One year ago, August 29, Hurricane Katrina visited devastation and flooding in the Gulf Coast region. The recovery has been slow and difficult. Much of the region still looks as though the storm passed only a month ago. But there are signs of recovery and hope where residents are reclaiming their homes, and often not waiting for government bureaucracies for help.
The overall picture of New Orleans is still bleak. "…basic electricity, water and phone services are undependable. Piles of trash are still everywhere. The National Guard is on patrol because crime is on the increase," according to Betty Ann Bowser on the Lehrer report, August 25.
To take stock of the progress being made and learn from the lessons of this disaster, a panel discussion was convened last Wednesday at the invitation of the National Press Club (NPC) in Washington, D.C. consisting of scholars affiliated with the Mercatus Center of George Mason University in Virginia and two commentaries from journalists of local newspapers. The Mercatus Center University released preliminary findings of a five-year research project on the response to and recovery from Katrina. They want to study Katrina to learn how better to respond to future disasters.
"Entire communities and neighborhoods still feel like ghost towns. Though New Orleans' French Quarter and Garden District merged relatively unscathed, neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward have seen virtually no rebuilding," said Emily Chamlee-Wright, a Beloit College economics professor and affiliated with the Mercatus Center.
"…the Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood most devastated by Katrina and the one with the most notable lack of recovery. Once a lively, low-income African-American community, today it is a vast wasteland, houses still crumpled in piles where Katrina left them one year ago," according to Browser.
"Most of the area still has no water or electricity, no telephones, not even enough basic services for FEMA to set up trailers. And in the areas where trailers have been set up, the water is undrinkable," continued Browser.
One of the heaviest hit areas was St. Bernard Parish where only 728 of the 4,538 requests for house demolition have been completed, according to Chamlee-Wright, who said "progress is painfully slow."
"Most people attempting to rebuild are simply incapable of meeting the physical demands of demolition, debris removal, and reconstruction without assistance from others," said Chamlee-Wright. So, people have discovered that, in addition to the one-way assistance (charity aid), mutual aid assistance is vital for their recovery too.
A typical example that Chamlee-Wright tells is the owner of a hardware store that was flooded by eight feet of water. Fortunately for him, his house suffered only minimal damage. His store manager and family were not so fortunate. So, the two worked out an arrangement where the manager helped, without receiving salary, the owner to re-open the store, and the manager plus his family and another family moved into the house of the owner. They all had a clean, safe home to live in, although it was very crowded.
The most frequent complaint, along with private insurance claims, is how slow the wheels of bureaucracy turn. Doris Voitier, Superintendent of the St. Bernard Parish Public School District, grew impatient with the pace of the recovery of the public schools. She saw the importance to the community in restoring the schools and tried to work with the state and federal government agencies. She concluded that their promises were not reliable, and delays were almost a certainty, and so she resolved to go it alone.
Voitier hired a local contactor and they found some portable classrooms in Georgia and in Carolina. In three and half weeks, they had put together a school with 20 classrooms. She had expected no more than 50 to register last November, but 703 students wanted to come. By April, 2,246 children were attending classes.
How to make the wheels of bureaucracy move faster was a topic that came up often at the NPC. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director has considerable leeway under the Stafford Act—the federal law governing disaster relief and recovery—to bend or suspend rules that compromise public health or safety, wrote Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal. Most everyone agrees that the federal and local governments need rules to ensure fairness and health and safety, such as the historical preservation requirements and asbestos removal. But when the layers and layers of rules hamper or delay work that is vital to get done expeditiously, the consensus of the panel was that rules should be suspended.
"The idea is to identify…legal and regulatory bottlenecks in advance," writes Rauch. Quoting a FEMA official, Rauch writes that you need to figure out, "what kinds of things stop working when you have a mega-catastrophe, so that compliance with the existing law is no longer workable."
James Varney, a writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune for the past 17 years, reminded the NPC audience "how sick" New Orleans was before Katrina: eighty percent of the city "poor," not one 500 Fortune companies located here, "disgraceful schools," public corruption, and corrupt police officers (not "plain" corruption, but police "who kill people").
Scholars are asking why has there always been the notorious corruption in New Orleans that Varney alluded to. Since September 2005, Congress has approved $113 billion on disaster relief for Katrina and Rita, and a surge of disaster relief fraud and corruption has ensued, according to Russell Sobel, an affiliated scholar at the Mercatus Center.
"When the federal government supplies relief following a natural disaster it creates a resource windfall…," opening new opportunities for bribery, according to Sobel. "Disaster relief windfalls also create new opportunities for public officials in charge of disaster relief funds to skim incoming resources for themselves or divert them to their friends." The corruption is aided by the chaotic and confused atmosphere typical of a major natural disaster.
Sobel cited a recent Senate investigation that found that since August 2005, federal prosecutors have charged nearly 300 individuals with abusing FEMA relief, many of whom are public employees accused of soliciting bribes from relief-funded contractors."
Sobel concluded that the FEMA disaster relief increased corruption more than 20%, and strongly suggests that the "notorious corrupt regions of the United States like the Gulf States, are well-known for their corruption because natural disasters frequently strike them, and a massive amounts of aid proves too tempting for the politicians and bureaucrats.
Perhaps for the cynical, nothing that was said about the role of government obstruction and the extent of corruption was unexpected. But anyone hearing about the massive problems of this recovery is bound to be moved by the resident' forbearance to overcome the various kinds of obstacles to reclaiming their former lives.