New Orleans - 19 Months Post-Katrina

Meredith, EB (Elizabeth) and I are in New Orleans as part of an All Souls DC service trip. We are staying at Hands On New Orleans and spending our days gutting homes, painting, and generally rebuilding. In groups we are also taking half-day tours, seeing the extent of the damage and hearing about the waters and then injustice and racism that that have flooded this city for the last 19 months. I have also been reading the local papers and talking to everyone I come across to find out as much as I can.

This is my first trip to a disaster zone and it has been highly emotional. I have been deeply moved not just at times, but in a continually building and almost overwhelming way. Here are some of the stories I have heard, facts I have gleaned, thoughts I have had, and people I have met.

• 250,000 New Orleanians have still not returned to the city which previous to Katrina held around 500,000 people.
• 90% of the city was flooded. That is 90% of the homes as well. To repair a home that sat in water for two weeks you generally have to demold the home (a process that includes lots of chemicals), then you have to throw away nearly everything that was in the home and strip down all the drywall or plaster, pull up the flooring, if there was roof damage then take down the ceiling drywall. Then you essentially have a "gutted" home. Then you can begin rebuilding the interior - putting in new electric and walls and ceilings. Then you can buy furniture and go home. This is a long and very expensive process. Lots of labor, lots of materials, and in many neighborhoods almost every home needs to go through this process in order for folks to come "home".
• Federal Emergency Response Assistance is distributed based on a 1988 law that requires that municipalities requesting federal assistance contribute 10% of costs towards rebuilding and the Federal Government will cover 90%. New Orleans has already accumulated a debt to the federal government of $324 million in just their "10%". Congress wants to waive that debt to enable further rebuilding, Bush does not. That "10%" was waived for NYC after 9/11 and for Florida after Hurricane Andrew. In the Emergency Supplemental passed by both houses of Congress that debt is waived. President Bush plans on vetoing the supplemental bill because it also sets a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq (and he doesn't want to waive the debt in the first place). Also, funding from the government can not be used to improve infrastructure, only to return it to pre-disaster levels. They are balking at funding repairs to the sewer system as they claim it was poorly maintained before hand. Also rebuilding in such a way to reflect changes in population (such as combining schools) is not an option - it has to be the same as before. In the NY times an article used this analogy, if you had a 1981 Toyota Camry with a leaky radiator that was lost in the flood the Federal Government will buy you a 1981 Toyota Camry and punch a hole in the radiator.
• I cleaned out debris from under a home today which is currently owned by Mr. Banks. It used to belong to his aunt who died shortly after the storm. He currently has moved across the river to an area that wasn't flooded. He is a disabled veteran and lost everything in the storm. His daughter has to go to school in Baton Rouge - 100 miles away. He is going to let the Hands-On long term volunteers stay there for six months pro-bono after the home is rebuilt.
• My team leader was Chet. Chet worked got laid off of his factory job in Michigan shortly after the storm and took to drinking heavily. One night he saw some nightly news coverage about the losses that New Orleanians have endured. He remembers thinking, "I thought I had it bad". He sold all his belongings and took a Greyhound to New Orleans with $500 in his pocket last Spring. He has been volunteering at Hands On ever since. Gutting and rebuilding homes. Chet is not alone in his dedication.
• Bree is a member of the First Unitarian Church of New Orleans. She was a renter pre-Katrina and lost everything she owned in the storm. She is handicap. She was given a FEMA trailer that was non-accessible and had to join a class action lawsuit to get an accessible trailer - they won two months ago and she is still awaiting her trailer. She is making due with the non-accessible one. I also learned that the original "accessible" trailers given out after the storm didn't come with ramps, had light switches on the ceiling, and temperature controls under the table.
• Two weeks after Katrina the New Orleans School board voted to turn many of the local public schools into charter schools. Few Schools have reopened, many teachers have retired putting a lot of strain on the city to pay pensions and health care costs with a much smaller tax base.

I have a couple of more days here and am learning more each day. I am truly learning what a disaster is.

Yesterday while touring the city and seeing all the damage I realized I had left my boots and jeans outside to dry from my previous day's sweaty work. I bought $40 sole inserts for my boots a couple of weeks ago and I have pretty nice boots. After realizing that I became somewhat anxious hoping they would still be there when I returned. I jumped out of the van when we got back and sure enough they were sitting there. Relief swept over me until I realized that I had driving past the lives of nearly 450,000 people who came home to find that not only were their boots lost, but so were their hats, their dogs, their favorite recipes, their cars, their walls, their neighbors, and their neighborhoods.