|
Remember Katrina?
October 31, 2006
On Hurricane Katrina’s one-year anniversary in late August, the Gulf Coast received a flurry of media and political attention. The White House launched a “public relations blitz,” and President Bush promised to “make sure this good area [the Gulf Coast] recovers.” But by the next week, the attention had largely faded. Currently, in the week before the midterm elections, few—if any—candidates are focusing on Katrina reconstruction. The one-year anniversary is over, but reconstruction hurdles remain. Survivors all over the nation continue to struggle. Many are unable to return to their homes on the Gulf Coast, and those who do face a lack of basic services. Columbia University geophysicist John Mutter estimates that hundreds of Katrina evacuees have since died from related health issues, putting the real death toll “well in excess of 2,000.”
- Tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents are still displaced, and those who have returned lack basic services. The Government Accountability Office estimates that approximately 600,000 households were displaced from affected areas during hurricanes Katrina and Rita. While some areas have been reconstructed, much of the area remains a shell of what it was before Katrina. The population of New Orleans is 57 percent smaller than it was in 2005, with just 187,525 residents. Fifty percent of New Orleans’s doctors and nurses have not returned, and just two out of ten hospitals have reopened. Approximately 125,000 local residents lack health insurance. Just over 60 out of 130 New Orleans Parish schools have reopened. In late September, residents of the Lower Ninth Ward protested that they still had no clean drinking water, and likely wouldn’t for awhile.
- The administration still has not learned the lessons of Katrina. Despite a promise to rebuild the area higher and safer, the Bush administration has avoided committing to hurricane protection much beyond what was in place when Katrina, a Category 3 storm, shredded New Orleans’ levees and floodwalls. “The cost is far outweighed by the maybe $300 billion in losses from Hurricane Katrina,” noted Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-LA). In 2005, the 9/11 Commission blasted the Bush administration for also forgetting the lessons of the 2001 terrorist attacks. “Hurricane Katrina pointed out serious flaws in our emergency preparedness and response. And what is frustrating to us is that [these are] many of the same problems we saw in 9/11 and the response to that disaster,” said the commission’s chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean.
- There are members of Congress who are fighting to speed up hurricane reconstruction. The House Katrina Task Force recently released a report with recommendations for legislative action on hurricane reconstruction. “Better levees, reforming FEMA, and fast-tracking coastal restoration and comprehensive hurricane protection projects are all included. This report is also a blueprint for how we can better respond to disasters in the future, wherever they may strike,” said Melancon, who spearheaded the effort with Rep. Gene Taylor (R-MS). Topping their list, though, is reform of the insurance industry, where according to Taylor, there “is a built-in, anti-consumer incentive for insurance adjusters to claim that storm damage falls outside the policy guidelines.” The report proposes eliminating the antitrust exemption enjoyed by the insurance industry and mandating “that companies sell policies that cover all hazards including floods and create federal oversight of the industry, which is currently regulated by the states.”
|
