Filed under: News, Politics, President Obama, Race and Civil Rights
After Hurricane Katrina, Jim Pate says he was struck by how gray and lifeless New Orleans looked. More than 1,600 people were killed and 80 percent of the area was flooded or damaged. Back in the city a little over a week after the storm, silt, mud and debris covered the roadways and the normal signs of life - trees, cars driving down the street and birds singing - were all non-existent.
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Still, as the executive director of the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, Pate knew things were turning around when the volunteers started flooding in and the gutting and rebuilding of people's homes began. And then something remarkable began to happen:
"In the five years since Katrina, what has unfolded is a true sense of unity and commitment among the people of New Orleans that crosses all ethnic, religious and socioeconomic bounds," Pate told Aol. Black Voices in an interview.
That unity has helped Habitat manage 130,000 volunteers and build more than 300 houses in the last five years, a four-fold increase in the five years before Katrina.
"The two most critical components of the recovery was the courage and resiliency and self-support of people who lived here and had returned or were to trying to return," said Pate.
Five years after Katrina, a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that the overwhelming majority of New Orleans residents share Pate's positive outlook: Seventy percent of residents say that the rebuilding and recovery effort is headed in the right direction. That's an increase from the 56 percent who felt the same way in 2008.
President Barack Obama is scheduled to give a speech on the anniversary at Xavier University. Obama is expected to highlight his efforts at cuting through the red tape by creating a dispute resolution process that made $2.25 billion available in Louisiana and $170 million available in Mississippi, helping thousands of families transition to permanent housing and repairing of 220 miles of levee and floodwall protection.
"We saw a significant removal of road blocks since the Obama administration took over, such as the creation of mediation panels to resolve FEMA disputes. That is going to be valuable for any other place in country where a disaster occurs but the blueprint has been established in New Orleans," said Pate.
"Our school system was in terrible shape but post-Katrina we have more charter schools per capita than anywhere else in the country, allowing us to become a laboratory of sorts for new ideas," he added.
But despite the progress that has been made since Katrina, tremendous challenges remain in everything from health to infrastructure repair.A third of residents who survived the storm still say their lives are disrupted while a quarter are planning to move from the New Orleans area, the Kaiser survey found.
Sixty-four percent say not much progress has been made in addressing issues of crime and public safety.
African Americans are not nearly as optimistic, with 42 percent saying their life has not recovered from Katrina. That's more than double the 16 percent of whites who say the same. At the same time, almost 70 percent of area residents believe that Americans have forgotten about the challenges facing the area."It's been five years, but we have a lot more work to do," said Kecia Powell, 42, a New Orleans resident who works at the Superdome. "Once I pass my house there are homes that are still abandoned, but I thought it would take longer than this for us to recover. A lot of folks say it will take at least 10 years."
Physical and financial challenges also remain. The Army Corps of Engineers is working on completing a 350-mile ring of levees and floodgates to open by next year's hurricane season, but the wetlands, a truly natural barrier from a Katrina-like surge, are still in danger.
"The indisputable critical factor is the restoration of coastal wetlands. It is far and away the single most important thing that has to happen and the only way for us to be protected for the long haul," said Pate.
Even as New Orleans needs billions to rebuild its infrastructure, the money is simply not available, according to a studyfrom Bureau of Governmental Research.
Among the most pressing needs is $1.4 billion to replace streets and drainage infrastructure and another $40 million per year for maintenance of those facilities.
But Orleans Parish is already well above its bonding capacity and may be unable to raise the money without additional tax increases.
Another pressing issue is the attitude toward governmental regulation that directly and indirectly contributed to the aftermath of Katrina and events such as the BP Gulf Oil Spill.
"There was a series of complex causes that led to this disaster and in the aftermath it's pretty clear that we have not fixed all of those conditions," said Wake Forest University Law Professor Sidney Shapiro, who along with Rena Steinzor, is the author of "The People's Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public: Special Interests, Government, and the Threats to National Health, Safety and the Environment."
Among those issues is the restoration of the wetlands and the updating of things, such as safety-evacuation plans.
"There are regulatory requirements that they had to have evacuation and other safety plans. it was obvious to local and state officials that they had no way to deal with the large population of people without cars. They let it drift and federal oversight let it drift," Shapiro said of the scenes of people trapped on their roofs and at the Superdome. "Even if it was inevitable that city was flooded, it was not inevitable that we left all these people behind."
The challenge now is to continue to marshal the necessary resources needed to bring the city back, said Pate. That includes bringing back the people who hold the city's culture as Habitat will do as it completes a major phase of its musician's village in time for the fifth anniversary. Anyone who is counting the city out is wrong, he said.
"In New Orleans, we are famous for our second line tradition. When someone dies, we take them to the grave playing the slow music and lay them to rest assuming they are going on to better things," Pate said. "But then the drums and the jazz breaks out in the second line. That's the way we are looking at this, as a time for reflection and a time for celebration."
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