I swear, you just can’t make up stuff like this. Lawmakers are "infuriated" by subpoenaed documents released yesterday showing the agency, already under fire for not paying companies charged with post-Katrina clean-up, discouraged officials to follow up on reports of toxic chemicals in FEMA trailers. Trailers were not inspected even after occupants complained of respiratory problems, which were later found to result from toxic levels of formaldehyde in trailers.
This is almost hard to read. No family, I mean no family should have to endure this much bad luck in a lifetime, much less just a couple years.
Joseph’s home of more than a decade destroyed for the second time in two years. Hurricane Katrina swallowed up her home with ten feet of water and then, this past weekend, a fire finished it off.
Joseph, a mother of six, raced down from her temporary residence in Baton Rouge to find her home destroyed by fire. "The firefighters found a picture of my grandmother and a picture of my youngest daughter and that’s all they found," Joseph said.
Investigators said the fire was started with a stolen car, which had been stripped and dumped in Joseph’s driveway before being lit on fire. The flames spread to her nearby home, which she had been rebuilding.
Joseph said she’d managed to repair 80 percent of her home through Road Home money. She had plans to turn on the electricity there for the first time since Katrina on Monday.
But it was not to be.
[…]
Part of the problem, according to neighbors, was no one saw anything due to lack of streetlights in an area struggling to rebuild.
But there is hope for the Joseph family. A number of medical students at Tulane have started a website called Project: Bring Miracle Hope. From the Website:
On a fresh late-summer’s afternoon of the 22nd of September, 2007, Miracle Lewis came down to New Orleans to see her newly restored room. Miracle’s family was rebuilding the home after the house had been filled with ten feet of water and damaged by a massive tree. After being forced out by the storm to Port Allen, LA, and on to Houston, TX, her family had made it a little closer to their goal of returning to their roots by finding temporary-stay housing in Baton Rouge. The gleeful approval in Miracle’s eyes after seeing her room on this day, however, was truly a milestone on the soon-to-be-realized path of bringing the family back home.
[…]
After losing their home originally in Hurricane Katrina the Joseph family put $138,000 which they received from a Road Home grant towards rebuilding their home and life. This investment was tragically lost in the fire, and unfortunately the maximum they can receive from their insurance to rebuild their home a second time is $12,000. As a consequence, the Joseph family will not have the means to rebuild their house.
If you can spare just a couple bucks I think this might be a pretty worthy cause.
It would be nice if the below didn’t have to happen, but heck, at least some people are trying to fix things. That is more then can be said for our elected leaders. Slate reports:
Law firms are the cavalry of the legal world. Disaster strikes, and the firms, with their thousands of lawyers and millions of dollars, ride into town to clean up the mess.
But what happens when the cavalry doesn’t show?
That’s the situation in New Orleans, where almost two years after Katrina, the criminal-defense system is still in a state of emergency. Public defense was never the city’s strength: When the levees broke, there were about 7,000 criminal defendants waiting to see a state-appointed lawyer. Immediately after the storm, the city jailed roughly 5,000 of them, many on shaky legal grounds. Most remained locked up for over a year before speaking with a lawyer. The public defender’s office is slowly working through the backlog, but is still overwhelmed. It’s a situation public defenders bitterly call "Gitmo on the Bayou."
In response to the crisis, more than 2,700 law students traveled to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, on trips a bit reminiscent of the famous civil rights freedom rides. The students do just about everything but appear in court, including interviewing defendants and collecting evidence. Public defenders from different parts of the country took sabbaticals from their day jobs to come down as well. But however welcome, this is as effective as washing the bathroom floor with a toothbrush, say New Orleans public defenders. Eventually, you’ll clean up the mess, but a mop could take care of the problem a whole lot faster.
At points the story takes several turns to the nasty and mentions that much more could be done, and of course it should be. But the blame is based more on the "Big Law Firms" and why they are not doing more. Now I am no fan of "Big Law Firms" but it isn’t their job. If our resources at the FBI and the US Department of Justice were not being diverted 24/7 to the war on terror they could/should be the people helping to rebuild the justice system in New Orleans.
CorpWatch has a wonderful new report on Katrina. Written by Eliza Strickland and Azibuike Akaba, Casualties of Katrina: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Two Years after the Hurricane
tells the story of corporate malfeasance and government incompetence.
This is CorpWatch’s second report, the first being, Big, Easy Money.
Casualties of Katrina can be read as a PDF (download here) or online by chapters. The report
is broken into three parts: the struggle by ordinary residents to
return home, the major effort to fix the broken Gulf Coast
infrastructure, and finally–what the future looks like for a regional
revival. The report also has a fact sheet that accompanies it, which is also worth a read for some quick bullet points on the state of affairs post Katrina.
