Four Months Later

Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast at the end of August. Here it is the end of December, nearly four months later, and you would expect that after all the promises and all the speechifying and all the money budgeted for reconstruction that area of the country would be well on its way to recovery. Unfortunately, and as usual with this regime, you would be wrong. In four months very little debris has been removed and almost no reconstruction started. A brief survey on some news articles that appeared yesterday and today will show the extent of the problems.

First, the Washington Post:

Where rebuilding New Orleans and Gulf communities was seen as a national priority in the days after Hurricane Katrina hit -- most tangibly when lawmakers approved $62 billion in aid just two weeks later -- Congress's race to complete a new round of reconstruction aid this month became fodder for politics-as-usual in the capital, and in increasingly strong tones.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) lumped Congress's slow rebuilding response into an attack on a Republican "culture of corruption and cronyism, coverup . . . and incompetence," which she later said "caused so much more loss of life and damage in the Gulf Coast."

Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) faulted President Bush's efforts to restore housing, small businesses, health care, education and minority voting rights to storm victims. Pelosi applied the word "failure" or some variant to the administration 44 times in an 11-page report.

Republicans have responded in kind. Condemning a Democratic push to subpoena top administration aides for e-mails as part of a House investigation into the Katrina response, Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.) said, "Let's pierce the political veil here. There should be no doubt that the purpose of this motion" is to protect Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) and New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) "to try to somehow shift all this back over to the White House." [Emphasis added]

Is it just 'politics as usual' warming up for the election season? In unquoted sections of the article the writer suggests that what the hold-up is really caused by is differing philosophies and differing views on the best way for the government to spend tax dollars. That would be tenable but for the realities on the ground as noted by the other two articles, such as this NY Times piece.

There are many reasons for the difference between the lack of progress in Pascagoula and the quick cleanup in the Biloxi area. But officials here point fingers at what they consider the No. 1 culprit: the federal government and, in particular, the Army Corps of Engineers.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Harrison County, the home of Biloxi, and Jackson County, where Pascagoula is located, each had about 10 million cubic yards of debris to clean up. Both counties took up the federal government on its offer to foot the bill.

But while Harrison County and all but one of its cities hired contractors on their own, Jackson County and its cities, at the urging of the federal government, asked the Army Corps to take on the task. Officials in Jackson County said it was a choice they had regretted ever since.

The same appeared to hold true in Louisiana: The cleanup from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was 45 percent finished in jurisdictions that called in the corps, and nearly 70 percent complete in communities that employed private contractors, state records showed. The imbalance remained even when New Orleans, where the cleanup has been particularly complex and slow, was removed from the tally. Across the Gulf Coast, the cleanup was, on average, about 60 percent done, records showed.

Pascagoula and other Jackson County cities are sticking with the corps. But City Manager Kay Kell of Pascagoula said she was disappointed. Her city had a private contract to clean debris for $7.80 a cubic yard, but now relies on the corps, which is paying its contractor $17 to $19 a cubic yard for the same work. [Emphasis added]

Keep in mind that the Army Corps of Engineers is not doing the actual debris removal, it, as a government agency, has contracted the work out to private companies, often under no-bid contracts. This means there is an additional layer of bureaucracy coupled with the additional costs attendant to the rather 'unusual' contract procedures.

The result, of course, is that many Gulf Coast residents are still without homes, some even without housing of any type, and reconstruction keeps receding further down the road. The effect, particularly during the holiday season, is disheartening, as noted in this story from WWL TV.

Plastic snowmen sit among mountains of rubble in nearly deserted neighborhoods. Refrigerators spray-painted with "Merry Christmas" lie on street medians. And signs in front of crumbling houses implore, "Santa, stop here."

In many places, time seems to have stood still since late August when Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast.

The upended cars and sludge-covered refuse suggest that the hurricane hit hours – not months – ago.

The Crescent City remains a shell of its former self this Christmas, with only slivers of the city up and running.

If it is indeed a matter of differing philosophies on government, I know which philosophy I hope wins out. Not the one that just dribbles out aid to Katrina victims because more money is needed for the Iraq misadventure and tax cuts for the have-mores. That other one, the one that cares about the welfare of Americans, that cares about housing and jobs for them, that cares about their civil liberties, even in the face of a huge crisis. I just hope the victory comes soon.