Social Welfare
February 22, 2007
Almost 18 months after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed more than 250,000 homes, Habitat for Humanity says it has built just 416 houses for hurricane victims along the entire coast, from Alabama to Texas, including 36 in New Orleans. More are under construction, for a total of 702. That slower pace reflects, in part, the more complex houses that Habitat builds in the United States, as well as the mind-numbing issues — involving insurance costs and government regulations — that seem to have bogged down efforts to rebuild after the hurricanes. But Habitat International is starting to face criticism that its procedures are slow, rigid and perhaps unsuited to helping disaster victims, however rewarding its efforts are for its volunteers, reports The New York Times.
January 24, 2007
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a famed order of nuns who take a vow of poverty, say the city of New Orleans owes them a hefty sum of money after Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has doled out $1.4 million to reimburse the order because one of its facilities, the Mary Joseph Residence for the Elderly in New Orleans, was used as an emergency operations center after the storm. But the money had to go through channels — first to the state and then to the city of New Orleans, reports The Associated Press. It has been sitting in the city's coffers for about a month and it could take several more weeks before the nuns receive the funding.
A week after angry and displaced New Orleans residents stormed a fenced-off public housing complex in a bid to return home, the federal housing agency has asked a judge to give it the power to stop future incursions, reports The Associated Press. The Department of Housing and Urban Development urged U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle to hold an immediate hearing on its request to bar unauthorized people from the development, but the judge deferred. He took it under consideration and did not schedule a court date. Last week residents and activists entered gaps cut into a barbed wire fence surrounding the grounds of the St. Bernard housing development to stage a cleanup.
January 23, 2007
A six-month extension of emergency housing assistance will stave off an immediate catastrophe but will not solve the underlying problems preventing hurricane victims from rebuilding their lives, Katrina evacuees and their advocates said Monday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency confirmed that assistance would continue through Aug. 31 for about 128,000 households living in trailers, mobile homes or apartments, including about 14,000 in the Houston area. Leaders of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide permanent rental assistance vouchers to elderly and disabled evacuees, reports the Houston Chronicle.
January 12, 2007
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has begun telling some Katrina evacuees in Texas that their rental subsidies will end late next month, producing new worries for families that haven't been able to re-establish themselves economically, several New Orleans evacuees said Thursday. The Times-Picayune reports that letters announcing the end of housing assistance in San Antonio have begun to go out to evacuees occupying once-vacant homes seized in foreclosures by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
January 4, 2007
Mississippi's Jackson County is in line to set up a long-awaited drug court for teens at Youth Court for one year, beginning mid-February. County supervisors on Tuesday voted to allow the Jackson County Community Services Coalition to set up and run the drug court on Youth Court property, with a $37,000 grant from the state Department of Public Safety, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. The coalition's director says that while 80 percent of the county's youth don't have a problem with drugs and alcohol, abuse has gone up since Katrina.
January 3, 2007
By announcing his presidential candidacy in New Orleans, John Edwards said he was trying to make two points: that the city's slow recovery highlights the "two Americas" of rich and poor that became the symbol of his first run for president in 2004, and that it is important for Americans not to just complain about problems but to "take action" as so many post-Katrina volunteers did. How the setting for his presidential announcement will affect his candidacy and whether it will refocus national attention on the unfinished business of Katrina remains to be seen, reports The Times-Picayune. But political pundits agree Katrina is a good issue for Edwards because it fits with one of his campaign's major themes: the need for the next president to address the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots.
December 12, 2006
In New Orleans, musicians have been helping other musicians in the aftermath of the disaster that tossed the city's soul — its music scene — into limbo, reports Reuters. More than a year and 110 gutted homes later, the Arabi Wrecking Krewe has attracted dozens of volunteers to get jazz, R&B and brass band players on track to rebuild their houses by ripping out nearly everything but the studs free of charge. Luminaries such as soul singer Irma Thomas, trumpeter Leroy Jones and bandleader and clarinetist Dr. Michael White have all had work done by the "krewe" — the spelling used by groups that put on Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans.
December 11, 2006
In the latest twist to the demographic transformation of New Orleans since it was swamped by Hurricane Katrina last year, hundreds of babies are being born to Latino immigrant workers, both legal and illegal, who flocked to the city to toil on its reconstruction. The New York Times reports that the throng of babies gurgling in the handful of operational maternity wards in New Orleans has come as a big surprise — and a financial strain — to this city, which before the hurricane had only a small Latino community and virtually no experience of illegal immigration.
December 6, 2006
FEMA said Tuesday that it will appeal a judge's order that the agency resume housing assistance and make retroactive payments to thousands of hurricane evacuees, according to the Houston Chronicle. The appeal notice came just hours after lawyers for evacuees asked a federal judge in Washington to order FEMA to provide a plan for compliance with the Nov. 29 order. FEMA's notice did not specify grounds for the appeal.
More than a year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, life is still precarious and unpredictable for many evacuees, especially those who have depended on the government for a modicum of stability, reports The New York Times. About 102,000 families are still living in government trailers scattered around the region, and an additional 33,000 are living in apartments paid for by FEMA. What trauma victims need most, stability, is just what has proved most elusive.
December 4, 2006
Stronger levees, better schools and increased access to health care must be the top priorities as New Orleans rebuilds, a group of more than 2,500 Crescent City natives has told city and national leaders. Connected by satellite and the Internet, Hurricane Katrina survivors in 21 U.S. cities mulled over their priorities during an eight-hour Unified New Orleans Plan workshop Saturday, according to the Houston Chronicle. Their thoughts on how to improve utilities, housing, education, flood protection and emergency services in New Orleans will be included in the final recovery plan, which is expected to be submitted to the city's leaders in January.
December 1, 2006
The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency says he was disappointed that a judge, in a sharply critical ruling, ordered the agency to resume housing aid to thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees. "It's almost a thing of no good deed goes unpunished," Director R. David Paulison told reporters at the National Press Club. "We felt like we did a good job." The Houston Chronicle reports that a federal judge on Wednesday ordered the federal government to resume paying rent and make three months of retroactive payments for about 2,600 hurricane evacuee households in Houston and thousands more across the country.
November 30, 2006
Thousands of Louisiana public-school students are at risk for years of academic problems because they were uprooted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a report issued Wednesday says. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that according to the report, the storms displaced nearly 200,000 students last year — the largest such upheaval in U. S. education history. More than one-fourth of the students in Louisiana's public schools had to flee because of the devastation. They relocated to every parish in Louisiana and to 48 other states. About 40,000 students missed more than seven weeks of the last school year, according to Student Displacement in Louisiana After the Hurricanes of 2005: Experiences of Public Schools and Their Students, a 133-page report by the education division of the Washington-based RAND Corp.research group.
November 29, 2006
Since Hurricane Katrina, murders in Jefferson Parish have doubled, the majority of them black-on-black killings. National Public Radio reports that late last month, Harry Lee, the flamboyant and outspoken sheriff of Louisiana's Jefferson Parish, made an offhand comment to a TV reporter that created a new controversy. "We know the crime is in the black community. Why should I waste time in the white community?" Lee was quoted as saying. The Chinese-American lawman, now in his seventh term in office, has a penchant for putting his foot in his mouth, but it only seems to increase his popularity.
See, hear National Public Radio report
November 27, 2006
Nearly 15 months after the hurricane, the number of Katrina victims spending Thanksgiving in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency this year is paradoxically greater — roughly three times greater — than it was last year, reports the Associated Press. The reason: Many people who were living with family members or staying in hotels at government expense last year have since moved out or been evicted. But they have been unable to return to their homes because they are still waiting for their houses to be repaired, their insurance to come through, or water and electricity to be turned back on — or they have yet to decide whether to rebuild at all.
November 20, 2006
The city of New Orleans activates its "freeze plan'' for the homeless when the temperature or wind chill is forecast to hit 38 degrees or lower. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that with the loss of several emergency shelters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, advocates fear that many homeless will get left out in the cold this winter.
November 3, 2006
With a $221 million bid, Motorola Inc. won selection Thursday to build an emergency radio system in Mississippi that will connect state agencies and allow counties and cities to buy into the network, reports The Clarion-Ledger. The state Wireless Communication Commission and the Information Technology Services Department Board voted unanimously for the Motorola bid, which undercut competitor M/A-Com's by $90 million. Hurricane Katrina highlighted the need for a statewide system: with communications antennae down and a multitude of state, federal, local and private responders, confusion and chaos ensued.
October 30, 2006
Parts of New Orleans that suffered minor damage during Hurricane Katrina and thus have the heaviest concentration of residents and open businesses should be given priority as limited money is directed to repair utilities and other infrastructure, most participants in a citywide planning meeting said Saturday. The Times-Picayune reports that nearly half of respondents also said it matters little or not at all whether the city remains "the same physical size," perhaps addressing the question of whether its footprint should shrink to exclude some of the worst-flooded areas, which tend to have more black and poor residents. About 75 percent of the roughly 350 participants were white and 40 percent had an annual household income of more than $75,000. Before Katrina, the city was 67 percent black and 54 percent of households earned less than $29,000 — only 2 percent earned $75,000 or more.
For now the official Hurricane Katrina death toll stands at 1,697. But Columbia University geophysicist and earth scientist John Mutter believes the number is "well in excess of 2,000," reports The Associated Press. That's because Mutter isn't just counting people who drowned in Katrina's waters or were crushed because of the storm's powerful winds. Mutter's count also would include the despondent evacuee who committed suicide, the suspected looter fatally shot, and the dialysis patient who died because the storm interrupted treatment.
October 26, 2006
Jimmie Fore, the president of New Orleans' Ernest N. Morial Convention Center said Wednesday he does not want the giant riverfront hall to be used as the main staging area for evacuating people during hurricane threats after this year, according to The Times-Picayune. The plan for the 2006 storm season announced in May by Mayor Ray Nagin called for using Regional Transit Authority buses to transport residents unable to evacuate on their own to a site behind the convention center; once there, they would be put on intercity buses that would take them to shelters out of the hurricane's path. The plan was strongly endorsed by Convention Center board Chairman Warren Reuther, but board member Ralph Brennan objected, saying the facility could suffer irreparable damage to its image among convention planners around the nation and world if it showed up again on TV screens as a hurricane shelter.
October 24, 2006
In an effort to fully account for those killed by Katrina, researchers at the Earth Institute at Columbia University are compiling an online list of all Gulf Coast residents who died as a result of the hurricane. John Mutter, deputy director of institute, said the project's goal is to identify all of those who died from both direct and indirect effects of the storm, as well as due to social standing or decisions made by policy makers. According to the article posted on the institute's Web site, more than 1,250 names have been collected to date by reviewing obituaries and coroners' lists, then following up with calls to family members, churches and social service organizations to build a more comprehensive picture of each victim.
October 23, 2006
With more than 300 homicides since January, Houston is on pace to record nearly 400 slayings for the year — which would be the highest number of killings the city has seen in more than a decade, the Houston Chronicle reports. As of Oct. 16, the city had recorded 316 homicides, up 25 percent from the 252 slayings at this time last year. The Houston Police Department said an uptick in homicides by Hurricane Katrina evacuees has contributed to that increase.
Located in a high-density area loaded with apartments, the Park at Lakeside is a prime example of property where New Orleans exiles have settled, surrounded by single-family residences where homeowners put down roots years earlier. According to the Houston Chronicle, Houston Police Department statistics show the frequency of crime at this property — and the number of times police have been called there — increased in the year after the storm. But it was not as if those numbers soared to unprecedented levels. Rather, they virtually equaled statistics recorded two years earlier — well before Hurricane Katrina struck.
October 20, 2006
A Louisiana state panel endorsed plans Thursday to offer health care to everyone in Hurricane Katrina-devastated greater New Orleans — amid warnings that without more federal aid soon, few doctors and nurses might be left to deliver the care, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The Louisiana Health Care Redesign Collaborative ratified a 67-page document laying out its vision for universal access and managed care. No one on the panel voted against sending the plan to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt so that talks on a final agreement can begin between federal and state government officials. Leavitt wants to use federal aid for the poor, which has largely gone to the state-run charity hospital system, to purchase private insurance for the uninsured.
October 6, 2006
Fewer than 190,000 people are living in New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina, according to a door-to-door survey released Thursday. The population of 187,525 is about 41 percent of the 454,000 people estimated to be living in Orleans Parish before the storm hit Aug. 29, 2005. The survey was conducted for the Louisiana Recovery Authority and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals by the Louisiana Public Health Institute, reports The Associated Press. Mayor C. Ray Nagin has cited a slightly higher figure, and last month said he believed the city was on track to reach 300,000 people by year's end. (See Government Data for link to survey reports.)
Only 60 percent of all the greater New Orleans-area churches are open and functioning one year after Hurricane Katrina, according to a study by an associate professor at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. The study found that only 905 of the 1,508 churches that existed before Katrina are functioning one year after the storm, reports the Baptist Press. The research focuses on the five parishes that represent the New Orleans metro area — Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany parishes — and is not limited to Baptist churches.
The Louisiana Public Health Institute has posted 2006 Louisiana Health and Population Survey reports for some hurricane-affected parishes on its Web site.
2006 Louisiana Health and Population Survey
September 27, 2006
The number of valid child abuse and neglect allegations have gone down in Louisiana — most likely the result of a decrease in population following hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Statistics released by the state Department of Social Services show that 20 children died from child abuse or neglect during the 2006 state fiscal year, which ran from July 1, 2005, to June 30, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. Anna Fogle, president and CEO of Prevent Child Abuse Louisiana, said people have been so focused on storm recovery that reporting child abuse and neglect has taken a lower priority.
September 26, 2006
A shortage of prosecutors and other legal staff in Houston is hampering Harris County's efforts to keep up with a growing number of criminal and child abuse cases, the county's two top lawyers said Monday. District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal and County Attorney Mike Stafford will ask Commissioners Court to authorize hiring 49 prosecutors, three civil lawyers and additional clerical staff to assist the new attorneys. Additional cases due solely to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina evacuees did not prompt their requests, but Stafford said child protection cases involving evacuees had created a greater need for more lawyers, reports the Houston Chronicle.
September 25, 2006
Although many Hurricane Katrina evacuees who landed in the Washington, D.C., area have moved on, almost 10,000 households are still registered with FEMA in the District, Virginia and Maryland, according to The Washington Post. But the special services for them, funded by donors and local governments, are mostly gone. Catholic Community Services ended its program in June. The local Salvation Army's $311,000 in Katrina aid is gone and so is the Jewish Federation's $1 million fund.
September 8, 2006
Houston may be hot, unfriendly and frustratingly difficult to navigate, but more than two-thirds of the poorest New Orleans evacuees who fled to the city after Hurricane Katrina plan to stay, a Rice University survey released today shows. Almost 69 percent of the 1,081 people queried in the National Science Foundation-funded study conducted in July by political science professors Rick Wilson and Robert Stein said they likely will remain in Houston, according to the Houston Chronicle. Wilson and Stein say their findings reflect the view of 35,000 to 40,000 evacuees, about one-fourth of the displaced New Orleanians thought to be living in the city.
September 6, 2006
The owners of St. Rita's Nursing Home, arrested in the deaths of 34 patients who perished in Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters, are suing the government, saying federal, state and local officials failed to make sure vulnerable citizens were evacuated as the storm approached. The Los Angeles Times reports that the lawsuit, filed last week, names the Army Corps of Engineers, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, Atty. Gen. Charles C. Foti Jr. and numerous other authorities and agencies.
September 5, 2006
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is a harsh place for people with serious mental illnesses, reports The Times-Picayune. As other parts of the health care system have begun to bounce back, the shortage of inpatient beds for the mentally ill remains the biggest hole in a safety net that was decimated by the storm. The controversial decision to close Charity Hospital has meant that mental patients are routinely recycled back to the streets, where they strain the overburdened Police Department and pose a danger to the community and to themselves.
August 31, 2006
Katrina fatigue erupted into anger and frustration Wednesday night, as more than 1,700 residents urged Mayor Bill White to send evacuees home to New Orleans. The Houston Chronicle reports that one year after the city of Houston welcomed at least 250,000 evacuees, more than 100,000 New Orleans natives still remain. West Houston residents who gathered Wednesday at Grace Presbyterian Church to address increases in violent crime over the past year in their community said evacuees are to blame.
August 30, 2006
After Hurricane Katrina, the Tulane Law Clinic was appointed to handle the cases of all prisoners in Orleans Parish who were not represented by an attorney. Thus began the students' foray into a New Orleans justice system ravaged by Katrina, reports Fox News. About 80 percent of New Orleans defendants are supposed to be represented by the public defender's office, which is nearly three-quarters supported by traffic court fines, tickets and fees — all of which evaporated after Katrina, along with the people. The office went from having 42 lawyers to fewer than 10 after the storm — many low paid and part time. It didn't have the manpower nor the funds to visit and represent inmates scattered across the state.
August 10, 2006
In an episode that began as a traffic stop for erratic driving in New Orleans, John McCusker, photographer for The Times-Picayune, was halted, pinned a police officer between cars, fled and drove into several cars and construction signs before being stopped again and finally subdued with a Taser gun. In both stops, the police say, he begged officers to shoot him, telling them he did not have enough insurance money to rebuild his home. The public unraveling of a well-known local photographer shined light again on the troubled state of mental health in New Orleans, according to The New York Times. The state has estimated that the city has lost more than half its psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and other mental health workers, many of whom relocated after Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleanians seeking help with cleaning and gutting their flood-damaged homes by the Aug. 29 deadline set by the city can contact more than a dozen nonprofit organizations that offer free gutting, according to a list posted on the city's Web site. Officials said last week that the city will not take any action against homeowners who have shown an intention to fix up their homes. The City Council voted in April to set Aug. 29 as the deadline for property owners to clean, gut and board up damaged homes, The Times-Picayune reports. If the owners miss the deadline, the council's ordinance says, the city can declare their properties to be "public nuisances" subject to "repair, rehabilitation, demolition or removal."
July 31, 2006
Declaring a state of emergency in the New Orleans criminal justice system, an Orleans Parish judge Friday said he will begin releasing poor defendants awaiting trial on a case-by-case basis Aug. 29, the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Criminal District Court has a backlog of 6,000 cases and growing, while the public defender's office is barely recovering from going broke after Katrina and losing almost all of its attorneys. At least hundreds of indigent defendants remain jailed without court-appointed representation. "It is a pathetic and shameful state of affairs the criminal justice system finds itself," Judge Arthur Hunter ruled from his bench after a hearing that Gov. Kathleen Blanco declined to attend, despite having been subpoenaed. "Facts, reports and studies have concluded constitutional rights are being violated." Only defendants who have not gone to trial will be eligible for release, Hunter said, and release from jail does not mean the defendant is freed from any charges. Prosecutors said they will appeal the ruling, The Times-Picayune reports.
Across New Orleans this summer, hundreds of former residents have returned to jumpstart the city's recovery. Yet the renaissance is uneven from neighborhood to neighborhood, even from block to block, according to The New York Times. Just short distances from the well-populated New Orleans East subdivision are stretches of city that look abandoned. Since the hurricane, the city has granted more than 28,000 building permits for residential and commercial construction projects. More than 60 percent of those permits have been issued since March, in anticipation of a summer spent working on repairs. Yet it is hard to know how many people have returned to act upon those permits. It is clear that many have not, despite the city's estimation that its population is 225,000 — about half its pre-hurricane size.
July 28, 2006
Haunted by memories of the confusion and sense of helplessness in the chaotic weeks after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans-area churches have thoroughly retooled evacuation plans to protect themselves from the next hurricane — and in a few cases, to help get their elderly and shut-in members out of harm's way. Church planners have tried to build more robust communications systems that will survive the widespread cell phone failures that everyone now anticipates. They want to make sure that faith communities scattered by the next hurricane can maintain a sense of cohesion. Last year, some churches and major denominations had evacuation plans that proved unequal to Katrina, according to The Times-Picayune.
July 27, 2006
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year, it revealed serious shortcomings in nursing homes' evacuation plans, reports the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch. A year after the disaster, flaws in emergency plans still have not been fixed according to "Disaster Preparedness: Limitations in Federal Evacuation Assistance for Health Facilities Should be Addressed," a report released the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found that facility administrators faced several challenges, including deciding whether to evacuate, obtaining needed transportation and maintaining outside communication. The GAO also found that the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan — the basic framework for how the federal government helps states and local governments during disasters — fails to address the evacuation of nursing home residents.
See Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch article
July 25, 2006
Doctors and nurses might not stay behind to care for patients during another New Orleans hurricane in fear they could be the next targets of Louisiana prosecutors. A doctor and two nurses are facing murder charges, accused of administering a "lethal cocktail" of drugs to four patients at Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina hit the city. For medical professionals, the accusations represent a new danger of hurricane duty some are unwilling to face, according to Reuters. In addition to the specter of prison, potential dangers include difficulty with careers and civil suits.
July 24, 2006
To the list of daily aggravations in the new New Orleans, add one that augments the heat, spoils the food and drains the cash register: power failures. Ten months after Hurricane Katrina, the city still does not have a reliable electrical system, reports The New York Times. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of repairs are still needed on a system devastated by flooding, the local utility is in bankruptcy and less than half of pre-storm customers have returned. Entergy New Orleans wants to increase its rates 25 percent to help pay for part of what it says is $718 million in storm losses and revenue shortfalls. That would increase the average household bill by $45 a month.
July 20, 2006
It has been a month since the National Guard and Louisiana State Police appeared in New Orleans, reports The Times-Picayune. Their arrival freed up entire squads of the New Orleans Police Department to attack crime in the city's most dangerous neighborhoods. Since then, arrests in some crime-plagued neighborhoods have almost doubled, and the number of murders has been nearly cut in half, police said. During the 30 days before the June 20 deployment of the National Guard into more desolate areas of the city to contain looting and burglaries, there were 21 murders in the city. In the month after their arrival, from June 20 to Wednesday, there have been 11 killings.
A report from the nonprofit group Living Cities provides a blueprint for redeveloping Katrina-devastated East Biloxi, Miss. The question is, will city leaders and residents support the recommendations? The plan, which takes into account Federal Emergency Management Agency advisory flood elevations, suggests a central park with public space linked up from the Gulf to Back Bay in a flood-prone area where single family homes were destroyed. Multifamily housing designed to minimize flood damage would surround the park and building heights would increase gradually to blend with taller buildings at the city's east end, The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports.
July 10, 2006
Along a funky stretch of Magazine Street in New Orleans, shopkeepers are on the alert for criminals dressed to steal: A gang of cross-dressing shoplifters that has been terrorizing clothing stores for months. Rather than brandish weapons, they have used props such as fake babies or real toddlers as distractions in at least six robberies since shops reopened after Hurricane Katrina. USA TODAY reports that the designer purse-toting bandits recently took about $2,000 in merchandise from Turncoats, a store that sells tank tops and t-shirts. But with the city's recent spike in violent crime, tracking them down has not been a priority for police.
July 7, 2006
The Louisiana Recovery Authority on Thursday allocated $500 million in block grant money to help leverage billions of dollars in federal spending on infrastructure torn up by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Most of the money will be matched to Federal Emergency Management Agency repair money. The LRA move will ensure that billions will be spent on repairing water treatment systems, port facilities, airports, highways and public schools. But use of the money faces a hurdle in parishes that have not yet adopted recommended flood-elevation standards advised by FEMA, according to The Times-Picayune. FEMA expects strict compliance with the advisories, and LRA officials generally back the standard, said LRA Executive Director Andy Kopplin.
July 6, 2006
With the verified sexual-assault count among Hurricane Katrina evacuees nearing 70, police and women's advocates in the Gulf Coast area say the risk of violence against evacuee children and women is intensified by crowded, temporary housing 10 months after the storm. Lt. David Benelli, commander of the New Orleans Police Department Sex Crimes Unit, said sex-assault charges against people who are not strangers to their accusers are mounting. In January, the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a list of Katrina evacuees so it could urge those witnessing or suffering sexual violence to contact them for help, but director Judy Benitez said FEMA sent a form letter denying the request, Women's eNews reports.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco will announce today a $200 million restoration of Jackson Barracks, a project expected spur redevelopment in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward and Arabi areas, as well as enabling the Louisiana National Guard to return its state headquarters to the complex. The huge repair project, which will be in accordance with FEMA guidelines, will demonstrate to property owners how to repair shattered homes and build new ones according to new hurricane codes, Blanco said. The 100-acre historic base took on between 4 feet and 8 feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, The Times-Picayune reports. The flooding forced the Louisiana National Guard to temporarily move its state headquarters to Camp Beauregard, near Pineville.
June 30, 2006
The government will keep covering the full cost of clearing the bulk of Hurricane Katrina wreckage in the Gulf Coast for the rest of the year, the White House said Thursday. A program that reimburses states and cities for all their bills was to end June 30, reports The Associated Press. That would have shifted 10 percent of the cost away from Washington. An estimated 20 million cubic yards of wreckage still litters New Orleans and Mississippi waterways, according to the most recent Federal Emergency Management Agency data available.
As New Orleans rebuilds tens of thousands of homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina, FEMA has recommended rebuilding at levels below last year's floods, reigniting a debate about how the levee-ringed city can be rebuilt safely. If buildings are rebuilt too low, most of the money spent on construction could be wasted, while a level too high would be costly for the cash-strapped city, according to Reuters. FEMA, widely criticized for its response to Katrina last year, published preliminary rebuilding height guidelines earlier this month based on its model for a 100-year flood. Katrina and Rita led the agency to re-examine its previous flood maps, but researchers ruled out using either storm as the basis for the 100-year hurricane model.
June 9, 2006
Thousands of people will struggle to find affordable housing if officials fail to recognize the need as the Gulf Coast rebuilds, according to a report released Thursday by the Rand Gulf States Policy Institute. Researchers from the nonprofit organization went to the area in October to study affordable housing needs, according to The Clarion-Ledger. The report states that about 81,000 housing units were damaged or destroyed. Around a third of those were occupied by households living below the U.S. median income, which was $43,318, according to 2003 U.S. Census Bureau figures.
June 8, 2006
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is telling local leaders June 30 will be the last day they will remove Hurricane Katrina-related debris in pummeled Hancock County, though officials say the job is far from over, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. John Martin, a corps debris specialist, told Bay St. Louis, Waveland and county officials to begin making plans to take over the job once the agency quits.
June 7, 2006
They are the backbone of post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction: workers who converge at dawn and wait to be picked up for 14-hour shifts of hauling debris, ripping out drywall and nailing walls. But because many are in the country illegally, immigrant workers rebuilding New Orleans are especially vulnerable to exploitation, according to a study released Tuesday by professors at Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley, reports The Associated Press.
June 5, 2006
Days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Louisiana/Mississippi border, it became clear that people with disabilities were having trouble getting help. Census figures indicate that more than 20 percent of the population affected by Hurricane Katrina had some type of disability, according to National Journal. As people flowed out of New Orleans last August, complaints began flowing in from those with disabilities who were poorly served during the evacuation.
May 31, 2006
A Houston federal judge refused Tuesday to order federal officials to continue an emergency housing program for Hurricane Katrina evacuees nationwide until June 30. The decision by U.S. District Judge David Hittner means that more than 2,000 evacuees will lose their housing assistance Thursday, according to the Houston Chronicle. The Houston law firm Caddell & Chapman is representing the plaintiffs and had sought a temporary restraining order — effective for a maximum of 20 days — to give evacuees more time in FEMA's emergency program while the court considers the plaintiffs' request for long-term relief.
Thursday is the start of the new hurricane season. It also is the day the Federal Emergency Management Agency will begin dismantling camps that have housed and fed 40,000 volunteers who came to Louisiana to help salvage blighted areas in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, Newhouse News Service reports. FEMA previously had said it would tear down its last four Louisiana camps in April, but it extended the deadline when local officials and charities pleaded for more time so the volunteers would have a place to stay. FEMA will continue to fund housing assistance programs and public rebuilding projects, but local officials and charities say closing the camps now threatens the region's recovery by taking away the only conveniences the depressed areas can offer volunteers: a place to stay and decent meals.
See Newhouse News Service article
May 30, 2006
Firefighters still searching for those missing after Hurricane Katrina have found another body in New Orleans, reports The Associated Press. It was found Saturday in the rear laundry room of a house in Mid-City, where most houses are raised several feet but floods still reached the attached mailboxes, nearly chest-high. The house was fifth to be checked of 47 addresses given to the search team Friday, said Capt. Kenneth Kirsch of the New Orleans Fire Department. The addresses came from the Louisiana Family Assistance Center, a state agency that has a list of 226 people missing since the 2005 hurricanes.
All along the coast of the southeastern United States, even in those places untouched by its rage, Hurricane Katrina has obliterated long-held certitudes, according to The Washington Post. Last year's destructive storm eroded the almost innate self-confidence of residents who once viewed hurricanes as tempests that could be weathered, not unimaginable catastrophes. On the verge of what forecasters say will be a "very active" hurricane season, the result is a hovering fear. The wariness is a key but often unspoken cause for the slow recovery in towns wrecked last year — residents are too afraid to return — and a source of widespread anxiety everywhere else along the southeast coast.
It begins as a conversation, perhaps over dinner, at the end of the day: Where are you going this year? As a symptom of the general uneasiness in New Orleans, this year's hurricane evacuation talk ranks among the most acute. Within it are the immediate and long-term threats: the unnamed storm everyone may soon have to flee, and the grim likelihood that the next big one could be the knockout punch for this struggling city. Never has a coming hurricane season generated as much anxiety, many here say. The official start to the season is Thursday but the unofficial worrying has long since begun, according to The New York Times. On top of the ever-present reminders of last year's catastrophe — ruined neighborhoods, piles of debris, empty streets — the new threat is proving to be too much for some. Everyone here, it seems, knows someone who is picking up and leaving New Orleans for good. Many who swear they will not abandon the city have at least set up an alternative home-place somewhere else.
About 55,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina face the end of a federally funded rental assistance program, in which local governments issued 12-month housing and utility vouchers. Last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began issuing letters to thousands of evacuees telling them their aid would be terminated. The vouchers are to end Wednesday in most of the country, reports The Washington Post. That decision, says a class-action lawsuit filed by the Houston law firm of Caddell & Chapman and a consortium of public interest law groups, will create "widespread homelessness" and violates FEMA's statutory obligations to provide temporary housing assistance to hurricane victims. Sixty-two members of the House filed a brief last week supporting the suit. It says that FEMA "continues to engage in a process that is marked by inefficiency, a lack of discernable standards and seeming disregard for the plight of the vulnerable survivors who are depending on the aid that FEMA is statutorily obligated to provide."
May 25, 2006
Plans to use the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center as the main staging area for evacuating people from New Orleans by bus during hurricane threats this year came under strong attack Wednesday from board member, Ralph Brennan. At the monthly meeting of the Convention Center's board, Brennan, said the center could suffer irreparable damage to its image among convention planners around the nation and world if it shows up again on TV screens this fall as a hurricane shelter, reports The Times-Picayune. The evacuation plan announced May 2 by Mayor C. Ray Nagin calls for using RTA buses to transport most residents who can't leave the city on their own to a site behind the Convention Center.
May 24, 2006
New Orleans plans to hold its first criminal trial since Hurricane Katrina possibly next week, the first step in solving a judicial crisis in which thousands of suspects have been jailed for months without trials. Criminal District Court Chief Judge Calvin Johnson says courts will reopen in the downtown courthouse, which was flooded after the Aug. 29 storm. He says 3,000 jury summonses have been mailed, and criminal trials could resume soon after Memorial Day weekend. It's unclear who will be tried or how they will be chosen, USA TODAY reports. Defense lawyers, however, warn the effort may stall quickly. They say that Katrina ripped apart an already troubled judicial system and that it's unclear whether defendants can get fair trials.
May 23, 2006
Hurricane Katrina took his house, his courtroom and, Judge Arthur L. Hunter Jr. says, his faith in the way his city treats poor people facing criminal charges. He says nine months after the storm, more than a thousand jailed defendants have had no access to lawyers because the public defender system is short of money and staffing, without a computer system or files or even a list of clients. Hunter is moving to let some of the defendants without lawyers out of jail, reports The New York Times. He has suspended prosecutions in most cases involving public defenders. And, alone among a dozen criminal court judges, he has granted a petition to free a prisoner facing serious charges without counsel, and is considering others. The district attorney's office opposes letting defendants back out on the street, saying the court should find them lawyers. But Hunter said he has had little luck finding private firms willing to take on most indigents' cases.
New Orleans police got a reminder of the challenges facing the local justice system two weeks ago, when they finally pried open the rusty doors of their department's evidence rooms, which had been flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year. Much of what was inside was a moldy mess, USA TODAY reports. It's unclear how much of the evidence will be salvageable. The damaged evidence represents only a small part of the difficulty in restarting their criminal justice system, which is unable to guarantee thousands of crime suspects their right to a speedy trial and does not have nearly enough public defenders for low-income defendants. As dire as the situation seems now, some say Katrina has given New Orleans an opportunity to repair a criminal court system that did not serve low-income residents well even before the hurricane swept in from the Gulf of Mexico.
May 22, 2006
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin was re-elected Saturday in what many considered an improbable victory, overcoming a ceaseless barrage of criticism stemming from the chaos of Hurricane Katrina and the stalled recovery. The Washington Post reports that in addition to the frustrations of post-hurricane New Orleans, Nagin had to fend off a strong challenge by Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, the scion of a politically powerful clan, who outspent him by large a margin. Surrounded by throngs of cheering supporters, Nagin acknowledged the antagonism he has aroused since Katrina and, to the surprise of many in the room, thanked President Bush. He cited the billions of dollars for housing and levee construction that Bush has supported, and then urged unity: "This election is over, and it is time for this community to start the healing process."
Three thousand families in Mississippi have been deemed ineligible for a trailer as Federal Emergency Management Agency weeds out those Katrina victims who do not meet the qualifications for its emergency housing program, according to the Los Angeles Times. About 450 households have received eviction letters from FEMA; the rest are scheduled to receive notices in the next few weeks. Mississippi has 38,000 FEMA trailers. The reasons for the evictions are varied, and many are legitimate. There are trailer dwellers who could not prove they are legal U.S. residents; people who had owned a second, undamaged home all along; and people whose homes were damaged, but not by Katrina. But a number of residents said they were being kicked out erroneously, or for technicalities that arise from gray areas in FEMA regulations.
May 19, 2006
A continuing rise in reports of out-of-state deaths related to Hurricane Katrina caused Louisiana's official toll to jump by 22 percent to 1,577. The Department of Health and Hospitals added 281 more victims to the count Thursday to reach that total, reports The Times-Picayune. State officials say that for weeks after it made landfall Aug. 29, Hurricane Katrina kept claiming victims, often in more subtle fashion and in other states: elderly and ill evacuees too fragile for grueling trips on gridlocked highways, infants stillborn to mothers who were shuttled to other cities when they should have been on bed rest and residents overcome with anxiety by 24-hour television broadcasts of the devastation back home.
Nearly nine months after Hurricane Katrina, PBS' NOW returns to New Orleans to talk to residents hit hard by the storm about who they believe will be the best man to run the beleaguered city as mayor. With as many homes and businesses still in ruins, reconstruction is the core issue of the runoff between incumbent C. Ray Nagin and Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu. Just ahead of the election, NOW looks at how far New Orleans has come and her tough road ahead with a new hurricane season just around the corner.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed at least 250 historic buildings and severely damaged just as many in Mississippi, said Jennifer Baughn of the state Department of Archives and History. Baughn, a historical architect, said there's no telling how much it could cost to restore buildings and sites. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, a Republican from Mississippi, has included $80 million to restore storm-damaged historic sites in a $27 billion emergency hurricane package pending in Congress, The Clarion-Ledger reports. The Federal Emergency Management Agency pays up to 90 percent of the total cost to repair public sites, including schools and courthouses. But that leaves state and local municipalities, many of which were financially wiped out, to pick up the remaining cost, which could add up to millions of dollars, Baughn said.
May 17, 2006
Block by block, New Orleans is springing back to life. Block by block, it is also receding into the past tense. With Hurricane Katrina nearly nine months past and about 60 percent of New Orleans's pre-storm population still somewhere else, the rebirth and the wasting away are closely tracking neighborhood patterns of race and poverty. Disparities in wealth and in the distance of evacuees from their ruined houses are dictating, in many cases, which neighborhoods will be part of the city's future and which will be consigned to its history, according to The Washington Post. For a city that was two-thirds black and nearly one-third poor before the storm, the uneven pilgrimage back to New Orleans has already changed voter turnout and seems certain to transform the culture and character of the city, making it substantially whiter, richer and less populous than before.
White voters remain a minority in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but they may decide who leads this city through its critical recovery years, according to data from the mayoral primary. Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who is black, and his opponent, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who is white, are competing for the more than 60 percent of white voters who didn't vote for either of them, TODAY reports. In the last days before the runoff election Saturday, they are campaigning in majority white neighborhoods and scooping up endorsements from white "also-rans" from the primary. Katrina reduced the city's population from 450,000 to fewer than 200,000 and in the process narrowed the racial gap. This formerly two-thirds-black city is now closer to 50-50, says pollster Silas Lee. The focus on white voters is a turnabout from the primary election, when the 22 candidates made history by holding debates in cities such as Houston and Atlanta, home to many black hurricane evacuees.
New Orleans’ water board — with $408 million in debt, including $137 million due to investors in July — faces the threat of drowning, USA TODAY reports. Strapped with large fixed costs, heavy borrowings and massive new investment needs in a city whose population is 61 percent smaller than before the storm, the board is hard-pressed to cover its bills and provide basic services. Wall Street credit-rating firms view the water board as a gauge of how local governments across the Gulf Coast will weather a post-Katrina storm in public finance. The credit agencies have downgraded several dozen municipal borrowers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, including some — such as the water board — to non-investment grade “junk” status. In Louisiana, the debt is $8 billion, only half of which is insured. Whether any of these local government borrowers eventually might have to seek federal bankruptcy court protection has not been discussed seriously. But the magnitude of the problems approaches the strains that preceded the large-scale collapses of New York City in 1975 and Orange County, Calif., in 1994.
May 11, 2006
A coalition of advocates for displaced New Orleans residents called on the city's mayoral candidates Wednesday to speak up for thousands of families in Houston and elsewhere who are about to lose Federal Emergency Management Agency rental assistance, and perhaps their apartments, according to The Times-Picayune. A FEMA spokesman in Austin confirmed that about 7,000 of the 36,000 New Orleans area families now living in Houston might lose rental vouchers because they do not qualify for a longer-term federal assistance program with tougher eligibility requirements. Local families displaced to other states after Hurricane Katrina are in a similar bind, although national numbers were not available. The news distressed local housing advocates for the poor, who said they worry that New Orleans tenants evicted in Houston may try to make their way back home, where there is little to no affordable housing for them.
The private National Trust for Historic Preservation put 20 New Orleans neighborhoods on its 2006 list of “most endangered historic places” in the country Wednesday, hoping to bolster public awareness and rally resources to save them. The National Trust said those neighborhoods contain 30,000-plus structures and make up more than half of the core area of the city. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that the nonprofit Washington, D.C., group also placed historic communities and landmarks of the Mississippi Gulf Coast on the list. The National Trust, which helps preserve architecturally or historically significant places, wants to save as many old structures as possible in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.
May 10, 2006
The processing of disaster loans by the Small Business Administration was slowed by a new computer system that limited the number of employees who could access the system at one time, according to a report that evaluates the performance of 22 federal agencies in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita. The 226-page report was prepared by inspectors general for the agencies and is possibly the broadest look to date at the federal bureaucratic response to last year's hurricanes, The Times-Picayune reports. The report said that the immediate federal response to Katrina was delayed and impeded because FEMA did not have contracts in place for the quick distribution of ice, water, food, tarps, transportation and travel trailers. Because the planning process did not take place before Katrina, "FEMA found itself in an untenable position and hastily entered into contracts, with little to no contract competition for disaster commodities," the report concluded. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, awarded 64 percent of the 554 Katrina-related contracts over $500,000 without competitive bidding in the first three months after the hurricane, the report said.
May 8, 2006
For nearly 270 years, medical care for New Orleanians with no insurance could be summed up in two words: Charity Hospital. With an abundance of doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals in its clinics, operating rooms and world-renowned emergency department, the colossus on Tulane Avenue and its sister institution, University Hospital, handled everything from well-baby clinics to diabetes monitoring to treatment of gunshot wounds. But in addition to sending tens of thousands of residents across the United States seeking shelter, damage caused by Hurricane Katrina forced the state to relocate the hospitals' medical services, as well as the people who offer them. Some practitioners and specialties, such as trauma care and HIV outpatient services, have returned to New Orleans. However the medical equivalent of one-stop shopping is over for the time being — and the impact ranges from inconvenient to life-threatening, The Times-Picayune reports.
Hurricane Katrina evacuees deemed ineligible for further housing assistance will be allowed to remain in the city of Houston's voucher program an extra month, city officials said Friday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency extended the deadline from June 1 to June 30, the Houston Chronicle reports. Meanwhile, FEMA staff continues to review the cases of about 8,900 heads of household the agency deemed ineligible for the individual assistance program that is replacing the city-sponsored voucher program.
May 4, 2006
New Orleans city council members grilled a FEMA official Wednesday, insisting they have done everything in their power to push the city's recovery forward while battling the agency’s bureaucracy and closeted planning of Mayor C. Ray Nagin. For more than an hour, Mark Misczak, who identified himself as a "human services branch director" for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, fielded questions, The Times Picayune reports. The queries initially focused on housing issues, but eventually morphed into a litany of complaints on issues ranging from the exclusion of local companies from FEMA contracts and the slow pace of Entergy repairs to the precarious position that people still living in trailers will be in this hurricane season. Citing reports that FEMA was closing its long-range planning office in New Orleans because neither the city nor the state could create a timely recovery plan, council members railed against the agency for deserting desperate citizens. However, Misczak said that was not the case and that perhaps confusion arose over location, not intent; FEMA is not shuttering its New Orleans operation, he said, but is simply moving a small piece of it under another roof.
The neediest of Hurricane Katrina survivors will receive unprecedented help through a long-term Salvation Army plan and a $155 million donation for related services, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. The Salvation Army unveiled its recovery and rebuilding plan Wednesday at Biloxi’s Yankie Stadium. The services, for Katrina survivors in Mississippi and Louisiana only, include emergency relief for local Salvation Army centers, homeownership grants of up to $10,000, job-training services and a fund for unmet community needs.
School libraries wiped out by Katrina and Rita are getting grants worth $500,000 to help them rebuild, along with a rare magazine collection, first lady Laura Bush and media executives announced Wednesday. Bush, a former librarian and public school teacher, announced the grants at Chalmette High School in St. Bernard Parish, La., where every building — including 15 schools — was flooded. Seven public and private schools in Louisiana and three in Mississippi will receive the money from the Laura Bush Foundation's Gulf Coast Library Recovery Initiative, The Associated Press reports.
May 3, 2006
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is closing its long-term recovery office in New Orleans, claiming local officials failed to meet their planning obligations after Hurricane Katrina, reports The Associated Press. The office is responsible for helping the city devise a blueprint to rebuild destroyed houses, schools and neighborhoods. "FEMA cannot drive the planning — our mission is to support it. We can only do so much and then we look to the city to embrace and begin planning and managing," said FEMA's national spokesman Aaron Walker. "Once they begin planning, we can re-engage with them."
May 2, 2006
The National Guard heads into the 2006 hurricane season with more troops at home than last year, but less equipment to handle emergencies, according to Stateline.org. State-based units are short on critical equipment because guardsmen about to return from overseas assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan are handing off their rifles, radios and vehicles to incoming units. State officials say shortages at home of Guard equipment, such as Humvees, mean they must rely on backup assistance from neighboring states once hurricane season begins June 1. In Louisiana, about 100 of the Guard's high-water vehicles remain abroad — even as the state continues to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina. Vehicles are particularly crucial to hurricane response because they are often the only way to ferry ice and water through devastated areas.
With voter turnout down in many flood-ravaged wards and up in relatively undamaged areas, residents of neighborhoods like the Lower 9th Ward and eastern New Orleans could see an erosion of political clout, according to a Brown University study released Monday. As expected, Katrina's population displacement also depressed overall voter turnout and shifted the racial demographics of the electorate, The Times-Picayune reports. But the shift in the voting power of different neighborhoods could have more impact in the city's new political landscape, where neighborhood issues reign over all others, said Brown sociologist John Logan.
The nation of Qatar plans to announce today roughly $60 million in grants to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina, including $17.5 million to Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically black Catholic university in the United States. Other beneficiaries are to be Tulane University, Children's Hospital in New Orleans, Habitat for Humanity, Louisiana State University and the March of Dimes, The New York Times reports. Nasser Bin Hamad M. al-Khalifa, Qatar's ambassador to the United States, said the remainder of the $100 million his country had pledged would be assigned in the coming months.
May 1, 2006
Across vast stretches of New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, there is only silence among the ruins. Eight months after Hurricane Katrina, nothing in the city looks quite like the Lower 9th. The collapsed houses, mud-wracked cars and ubiquitous debris are only the most evident symptoms of a community's brush with death. Other symptoms are invisible: The water is not safe to drink or even bathe in. Electricity is spotty at best. A few houses have been red-tagged and demolished. Scores of volunteers are arriving daily to rebuild the Lower 9th, one house at a time, according to The Times-Picayune. The Common Ground Lower 9th Ward Project, as the effort is called, is one of several efforts by Common Ground, a nonprofit agency created in Katrina's aftermath that has drawn the young and the idealistic — and substantial philanthropic dollars — from all across the nation.
April 28, 2006
Facing renewed criticism of his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush signaled Thursday while in New Orleans that his administration was listening to its critics. "All of us in positions of responsibility appreciate those who are working to help us to understand how to do our jobs better," Bush said during his visit to the heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward. His trip was planned to highlight the progress of rebuilding efforts on the Gulf Coast and, this being National Volunteer Week, the role volunteers have played in them, according to The New York Times. But it came on a day that a bipartisan Senate panel’s report called the Federal Emergency Management Agency the living "symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy."
April 27, 2006
Residents of News Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood are participating in an urban-planning method called a “charrette,” in which architects, developers, environmentalists, sociologists and transportation experts work directly with community residents to collectively design a model on which everyone can agree. Charrettes have been going on throughout Katrina-ravaged communities in Louisiana and Mississippi, but this planning project is the first of its kind in New Orleans and an all-volunteer effort; some local politicians believe it will serve as a model of bottom-up planning for the rest of the city’s neighborhoods. The Gentilly plan, which calls for a more walkable town center and raised housing designed to withstand future floods, offers a first glimpse of what New Orleans might look like, reports The Christian Science Monitor.
See Christian Science Monitor article
April 25, 2006
A new report on communication-gear shortcomings in states most likely to be hit by hurricanes praises South Carolina for having a strong, reliable system that lets state and local police and emergency services workers talk to each other. But it also notes problems in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas, The Associated Press reports. When emergency workers can't communicate, they can't coordinate rescue efforts, said Steven Jones, executive director First Response Coalition. The lack of communication when Hurricane Katrina struck the Mississippi and Louisiana coast was disheartening, especially coming just four years after emergency workers, police and others struggled to talk during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Jones said.
Evacuation information is being distributed door-to-door to Mississippi Gulf Coast residents now living in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers as part of preparations for the 2006 hurricane season, according to The Associated Press. FEMA said Monday that the door hangers encourage residents to call a toll-free number by May 26 if they need a transportation to safe areas should a hurricane threaten the area battered last August by Hurricane Katrina.
April 24, 2006
Some 1.2 million children under the age of 18 were living in counties rendered disaster zones by Katrina, reports The Associated Press. As many as 8 percent, or 100,000, are expected to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, according to one assessment. Most experts say the toll is likely far higher. Of the first 1,000 children screened by the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, 27 percent displayed symptoms of trauma, including nightmares, flashbacks, heightened anxiety and bedwetting, says Dr. Joy Osofsky, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at LSU's Harris Center for Infant Mental Health.
Hurricane Katrina didn't discriminate when it roared ashore Aug. 29, leaving a path of destruction in both the rich and poor areas of South Mississippi, The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports. Most of the beachfront homeowners have received at least partial settlement to rebuild. But scores of residents in the city's low-income communities, such as Ward 3's Forest Heights, Turkey Creek and North Gulfport, had no flood insurance, were not in a flood plain or did not have enough insurance to cover their expenses. Those residents credit their survival to faith-based organizations and other volunteers who left their comfortable lives back home to help them rebuild. Volunteers from across the country started streaming into Gulfport just days after the storm. Eight months later, they're still here.
April 21, 2006
A hurricane relief fund headed by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton will soon begin to distribute $20 million among thousands of churches, temples, mosques and other places of worship in New Orleans and other areas shattered by Hurricane Katrina, The Times-Picayune reports. The award is part of about $119 million the former presidents have raised for Katrina relief since they began soliciting funds last fall.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants 2,044 Mississippians to repay money the agency gave them in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, reports The Clarion-Ledger. Some storm victims got duplicate benefits or more money than they should have because of FEMA errors. Others might have gotten FEMA benefits for immediate expenses that later were reimbursed by insurance settlements. And others benefited "by intentional misrepresentation," FEMA spokesman Eugene Brezany said. As many as 3 percent of all hurricane victims who received FEMA benefits could have to repay benefits. The recipients have 30 days to pay back a total $4.7 million of the aid that the agency paid in disaster benefits, Brezany said, adding that those who can't repay the full amount can set up payment plans.
April 20, 2006
Louisiana officials plan to unveil an organization today that will revive the process of creating a New Orleans rebuilding plan, using $3.5 million newly pledged by the Rockefeller Foundation, according to The New York Times. The ambitious effort calls for six months of work by urban planners, architects and other experts, along with public meetings in New Orleans's 13 community districts and in the four cities that have taken in the greatest number of the displaced: Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Dallas and Houston.
Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson is urging emergency responders across the state to identify American Red Cross shelters in their communities before the hurricane season begins June 1, reports The Associated Press. But some Mississippi officials say the Red Cross shelter certification requirements are too stringent — the latest complaint against the charity that has weathered strong criticism for its response after Hurricane Katrina.
Officials from archives in nine Southeastern states and New Jersey met Wednesday at The Georgia Archives to brainstorm ways to improve their emergency plan in case a storm like Katrina strikes again. Archivists call the hurricane the world's worst natural disaster in more than three decades for important documents and records, The Associated Press reports. Katrina devastated public archives charged with protecting important documents — not only historic treaties and photographs, but critical, mundane modern documents such as birth and death certificates and car titles. The archivists hope to have a plan in place at their agencies by August, and that it can serve as a national model.
April 18, 2006
The staffs of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and The Sun Herald of south Mississippi captured Pulitzer Prizes for public service Monday for chronicling the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina despite life-changing damage to their own homes and workplaces. The Associated Press reports that according to the Pulitzer citation, The Sun Herald won for its "valorous and comprehensive coverage ... providing a lifeline for devastated readers" and The Times-Picayune for its "heroic, multi-faceted coverage" to "serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant."
Frustrated with the performance of the American Red Cross, Alabama's Gov. Bob Riley has asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff for the federal aid necessary to let the state assume primary responsibility for operating its own emergency shelters in disasters. The move comes after months of criticism of the Red Cross, inspired by what even the organization's own leaders acknowledge was its inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, The New York Times reports.
April 17, 2006
Opal Jackson had never seen so many people who needed help as she saw at the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster recovery center in Houston on the South Loop, reports the Houston Chronicle. For months, it was the eye of a chaotic storm of evacuees from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and elsewhere who had lost homes and possessions in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. At least 200,000 families sought aid at the site, the largest recovery center FEMA has ever operated, said Jackson, an agency spokeswoman. But after nearly seven months, the center closed at 1 p.m. on Friday.
April 13, 2006
While some Gulf Coast residents hunker down on moldy mattresses in scavenged tents in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, 10,477 government trailers slated for Katrina survivors sit empty in Hope, Ark., according to The Christian Science Monitor. These ragged dome tents are part of a network of official and unofficial tent cities in the woods and along railroad tracks up and down the Gulf Coast. But getting tent residents into sturdier abodes has been a tough task. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says it seeks to stop fraud by requiring people to provide proof of their previous residence in the area. The agency also ensures that trailers are placed out of floodzones, as legally required. But that people are making their homes in tents reflects poor planning and inflexible management, critics say. And it shows how the social safety net is fraying, others add.
See Christian Science Monitor article
Trudging through the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast last fall, David Shayt, a curator with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, searched for artifacts that would preserve the story of Hurricane Katrina, reports the Houston Chronicle. It was the museum's first concerted effort to document a natural disaster using physical objects that evoke not only the storm's human toll, but also its political and social fallout.
April 12, 2006
Red Cross officials announced plans yesterday to dramatically increase their stockpile of food and other disaster supplies in key danger zones nationwide and partner with community-based organizations to speed assistance to victims — all to avoid a repeat of problems the charity experienced last year in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Washington Post reports that the changes mark a shift in how the nonprofit conducts itself. Traditionally, the Red Cross has relied largely on its own resources in times of crisis. The future will find it relying much more on community-based groups when it confronts disasters.
April 10, 2006
Assailed for its many missteps in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the American Red Cross is plunging into a daunting, two-track effort to overhaul its entire disaster response system and the often cumbersome way it governs itself, The Associated Press reports. There is pressure to move quickly and convincingly — the new hurricane season starts June 1 and the Red Cross is hurrying to get its new response plans in place before storms arrive. The organization hopes to complete an independent audit this summer and offer governance reform proposals to Congress before skeptical politicians start pushing their own reform plans.
While many of the country’s newspapers have moved on from coverage of Katrina, both The Sun Herald of Biloxi, Miss., and New Orleans’ Times-Picayune remain all Katrina, all the time, reports The New York Times. Both papers have received accolades for their roles in covering the storm, and next week both might well receive Pulitzer Prizes. Both papers have struggled along with their communities, and during the recovery have faced similar issues and adopted similar approaches to their new reality. Both also have taken on a new importance as news sources and advocates in their communities, connecting with readers the way newspapers did before the arrival of television.
April 7, 2006
Race and class played important roles in shaping how Gulf Coast residents, particularly low-income blacks in New Orleans, responded to Hurricane Katrina, a Tulane University sociologist said Thursday. Using data from a Gallup telephone survey of 1,500 adult Katrina survivors, Tulane sociology Professor James Elliott and sociology graduate student Jeremy Pais found that low-income blacks — though not all black or low-income people generally — were most likely to stay in New Orleans through the disaster, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The survey also discovered that black people from New Orleans were nearly four times more likely to lose their pre-Katrina jobs than white workers.
April 5, 2006
Two international Red Cross organizations issued scathing criticisms of the American Red Cross's chaotic response to Hurricane Katrina, accusing the charity of approaching the relief effort with a "dangerous combination of ignorance and arrogance," according to The Washington Post. The reports by the British Red Cross and the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, which sent experts to the Gulf Coast shortly after Katrina struck, say that their American counterpart was ill-prepared for the disaster, relied on inexperienced volunteers in key positions and had an ineffective system for moving supplies to where they were needed.
April 4, 2006
Criticized for its Katrina response, the American Red Cross will overhaul the way it handles future disasters by sharing its aid dollars with other groups and cracking down internally on waste and abuse, reports The Associated Press. The nation's largest charity promised the changes in a statement to a Senate panel on Monday, following its acknowledgment last year that its $2 billion response to the Gulf Coast storm fell short.
As the first vote since Hurricane Katrina, the April 22 New Orleans mayoral primary was supposed to be about the critical choices facing this battered city — an issues-filled debate about whose reconstruction plan was best. Instead, with the city's majority-black status in doubt for the first time in decades, one dominant motif has emerged in the campaign: race, which for nearly 30 years has been merely a muted subtheme in politics here. New Orleans has elected black mayors since 1978, and there has been little doubt about the racial identity of the eventual winner, The New York Times reports.
As the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina receded in September, roads filled with residents leaving New Orleans, their cars, SUVs and moving vans jammed with what they had salvaged of their lives. But another mass movement was taking place on the other sides of the highways, reports the Los Angeles Times. Thousands of men from Mexico and Central America were driving into the city. Word had spread throughout the Latino immigrant diaspora in America that the city had plenty of work, construction wages had doubled to $16 an hour and no one was asking for papers.
April 3, 2006
When Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29, thousands of people who had not known loss suddenly knew what it was like to be homeless and jobless, to taste hunger and feel thirst, to go without medical care or even toilets. And those who didn't experience the misery and chaos firsthand saw it in graphic detail every day and night on television. Katrina was the cataclysmic event that was supposed to launch a vigorous "national dialogue on poverty." The Associated Press reports that advocates for the poor say it didn't happen.
March 31, 2006
The American Red Cross, plagued by continuing controversy over its Hurricane Katrina relief effort, said yesterday that it is turning over to federal law enforcement officials results of its investigation into possible wrongdoing at a food and warehouse operation in New Orleans, reports The Washington Post. It also thanked volunteers who brought the matter to their attention. The embattled charity has spent much of the last six months defending how it used $2.1 billion in donations it received for victims of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
With the 2006 hurricane season approaching, Louisiana continues to have gaps in its health-care emergency response system that can only be corrected with funding and a uniform plan, the head of a Louisiana Recovery Authority subcommittee reported Thursday. Dr. Les Johnson, who heads the LRA subcommittee, said there has been no shortage of disaster planning that gives the illusion of preparedness, but it has not been accompanied by funding, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate.
March 30, 2006
A Louisiana Senate committee on Wednesday rejected a bill pushed by civil rights groups to make it easier for displaced New Orleans residents to vote in the mayoral election next month. The Associated Press reports that the panel rejected a bill to create "satellite voting centers" in other states so that registered voters living elsewhere could cast ballots without traveling back to Louisiana for the April 22 election. The Rev. Jesse Jackson testified that forcing displaced voters — most of whom are black — to pay for transportation back to New Orleans amounted to a "poll tax" like those from the Jim Crow era.
March 27, 2006
In a major shake-up of its relief operations in New Orleans, the American Red Cross dismissed two key supervisors as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into the improper diversion of relief supplies after Hurricane Katrina, a Red Cross official said. The New York Times reports that the supervisors — volunteers, as are 95 percent of Red Cross personnel — were in charge of the organization's kitchens and shelters, which have assisted tens of thousands of the hurricane's victims. The move came a day after the interim president of the Red Cross said the organization was investigating accusations of impropriety, including possible criminal activity.
A clearer picture of what residents may be up against when a storm such as Hurricane Katrina is barreling down on them might motivate them to make the potentially life-saving move to head for safer ground, according to meteorologists and university researchers. The Mobile Register reports that a better understanding of why people do what they do is crucial to tailoring weather information in a way to get them to make the right decisions to protect themselves, according to scientists and researchers attending the 60th Interdepartmental Hurricane Conference in Mobile, Ala.
March 24, 2006
The American Red Cross, the largest recipient of donations after Hurricane Katrina, is investigating wide ranging accusations of impropriety among volunteers after the disaster, The New York Times reports. John F. McGuire, the interim president and chief executive of the Red Cross, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said some of the actions might have been criminal. The accusations include improper diversion of relief supplies, failure to follow required Red Cross procedures in tracking and distributing supplies, and use of felons as volunteers in the disaster area in violation of Red Cross rules.
As Barbara Bush spent two hours championing her son's software company at a Houston middle school Thursday morning, a watchdog group questioned whether the former first lady should be allowed to channel a donation to Neil Bush's company Ignite Learning through Houston's Hurricane Katrina relief fund. The Houston Chronicle reports that some critics said donations to a tax-deductible charitable fund shouldn't benefit the Bush family. Others questioned whether the Houston Independent School District violated district policy by allowing the company to host a promotional event on campus. School officials said the event at the middle school, where Bush met with 40 educators and business leaders, did not violate policy.
March 22, 2006
Nearly seven months after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and forced out hundreds of thousands of residents, most evacuees say they have not found a permanent place to live, have depleted their savings and consider their lives worse than before the hurricane, according to interviews with more than 300 evacuees conducted by The New York Times. The interviews suggested that while blacks and whites suffered similar rates of emotional trauma, blacks bore a heavier economic and social burden. And even as both groups flounder, most said they believed that the rest of the nation and politicians in Washington have moved on.
More than six months after Katrina and Rita struck, all 5,192 Gulf Coast children listed as missing have been reunited with family members in what became the largest child-recovery effort in U.S. history, reports The Associated Press. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children worked with the FBI, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Postal Service, Red Cross and other agencies to reunite children separated from their parents or guardians when Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29 and Rita hit just a few weeks later. All but 12 of the children were found alive. Most were found living with other relatives, family friends or other adults, an official said.
Almost seven months after Katrina's devastating assault on New Orleans, nearly 1,500 people remain missing, reports the Houston Chronicle. And hundreds of new missing-persons calls continue to pour in even as workers struggle to reunite families, identify the dead and close the books on a massive human lost-and-found effort. An official said that some "missing" individuals were reluctant to be reunited with their families because of financial or domestic problems. Names of those who proved to be fugitive lawbreakers were passed on to authorities.
March 21, 2006
As hurricane season approaches, the city of New Orleans doesn’t have an emergency shelter, and local officials are asking for federal help to get people out of harm’s way if another disaster strikes, according to USA TODAY. Residents who can't leave town on their own before a storm this hurricane season (June through November) will be asked to board buses at the city's downtown convention center and will be shuttled to shelters in outlying areas.
March 20, 2006
With angry tones in their voices, clergy from more than 100 cities called on Washington lawmakers to end their squabbling over $4.2 billion in federal money earmarked to rebuild hurricane-damaged housing in Louisiana, and to direct more money to evacuated residents trying to return to the New Orleans area. The Times-Picayune reports that the clergy members said Congress has moved too slowly to put money into the hands of evacuees for repairing their homes and reviving their communities.
March 16, 2006
Many Hispanics are still homeless and living in dire conditions along the Gulf Coast because of a language barrier and ethnic profiling, researchers at the University of South Carolina said Wednesday. The Associated Press reports that the school was awarded nearly $400,000 in grants to fund 18 research projects on the societal and environmental impact of Hurricane Katrina. On of those projects was a $25,000 study on how Hispanics managed during and after the storm.
In Boston and other metropolitan areas, faith groups have formed coalitions to give emotional, spiritual, and practical support to Katrina evacuees confronted with immediate needs for housing, jobs, healthcare, and schools for their children, reports The Christian Science Monitor. As on the Gulf Coast, religious groups are responding in ways that government cannot.
See Christian Science Monitor article
March 13, 2006
The Internal Revenue Service has used a fast-track approval process to grant tax exemptions to almost 400 new charities that said they planned to assist Hurricane Katrina victims, reports The New York Times. But one that distributes leather jackets to address the special needs of sadomasochists? Another that hands out new underwear? A spot check of the new charities shows that some have disappeared, while others are struggling to help storm victims or to broaden their mission after an initial spurt of activity. Over all, about $3.6 billion has been pledged to Katrina-related charities, with roughly 60 percent donated to the American Red Cross.
March 10, 2006
A study by the National Council of La Raza has criticized all layers of government and the American Red Cross for failing the Hispanic community both in preparations for Katrina and Rita and in the response after the hurricanes hit. The Scripps Howard News Service reports that hundreds of Latinos lived along the state's coast and worked in the booming gambling-casino industry. Many spoke little, if any, English, but no efforts had been made by local officials to put out warnings and shelter information in Spanish. The group faulted FEMA for having no plan to disseminate emergency information in any language but English.
See Scripps Howard News Service article
March 8, 2006
President Bush yesterday ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create a center for faith-based and community initiatives within 45 days to eliminate regulatory, contracting and programmatic barriers to providing federal funds to religious groups to deliver social services, the White House announced last night. Pressed both by churches that have not received privately raised Hurricane Katrina relief funds as promised and by the outpouring of help of religious groups to Gulf Coast storm victims, Bush also called on the department by September "to identify all existing barriers … that unlawfully discriminate against, or otherwise discourage or disadvantage the participation" of such groups in federal programs, reports The Washington Post.
March 6, 2006
Expanded services to treat problem gamblers in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and two other Louisiana locales are on the way. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that it’s part of an effort to get more help closer to people displaced by Hurricane Katrina and respond to a growing number of gambling addicts in need of treatment. Katrina shut down a compulsive gambling in-patient treatment center in New Orleans with a 16-bed residential board and a halfway house attached to it, said Michael Duffy, assistant secretary of the state Office of Addictive Disorders.
Grass-roots groups that claim the United States failed to protect human rights of evacuees and workers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have urged an international commission to press the U.S. government to address the abuses, the Hattiesburg American reports. Representatives from the groups that included the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance gave a lengthy list of alleged abuses to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the Organization of American States. One New Orleans Katrina survivor said the National Guard detained her, her family and scores of other evacuees on an Interstate 10 causeway in the broiling sun without adequate food, water or shelter.
See Hattiesburg American article
March 2, 2006
After Hurricane Katrina struck, President Bush enlisted a coalition of clergy from across the nation to distribute part of the $110 million in private funds that former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton raised to help victims of the storm. But six months later, Bishop T.D. Jakes, one of the ministers selected by Bush, said that not a dime of the $20 million designated for faith organizations along the Gulf Coast has arrived, The Washington Post reports. He blames the fund for not coming up with a plan to distribute the money to churches and other faith-based organizations.
March 1, 2006
About 600 Hurricane Katrina evacuees were flown to Utah in September in the nation's hurricane relief effort. They were met with a charitable outpouring of support and an economy flush with jobs. But The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the evacuees, and those who came on their own, faced adapting to a starkly different culture and climate. Some are thriving and plan to stay in Utah. Others are still jobless, homesick and isolated in their apartments, according to outreach workers. News reports document a handful turning to drugs or crime.
Despite intensive efforts to reach the scattered refugees of Hurricane Katrina, nearly 2,000 such names remain on the state's list of people still unaccounted for, out of 12,000 that had once been reported. Even now, new missing persons reports trickle in; there were 99 over the two-week period that ended Feb. 5. But The New York Times reports that officials say the number is less a measure of the storm's lethal power, or even of the lives it upended, than of the trauma, disarray and instability that persist half a year later. Only about 300 of those on the list are believed to have died in the flooding; many of the rest are adrift in America, having failed, for a variety of reasons, to remain in touch with their own families.
Six months after Hurricane Katrina drove them from their homes and destroyed their possessions, some still live in shelters, others in hotels and FEMA trailers. A few have begun to rebuild. The worst natural disaster in U.S. history displaced some 770,000 residents — the most since the great Dust Bowl migrations of the 1930s. The storm destroyed or made uninhabitable some 300,000 homes, reports The Christian Science Monitor. Those who have returned live on lonely streets, along barren, windswept shores, and in tiny trailers beside gutted homes.
See Christian Science Monitor article
February 28, 2006
The American Red Cross — castigated in a recent House report for its disorganization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — had been warned for years that its management structure would plague future disaster response, according to documents released by a Senate panel. The Los Angeles Times reports that in a letter to the charity, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned the effectiveness of its massive organizational hierarchy. After Grassley wrote the charity in December questioning the adequacy of its response to Katrina, he received dozens of letters, e-mails and phone calls from current and former Red Cross employees and volunteers. Among other things, they complained about: a lack of coordination between headquarters and workers in the field; the use of costly hotels, rather than shelters, to house volunteers; and top officials using contributions to hire consultants to buff up the organization's image.
February 27, 2006
The lack of revelry on the Friday before Mardi Gras reflects the lack of people — New Orleans's black middle class is gone. The Washington Post reports that many African-Americans prosperous enough to pay dues to a social club and buy tuxedos and gowns for debutante balls lived in the predominantly black subdivisions of New Orleans East, a former marshland drained by canals that severely flooded after Hurricane Katrina. Mile after mile of suburban homes along its cul-de-sacs and man-made lakes as well as a similar neighborhood, Gentilly, are virtually empty. Those black professionals are scattered across the South, finding new jobs, establishing new medical and legal practices and businesses.
The budgetary woes caused by Katrina and Rita are putting unwanted strains on people who raise foster children. The Associated Press reports that the Louisiana Department of Social Services' Office of Community Services is struggling to find money for mandatory annual parent training, orthodontics and school tutoring programs.
February 24, 2006
Across the Gulf Coast region, churches, temples and mosques have struggled not only to rebuild their homes but to re-gather their members, USA TODAY reports. The damage has been so great that the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, headed by former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, announced in December that $20 million of the $90 million it will spend in the region will go to churches and other houses of worship, which are not eligible for public rebuilding funds. An estimated 900 houses of worship in the Gulf region were damaged, destroyed or unusable after the hurricanes, according to Religion News Service.
Distraught relatives continue to search for at least 131 children whom they have not heard from since Hurricane Katrina struck six months ago. USA TODAY reports that 97 percent of the children initially displaced have been reunited with parents or other relatives, according to Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Yet investigators are struggling to find the rest.
February 23, 2006
With the entry of prominent Louisiana politician Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu into the mayoral race, the campaign issues may move beyond rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina to the root causes of this city's problems that stretch back generations, reports the Los Angeles Times. And if elected, Landrieu would be the first white mayor to hold that office since his father left the job in 1978.
February 22, 2006
New Orleans doesn't want its poorest residents back — unless they agree to work. That was the message from three New Orleans City Council members who said government programs have "pampered" the city's residents for too long, the Houston Chronicle reports. The news that some New Orleans City Council members weren't keen on the city's poorest residents returning home added another layer of discomfort in Houston, where local residents and elected officials alike have stretched to meet the needs of thousands of Louisiana residents in the months after Hurricane Katrina.
February 10, 2006
The Archdiocese of New Orleans has announced plans to close 7 of its 142 parishes, temporarily merge about two dozen, and consolidate or change many of its 107 schools. Effective March 15, the plan will be re-evaluated in two years, when the future of New Orleans itself should be clearer, The New York Times reports. The history of the Roman Catholic Church is intimately entwined with that of the city, where two dozen streets are named after saints and St. Louis Cathedral has soared over Jackson Square for two centuries.
A group of Lower 9th Ward leaders and the community group ACORN have filed a federal lawsuit seeking major changes in Louisiana's plans to hold elections this spring for New Orleans mayor, City Council and other offices. The Times-Picayune reports that the suit says the state's election plans would violate the voting rights of thousands of primarily African-American voters displaced from the city since Hurricane Katrina.
February 9, 2006
A deep unease has settled over the Big Easy with the approach of the first Mardi Gras since Hurricane Katrina and the disturbing juxtapositions that are certain to result, the Chicago Tribune reports. Floats soon will move down boulevards that just five months ago were under water. Drunken revelers will careen across the same sidewalks where ailing and elderly storm victims dropped dead in the late-summer heat. And only a few blocks from the colorful tourist havens in the French Quarter, the Garden District and downtown, endless brown vistas of flood-ruined houses still stretch as far as the eye can see.
February 6, 2006
More than 10,000 religious people across the country have poured through the stricken Mississippi Gulf Coast in an unprecedented volunteer effort, according to The Washington Post. They sleep in church sanctuaries, RVs and tents. They leave behind jobs, schools and retirement for labor pilgrimages of days, weeks or months. Some have taken drastic measures, selling their homes and leaving family to move to the crushed Gulf Coast to devote themselves full time.
February 3, 2006
In great confusion and peculiar circumstances, New Orleans has suddenly found itself in the midst of an unexpected mayoral election campaign. The result may once again upend this city's old order: a white man might be elected mayor in a city that was, until a few months ago, mostly black, The New York Times reports. That outcome would have been undreamed of before the hurricane, but the high probability of one of Louisiana's most potent political families entering a race that almost didn't happen could further transform a political calculus that has prevailed here for nearly three decades.
February 2, 2006
The racial divide exposed by Hurricane Katrina has united minority lawmakers in Congress who hope to leverage their numbers to aid overlooked communities. The Associated Press reports that members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus are creating a new group that will include all of their members. The Tri-Caucus will not replace the existing caucuses.
January 27, 2006
Poor African American residents of New Orleans were disproportionately displaced by Hurricane Katrina, a study released Thursday confirmed. The Los Angeles Times reports that the demographic research by Brown University sociologist John Logan reinforced anecdotal observations and media images that showed the city's most socially vulnerable residents were hit hardest by the Aug. 29 storm and subsequent flooding. Examining the social differences among the city's 13 planning districts and 72 neighborhoods, Logan found that New Orleans was at risk of losing as much as 80% of its black population.
January 12, 2006
Angry homeowners screamed and City Council members seethed Wednesday as this city's recovery commission recommended imposing a four-month building moratorium on most of New Orleans and creating a powerful new authority that could use eminent domain to seize homes in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt. The Washington Post reports that hundreds of residents packed into a hotel ballroom interrupted the presentation of the long-awaited proposal with shouts and taunts, booed its main architect and unrolled a litany of complaints.
January 3, 2006
As they plan budgets for 2006, officials in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas and elsewhere are first calculating the costs of providing for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. They've come up with some daunting numbers—and questions, the Los Angeles Times reports. Although they expect reimbursement from the federal government for many expenses, officials say they aren't sure how much they will receive or when the money will arrive.
December 23, 2005
Efforts to locate 500 children still classified as missing after Hurricane Katrina are stalled because FEMA, citing privacy laws, has refused to share its evacuee database with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to investigators tracking the cases. The Washington Post reports that not until the White House and Justice Department intervened earlier this month did Department of Homeland Security officials agree to a compromise that grants FBI agents limited access to information that may provide clues to many of the unresolved cases.
Gay neighborhoods in New Orleans were about the only areas that weren't severely damaged by massive flooding from burst levees after Hurricane Katrina. And more than three months later, the New Orleans gay scene appears to be bouncing back faster than the city in general, Southern Voice reports. Still, many gay residents didn't live in those neighborhoods of New Orleans, especially lesbians, African-Americans and men who don't frequent gay bars. The fact that most evacuees still haven't been able to come home also has thrown the Lesbian & Gay Community Center into dire financial straits.
December 22, 2005
The hurricane evacuees still living in a string of flophouse motels in Columbia, S.C., after three months are among the most down and out. They were the hidden underclass in New Orleans, with no steady jobs or addresses, and they will be the hardest for government officials to move into apartments, The New York Times reports. Officials say the people who could fend for themselves have found other accommodations; rooms are now occupied mainly by the elderly, the disabled or the mentally ill. Many others are felons whose applications for apartments are routinely rejected or people with a string of evictions who seem to be waiting to be removed again.
For some African-American residents who were driven from their homes, the evidence suggests unseen powers ordered the sabotage of New Orleans' protective levees to cause low-lying black neighborhoods to flood. The plot, according to those who believe it, was to use the deadly hurricane to transform this majority-black city into a whiter, richer place, reports the Chicago Tribune. And everything that has happened since — the delays in reopening the poorest districts, the shuttering of the city's public housing projects, the sluggish delivery of federal storm aid, the mass layoff of the city's mostly black municipal workforce — has only reinforced the fear of many exiled black residents that New Orleans will be reconstructed without them.
The Gulf Coast in general — and New Orleans in particular — has at times felt abandoned by the American government. But USA TODAY reports that they haven't been abandoned by Americans, who have volunteered by the thousands to clear out houses, collect trash, fight mold, cover roofs, feed the hungry, tend to the sick and help in any way they can. Now, as disaster relief gives way to rebuilding, volunteers are renovating and constructing homes, restocking libraries, surveying historic structures, tracking down voters and helping communities plan for the future.
December 21, 2005
Saying their clients were duped by unscrupulous employers, an immigrant advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit yesterday against a Howard County, Md., contracting company, saying it refused to pay 35 Maryland laborers hired for cleanup projects along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The Baltimore Sun reports that the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, contends that the Mount Airy firm MFC General Contractors Inc. refused to pay its workers the $10 an hour it promised them and offered no overtime pay. The owners of the company denied the accusation yesterday, saying delays in worker payments resulted from problems with the firm that hired them to do the work.
December 20, 2005
Dozens of homeless Atlanta men have traveled to New Orleans to find work cleaning up the hurricane-battered city, along with cheap housing. There, Newsday reports, they have encountered the harsh reality of doing business in the post-Katrina environment - subcontracting and the problems it presents bit players, who went from being penniless in Atlanta to being penniless in New Orleans after working weeks without pay.
December 19, 2005
The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city's poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana. The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit — that it was the city's poorest African-American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city's poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some richer districts.
A study by The New York Times of more than 260 Louisianans who died during Hurricane Katrina or its aftermath found that almost all survived the height of the storm but died in the chaos and flooding that followed. Of those who failed to heed evacuation orders, many were offered a ride or could have driven themselves out of danger — a finding that contrasts with earlier reports that victims were trapped by a lack of transportation. Most victims were 65 or older, but of those below that age, more than a quarter were ill or disabled.
December 14, 2005
The American Red Cross, facing criticism for its Hurricane Katrina relief effort, said yesterday that its chief executive, Marsha J. Evans, has resigned — the latest in a string of leaders who have struggled to guide the giant, often troubled charity, according to The Washington Post. Red Cross senior executives insisted that Evans's departure, effective at the end of the month, was voluntary. But others in the organization said Evans was forced to resign after her relationship with the 50-member board of directors deteriorated over issues of control of the $3 billion organization.
The issue of where to place trailer parks in New Orleans seems to have stirred tensions and rubbed people like little else, reports The New York Times. The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants to set up more than 22,000 trailers in the city in an effort to house returning residents while they rebuild their homes. Many will go in private yards, but plans also call for 22 trailer parks, said Rachel C. Rodi, a FEMA spokeswoman. The juxtaposition has raised simmering issues of class, race and neighborhood loyalty in a city whose residents were far more rooted than those in almost any other in the nation.
December 13, 2005
Hurricane Katrina may have emptied whole sections of New Orleans, but it hasn't set in motion the great national diaspora that was widely foreseen, according to the Los Angeles Times. Instead, the vast majority of displaced households are staying close to their former homes, postal records show. A Times analysis of address changes after the hurricane also highlights the metropolitan area's sharp distinctions of class and race.
The reduced population in New Orleans after Katrina could ease the process of revamping the state's juvenile justice system to focus more on rehabilitation, state officials said Monday. The Times-Picayune reports that at the Bridge City Center for Youth, the state Office of Youth Development has been able to use the months after the storm — when the facility has had a smaller population — to remodel more dormitories to meet new standards, said the agency’s head.
December 12, 2005
The homeless population in the Baton Rouge area has grown since Katrina hit, but social service agencies say that growth is just the beginning, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. An official with the Capital Area Alliance for the Homeless says it probably won’t see the real effect until the Federal Emergency Management Agency stops paying hotel bills in January.
December 9, 2005
Hispanics who have worked in construction in other parts of the United States have been drawn to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast by the prospect of good money from cleanup and rebuilding jobs, according to MSNBC.com. In Waveland, Miss., the pre-Katrina demographics had been 80 percent white, 15 percent African American and less than 2 percent Hispanic. Since the storm, however, Hispanics are very visible at the few restaurants now open and especially working at the largest debris removal sites.
On Saturday, hundreds of displaced residents living in Houston will return to New Orleans to protest government policies they say make returning to their old homes difficult. The Houston Chronicle reports that more than 200 are expected to join a bus caravan organized by longtime New Orleans activist Malcolm Suber, who alleges that blacks have been excluded from planning their city's rebirth.
December 8, 2005
A brawl that began in the Westbury High School cafeteria Wednesday and spilled outdoors capped weeks of growing tension between local Houston students and transplanted Katrina evacuees, resulting in the arrest of 27 students. The Houston Chronicle reports that the fight was one of about a dozen such on-campus clashes that have roiled Houston and surrounding areas since thousands of students from New Orleans began attending local schools in September.
December 7, 2005
The emotional impact from Hurricane Katrina — which displaced nearly 2 million people, eradicated entire neighborhoods, separated families and reopened racial wounds — is far beyond what mental health experts in this country have ever confronted, they say. The Washington Post reports that in the extreme cases — and there have been many — those who managed to survive the storm itself have hanged themselves, overdosed and put guns to their heads. The number of suicides in neighboring Jefferson Parish this fall is more than double the fall 2004 total.
December 5, 2005
The American Red Cross has launched an aggressive effort to reach out to racial and ethnic minorities and add more of them to the charity's vast network of volunteers, in response to criticism that it treated them callously during the hurricane relief effort, according to The Washington Post. More than two months after Katrina and Rita caused tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents to flee their homes for Red Cross shelters, the organization is dealing with complaints that it failed to provide enough translators and overlooked cultural sensitivities. The concerns have been raised by members of Congress and groups representing blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans.
November 4, 2005
President Bush on Thursday reinstated the wage protection law he suspended Sept. 8 after Hurricane Katrina, USA Today reports. The Davis-Bacon Act mandates that construction workers on federally financed projects be paid no less than the local minimum prevailing wage. The Chicago Tribune reports that some say the law's suspension contributed to the wave of illegal immigrants seeking Gulf Coast reconstruction jobs.
Bush reinstates wage laws after Katrina
Big Easy uneasy about migrant wave
October 27, 2005
The White House has reinstated a law that guarantees the prevailing local wage to Hurricane Katrina recovery workers paid with federal money, reports the Washington Post. It had been waived to save the government money and hasten the rebuilding process, but bipartisan opposition to the move grew in Congress. The wage guarantee rule will go back into effect on Nov. 8 and will not apply retroactively.
Prevailing Wages to Be Paid Again On Gulf Coast
October 13, 2005
USA Today examines some of the federal regulations that the government waived in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to speed up the recovery effort. But critics and watchdog groups fear that the very measures that some federal officials think of as a means to increase efficiency are a dangerous rollback of federal protections. The moves in question include the Labor Department lifting affirmative action requirements for companies hired on reconstruction work, the Transportation Department allowing no-bid contracts until Dec. 1 on restoration projects, and President Bush waiving a law in parts of the four states most affected by Katrina that requires workers on federal construction projects to receive the prevailing or average minimum wage.
Some federal rules waived after Katrina
October 4, 2005
The Christian Science Monitor says that the Bush administration's decision to relax labor laws in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina has reignited the immigration debate. Bush decided to suspend temporarily—in Katrina-hit states—sanctions against companies that hire undocumented workers.
Post-Katrina easing of labor laws stirs debate
September 29, 2005
NPR reports more criticism of government plans to reimburse religious groups, while the White House promises that evangelizing will not be funded:
Faith-Based Groups to Receive Katrina Funds
September 23, 2005
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said yesterday that the nation's piecemeal emergency communications should be replaced with a new system, The Washington Post reports.
Crisis Communications Network Criticized
Attempting to learn from their mistakes, federal officials are making more careful preparations for Hurricane Rita, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Managing a Hurricane – Differently (subscription required)