Longer-term Recovery and Mitigation Experiences for a Socially Vulnerable Community
Longer-term Recovery and Mitigation Experiences for a Socially Vulnerable Community ksc17The response to Katrina was inadequate and in retrospect revealed a need for improvements to all levels of emergency planning – from evacuation to caring for the vulnerable, to providing for equitable recovery – and more. Today we look back on Katrina as an example of poor disaster planning and New Orleans as a city with very low adaptive capacity at the time. Why was the response so poor, and how have things changed since then? Is the Gulf Coast and New Orleans in particular, better prepared for a major storm, and has it increased its adaptive capacity? In other words, have each component of the emergency management cycle – mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery been addressed to ensure another "Katrina experience" does not happen?
Immediately after Katrina broke the flood defenses of the city, with 80% of the city underwater and a crippled infrastructure, New Orleans had to be completely evacuated. Those who could not or did not evacuate ahead of the storm were temporarily trapped in a hellish scenario for days before an organized response could evacuate everyone. People were gathered at the New Orleans Superdome, Convention Center, and New Orleans International Airport where conditions were deplorable. Triage and evacuation centers were set up in locations that were above water in the flooded city and those rescued from the flood were processed and transported out. It was a chaotic and sometimes violent situation. The temperatures were in the 90’s Fahrenheit and there was no power at all. There was a deep level of suffering and trauma as families were separated and individuals sent far away from home to places where they had no family or friends. Many older people who were in poor health succumbed to the heat, lack of food and water, and extremely poor sanitation. Many did not know the fate of their family members and communication was almost impossible with all cell towers having been toppled. It was obvious to even a casual observer that the majority of the stranded citizens were disadvantaged by poverty and most were African American.
The introductory video in Module 11 showed some of the immediate aftermath of Katrina.
Even though the flood itself affected 80% of the city in a way that crossed socio-economic boundaries and did not discriminate, some of the lowest-lying areas were also the areas where there was more poverty so that the disadvantaged residents of the city were significantly more likely to be displaced by the flooding than those with greater wealth.
A great deal of attention was given by the press to the poor, predominantly African American neighborhood of New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward. This area was flooded by a break in the floodwall of the Inner Harbor (Industrial) Canal, a shipping canal that cuts through the heart of the city and at that time (incredibly) was directly connected to the Gulf of Mexico via the Intracoastal Waterway and The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and Lake Borgne. The flood wall was broken by the force of the water, and a loose barge pushed its way through. Water poured through the break, washing houses off their foundations, and drowning many residents. To this day, fifteen years after Katrina, many blocks of this neighborhood still sit vacant after houses had to be demolished and families were unable to return and rebuild. This is even with organizations such as Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation pouring money into rebuilding and trying to “make it right” for the local residents. This can be considered a forced relocation by a natural disaster.
It was the aftermath of the flood and the recovery process that really shone a spotlight on the disparity of fortune. The suffering did not end when the floodwaters were finally pumped out of the saucer-shaped city, against the force of gravity - this “dewatering” took most of the month after the flood. Nobody could return until the infrastructure – power, water, sewage, etc. was functioning well enough to make it minimally livable, and as the city slowly reopened, people who could return found their houses completely wrecked and their neighborhoods almost unrecognizable. Those lacking financial resources, could not get back to the city for months or even more than a year. Families had to find ways of making a living wherever they had landed after the flood. People with stronger financial resources were able to return and take care of the myriad tasks of recovery much more easily than those in poverty. This and other factors and financial obstacles meant that it was the wealthier neighborhoods that were rebuilt more quickly than the poorer neighborhoods.
Please watch this 9.54 minute CBS Sunday Morning video: “New Orleans After Katrina: A Tale of Two Cities” that examines the inequity of the rebuilding process in which it is mentioned that black homeowners were more than 3 times more likely than white homeowners to have lost their home in the flooding and that the Road Home Program, the state’s policy for funding rebuilding through grants to homeowners, was found to be discriminatory. The flaw in the policy was that it used the home’s value before the storm to determine the amount the homeowner received. So, the homes of much lower value in poorer, predominantly black neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward, were eligible for significantly less funding for rebuilding, failing to meet rebuilding costs.
Video: New Orleans after Katrina: A tale of two cities (9:54)
New Orleans after Katrina: A tale of two cities
NARRATOR: As if we needed reminding, even after 10 years, how terrible Katrina really was, and what a colossal fiasco.
YOUNG GIRL: We are going to die out here if they do not send somebody out here right now.
NARRATOR: The horror show at the Superdome. Close to 25,000 people were trapped there for days in the heat and stink.
WOMAN 1: We need to feed our babies. We need to give our babies some water.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
NARRATOR: Thousands more baked on overpasses along the interstate.
WOMAN 2: This man jumped to his death because he just couldn't take it anymore.
NARRATOR: More than 1,800 people died across the Gulf Coast. How could this be happening in the United States of America? Who seemed more out of touch-- President Bush or FEMA director Mike Brown?
GEORGE BUSH: And Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.
NARRATOR: New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin let loose on a radio broadcast.
RAY NAGIN: Now get off your asses and let's do something, and let's fix the biggest [BLEEP] damn crisis in the history of this country.
NARRATOR: 80% of New Orleans was flooded. Billions and billions of gallons of water swept over the city, not so much because of the storm itself, but because the levees gave way. The floodwalls broke.
GARY RIVLIN: Being there in those first months, it felt like, am I witnessing the death of a great American city?
NARRATOR: Gary Rivlin covered Katrina for the New York Times. His new book, Katrina:After the Flood, has just been published by CBS-owned Simon & Schuster.
GARY RIVLIN: People talk about Katrina being an equal opportunity storm. Didn't make a difference if you were black or white, rich or poor, but it wasn't exactly an equal storm. If you were a black homeowner, you were more than three times more likely to have lost your home in the flooding than if you were a white homeowner. And just like it wasn't an equal opportunity storm, it has not been an equal opportunity recovery.
This was one of the first things I saw when I came into Lakeview for the first time, and there was a mound 10 stories high of debris. And I just remember pulling to the side stunned, and I just began to weep.
NARRATOR: Connie Udo's house a few blocks away looked like this after Katrina. When the water finally drained away, what had been her middle class overwhelmingly white neighborhood looked like this.
CONNIE UDO: We were fortunate because my home is a triplex. Because we lived on the second and third floor, we didn't lose everything.
NARRATOR: After moving six times, Udo, her husband, and two children dared to go home in January 2006, four months after the storm.
CONNIE UDO: It was a very sad place to be. As long as I was in my house, I was OK. When I walked outside, I would feel myself just kind of slide. And got to the point where I told my husband I don't think I can do this. And so he said, you know, I think you have to find a purpose.
NARRATOR: A few months later, the former tennis teacher had become a combination Angie's List and Mr. Clean, a whirlwind running the St. Paul's Homecoming Center. Her job-- connecting people to resources, marshaling volunteers to get her Lakeview neighbors back in their houses.
CONNIE UDO: I realized we were in a fight for our life to save our neighborhood, to save our city.
NARRATOR: How did you go about this assault on the storm?
CONNIE UDO: Do not wait for the government-- that became our motto. People would say, well, I'm going to wait for this. I'm going to wait for my-- the government's going to do this, right? I was like, no, I don't think so. The government didn't even show up when we were stranded at the Dome for five days. Why do you think they're going to show up to help guide our schools, churches, and businesses? Why do you think that? We need to do this.
This is one of our success stories, actually.
NARRATOR: And they did, Connie Udo's organization and others. There are reminders of Katrina. The high water line is immortalized at Starbucks, but Lakeview is back. A supermarket opened in 2010. The St. Paul's Homecoming Center has moved on.
[MARCHING BAND PLAYING]
In New Orleans, happy or sad, you dance to the music. And yesterday on the actual anniversary of Katrina, people danced in the Lower Ninth Ward, where the most damage was done. This is what it looks like still. Almost entirely African-American before the storm, only 37% of its pre-Katrina residents have returned.
Brad Pitt's Make It Right and other charities have built hundreds of homes, but thousands were destroyed. The closest thing to a grocery store opened last year. More on that later.
BETTY BELLE: And this was the front door.
NARRATOR: Someone else's roof was on top of Betty Belle's house when the retired social worker finally was allowed back for a look a month after Katrina. The city demolished it.
BETTY BELLE: You know, I just tried to be strong and not let it really affect me too much because I don't want to run my blood sugar up.
NARRATOR: Her insurance settlement, nowhere nearly enough to rebuild. The bank took most of it to pay off her mortgage, anyway.
BETTY BELLE: This was the bathroom.
NARRATOR: Construction is about to start on Betty Belle's lot, but it's taken 10 years of fighting and the intervention of a local advocacy group to get her barely enough money for a house one third the size of her old one.
BETTY BELLE: It's not what I had, but at least I'm getting something. And it took a long time to get to this point.
NARRATOR: For Belle, the problem was Road Home, Louisiana's nearly $10 billion federally-funded program intended to bridge the gap to provide homeowners enough money to rebuild. For many, many Katrina victims, it ended up a bureaucratic nightmare, a symbol of incompetence, but for residents of African-American neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward it was a symbol of something else-- discrimination. Road Home based its payment formula on the value of a property before Katrina.
In New Orleans, historically, homes in African-American neighborhoods have been valued significantly lower than similar homes in white neighborhoods. Never mind that construction costs are the same regardless.
GARY RIVLIN: It was just a fundamental flaw in the program. In fact, it's not just me saying that. A federal judge ended up concluding that the Road Home program did in fact discriminate against black homeowners.
It's not that they were not made aware that it was not a good policy. Myself and others personally appealed to the powers to be to not use that policy.
NARRATOR: One of the city's most prominent African-American leaders, Alden McDonald, heads Liberty Bank and Trust Company. After Katrina, his headquarters, his branches, and his own home were all devastated, but he managed to keep the bank open.
ALDEN MCDONALD(VOICEOVER): We're Louisiana made, Louisiana proud at Liberty Bank.
NARRATOR: And has in the past 10 years built it into one of the largest minority-owned banks in the United States, but this speaks volumes. The Liberty Bank building in African-American New Orleans East marooned, surrounded by what was a million square foot mall before Katrina.
ALDEN MCDONALD: When I take a look at what happened and what didn't happen, you could see that the ability of money helped communities to rebuild faster and bigger and to do things that perhaps the African-American community with less wealth was not able to do.
MITCH LANDRIEU: We're ready. Nearly 10 years after Katrina, we're no longer recovering. We're not rebuilding. Now we're creating.
NARRATOR: The current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, likes to talk about a new New Orleans.
[JAZZ MUSIC]
All you have to do is look around. The Superdome rebuilt, a new state of the art hospital, new schools. A new $14.5 billion flood protection system reduces. It doesn't eliminate the risk of catastrophic flooding. The tourists have returned, but nearly 100,000 African-American New Orleanians gone.
[CLARINET MUSIC]
The new New Orleans looks familiar but may never quite be the Big Easy again.
[CLARINET MUSIC]
MAN: Only in New Orleans!
Geographer Richard Campanella, in his book Geographies of New Orleans, addresses the question, were poor, black neighborhoods impacted by flooding more than more affluent white neighborhoods, due to the fact that the poor tend to occupy the lower, less desirable land areas? His analysis showed, through mapping the demographics and the levels of flooding together, that the answer is more complex than you may expect. He looked at the distribution of ethnic groups, distribution of flooded land, and the length of time an area remained flooded after Katrina. If only the city of New Orleans itself is considered (and not the suburbs), his data shows that the pre-Katrina population consisted of 67% African American and 28% white, while 76% of persistently flooded properties were of African American families, 20% were of white families. So African American neighborhoods did suffer greater persistent flooding. The maps below illustrate the complex nature of the distribution of social vulnerability in relation to the more intense flooding. The neighborhoods of Gentilly, New Orleans East, the Lower 9th ward, Chalmette, and Lakeview experienced the deepest floodwaters. The distribution of wealth and poverty in these communities is complex, with New Orleans East, the Lower 9th Ward, and Gentilly being predominantly black neighborhoods, while Lakeview is an affluent, mostly white part of the city. Chalmette is a mostly white suburb of mixed-income.
So, in summary, Hurricane Katrina negatively affected the poorer citizens of the city, who were represented heavily by the African American community, more than the affluent members of the community. The poor are the most vulnerable citizens due to their sensitivity. They are also the least resilient, having lower levels of adaptive capacity, due almost entirely to a lack of financial resources. Without the incredible generosity of non-profit and non-governmental organizations, faith-based groups, and volunteers, many people would never have been able to return home. In addition, insurance payments, various federally funded programs such as the Road Home Program, and the migration to the area of people and companies willing to invest in rebuilding all contributed to the recovery of New Orleans house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Would New Orleans fare better if another “Katrina” hit the city? Many improvements have been made. Preparedness and response, including evacuation plans with transportation for those without a vehicle, and response plans are all greatly improved. The city’s overall adaptive capacity and resilience have made strides and the economy of the city has stabilized, but poverty is still a major problem for the city. The system of engineering structures, designed to protect the city from a surge from - up to category 3 level “100-year" (1% chance in a given year) storm, has been rebuilt and greatly improved. But projections indicate that this system will deteriorate over time and it is very expensive to maintain. New Orleans may be in a good position at this time if a category 3 hurricane were to hit the city. But there are too many variables to say for sure what the outcomes would be in terms of long-term recovery in the future or for a larger storm. For example, an event with precipitation of the magnitude of Hurricane Harvey would quite likely prove to be equally devastating to New Orleans as Katrina.