Katrina: Two Years Later And I’m Still Angry
Posted by: Scott at 12:01 am in The SoapBoxLiving like birds in the magnolia trees,
Child on the rooftop, mother on her knees;
Her sign reads "Please…
I am an American!"
Today marks the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting the Gulf Coast. At least 1,836 lost their lives due to Katrina and its aftermath.1 That doesn’t even begin to take into account the thousands of people who were displaced or otherwise had their lives dramatically altered by the storm. A city so rich in history and culture nearly died that day.
For many of us, although we had seen hurricanes before, nothing prepared us for the devastation Katrina caused.
And nothing prepared us for the idea that our own government could fail us so completely.
I still get spitting mad every time I think about how horribly FEMA, Bush, "Brownie," and the government bungled it. It suddenly brought into an ugly, harsh light just how severe of a culture divide there is in America as a result of poverty and race. For a couple weeks there was the promise of finally having an open and honest national discourse on the subject, but short attention span America was quickly distracted by another inane media fixation (Paris Hilton, anyone?).
I don’t know what else to say on Katrina that hasn’t already been said except that I don’t know if I can ever forgive Bush and the other government leaders for their deadly mismanagement and lack of action. Thank god for the thousands of real life ’saints’ who came to the rescue (and still are) in the absence of government aid. Now I don’t have a lot of money to donate to the cause, but I’ll gladly pick up a hammer and work until my hands are blistered and cracked in order to help rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. If anyone knows of a good organization that can put me to work like that as a volunteer (without costing me a ton of money in travel and lodging expenses- remember my monetary resources are limited), please let me know.
As a final thought on the subject, last year U2 and Green Day came together for a charity recording of the song "The Saints Are Coming" to benefit New Orleans. They performed it live at the reopening of the Super Dome last fall. I watched their live performance back then, but I only recently came across the actual video for the song. In it, they re-imagine the Hurricane Katrina relief strategy as if the government did all that they possibly could do to save the people of New Orleans. It is both moving and infuriating at the same time. Tell me if you get chills up your spine like I did the first time they sing the chorus lyric "the saints are coming" and the jets streak across the sky.
There is also a second version of the video with slightly different imagined "news footage" near the end that you can watch here.
The quote at the top of this blog post are lyrics from a bridge Bono added to the song when they performed it at the Superdome (which you can watch here), but they are not in the video version.
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My 13-year-old son went down to the region back in June along with about 15 other kids to volunteer their time and manpower to the rebuilding effort. They primarily helped out at a soup kitchen, offering free meals to families that are still struggling to get their lives back together. He was really struck by how bad it still is down there. I don't remember the organization he volunteered with, but I can get it for you.
Very sad indeed! I think it is patetic that we spend Billions on other countries but our own countrymen are left in a ruins. I also blame these oil companies that are making money hand over fist in record breaking highs but they don’t contribute some of that money back to the people. My guess is that their contribution if any would be to get their own oil refineries back up and running in the Orleans area. Pretty sad!
alas, it will all happen again, and everyone will bellow why nothing was done for better preparation
i imagine miami is due for a hurricane, not having one since the 30s.
the folly of man.
Say, I have an idea: why don’t the Orleanos stop whining and rebuild their own city? Why should the federal government have to do it? Because Orleanos like to get stuff for free? Well, we all do, but no one can say it’s his right. So grow up!
Well that is all fine and dandy if they had freaking house to live in and an economy to contribute. The fact is that the government dropped the ball and the agencies that were supose to do something didn’t and now 2 years later how do you think those levies are? Yeah they aren’t much better so when the next huricane comes though the city will be under water again.
FeticheNouvelle can’t be serious? Foolish!
Our response (or lack thereof) to Katrina is a tragedy - and, unfortunately, people are acting like it’s all no big deal anymore.
OK, I want to know how it is that 14% of Scott-O-Rama readers are picking that idiot Giuliani for PRESIDENT?
FeticheNouvelle-
Then should we eliminate federal funds from ALL natural disasters? All those floods in the midwest? Forget it. Let them rebuild their own midwest, right? Is that how your philosophy goes?
It is truley sad that it is taken this long to rebuild. There always seems to be alot of finger pointing, mostly toward the Fed Gov. If people remember, the Gov of La., while the Mayor of N.O. was there, when asked about troops coming in, stated she’d wanted to wait until after the storm so as not to add to the confusion. Money was given for the levee’s to be repaired prior [2yrs] to the storm, the money was spent on a River Boat casino, People were offered housing in Anniston, Al. but anorganization stood up for the families and said it wasn’t fair to expect these people to get jobs so they can pay for thier new homes [by the way 4 br ranch @130k] ….I can go on, for both sides of the coin, the fact is if most people would stop blaming others and do something to help, in some cases help them selves, things might be better. Not 100% but closer then now. {Yes I know “if they had freaking house to live in and an economy to contribute…” [from above post]} Sadly your looking at a town, which is one of my favorites, which in reality had BIG problems before Katrina, and are multiplying now. i hope everyone can stop pointing fingers work together and get her up again
The vitriol with which you attack the Bush Administration for its failure to administer to the disaster in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina is unwarranted. Local and state governmental entities are as much to blame, if blame is warranted, as the federal government. For one example, school buses that could have evacuated hundreds if not thousands of residents sat idle in parking lots and were eventually swamped and rendered useless. Last time I checked, schools are the bailiwick of mostly local and to some extent state governments. They didn’t react. Witness: when it was predicted that recent Hurricane Dean might strike Texas, resources were mobilized. . .including school buses to be used for evacuations. Now granted, this type of preparation from Texas officials might have been the result of Katrina (and later Rita), but I tend to believe that there was some type of plan like this on the books long before.It is well known that New Orleans, as a city, has been a basket case for years. Virtually nothing that required government involvement worked. Yet, year after year after year, somebody always pointed a finger blaming somebody else for not dealing with a problem and nothing ever got done. There were reports published years before Katrina that New Orleans would not survive a category 3 hurricane, and yet, has there been any reported evidence that the city of New Orleans acknowledged the problems and were working to get them fixed?Since Katrina, Americans across the nation have suffered from a variety of natural disasters. More recently, flooding in my home state of Ohio. . .Findlay, Ohio to be precise. Despite the devastation and the damage, I haven’t seen one news report of anyone stranded in a public facility screaming that the government needed to provide them with water or food or a way to be evacuated. They didn’t say "Gimme, gimme, gimme and gimme some more." They said, "Pray, pray, pray and pray so! me more.
" When officials in Findlay warned that flooding was possible, people got the hell out. A friend of mine’s mother lives in Findlay with her mentally handicapped adult child, who just so happened to have been in the hospital for a non-life-threatening operation when the rains and flooding came. As a result, she couldn’t get from her home to the hospital to be with her child. She didn’t appear on CNN or Fox News blaming some governmental entity for not being able to get to the hospital to check on the status of her child. It is reported she said, "The road’s warshed (sic) out. I guess I’ll try again tomorrow."What happened in New Orleans after the hurricane was and is a tragic confluence of events, both man-made and natural. While criticism of how governmental officials on all levels handled the situation is justifiable, you cannot lay most of your blame on President Bush.So, Scott, let’s not be so quick to judge the federal government, and by the biased slant of your comments, specifically the Bush Administration. I truly believe the "system" in New Orleans is so f***ed up on all levels that it wouldn’t have mattered who was in office. The results would have been the same. Pick up a hammer and come to Findlay to help people there rebuild their shattered lives - it won’t cost you that much to get there and I’m sure somebody will provide you with shelter and meals - at no cost to you or the federal government. I have it on good authority there isn’t a FEMA trailer in sight. They’re making due.Mark
It’s so outrageous Bossy is speechless. So *there*.
It’s rather telling that people who blame President Bush for the disaster in New Orleans left by Hurricane Katrina would choke on their words if they tried to give him credit for the speedy and substantial recovery happening just up the coast in Mississippi.
I’ve been in New Orleans since last Monday to visit friends (it was Southern Decadence this weekend…woo hoo!) and I drove up to the coast to see for myself what they had been talking about in Mississippi. The Mississippi Gulf Coast, near which I went to college, bore the full brunt of the storm, was almost completely washed away, and yet today is humming with tourism and reconstruction. http://tinyurl.com/35ept2 Thank you President Bush, then?
New Orleans however is still wallowing for the most part. Why? Could it be that Mississippi is pulling itself up by its own bootstraps while New Orleans continues to wait for the nanny state its has grown accustomed to being babied by to do it all for them? http://tinyurl.com/3bomd5 How about a big thank you to Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin for that?
Like 9/11, it’s doe and over with. I’m not melodramatic enough to worry about the past. However, I’m not totally sure I agree with it being our government’s fault. I mean sure, as far as releif efforts go we could have put forth more effort but… government doesn’t effect weather or geography [or the people who were told to evacuate and did not].
While I agree that Bush, FEMA, et’al could have done some things better, I can not say they are solely to blame, nor mostly to blame for the current state of affairs in NO.
One lady, who lived in a house with a fair market value BEFORE the storm of roughly $15,000 received $78,000 from FEMA to rebuild her house and. She spent it all up on a house that now needs painting on the outside, and “better paint” (her words) on the inside and a few other things she wants. She is mad that FEMA hadn’t given her more money to finish her house. National TV took up the cause and she now has another $50,000 to “finish” her house, because they said that is what she would need to finish it up and upgrade the windows to “storm ready”, replacing the ones she put in. (Rumor has it that she spent $3K on a big screen, HD TV out of the original 78K, that should more than cover the paint on the inside!) Owners of houses that had a street value of from 1K to 20K have received over 50K, and house of value from 20K to 100K have receive from 100-300K, and house from 100K-200K have received over 300K to rebuild, owners of houses with a value of 200K or more mostly had insurance that was covering their rebuild cost, but if not FEMA has given them as much as 600K to fix their house where insurance would not. MOST of the house owners that are complaining did not have insurance (yes, they were poor to begin with), but FEMA helped them out anyway.
On the local government there is the issue of them being warned WELL in advance, over two years earlier, that the levies would not hold up to a strong storm, they needed work and were giving money to fix them, and not spending the money on fixing the levies, “because it would be too hard to do”. They spent the money on many other things. Here I AM mad with the feds. They should have demanded the money back when it was spent on a Casino boat was built and the “enhanced” parking lot built at the Mayors house.
Should FEMA get slapped, and hard, for the issues with the Trailers (formaldehyde)? YES! Here they screwed up! (IF it was an issue with the trailers, or the area they put them up in. If it is do to the living life style of those living in the trailers and by actions of their own doing no.) (Although I’m pretty sure here FEMA screwed up by not doing proper quality control on the trailers before issuing them.)
MOST of the blame goes on the locals and on the local government. The feds to get some blame though.