The Automatik

Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi seven months ago. Although the story of the storm and the aftermath is no longer on the daily national news radar, the people who lived in Louisiana and Mississippi are still struggling with the realities of its effects every single day. Although some areas have recovered, for a vast majority of the residents, very little has changed.

I spoke to my father in Mississippi last night. He and my stepmother recently received some bad news – they were denied an SBA loan because the loan officer felt that their damaged home in Bay St. Louis did not have enough equity to warrant the loan. They were told that if they put up my father’s home in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana as collateral, then they could be eligible for the loan. This made my father nervous because he didn’t want to risk losing the only habitable home to which he has access.

Although it may seem like my father is some wealthy man because he owns two homes, this is not the case. Neither of these houses are what one would consider modern palaces of luxury. The Bay St. Louis property, for example, is over 100 years old. It needed major renovations (such as central air and heat and new plumbing) and before the storm, he and my stepmother only occupied part of the house because it needed so many repairs.

My father had purchased the house in St. Charles over 20 years ago, when he was teaching at Hahnville High School. The home in Bay St. Louis was purchased about five years ago – the plan was to eventually move to Mississippi and live and work there full-time (which they did about two years ago). Then he and my stepmother would either rent out or sell the St. Charles property and use that money to renovate the Bay St. Louis home.

Hurricane Katrina changed all of those plans.

These photos were taken within a couple of weeks of Hurricane Katrina. Much of the debris has been removed already, but no repairs have been made to the home because they did not have flood insurance.

Many residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast will not receive help from FEMA to remove their destroyed homes.

According to Gulf Coast News:

Pascagoula city officials say they are upset over an apparent change in the rules from FEMA over paying to removed (sic) Katrina-damaged homes. FEMA has refused to remove over 100 homes that were listed on the list of homes to be removed on people’s property. While the homes are still standing, they are severely damaged, city officials have reported, but FEMA’s inspectors say that if the home doesn’t fall on top of them, then they won’t pay for its removal, even if the home is unsafe to live in or be restored. This change also is after many similar homes were removed. (To read the entire update, click here.)

In addition, there is the ongoing issue of an ever-dwindling tax base. GCN states that:

Hancock County officials are reporting that nearly a quarter of the county’s residents have not returned since Hurricane Katrina. Hancock county officials say that according to a recent survey, almost 3,000 of Waveland’s 6,600 residents are gone, nearly half the entire town. Bay St. Louis lacks about 1,500 of its 8,200 prestorm population, and countywide, more than 13,000 people have not returned. The county’s current population – only about 34,000 – was estimated by counting all the electrical connections in the area and multiplying by 2.7 people, the average number of people per household, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

My father and stepmother are not alone in their quandary of having guaranteed employment (for now) in Mississippi and having to live in a trailer, even though they have a home in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana.

Affordable housing is at the focus for local and state officials as many of the homes destroyed were where low and moderate income workers lived. The issue that will make rebuilding the Coast difficult in that replacing the thousands of small older homes is impossible at current construction costs. Many Coast residents cannot afford mortgages and rent payments more than $500 a month, which is too low to pay on new homes. There is also the loss of apartments, which have to be replaced. Most of the federal assistance programs do not address affordable housing or rebuilding apartments lost by the storm. Until some plan is found to provide housing for low income and low income families, recovery from Katrina will be slow.

The worker situation is already an issue as many businesses on the Coast that depend on minimum and low wage workers do not have the staff to operate. Many restaurants, shops and service businesses cannot find workers, which jeopardizes those businesses on the Coast. Some businesses say that the Katrina Employment relief is keeping low income workers from seeking regular employment. But low income jobs do not provide enough money for many Coast residents to live under the current conditions. This is where corporate America could help the Coast, with the establishment of new business and manufacturing plants. But that is not happening. As GCN has been reporting, the disaster of Katrina is more than local, state and federal governments can handle. Corporate American (sic) should play a role here, too.

These problems are not limited to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, either. My father reiterated what my mother told me a few weeks ago regarding the lack of many businesses, particularly restaurants, in the city of Kenner, Louisiana. To put this in perspective, here is a map of the parishes of Southeast Louisiana.

For a clickable version of this map, go here: http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/la/laparmap.html

Kenner is in Jefferson Parish. Although there was significant flooding there, as I have stated before, it was not flooding of the same calibre that wiped out St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes and inundated Lakeview and the Lower 9th Ward (both of which are in Orleans Parish).

Even St. Charles Parish, which received some wind damage such as downed trees, power lines, and destroyed roofs, is feeling the affects of Hurricane Katrina, despite the fact that the most severe damage occurred several parishes away. As has been reported in several other news outlets, fast food chains such as Burger King and McDonald’s are offering wages of $10 an hour with sign on bonuses and weekly bonuses in the thousands. But the McDonald’s in Luling, Louisiana (St. Charles) is only open from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Other restaurants, such as Sal’s on Highway 90 in Luling are only open during the day. Why? Because there simply aren’t enough workers to fill the available jobs. Is this because people who would normally have filled these jobs are living elsewhere and have no means to return? Regardless of the reason, the fact remains that it is not just the Greater New Orleans area that is feeling the long term affects of Hurricane Katrina’s wrath.

The problem reaches far beyond the food service industry. Many of the hospitals in the Greater New Orleans area have closed and have not reopened. The hospitals that have are struggling with a tremendous overload of patients. This is due in part to the fact that Charity and University Hospitals, the main health care providers for the uninsured populace before the storm (and home to the only trauma units in the entire state of Louisiana), were so severely damaged that they will likely remain closed permanently, unless someone can cough up the $750 million price tag to rebuild.

For more on the health care crisis in the GNO area, here is an article from WWLTV.com, called “New Orleans’ Health System Still in Shambles After Katrina.”

According to my father, however, there are many interesting and potentially positive developments with regard to those in Mississippi who were affected by the storm and the recourse they have been seeking from insurance companies. The Gulf Coast News website supports what he has told me in a three-part article called “Marooned.”

The principle on which he says the law will stand is the Proximate Cause Doctrine – if the proximate cause of the loss is covered under an insurance policy, then all damage resulting from the cause is also covered.

There is a kind of circular logic to it.

• “Storm surge” is only caused by hurricane wind.
• Water exclusions do not specifically set out that they exclude storm surge.
• Storm surge is distinctly different from flood.
• Therefore damage from storm surge is covered under windstorm provisions.

We will have to wait and see what kind of affect this has on the Louisiana situation, a tragedy which was not a natural disaster, but a man-made one. The Army Corps of Engineers, who were responsible for building the levee floodwalls which failed, are now rebuilding them in advance of the 2006 Hurricane Season, which starts June 1st. At least one group of experts thinks that the job they are doing is inadequate.

The American Society of Civil Engineers said in a letter to the corps that they believe the safety of the New Orleans area hurricane protection system is open to question.

Many people have been quick to blame President Bush for the disaster that occurred in New Orleans, even stating that he “knew” what was going to happen and did nothing. While I am not a fan of Bush, we must not withhold blame for the local levee boards in Louisiana, whose corruption, negligence, and cronyism have been widely discussed.

So what happens now? Can we expect to ever rebuild Greater New Orleans, its surrounding cities, and the towns of the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the way they were before Hurricane Katrina? Should we? There is an April 22nd election looming over the heads of New Orleans residents, both those who are still in the city or have been able to return, and those who have not. MSNBC and Yahoo! News report on the potential civil rights violations of those who are being referred to by the NAACP and others as “disenfranchised.”

There is plenty of disenfranchising to go around and it’s not just limited to this upcoming election, in a city with a formerly majority black population that may soon have its first white mayor in years. Is it fair to postpone the elections because people can’t return to vote? Is it fair not to? This is a unique situation that, like the rebuilding of New Orleans itself, will require unique approaches and perhaps even unique legislation.

Here is an excerpt from a sobering and rather prescient article I just found, but which is dated September 3, 2005, from the History News Network, entitled, ”In New Orleans, Once Again, The Irony of Southern History.”

New Orleans wasn’t built just on a swamp. It was built, too, on the backs of black laborers. White supremacy helped make New Orleans an important place. In recent decades it has become a curiosity of little real import. If the city never recovers, it won’t be just because of the natural environment. It will be because long ago the whites of New Orleans, and whites in Washington and around the nation, made a bargain with the devil of white supremacy, and now they, we, will have now lost it all.

We need new approaches, new ways of thinking and acting that will allow everyone who lived in and lives in Greater New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast to become functioning, productive citizens, not just victims of nature and negligence, both that which is human and that which is inhumane.

Update: May 17, 2006 – The nonprofit group Levees.org provides compelling evidence that The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, not the local Levee Boards, has “sole authority over the design and construction of metro New Orleans’ flood protection and water management.”

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