Project Katrina

Shelley Midura a New Orleans City Council member from District A wrote the following open letter to President Bush. It is thoughtful, respectful (or at least a lot more then I would be), and outlines many things that the Feds could do to help New Orleans if only the White House would listen to the elected leaders and citizens that live in New Orleans.

Dear Mr. President:

Thank you for visiting New Orleans for the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the worst federal levee-failure disaster in United States history followed by the worst federal disaster response in United States history. We’re also grateful for the $116 billion federal allocation for the Gulf Coast. That $116 billion has served you well, as your spokesmen often cite it as an indicator of your dedication to our recovery. But, it hasn’t served us as well— it’s not enough, it’s been given grudgingly, and only after our elected officials have had to fight for it. So I feel I must correct the record about you and your administration’s dedication to our recovery and implore you to take action to make things better.

Indeed, you have allocated $116 billion for the Gulf Coast, but that number is misleading. According to the Brookings Institute’s most recent Katrina Index report, at least $75 billion of it was for immediate post-storm relief. Thus only 35% of the total federal dollars allocated is for actual recovery and reconstruction. And of that recovery and reconstruction allocation, only 42% has actually been spent. In fact, while your administration touts "$116 billion" as the amount you have sent to the entire area affected by Katrina and the levee failures, the actual long term recovery dollar amount is only $14.6 billion. This amount is a mere 12% of the entire federal allocation of dollars, billions of which went to corporations such as Halliburton for immediate post-storm cleanup work, instead of to local businesses. Contrast that to the $20.9 billion on infrastructure for Iraq that the Wall Street Journal reported in May 2006 that you have spent, and it’s an astonishing 42% more than you have spent on infrastructure for the post-Katrina Gulf region. The American citizens of the Gulf region do not understand why the federal obligation to rebuilding Iraq is greater than it is for America’s Gulf coast, and more specifically for New Orleans.

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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.

A flash back to the past. Here is an interview on NPR with author Douglas Brinkley about the process he was using to gather data for the book he would eventually publish, The Great Deluge.

It would appear that Spike Lee is going to make a sequel to When the Levees Broke.  I think that’s a great idea. We can never forget NOLA and because of Spike we won’t. I just wish the darn thing was showing on my cable systems OnDemand.

The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank is a wonderful project run by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and the University of New Orleans, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of American History. It only takes a few seconds to add a short memory that can be saved for generations to come.

This is pretty neat. Dr. Douglas Brinkley, the author of The Great Deluge, has an Oral History project related to Katrina. For those of you that are not familiar with oral history, it involves recording or transcribing eyewitness accounts of historical events through one-on-one interviews. This may sound live an obvious way to document history, but it is done a lot less in many instances then you might think.

From a recent post at the Interdictor blog:

I started my 1996 Honda Civic EX’s engine at 0100 EST. I rocketed up I-75 to I-10 and then headed west on 10 all the way in. At 0900 CST, I hit the Twin Single Span across the Lake. Moments later I realized that New Orleans will never be rebuilt in my lifetime.

New Orleans East cannot be described; it can only be seen. You must drive through it. What you see on television is nothing. Nothing. You have not seen devestation until you have driven through NOE. There is no life– mammalian, avian–nothing outside the plant kingdom (and whatever mold falls into). It is uninhabitable and must be bulldozed. This will take decades. Yes, the cleanup will take decades. In fact, it’s likely that the cleanup will never be complete.

I fully expect New Orleans to be a mostly dead city until I am an old, old man, maybe in my late 60s or my 70s. My guess is that no place on Earth compares to the ghost town of New Orleans East. Maybe some cities in the former Yugoslavia were close during the recent clashes. Close. But there, people still lived. No one lives in New Orleans East.

It’s been something like three months and most and perhaps even all of Carrollton Avenue still has no functioning street lights; neither does Earhart Expressway.

This is the single best editorial I seen written about the current situation in New Orleans and the spirit of the people. It was published in the Times-Picayune on September 10th. I can’t locate a copy online. A friend actually send me a clipping via “snail” mail.

Dear America, I suppose we should introduce ourselves: We’re South Louisiana.

We have arrived on your doorstep on short notice and we apologize for that, but we never were much for waiting around for invitations. We’re not much on formalities like that.

And we might be staying around your town for a while, enrolling in your schools and looking for jobs, so we wanted to tell you a few things about us. We know you didn’t ask for this and neither did we, so we’re just going to have to make the best of it.

First of all, we thank you. For your money, your water, your food, your prayers, your boats and buses and the men and women of your National Guards, fire departments, hospitals and everyone else who has come to our rescue.

We’re a fiercely proud and independent people, and we don’t cotton much to outside interference, but we’re not ashamed to accept help when we need it. And right now, we need it.

Just don’t get carried away. For instance, once we get around to fishing again, don’t try to tell us what kind of lures work best in your waters. We’re not going to listen. We’re stubborn that way.

You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you’d probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard.

We dance even if there’s no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk to much and laugh to loud and live to large, and frankly, we’re suspicious of others who don’t. But we’ll try not to judge you while we’re in your town.

Everybody loves their home, we know that. But we love South Louisiana with a ferocity that borders on pathological. Sometimes we bury our dead in LSU sweatshirts.

Often we don’t make sense. You may wonder why, for instance, if we could only carry one small bag of belongings with us on our journey to your state, why in God’s name did we bring a pair of shrimp boots?

We can’t really explain that. It is what it is.

You’ve probably heard that many of us stayed behind. As bad as it is, many of us cannot fathom a life outside of our border, out in that place we call Elsewhere.

The only way you could understand that is if you have been there, and so many of you have. So you realize that when you strip away all the craziness and bars and parades and music and architecture and all the hooey, the best things about where we come from is us.

We are what made this place a national treasure. We’re good people. And don’t be afraid to ask how we pronounce our names. It happens all the time.

When you meet us now and you look into our eyes, you will see the saddest story ever told. Our hearts are broken into a thousand pieces.

But don’t pity us. We’re gonna made it. We’re resilient. After all, we’ve been rooting for the Saints for 35 years. That’s got to count for something.

OK, maybe something else you should know is that we make jokes at inappropriate times.

But what the hell.

And one more thing: In our part of the country, we’re used to having visitors. It’s our way of life.

So when all this is over and we move back home, we will repay to you the hospitality and generosity of spirit you offer to us in this season of despair. That is our promise. That is our faith!

That pretty much sums up things IMHO.

Since Katrina hit I have checking out some bloggers in Louisiana. Electric Mist is one of the best. The author is Toni McGee Causey. Toni writes for a living, and it shows in posts like this:

I passed a man at a shelter the other day. He was tall and lanky and sunburned, dressed in cut-offs and a soaked blue t-shirt, with a grubby baseball cap shoved on top of muddy curls. There was something about his lean, sinewy body that made me think of the shrimpers I’ve seen down in Cocodrie — it’s a hard life and it makes for no-nonsense, self-sufficient men.

He was sitting in a metal folding chair, slumped forward, his elbows on his knees, and the exhaustion in his shoulders made me ache. Between his feet was a medium sized box, and he was staring down into it. The box held some basic necessities: toiletries, canned goods, a pair of socks, and a pair of underwear. I realized, then, that he was barefoot — the grime around his ankles marked him as having abandoned his shoes somewhere along the way. His large feet were probably too big for any of the donated shoes stacked up at a one of the neaby tables.

When I looked back at that box, I wondered what he must be thinking. My first thought, without seeing his face, was that this wasn’t much to give a man after he’d lost everything. This wasn’t much to hold onto for a man like that, and maybe he was angry at having lost everything, or frustrated that this is what he’d been reduced to. I had no words that would be of use, no words which could do any good, and I began to turn away when he suddenly looked up and caught my eye.

He had tears on his cheeks. When I stood there, not sure what to do, he shrugged and said, "I can’t believe how generous people are. I can’t believe total strangers would go out of their way to help so much." I mumbled something about it being the least we could do, as neighbors, and I moved off into the crowd, feeling wholly inadequate and humbled in the face of such grace.

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