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Three Years After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Still Reeling. Now There’s Gustav
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The Bush administration’s ideology-driven neglect of New Orleans has left the city vulnerable again to a potentially devastating hurricane, three years after Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and left thousands homeless.
Residents of the Crescent City could be forced to evacuate again as Tropical Storm Gustav bears down on the Gulf Coast. Weather forecasters say Gustav could enter the Gulf of Mexico as a hurricane this weekend or early next week. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) has declared a state of emergency and said an evacuation could begin as early as Friday—three years to the day after Katrina devastated New Orleans.
A deluge from Gustav would just compound the tragedy of Katrina because, three years later, the city is still not rebuilt and levees, which were not built to withstand a stronger storm, are suspect. Despite big promises from President Bush, his administration has all but ignored the plight of the thousands of poor and working people who lost everything they had. Instead, union and community leaders say the Bush administration is using the rebuilding effort to promote its conservative agenda and to push poor people out of New Orleans.
Says Robert “Tiger” Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO:
It’s a shame. The federal government failed its responsibility. Here they spend $11 billion a month and they can’t give $18 billion to rebuild the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish. It’s been horrible—the negligence and mishandling of funds.
First, there is the issue of safety. Three years after Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and left thousands homeless, there is still no certainty the levees will hold up if another big storm hits.
This past May, the Associated Press reported that despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city’s flood defenses. Outside engineering experts said the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm.
Last year, workers also set up a human levee to draw attention to the inequities in levee construction. They demanded the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state of Louisiana build levees to protect the working-class communities in New Orleans’ Jefferson Parish that border the flood-prone Monticello Canal, just as they did for affluent areas on the other side of the canal.
But even if Gustav spares the Crescent City, life there is still very painful. Writing on truthout.org, Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, shows just how desperate and shameful the situation remains after three years.
- Not one renter in Louisiana has received financial assistance from the $10 billion federal Katrina rebuilding program, although 116,708 homeowners have received such aid.
- Only 82 rental homes have been repaired and occupied by August 2008 out of a projected 10,000.
- There are 25 percent fewer hospitals than there were before Katrina.
- Only 11 percent of families have been able to return to live in the heavily damaged Lower 9th Ward. At this pace, experts estimate it will take 20–25 years to rebuild the city.
- More than half of the city schools are privately run public charter schools and there is no data available to evaluate how effective they are.
- Nearly 7,000 families are still living in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers in the metro New Orleans area, three years after Katrina.
How has this happened? A report last year by the Campaign for America’s Future says ultraconservatives tried to use the hurricane disaster to prove their theories and consolidate their power:
Any policies that might have put money in the pockets of the working class were turned aside—in favor of ones that lined the pockets of the rich. Davis-Bacon, the law requiring federal construction projects to pay the locally prevailing wage, was suspended.
Affirmative action rules were suspended, too—as Republicans worked on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer private school vouchers for displaced school children, lift environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction.
The same combination that crippled the reconstruction in Iraq—lack of planning, crony capitalism, no-bid contracts, scorn for public infrastructure—undermined reconstruction in New Orleans.
Yet, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast have not been abandoned by the American people, particularly union members. Over the past three years, thousands of volunteers have streamed into New Orleans. Hundreds of thousands of individuals have donated money, food and clothing. More have opened up their homes and communities to evacuees. Nonprofit organizations have taken on projects ranging from emergency housing to tourism development.
The AFL-CIO’s Gulf Coast Revitalization Program is deep into $1 billion worth of strategies to produce new housing, fund economic development projects, create thousands of new jobs, train workers to fill those jobs and guarantee the right of return for all former public housing tenants.
Last year, on the second anniversary of Katrina, leaders of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO, the United Teachers of New Orleans/AFT and members of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and Coalition of Black Trade Unionists joined with civil rights, community and religious groups for a Day of Presence to bring attention to the failure of the Bush administration to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and call for a Marshall Plan to rebuild the city.
Sen. Barack Obama, who has visited New Orleans numerous times since the disaster, has promised to make good on President Bush’s broken promises and
cut the red tape, so that the federal government is a partner—not an opponent—in getting things done.
His Republican opponent, John McCain, voted in 1999 to suspend Davis-Bacon protections for construction workers in federal disaster areas. He voted against a spending bill in 2006 that would have provided $28 billion in hurricane relief and legislation that would have extended unemployment and Medicaid benefits to hurricane victims for several months. The Arizona senator also opposed a commission to study the federal government’s response.
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