by James Parks, Aug 29, 2006

In the latest in our series of profiles highlighting Hurricane Katrina survivors, we talk with former teacher Gwen Adams, whose experiences illustrate what some say is a broader move to use the disaster to further the anti-worker, anti-union agenda.

Gwen Adams lost all her possessions to Hurricane Katrina. But the worst damage to her life has come through what some call Katrina’s second crisis—legislative and other action that, under the guise of making room in the budget for rebuilding costs, cut social programs, undermine survivors’ chances of returning home and fail to support them in starting over elsewhere.

In the year since the storm, Adams was forced to retire early after teaching in New Orleans’ public schools for 25 years when the state shut down the public schools. Now, the city has bulldozed her house without her permission and the Bush administration has done nothing to help her and her neighbors.

Before Katrina, New Orleans had 128 public schools. By September, 53 will have reopened. Thirty-three are autonomous charter schools, the largest group of charter schools in the nation. The local Orleans Parish School district only operates five schools. The rest are run by the state-controlled Recovery School District, which took over schools with performance scores below the state average, even if they were meeting yearly progress goals. Employees in those schools have no union representation.

Some 4,500 public school teachers, mostly members of the United Teachers of New Orleans/AFT were forced to retire or just lost their jobs. Adams says the real motive behind the move was to break the union:

They had been trying to break the union for years. They just used the hurricane as an excuse. Now without a union, they can tell the teachers to work on Saturday. I have a friend who teaches at one of the schools who is not scheduled for a lunch break one day a week. School officials told her that could be her “diet day.”

Not only did Adams lose her job, she is being shortchanged on her retirement benefits. At age 54, Adams says she is too young to retire, so her benefits were reduced because she left early.

Adams and her husband, who is disabled, lived in the predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest hit area of New Orleans, an area where nothing has been done to repair the neighborhoods or lay the foundation for people to return.

The Bush administration—which in its Katrina one-year damage control PR blitz is making a point of passing the buck to local and regional governments—has deserted the residents of New Orleans, especially the Lower Ninth Ward, Adams says.

Why leave us in this mess all this time? When is this administration going to realize it’s playing with people’s lives? We want to come home. We want to rebuild. It’s like they’re trying to discourage us on every front. It’s sad.

As Think Progress reports, the state of New Orleans one year after Katrina is a disaster:

• Less than half of the city’s pre-storm population of 460,000 has returned, putting the population at roughly what it was in 1880.
• Nearly one-third of the trash has yet to be picked up.
• Sixty percent of homes still lack electricity.
• Seventeen percent of the buses are operational.
• Half of the physicians have left, and there is a shortage of 1,000 nurses.
• Six of the nine hospitals remain closed.
• Sixty-six percent of public schools have reopened.
• A 40 percent hike in rental rates, disproportionately affecting black and low-income families.
• A 300 percent increase in the suicide rate.

Adams and her husband voluntarily evacuated to Mississippi where they lived with family until December. Adams recalls the sight that confronted her when she returned to her house in New Orleans:

Everything in the house had rotted or was molded. We couldn’t save our personal possessions. We lost everything.

Film director Spike Lee, whose latest movie, “When the Levees Broke,” chronicles the destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward, says in an interview with the HBO cable TV network the area looks like a war zone:

Anyone who has been to New Orleans will automatically tell you that what you saw on television, the pictures, they can’t really describe the scale of the devastation. When you go to the Lower Ninth Ward, it looks—Hiroshima must have look like that. Nagasaki. Beirut. Berlin after it was bombed in World War II. That’s the way the Lower Ninth Ward looks like, and a lotta other places in New Orleans.

People in New Orleans are up in arms about progress. People wanna move back. People wanna come home, but there’s nowhere for them to live. They wanna work. The thing is just all messed up.

Seems like the only thing happening in the Lower Ninth Ward is demolition of people’s homes. Stephen Bradberry and Jeffrey Buchanan write at TomPaine.com that:

In May, the city council unanimously passed City Ordinance 26031, which sets a deadline for homeowners to gut their homes or potentially lose them. By August 29, homeowners who have not been able to make the necessary repairs to their battered homes risk having their property seized and bulldozed by the city.

Many working-class families cannot return to New Orleans to prevent their homes from being seized. Most are still waiting to receive payment from insurance claims and are unable to pay the roughly $10,000 charged by contractors to gut their homes. Nor can they afford to take time off to gut their homes themselves. Low-income families have also yet to receive a dime from the federal government’s $7.5 billion in community block grants to Louisiana’s “Road Home” home repair grant program for homeowners. Those vitally needed funds, despite being given to the state of Louisiana months ago, remain tied up in red tape by bumbling state bureaucrats.

Adams’ s house was essentially seized weeks before the deadline, when it was bulldozed. She says she doesn’t know why it was demolished and why she was not notified beforehand, even though the law requires it:

They are feverishly tearing down homes in the area with no notifications. Something’s up. I can’t put my finger on it. But I have to ask if this was a white area, if they would be doing this.

Doing something like this just shows why they will never be able to get an accurate count of how many died because of Katrina. So many have died of despair. They stressed themselves to death because they could not rebuild. 

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