Katrina Update #52Katrina Update #52Being from Wisconsin, it is always difficult for us to get into the Christmas spirit down here, but we are finding it even harder this year. Not because of the condition New Orleans is in, necessarily, but because it has been unseasonably warm. As I write this, I notice our friends and family in Wisconsin and the Chicago area are below freezing, while it is supposed to be almost 80 here today. A warm breeze is coming in the window by my desk and we have all the doors and windows open in the house. Definitely not Christmasy.
But colder weather is on the way: the thermometer is supposed to dip into the mid 30's here on Monday night, and it will only be in the upper 50's for highs the rest of the week. I know that still seems warm to many of you, but for the locals here, that's cold. We are still amused by people down here who walk around in parkas when it is 50 degrees outside.
We did manage to get a Christmas tree yesterday, a 9 foot Frazier Fir that is opening up on our front porch. We will probably bring it in an decorate it tomorrow. Our annual Christmas CD is done and will be going out in the mail sometime next week, after Janis finishes writing her personal notes to include with them.
When Will They Come Back?
Mayor Nagin has been traveling around the country, visiting residents who have still not come back to New Orleans, trying to get them to come back to the city. About 75% of the city now has electricity and drinkable water. About 60% has working gas. This led to an interesting discussion where I realized a few things about the current situation.
In Update #46 I spoke about the haves and the have nots. Pre-Katrina, the line between the haves and have nots could, to some extent, be drawn between races, with much of the wealth being controlled by white folk and most of the poor being black folk. Katrina was very indescriminate in its fury, wiping out each without consideration of their economic status. The difference is that people with money had the resources to leave on their own, while the poor did not.
The Mayor is now saying the city's services will be able to support 300,000 people by the end of the year. The problem is, where would all these people live? 75% of the homes in the New Orleans area cannot be lived in. To further complicate matters, most of these people were evacuated by the government and have no resources to get back to New Orleans. This leads us to an interesting dichotomy.
Let's look carefully at how this happened. Many of the people in the 9th ward who lost everything had no resource available to them for evacuation except the government. They may have inherited their home from parents or grandparents and it is literally the only thing of value they had. As the flood waters rose, they either made their way to the Superdome, or were rescued from their rooftops and taken there. Next they were scattered throughout the country – quite literally – to 47 different states!
Now, mayor Nagin wants them to come home, but how do they get here? There is no plan in place to bring them home, and were there one, there is nowhere to house them.
Slow To Rebuild?
This, in turn, has a direct effect on another issue: why is it taking so long for New Orleans to rebuild? There is no one answer to that question, but I might be able to shed some light on it. First, let's not lose sight of the magnitude of this problem. Before reading further, do the following:
You will see a blue outline on the map that represents the area of New Orleans that flooded. This shows you the extent to which your town would have been flooded if it had the same elevation and experienced the same disaster. This should open your eyes to the extent of the damage. I did this for my home town of Racine, Wisconsin. Not only was all of Racine under water, but the flooding extended all the way out past Interstate 94 to Union Grove, then back southeast to a major portion of Kenosha.
They estimate the amount of trash being collected from New Orleans alone represents 34 years of normal trash collection for the city. And we see less and less trash and debris every week, so things are improving, but before you can do major rebuilding, you have to get the trash and debris out of the way.
Another issue is that the city and state promised no homes would be bulldozed without the owner's permission unless it was blocking a road. So here's the problem: you have people orginally living in New Orleans who are now scattered amongst 47 different states who have been told their homes won't be raized until they give permission. They aren't about to give their permission without first seeing what (if anything) they can recover (would you?), but they have no way to get back to New Orleans to do so. Catch 22.
It seems to me the first thing that needs to be done is the city needs to set up temporary housing camps for these people. These can be the same FEMA trailers being used for homeowners, but instead of being put on people's properties they can be put in parking lots or parks in areas near the homes of the displaced people. Once the camps are set up, arrangements need to be made to bring these people back so they can inspect their property. Once these arrangements are made, the government can then issue a deadline by which permission must be given or the property will be taken by eminent domain.
Not Funny
I got the following email from someone who periodically sends out humor:
Please read.....not very long but makes a lot of sense......or does it?
There's not a lot of sense in some thingsEvery once in awhile I take out my calculator.....and it's amazing what
you can learn with some simple division.....For example: Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking
the Congress for $250 Billion to rebuild New Orleans.....Interesting number, what does it mean?
Well, if you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man,
woman, child), you each get $516,528.Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans, your home gets
$1,329,787.Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.
Hello Washington, D.C. !!!...........................Are all your
calculators broken?????Tell you what.....just flood my house, I'd like to be on the "big easy"
street for the rest of my life !!
Needless to say, I got a little upset by this. The insinuation that each person who lived in New Orleans would somehow see a benefit of over half a million dollars is just insulting. If you figure as much as 75% of the city has been reduced to ruins and near-swampland conditions, and you factor in all the development that has been done over the past couple of centuries was undone in less than a day, the number starts making far more sense. I'm not saying people should be allowed to simply rebuild the way it was, and, in fact, the requirement that they build to certain standards is one of the factors that increases the cost.
The reality is that it took about 250 years to bring New Orleans to where it was before Katrina. During that time, perhaps some wrong decisions were made about where homes should be built. But these decisions were no more wrong than how buildings were built near fault lines; or homes that are built in a valley beneath a damn. Sometimes development outpaces reason, that's all.
So if you are the recipient of one of these emails, remind the sender that even if they didn't write it, the residents of New Orleans would also be there for them (via their tax dollars) were a catastrophe of this magnitude to strike them.
- I sent $150 to Tom Taylor for dental work. Tom is still living with his sister's family near Atlanta and hasn't found a job yet.
- BTW, there are some rules associated with the way donated funds are distributed: it must be for a necessity or health care. Those who lost almost everything, such as Cary, and Fay will probably be the biggest benefactors once they get settled in a place to live.
- New Orleans was to hold elections this coming February, but they have been postponed because of the lack of polling places, workers, and voting machines (most of which were destroyed in the flood). Not to mention the lack of most of its voting citizens. Elections are to take place no later than September 30, 2006.
- The last section of New Orleans – the portion of the lower 9th ward that received the most devastation – was opened for "look and leave" purposes on December 1st. This means if you own or rent in the area, you may enter at your own risk to survey the damage and recover what property you can. IDs are checked as you enter the area, and at least one person in your party must have an address in this area. You also have until dusk to leave.
- Looting has become the major crime in New Orleans now. There has been only 1 murder since 8/28. But organized gangs of looters are coming into the city, some posing as construction workers, and looting flooded homes. Many of these homes have 2nd floors that were relatively undamaged. So New Orleans has stepped up patrols in the still dark areas of the city in an attempt to catch the looters.
- New Orleans announced the nation's first government owned, city-wide Wi-Fi network this week. For now, only the Central Business District and French Quarter are on the network, but eventually the entire city will have free Wi-Fi. Right now it is operating at 512 kilobits per second, but after the State of Emergency is rescinded it will be throttled back to 128 kps due to a state law prohibiting government owned wireless networks from being faster. The fallout from this was that Bell South withdrew an offer to donate a building that has 250,000 square feet of usable space to be used as Police Headquarters.
- The first Habitat for Humanity barge carrying preformed homes from Minnesota arrived this week.
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