by James Parks, Aug 30, 2006

In the latest in our series of profiles highlighting Hurricane Katrina survivors, we talk with firefighter Keith Noya, who says the first responders who risked their lives to save others are not getting the respect they deserve.

Hundreds of firefighters and emergency medical workers, many of whom lost their homes, worked tirelessly to help their neighbors in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina came ashore a year ago. Everyone, including President George W. Bush, hailed them as heroes.

One year later, many of these first responders are getting a backhanded slap by officials who refuse to pay them a decent wage or to give them enough working equipment to do their jobs.

Such as New Orleans rookie firefighters who make $5.10 per hour—less than the minimum wage for risking their lives every time they get a call.

Keith Noya is a one of those firefighters. Although not a rookie, the 23-year firefighter, who holds the rank of captain, makes a little more than $13 an hour, slightly more than fast-food workers, who make $10 plus bonuses. Noya worked 18 days straight after Hurricane Katrina hit—and when he finally got a chance to check out his own home, it was covered by eight feet of water and the first floor of the two-story house was completely destroyed.

His wife, a nurse, had been evacuated to Texas, but eventually she was called back to work at a local hospital. For nearly six months they lived in a “teeny cabin” on a cruise ship. Finally, a tenant in a rental house Noya owned left New Orleans for good and “we jumped into that house,” he says.

Like thousands of other Louisiana and Mississippi residents, Noya is fighting with his insurance company because the company, like most insurers in the Gulf Coast, is refusing to pay anything for damage caused by the flood.

Despite the dismal failures of the federal government to act quickly to help New Orleans’ residents, President Bush Monday called the progress in rebuilding the Gulf Coast “amazing.”

Noya says it’s amazing, all right.

It’s amazing that it’s taking so long to get something done. I wish they would come up with a game plan to allow people to come in and rebuild—show some leadership.

What upsets Noya and hundreds of first responders just as much as the delay in getting back into their homes is the gap between what public officials say about the firefighters and what they do.

Last week, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (D) proposed raising the pay of police by 10 percent and hiking the wages for rookie firefighters—not the veterans who worked on Katrina, to $8.31. The Fire Fighters union points out that even with the raise, rookie firefighters will make less than a lot of fast-food workers. EMS workers also will not receive a raise.

Says Noya:

It’s a good start for the police and a good start for the recruits. I’m disappointed he [Nagin] didn’t say go across the board to pay everybody more. If you listen to what the city says, they say they appreciate what we do, but their actions don’t match their words.

Nick Felton, president of the New Orleans Fire Fighters Local 632, says the proposed raise is an insult to the firefighters, many of whom are still living in trailers and who risked their lives to save others after Katrina:

Not one of these firefighters who stayed here during Katrina, who never backed down, who never left their posts, is getting one penny increase out of this. The basic annual pay for a firefighter with one year of service amounts to $21,130, or $8.24 an hour, less than they might make flipping hamburgers.

The firefighters and EMS workers also must risk their lives putting out fires without enough help or working equipment. According to the New Orleans Fire Department, the department’s pre-Katrina workforce of 770 employees is down to 695 employees, including 651 firefighters. As many as five fire trucks are inoperable each day because of mechanical problems, many of them caused by operating in saltwater during the flood, Fire Department Superintendent Charles Parent told the Times Picayune.

The newspaper also reported that during a five-alarm fire Aug. 12 that injured four firefighters, the first man to fall through a hole on the second floor radioed a warning to others, but because of a shortage of radios and batteries, some of his colleagues did not hear him and two more fell through the floor.

Citing the low pay and “miserable,” working conditions, Felton says it’s going to be hard to find replacements:

You just can’t replace them in one day. You’re not going to be able to go down to the local supermarket and buy 100 or 150 firefighters.

State workers such as Charssie Muse, whose home was destroyed by Katrina, also are suffering from a lack of support by local officials. Since June, she and her husband have lived in a government-issued trailer in the front yard of what used to be their home. The trailer sat unoccupied in the yard for two months because it had no water or electrical hookups. When they finally moved in, the roof leaked and the water short-circuited the wiring, so again they had no electricity. And she has had to contend with rats “the size of my arm” running through the trailer at night.

Here’s how Muse, who turned 54 last week, describes it:

We lost everything. We had 14 feet of water. It went up to the second floor. We worked for years to save up enough money to buy that house. We moved in 10 years ago. I had planned to retire next year before all this happened. It’s a mess. It’s so discouraging. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Muse, a member of AFSCME, which represents state and local employees, processes Medicaid applications for the state of Louisiana. She and some 28,000 state workers were displaced by Katrina and thousands of them are still unable to return to their former homes.

The shortchanging of the public sector is part of the rush by the Bush and Nagin administrations to satisfy business interests ahead of the needs of working people—a reverse philosophy in which good government is portrayed as an oxymoron by extremists such as Republican policy architect Grover Norquist whose stated goal is to flush the entire enterprise down the toilet.

Writes Adolph Reed Jr., a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania:

The fetish of “efficient” government—code for public policy that is designed to serve the narrow interests of business and the affluent—is the ultimate cause of the city’s [New Orleans’] devastation. Remember that the city survived the hurricane. It flooded because the levees failed…Where the breech occurred, the [Army] Corps [of Engineers] had made concessions in sturdiness of construction to accommodate real estate developers’ desire to stuff as much new upscale housing as possible into that neighborhood.

As an illustration of how dominant that way of thinking is, Mayor Nagin, while the city was still submerged, fired 3,000 municipal employees, many, if not most, of whom had lost their homes or been displaced. Later, the Orleans Parish School Board laid off 7,500 teachers and other employees. No serious consideration was given to the possibility that maintaining a public workforce could help people return sooner by giving them income, providing services, and augmenting the cleanup and reconstruction efforts.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that the progress rebuilding Mississippi has outstripped progress in Louisiana, mainly because Mississippi has received federal aid quicker. For example:

• Ninety-six percent of debris has been cleared from Mississippi and 72 percent from Louisiana.
• Mississippi’s schools all are ready for students, while only one-third of New Orleans’ hospitals and less than half of its schools are reopened.
• Federal home rebuilding grants are beginning to flow to people in Mississippi, while those who want to rebuild in Louisiana have yet to be told how high to build homes and have not received the money to rebuild.
• Mississippi’s sales tax revenues are higher than last year, while most New Orleans businesses cannot operate because nearly 60 percent of homes and businesses lack electricity.

Some political observers say the reasons for this disparity likely lies in party politics:  Mississippi’ s Gov. Haley Barbour, a former Republican national chairman and Bush administration official, is close to the White House as are its two Republican senators. Louisiana’s governor, senior senator and Nagin, all Democrats, have been critical of the Bush administration. In fact, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is leading a Democratic tour through the Gulf Coast. She says the area looks like a “war zone.”

A year after the most powerful hurricanes in history hit America’s shores, the rebuilding process is only just beginning in many communities. And as long as tens of thousands of families can’t return home the work of recovery remains incomplete.

Countless neighborhoods appear as if the hurricanes were just yesterday, and they serve as harsh reminders of how our nation was so unprepared. Unfortunately, our nation in many ways remains unprepared for major disasters, whether they be hurricanes, earthquakes or terrorist attacks.

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