims, but as of the end of 2005, it was still in court. Initially, Katrina damages were estimated at well over $100 billion, with about half of it insured (a ratio that is typical for hurricanes). However, late last autumn, the insurance industry reported a comparatively paltry $37 billion in insured damage, which would mean $75 billion total for the storm if the insured-to-total-damage ratio held. This disparity was not simply initial overestimation. Total damages certainly must exceed $100 billion, considering how many communities have been completely washed out to sea, but insurance companies seem not to want to pay for more than about a third of that.

Curiously, the media seemed to ignore or remain in the dark about the situation in Mississippi and rural Louisiana, all the while condemning Louisiana state officials for the failures in New Orleans. In October 2005, history professor Robert McElvaine of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, wrote an editorial about the “Mississippi Myth” that the mishaps were strictly Louisiana-based and that it had been handled better in Mississippi. However, since then, there has been very little acknowledgment of the situation on the coastal areas of Mississippi and southern Louisiana that were literally “wiped off the map” by Katrina’s storm surge.

In New Orleans, on the other hand, entire neighborhoods were abandoned during the pre- and post-storm evacuation. These neighborhoods, which are almost exclusively poor or lower middle class, remain unoccupied, the homeowners unable to return, while their houses slowly disintegrate. The evacuees, meanwhile, remain in other parts of the country. Many of them did not have their houses insured, and, of course, many of those that did have insurance have not received any payments. No one at the scene seems to care, which recalls the class and race distinctions in the recovery from the 1928 Florida hurricane.

The abandonment of large parts of New Orleans is utterly shameful and is indicative of a pattern—and a looming problem. The 2006 hurricane season officially began on June 1, and already there has been one storm strike the Gulf Coast that nearly reached hurricane status, but thousands of people remain on the storm-battered coast in thoroughly unsafe and substandard housing—as accounts such as Jake’s would indicate. This is a major part of why the hurricane recovery is such a massive, enormous problem.

Volunteers to the Coast describe the devastated towns between New Orleans and Biloxi, MS as having “Third-World” conditions. A quick search on the Internet for Hurricane Katrina damage photographs proves this description to be quite apt. This strip of coastline, encompassing numerous small towns in Louisiana and Mississippi, is where the worst part of Katrina’s eyewall passed. It is where entire neighborhoods have been obliterated. –And it is the location that the private volunteers reveal has been most shamefully neglected in the recovery.

Given what we know about Governor Barbour’s push for onshore gambling, and given that the surrounding metropolitan areas are on the road to recovery in places, it’s not too much of a stretch to guess that this part of the Coast has been, as the residents say, abandoned by the government because of the comparative lack of wealth and economic (read: tourism) revenue it has brought to the region. Of course, the tourist money can’t be forgotten, and no one would suggest that the revenue-generating large businesses should be abandoned. However, they—by their very nature—have more resources and are better equipped than the private residents and small businesses on the Coast. Simply put, the “regular people” need the shot in the arm more, and instead they are getting the metaphorical back of their government’s hand.

What makes it especially disgraceful is that this is not unique to Hurricane Katrina. Leaving coastal communities to fend for themselves has been a pattern ever since 2003, when this administration first really had to deal with hurricanes.

Later:
Part IV: A Warning Shot in 2003? How Hurricane Isabel of 2003 was just the beginning.
Part V: Fiasco in Florida: What about the victims of the other hurricanes?
Part VI: A Dire Situation: What might 2006 hold?

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