Houses Hold Up Katrina Recovery
An effort to total and take down more than 9,000 rotting houses still standing after Hurricane Katrina has slowed almost to a total stop this year, prolonging the city’s attempts to rebuild. USA Today reports:
The homes—some almost untouched since Katrina struck a year and a half ago—are a lingering icon of the storm’s devastation and one of the biggest obstacles to New Orleans’ rebirth. More than half of the houses ruined during Katrina haven’t been razed, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that the debris from them would fill several times the volume of the Empire State Building.
New Orleans issued 330 permits to demolish houses in February, down from 458 in September, a USA TODAY analysis of permit records shows. The corps knocked down 118 last month, compared with 612 in December, according to an agency report.
This is just sad on some many levels. You don’t need to be an engineer to gather if you don’t take bulldoze these homes nothing can be built in their place.
