One underlying theme that kept cropping up during my week on the Gulf Coast was the ineptitude of FEMA and the federal government to respond to the ravaged region. Not only do people complain about the lacking response in the immediate aftermath, but the problems continuing today, nearly 10 months later.
Today you can drive through Pearlington, MS and see debris piles where houses once stood with FEMA trailers parked outside, PVC pipe rooted into the ground. What’s scary is that you can also see debris piles where houses once stood with no trailer, but with tents.
Have you ever lived in a tent for 9 months? Probably not.Have you ever slept in one for a night?
Tents are great for backpacking trips along the Appalachian Trail, but not for life along the Mississippi Delta.
Today you can drive into New Orleans, head down to the University of New Orleans Lakeview campus near Elysian Fields and see a grass field with uninhabited FEMA trailers with a good foot of weeds growing around them. From what I understand they “don’t have the keys” to move them. From what I understand there are multiple “trailer parks” like this around the region.
Why? Well, a big reason is that FEMA claims you can’t put these trailers in flood prone areas. I can see the logic (my stepmom works as Zoning Administrator in a rural SC county). Still, sometimes care for humanity should trump logic and law.
I could go on and on about similar stories I heard. Many folks in Pearlington applied for trailers 5 or more times in the first few weeks after the storm only to get them months later due to red tape. "Merry Christmas!" Here are a few quotes (as best as I could remember them) to help me sum up this first Katrina recovery-related post.
The first is from Jan, a woman in Pearlington whose house was destroyed by the 25 foot flood waters that surged through the town, which hadn’t flooded in the previous 100 years, “If they could go to Iraq and set up camps so quickly… why did it take so long for them to help us?”
The second is from George, with whom our church's team spent four days working with on repairing his and his wife’s home that flooded two feet into the second floor… “I was in Vietnam, and I remember detailed plans for the Army to drop relief supplies into rice fields for the citizens, and I remember those drops. You can’t tell me they wouldn’t have been able to do the same for those poor folks at the Convention Center.”
I struggle a lot with the concept of patriotism. I love many things about my country, but I question much of what goes on in its name. Jan and George are patriots, as is the woman outside the New Orleans Convention Center caught on camera saying “We Are American” (Dyson, Come Hell or High Water p.13). Patriots are people who place faith in their government’s ability to respond and protect them in certain life or death situations such as natural disasters or war. The same can be said for a local government. The police and fire departments are established to protect and to serve. Sadly, our government didn’t come near fulfilling those expectations following Hurricane Katrina. Time will only tell as to what happens following the next disaster…
