Remembering the Lessons of Hurricane Katrina

By Leslie Woods, Associate for Domestic Poverty and Environmental Issues, Presbyterian Washington Office

Rebuilding in the New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward has been slow. Photo by Andrew Kang Bartlett.

In January 2007, riding on a bus down St. Claude Avenue, which cuts across the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, I was struck that the Lower Ninth hasn’t changed much since I started visiting almost a year ago. To my left was the neighborhood of Holy Cross, where small, respectable houses that had clearly once been lovely and well-kept homes, were slowly being gutted. To my right was utter devastation.

On my first visit, the right side of St. Claude looked like a war zone. Houses were washed away, trees uprooted, and debris littered, piled as high as the houses that no longer stood there.

Today, on the Holy Cross side, there are more trailers, indicating that a few more residents have begun the arduous process of reclaiming their homes from the water, mold and sludge left behind by the receding water.

On the other side of St. Claude, some debris has been cleared away, leaving concrete slabs where houses once stood. For the most part, however, it looks unchanged and forgotten.

One year and a half since Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, the recovery has barely begun. More than half of the city’s pre-Katrina population has still not returned home, and some never will. Affordable housing units are incredibly hard to come by, as are jobs, doctors, schools, and the other basic necessities that make it possible to live and thrive in a place.

Some rebuilding is Rebuilding in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. Photo by Andrew Kang Bartlett.

The public safety net that failed so dismally as the storm approached the city, and when the levies broke letting the flood rush in, is in shambles. The Lower Ninth Ward did not have running water until October 2006, over a year after the storm. But even worse than seeing what little progress has been made on the surface, is examining the issues that run deep below the surface of an economically and racially divided city — and nation.

As Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans, the residents who could, fled. Those who owned cars, trucks and vans jammed the northbound highways, while those who didn’t own a vehicle stayed at home. Not until Sunday, August 28, 2005, the day before the storm made landfall, was a mandatory evacuation order issued and by this time, alternate modes of transportation like buses and planes had ceased functioning.

According to the 2000 census, New Orleans was tied for sixth poorest large city in the nation, with a staggering poverty rate of 28 percent. More than half of the poor households in pre-Katrina New Orleans did not own a vehicle, including almost 60 percent of poor African American households and 65 percent of the elderly.

Many people who remained at home as the hurricane barreled toward their city had no choice; they couldn’t leave. Of the 5.8 million people who lived in the areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that were hardest hit by the hurricanes, more than a million were living in poverty, and one in every three was African American. Those who were most egregiously impacted by the hurricanes and their aftermath disproportionately were poor, elderly and African American; and we — all of us — left them behind.

In the systemic poverty and racism that was brought so forcefully into the public consciousness by Hurricane Katrina, there is a microcosm of the systemic injustice that plagues this nation. Every day, in every town and city, the storms of poverty, racism and injustice are leaving this same group of people behind.

One year and a half since Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, the recovery has barely begun. Lower Ninth Ward. Photo by Andrew Kang Bartlett.

The tragedies and loss that followed Hurricane Katrina were not the result of a natural disaster; they were the result of a human disaster — systemic neglect and failure at every level of the public safety net, from the local governments that failed to issue mandatory evacuation orders and help the poor leave the city, to the federal agencies charged with maintenance of the levies, disaster response and a host of other “safety net” functions. There was nothing “natural” about the disaster that followed the hurricane.

And now, a year and a half later — as families still wait on lists thousands of names long to get trailers so that they have a place to live while rebuilding their homes — we must ask, “How could we let this happen?”  In the richest nation in the world, how can the system have failed so utterly, resulting in so much death, dislocation and devastation? 
As the 2007 legislative season shifts into high gear, and as the fate of poverty alleviation and environmental programs is decided on the federal budget’s pages, the lessons and revelations of Hurricane Katrina must not sink below the polluted waters that we failed to hold back.

We must not forget, and we must call upon our legislators to remember our nation’s responsibility to the poor, the elderly, the sick and the neglected. Read the Hunger Program’s special report from New Orleans.

The Hunger Program responded soon after the Katrina and Rita hit with grants to community organizing groups in the New Orleans area, and we have continued to provide grants to feeding programs of PC(USA) congregations and other initiatives.