FEMA Help: Can you tell me if there is truth in a rumor that FEMA plans to offer/loan money to each head of household (approx. $26K each)? Please leave a comment or email me.
FEMA Update: A FEMA FAQ on acquiring disaster assistance, housing assistance, food and water and unemployment. Call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) or sign up online.
Unemployment: Katrina has left up to 750,000 temporarily jobless. Nevertheless, employment is available – “thousands of jobs to clean-up … followed by construction jobs to rebuild the thousands of damaged or destroyed homes and businesses.”
The Dept. of Labor “approved $20.7 million to hire 10,000 dislocated workers to aid recovery and clean-up efforts … prepared to authorize another $41.4 million, when the rescue situation stabilizes enough to get more people to work.”
—
Exactly a week after evacuating New Orleans, I wonder, “Has it only been a week?” Close on the heels of the initial thought is, “Wow, that week went by quickly!” Despite that New Orleans has yet to start large-scale recovery, take some peace in knowing that time happens. Our patience and encouragement are paramount.
- The water will be drained.
- The power grid will be reassembled. Entergy has 92 transmission lines out of service. Power has been restored to approximately 500,000 customers; another half a million remain without power due to limited access to flooded neighborhoods
-
Habitat For Humanity is currently accepting all the help it can get.
If you’re having your house rebuilt with contractor help, here are some important tips. Basically, be careful whom you hire and save all of the paperwork for insurance purposes.
—
The Chicago Tribune‘s front page bellyaches: Rebuilding a city “will be costly, and recreating New Orleans’ soul might be impossible.”
It took centuries to transform New Orleans from a mosquito-infested swamp into one of the world’s unique cities. And in a day long rampage, Hurricane Katrina demolished it.
Are they talking about the same city that I just left and to which I plan to return? New Orleans wasn’t demolished; it has been flooded and is in disrepair. Parts of Moss Point, Biloxi, Pascagoula, Bay St. Louis and other towns in Mississippi were demolished, but not New Orleans.
As for New Orleans soul, it doesn’t merely waft from colonial architecture in the French Quarter and red beans & rice in the Treme. The soul of the city is in the beating hearts of its people. As long as residents of the Crescent City believe in their city and each one helps rebuild, where is the room for loss? 80% of New Orleanians evacuated and are starting to help the 20% that didn’t.
For true inspiration, read the Tribune editorial written after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, “The ability of cities to survive and thrive after disaster depends on large part on what they aspire to be, and whether they can reinvent themselves to meet that goal.”
If Chicago did it in 1871, London and Paris did it in 1945 and Kuwait City did it in 1991, New Orleans can do it in 2005. We have all kinds of soul.
Open Letter to State & Local Officials
Voices have been raised to say that New Orleans should not be
rebuilt, or be rebuilt along hurricane-resistant/flood resistant
guidelines.
There is no doubt that rebuilding will take place. The port and
petroleum infrastructures are vital; the tourist industry is
profitable. The question is what will be rebuilt, and by and for whom.
President Bush has warned against price gouging. If federal funding
is available in any form, investors from outside will quickly move
in – indeed are “buying up entire industries” – to make profits that
will pour out of the city and region. The reconstruction effort will
quickly be taken over.
Meanwhile, small contractors, artisans and craftsmen – some of whom
have irreplacable traditional skills -, and a large pool of unskilled
and semi-skilled labor who have fled the city will be seeking to put
their skills to work in functioning economies in other cities – and
perhaps never return home.
It is true that any rebuilding sould follow strict storm-resistant
guidelines. But in order to help rebuild New Orleans’s economy along
with its buildings, those guidelines should also require that the
rebuilding be done to the extent possible by local contractors and
craftsmen who would be given preference and encouragement to return,
and with local labor.
Apprenticeship programs should be part of these guidelines so that
young people from the city, instead of being scattered in refugee
camps around the South and the US, could be housed near their own
city and help rebuild it while learning a trade.
Measures need to be taken now by federal, state, and local
authorities to ensure that the rebuilding of New Orleans benefits her
own people and not outside investors.
– 0 –