Via Rolling Stone (sorry about the commercial; this is worth it).

Pete Seeger may be 91 years old, but the iconic folk singer still has plenty to protest. On Friday night at New York’s City Winery, Seeger debuted a new song he wrote about the disastrous BP oil spill as part of a fundraising concert for the Gulf Restoration Network and Global Green USA . “It’s a strange, strange song,” said Seeger about the new tune, which featured a simple finger-picked chord progression and gravelly ominous lyrics like, “When the drill baby drill turns to spill baby spill/God’s counting on me/God’s counting on you.” Check out video of “God’s Counting on Me, God’s Counting on You” above.

After his set, Seeger told Rolling Stone he doesn’t write many songs these days, but the oil spill inspired him to team up with folk singer Lorre Wyatt to write the track at his home in Beacon, New York. “I’m a fan of old songs that have a lot of repetition, spirituals,” Seeger said. “Some of the greatest songs in the world only have one line, like ‘This little light of mine.’ ”

It was a busy week for Seeger. On Wednesday, he traveled to Albany, New York, where he sang the new number outside the state senate chamber to protest hydraulic fracturing, a controversial natural gas drilling technique. “I performed for 40 newspaper and radio reporters,” he said. “It made sense down there, too. When there’s a great big problem lets get together and do something about it and not leave it up to the government, the rich the poor.”

Apparently there’s also a new Pete Seeger record just out!

Grand Casino, Biloxi, MS, five months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi.

On August 29, 2005, the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Waveland, Mississippi, and the western side of the storm grazed New Orleans. Five months after the storm, I visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

According to a National Hurricane Center report on Katrina, “in many locations, most of the buildings along the coast were completely destroyed, leaving few structures within which to identify still-water marks.” The center’s researchers estimate that the hurricane produced a storm surge as high as 27 feet in some locations.

It was dumbfounding to drive along the coast in Biloxi and find the Grand Casino on the north side of Highway 90. Before Katrina, the casino was on a barge, docked off the beach, south of the highway. The storm surge lifted the casino barge out of the water, over the beach and over the highway. If you stand at the western end of the barge and look east, you can see the yellow and blue neon sign, a half mile down the road, where the barge originally sat. The same thing happened to two other casino barges—the President Casino in Biloxi, which landed on top of a Holiday Inn, and the Gulfport Grand Casino….

The national media have covered the near-total destruction of Bay St. Louis and Waveland. Driving along Beach Boulevard in the two towns, I saw a few people who had returned and were living in trailers on their plots of land, but practically everything was deserted. All that remained were the merest remnants of homes and the things that had been inside them….

In each place I visited along the western half of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the look of the destruction was a little different, but it was consistently total. And surprisingly, the destruction in the coastal areas of Pascagoula, at the eastern end of the state, is comparable. I remembered George W. Bush’s promise to rebuild another “fantastic house” for Trent Lott on the Pascagoula beachfront. I did not know that 95% of the city’s residential areas went underwater or that 65% of the city’s homes remain uninhabitable. Northrop Grumman Ship Systems’ facility in Pascagoula, which before Katrina employed 19,800 people, was all but obliterated.

Hurricane Katrina wiped out the entire Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. All along the coast—mile after mile—just about anything that was there is now gone.

But this is only part of the story. According to the National Hurricane Center, the surge “penetrated at least six miles inland in many portions of coastal Mississippi and up to 12 miles inland along bays and rivers. The surge crossed Interstate 10 in many locations.” Interstate 10 runs east-west, four miles or more north of coastal Highway 90.

Gayle Tart’s brother Sam and his son John died in Pass Christian during the hurricane, on John’s second birthday. Tart explained that father and son had drowned inside their own home.

“Water never came down there [before Katrina]. That’s across the track. [With Katrina] that water came in and that water went out, and the velocity was unbelievable,” Tart said. “The first boundary was the beach and the next boundary was the highway. The day after the storm, you saw neither—no beach and no highway.”

When I wrote this for Dollars & Sense Magazine in 2006, I focused on the housing crisis faced by Katrina survivors in Mississippi. Today, at the fourth anniversary of the storm, the housing crisis rages on, thanks to government inaction and skewed priorites.

Small rental and workforce housing progress has fallen dramatically short of State predictions, and so Mississippi has asked HUD for additional funds to temporarily subsidize lower-income residents in market rate rentals….

• Mississippi has allocated just over half its funds on housing, and has lowered its commitment to housing by over $800 million in the past 2 years. Louisiana has allocated over 85 percent to housing programs and increased its commitment over the same period.
• Mississippi has spent just under half its funds, while Louisiana has spent almost 68 percent of its funds, widening its lead over Mississippi.
• Mississippi diverted $600 million from its housing program to a port expansion, while Louisiana intends to reinvest $600 million in unused Road Home funds for housing assistance for low-income residents.
• Mississippi took longer to spend less later for low-income residents than for wealthier residents.

But the housing crisis was just one part of the ongoing disaster. Katrina has also been a cultural and ecological disaster of epic proportions.

A family photo rests on the foundation slab of a home obliterated by Hurricane Katrina in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

I emphasize Mississippi in this blog post because I know that nearly all of the fourth anniversary coverage of the ongoing Katrina aftermath, will focus myopically on New Orleans. The situation in New Orleans is still dire. The housing crisis is dire. But there will not be an adequate recovery until the interconnectedness of regions and issues becomes a fundamental insight that drives policy.

While poor and minority survivors and activists will agree (if anyone asks them) that they face multiple, interconnected disasters in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, this basic local insight goes largely unrecognized. Government failure is certainly most responsible for a “recovery” that has been arbitrary, resource-driven, and slow rather than holistic, need-driven, or effective. But no one, progressives as a group included, has adequately depicted, let alone offset, that failure. Narrowly focused aid has often segregated otherwise related issues, making one or another worse and masking the lack of an overall plan. Residents of the region feel tremendous gratitude to the tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of volunteers whose countless hours of labor, along with their financial contributions, are primarily responsible for what rebuilding has occurred. However, this individual good will is no substitute for the kind of comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained response that is needed from government at all levels.

Unfortunately, no thoughtful and coordinated response will occur without a compelling grassroots push for community visibility, multi-issue awareness, and broad social justice for Gulf Coast survivors. Our region today remains in a cultural, environmental, economic, and human rights crisis no less severe than its more frequently discussed housing crunch and extending far beyond the parishes of its famed city, New Orleans. The media, policymakers, academicians, and private funding groups repeatedly fail to recognize regional connectivity or to challenge the basic invisibility of the Gulf Coast’s multiply wounded communities and ecosystems—together, its very soul. [P]iecemeal analyses and responses … are moving social justice and equitable recovery nowhere fast.

The Gulf Coast Civic Works Act, still needing co-sponsors in the House, is a step in the right direction:

a hybrid model to partner directly with communities in planning, overseeing and administering recovery projects to assist the survivors of these disasters, provide communities with tools to build resilience against the impact of future disasters and revitalize the region economically.  The bill would create a minimum of 100,000 prevailing wage jobs and training opportunities for local and displaced workers on projects reinvesting in infrastructure and restoring the coastal environment utilizing emerging green building techniques and technologies.  This program would empower residents to realize their right to return with dignity and create stronger, safer, and more equitable communities.

Ask your Representative to co-sponsor this important legislation.

Carland Baker, Sr. on the site of his former townhouse, Longwood Apartments, 2012 2nd St, Long Beach, MS.

More reading and resources

• Marian Wright Edelman, Katrina’s Children—Still Struggling
• Jeffrey Buchanan, Four Years Later, Let’s End the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille
• The STEPS Coalition, Hurricane Katrina: Has Mississippi Fallen Further Behind?
• Institute for Southern Studies, SPECIAL REPORT: How is Obama doing on Gulf Coast recovery?
• Institute for Southern Studies, Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement
• Children’s Defense Fund, What It Takes to Rebuild a Village after a Disaster
• The KatrinaRitaVille Express
• Advocates for Environmental Human Rights
  
• Mississippi Center for Justice
• The Gulf Coast Fund

Gustav is now a Category 4 hurricane.

HAVANA, Cuba – Gustav has grown to a Category 4 hurricane with 145 mph winds, U.S. forecasters said Saturday, as the storm pummeled a Cuban province, threatened Havana and led to the evacuations of more than 240,000 Cubans.

The parallels to Hurricane Katrina three years ago are striking. See, for example, this report from the National Hurricane Center, 1 a.m., August 28, 2005:

…KATRINA STRENGTHENS TO CATEGORY FOUR WITH 145 MPH WINDS…

A HURRICANE WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR THE NORTH CENTRAL GULF COAST FROM MORGAN CITY LOUISIANA EASTWARD TO THE ALABAMA/FLORIDA BORDER…INCLUDING THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS AND LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN. A HURRICANE WARNING MEANS THAT HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. PREPARATIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD BE RUSHED TO COMPLETION.

Gustav is expected to touchdown somewhere in the same stretch of the Gulf Coast:

 The hurricane is still expected to hit the US Gulf coast on Monday or Tuesday, anywhere between east Texas and west Florida. Experts say the most likely area lies between Houston and Mobile, Alabama.

The eye of Katrina actually hit Waveland, MS; New Orleans just caught the side of hurricane, the worst of its devastation coming from the flooding that came after the worst of the storm. When I visited Mississippi for Dollars & Sense Magazine in January, 2006, I observed that in Bay St. Louis and Waveland:

I saw a few people who had returned and were living in trailers on their plots of land, but practically everything was deserted. All that remained were the merest remnants of homes and the things that had been inside them….

In each place I visited along the western half of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the look of the destruction was a little different, but it was consistently total. And surprisingly, the destruction in the coastal areas of Pascagoula, at the eastern end of the state, is comparable. I remembered George W. Bush’s promise to rebuild another “fantastic house” for Trent Lott on the Pascagoula beachfront. I did not know that 95% of the city’s residential areas went underwater or that 65% of the city’s homes remain uninhabitable. Northrop Grumman Ship Systems’ facility in Pascagoula, which before Katrina employed 19,800 people, was all but obliterated.

Hurricane Katrina wiped out the entire Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. All along the coast—mile after mile—just about anything that was there is now gone.

But this is only part of the story. According to the National Hurricane Center, the surge “penetrated at least six miles inland in many portions of coastal Mississippi and up to 12 miles inland along bays and rivers. The surge crossed Interstate 10 in many locations.” Interstate 10 runs east-west, four miles or more north of coastal Highway 90.

Gayle Tart’s brother Sam and his son John died in Pass Christian during the hurricane, on John’s second birthday. Tart explained that father and son had drowned inside their own home.

“Water never came down there [before Katrina]. That’s across the track. [With Katrina] that water came in and that water went out, and the velocity was unbelievable,” Tart said. “The first boundary was the beach and the next boundary was the highway. The day after the storm, you saw neither—no beach and no highway.”

Knowing what we know from three years ago, it is somewhat encouraging to hear that citywide evacuations are underway in New Olreans.

“I am strongly, strongly encouraging everyone in the city to evacuate,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin said in a news conference Saturday afternoon. “Start the process now. Go north if you can because the storm may continue to turn a little bit west.”

Mr. Nagin said that if the hurricane continues on its current path, a mandatory evacuation will be implented — probably about 8 a.m. Sunday.

Hotels were closing, and the sound of boards being hammered over windows could be heard. The state police on Saturday morning reported moderately heavy traffic on a principal highway north, Interstate 55, and a voluntary city-organized evacuation plan for the poor, elderly and sick — the principal victims in Hurricane Katrina — was in full swing.

Dozens waited outside for buses at 17 collection points all over the city to take them to the Union Passenger Terminal, the train station downtown. From there they will be taken by bus and train to cities in north Louisiana — Shreveport, Alexandria and Monroe — and to Memphis. They clutched duffle bags, plastic shopping sacks, small children and overstuffed suitcases, vowing to avoid at all costs the still-vivid nightmare of Katrina.

The buses arrived promptly at 8 a.m. — a sharp contrast to the chaos and disorganization of three years ago, when the only plan was to jam thousands of people without cars into the Superdome and let others fend for themselves.

“I refuse to go through that again,” said Roxanne Clayton, a photo technician at Walgreens, who was waiting in the Irish Channel neighborhood with her teenage son and 10-year-old daughter. She recalled being stuck in her attic for two days during Hurricane Katrina. “I’d rather play it safe than sorry, because I know what sorry feels like,” Ms. Clayton said.

A neighbor from the larger houses up Louisiana Avenue brought doughnuts for those patiently waiting, and many said they were simply grateful for the ride out of town.

In the Tremé neighborhood, bordering the French Quarter, large families without cars, and some who were simply homeless, waited for buses that quickly filled. “If you’ve been through Katrina, it’s time for you to go,” said Marion Colbert, a powder room attendant at a French Quarter restaurant for more than three decades. “You never know about these storms if you’ve been living in the city 80 years.”

In the Central City section, families, elderly men and the visibly infirm — people in wheelchairs and with canes — lined the sidewalk along Dryades Street for half a long block. “After going through Katrina, that ain’t no joke,” said Jody Anderson, who spent seven days in the Superdome. “It’s not worth it, trying to stay,” said Ms. Anderson, an unemployed former cashier….

State officials prepared an elaborate system of contraflow lanes on interstate and federal highways leading out of southern Louisiana, staging the plans so that those farthest south could exit first. In St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, officials ordered a mandatory evacuation beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, warning residents that curfews would be enforced. The parish was one of the hardest hit in Hurricane Katrina, and many of its residents never returned.

Yet not everyone is rushing to leave:

Still, there were few signs of a mass exodus, though gasoline stations were crowded. With forecasters not predicting a direct hit on New Orleans, some here had made the decision to stay. “My sense from talking to citizens is that they are either in an extreme state of ‘anxious to leave,’ or they’re just tired and ‘I don’t want to be bothered,’ ” Mayor Nagin told reporters late Friday.

Hmmm. Tired and not wanting to be bothered. Maybe. But Mayor Nagin neglected to mention other anxieties that might make it difficult to evacuate. I’m sure that Beth Basile from St. Bernard Parish is not alone in her worry:

“If it’s like Katrina, they might not let us back,” says the 52-year-old old Wal-Mart cashier, her eyes baggy and smudged with worry. “They might put a fence around the whole parish and say, `Go away.’”In places like St. Bernard, the Lower 9th Ward, and trailer parks along the Gulf Coast, those still reeling from Katrina are now the most vulnerable to Hurricane Gustav.

I’m wondering what is being done to reassure evacuees that their return home is guaranteed. I’m also wondering why Mississippi, which may yet again be the state hit by the eye of the storm, is not already mobilizing on the same scale as Louisiana.

George Bush has declared a state of emergency in Mississippi, as requested by the state’s governor, Haley Barbour. So far mandatory evacuations are only directed at the most vulnerable Mississippi residents, who are still living in FEMA trailers, Katrina cottages and in low lying areas.

In Harrison and Hancock counties, evacuations of residents from trailers and cottages will begin Sunday morning and they will be bused north to Jackson. Because there are fewer trailers and enough shelters in Jackson County, residents of trailers and cottages there won’t be evacuated until Monday, Barbour said. Residents in low-lying areas and anyone who signed up for the state evacuation plan also will be moved out beginning Sunday morning.

These most vulnerable people should for sure be evacuated. But the people Barbour is making sure to evacuate are the same people he has been tacitly telling to go to hell while he spends CDBG money, intended to alleviate their homelessness, on other things like a $600 million port expansion expansion scheme. Barbour has realized since at least 2006, that it would be a public relations disaster for him if the world watched as another hurricane washed these same neglected Mississippi residents into the Gulf of Mexico.Even if you are not as cynical about Barbour as I am, remember: when Katrina hit Mississippi, flooding devastated communities ten miles inland. I saw the destruction with my own eyes and talked to people whose loved ones drowned inside their own houses. But Barbour and Homeland Security’s Michael Chertoff are not rushing make sure Mississippians will be safe.

“We have not made a decision for any sort of mass evacuations,” said Barbour….

“We’re trying not to pull the trigger too quickly on evacuations,” Chertoff said. “There may be some shifting in the direction of the storm,” and the other officials urged residents to take personal responsibility for their safety by getting together food, water, first aid kits, flashlights and radios.

Since I started writing this post earlier today, Mayor Nagin has issued a mandator evacuation order for New Orleans. As the people of New Orleans once again flee a deadly storm, they can at least feel reassured that the local, state and federal authorities they have taken measures to ensure that the city is not again destroyed by flooding—actually just to make sure that some parts of the city are not again wrecked by flooding.

[F]loodgates have been constructed at the end of city drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain, the principal conduits for the fateful surge during Hurricane Katrina. Still, there is no such arrangement on the Industrial Canal, the surge from which destroyed the still-empty Lower Ninth Ward.

Gustav may soon be a Category 5 storm. Pray for the people of the Gulf Coast.

—
Photo credit: Karen Apricot.

I just received this email update from the KatrinaRitaVille Express:

House republicans moved today to pre-empt lawsuits against manufacturers of FEMA trailers, while whistleblowers from one supplier speak candidly about the dishonest government and company practices they were involved in.

Meanwhile, FEMA and local officials in coastal AL, MS and LA press on with evictions and other efforts to effectively shift the liability for any future health problems stemming from formaldehyde to trailer occupants themselves. New Orleans residents are now being fined $500 a day for remaining in FEMA trailers (on their own property) beyond July 1 – even though city and federal officials both know there is nowhere for them to go. Last month, 49 year old Eric Minshew, a mentally ill Katrina survivor in Lakeview, was killed by police after refusing to relinquish the FEMA trailer in his front yard – the only shelter he had. With occupancy down to 15,000 families (from 60,000 in January), it seems clear that one of the largest mass poisonings in US history is swiftly being remedied by one of our largest mass evictions.

The KatrinaRitaVille Express national FEMA Trailer Tour is headed to Denver, Saint Paul and down the Mississippi River this August and September. Please get involved. Stay posted.

In his letter to Gov. Haley Barbour, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said that although he’s concerned about using the housing money for the port project, congressional language associated with the use of block grant funds “allows me little discretion.”

“I’m sure that you share my concern that there may still be significant unmet needs for affordable housing, and I strongly encourage you to prioritize Gulf Coast housing as you move forward,” Jackson wrote….

The plan has drawn harsh criticism from several groups working on recovery efforts in the region who say housing is too scarce not to devote all possible resources to it.

Kimberly Miller, a policy analyst for Oxfam America, said the state’s long-term recovery committees that work with displaced families have 15,000 cases on their waiting lists, and a similar number of people are in temporary housing.

The state’s plan “doesn’t make any financial sense when you look at the number of people who haven’t gotten back into homes,” Miller said.

FEMA, in the meantime, is reneging on its payments to municipalities for emergency response and rebuilding costs.

Two-and-a-half years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast, less than a fourth of the 10,833 public rebuilding projects are completed.

Many haven’t even broken ground.

And local officials are finding it harder to work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Long Beach Mayor Billy Skellie spent much of Tuesday in a meeting with FEMA accountants arguing over whether the federal government will help pay overtime costs incurred by his fire and police departments in the days and weeks after the storm.

“They are wanting to deobligate about half of that,” he said.

In regular language, Skellie explained FEMA is hedging on paying the city’s costs of more than $350,000 because the agency’s contract accountants are not satisfied with the time sheets kept by first responders immediately after Katrina hit.

“We were just trying to survive. I mean, my God,” Skellie said. “It’s these people who worked around the clock pulling bodies out. … They don’t want to pay for any of that because a person’s name doesn’t appear on a time sheet.”…

Since the storm, about $1.3 billion has been paid out to cover the costs of rebuilding to local governments, school systems and eligible nonprofits.

But as Mississippi approaches its third hurricane season since Katrina, many of the projects have not made it out of the planning stages. In all, 22 percent of Mississippi’s 10,833 public projects have been completed.

Together, Haley Barbour, HUD and FEMA are making sure that thousands of Mississippi hurricane survivors remain homeless, many of whom have no option but to live in poisonous, carcinogenic FEMA trailers.

House Democrats accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday of covering up the long-term health hazards – possibly including cancer – linked to formaldehyde in hurricane trailers.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said at a committee hearing Tuesday it is “unacceptable” FEMA did not begin testing formaldehyde levels in travel trailers and mobile homes until last month.

“Even more troubling is the recent discovery that FEMA directed the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to not investigate, or communicate, the health effects associated with prolonged exposure to formaldehyde,” said Thompson, of Mississippi’s 2nd District.

More than 43,000 trailers and mobile homes still are on the Gulf Coast housing victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Some have been occupied for more than two years.

The House Committee on Science and Technology this week released e-mails from Christopher DeRosa, a CDC scientist analyzing test results on unoccupied trailers in 2006. The e-mails said FEMA repeatedly requested “we specify safe levels of exposure.”

“We should be very cautious about the use of the word ‘safe’ in reference to formaldehyde,” De Rosa wrote. “Since it is a carcinogen, it is a matter of science policy that there is no ‘safe’ level of exposure.”

In case you want some further reading:

• Haley Barbour Wants to Divert Even More CDBG Katrina Funds from Low-Income Housing
• The KatrinaRitaVille Express Tour
• Why Protecting Watersheds Is About Community and Culture

By the way, do you know Clarence? This post is partly for him. Check out his podcast, The Truth and Poplitics.

New satellite imaging has revealed that hurricanes Katrina and Rita produced the largest single forestry disaster on record in the nation — an essentially unreported ecological catastrophe that killed or severely damaged about 320 million trees in Mississippi and Louisiana.

The die-off, caused initially by wind and later by weeks-long pooling of stagnant water, was so massive that researchers say it will add significantly to the global greenhouse gas buildup — ultimately putting as much carbon from dying vegetation into the air as the rest of the nation’s forest takes out in a year of photosynthesis.

In addition, the downing of so many trees has opened vast and sometimes fragile tracts to several aggressive and fast-growing exotic species that are already squeezing out far more environmentally productive native species.

Efforts to limit the damage have been handicapped by the ineffectiveness of a $504 million federal program to help Gulf Coast landowners replant and fight the invasive species. Congress appropriated the money in 2005 and added to it in 2007, but officials acknowledge that the program got off to a slow start and that only about $70 million has been promised or dispensed so far. Local advocates said onerous bureaucratic hurdles and low compensation rates are major reasons.

“This is the worst environmental disaster in the United States since the Exxon Valdez accident . . . and the greatest forest destruction in modern times,” said James Cummins, executive director of the conservation group Wildlife Mississippi and a board member of the Mississippi Forestry Commission. “It needs a really broad and aggressive response, and so far that just hasn’t happened.”

The U.S. Forest Service and Farm Service Agency have made estimates of the forest damage from the two 2005 hurricanes, but they have generally focused on economic losses — $2 billion, or 5.5 billion board feet, worth of timber.

The new assessment of tree damage comes from a study being published today in the journal Science, written primarily by researchers at Tulane University who studied images from two NASA satellites.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita did more than 30 times the damage to forrests than Mt. St. Helens.

Most of the lost trees in the Gulf region stood 70 to 100 feet tall, and others will not grow back for decades, if ever, experts said.

Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in August 2005 with winds that reached 125 mph, damaged 5 million acres of forests, 80% of them in Mississippi, according to the U.S. Forest Service. By comparison, the 1980 eruption in Washington of Mt. St. Helens wiped out 150,000 acres of forest.

“In some areas of southeast Louisiana and southeast Mississippi, it was 100% damage,” said Wayne Hagan, founder of Timberland Management Services of Louisiana in Clinton. “I had one landowner on 2,000 acres who had basically $4 million worth of trees on his place. One hundred percent of the trees were blown over and broken down. That’s basically what the hurricane did.”

And for all this new talk of environmental damage, there has still been no comprehensive assessment of the other environmental issues severely exacerbated by the 2005 hurricanes.

A 6-year-old child, Blake Pendergrass, was struck and killed by an automobile in Escatawpa the other day. Escatawpa is about 20 miles from my home in Ocean Springs. I didn’t know him. I would imagine something like that happens somewhere in America every day — at least every week. But this one hurt me. Hurt me bad. You see, the little boy lived in a FEMA trailer park — a Katrina FEMA trailer park in Escatawpa. Escatawpa is — well, if you were plotting out a Monopoly board, it ain’t Boardwalk. It’s more like one of the purples right past “Go” — you know, the ones where the rent for landing on the space is $2.00.

I visited the scene where Blake was killed. The park in which he lived has no playground. Blake was killed while he was crossing the street attempting to get to his “playground.” The trailers are stacked in compactly, like sardines in a can. There is no room for a playground, just trailers. And more trailers. All identical. That’s how you identify a FEMA trailer park. The trailers have no amenities — no “identities.” Every one is just the same. Twenty-four feet long. Eight feet wide. White. Stacked right together. No thought is given to the children. No parks, no playgrounds, no sidewalks — the park just screams, “You’re just a bunch of poor kids and we don’t care.”

Immediately across the street from the trailer park sits an abandoned convenience store, complete with a parking lot — unused. The children of the trailer park have adopted the parking lot as their unofficial playground. Only to get to it they have to cross the street. The “street” is a highway. So 6-year-old Blake Pendergrass was killed while crossing the highway to get from his FEMA trailer home to his abandoned parking lot playground. And on that same day our governor, Haley Barbour, was busy taking $600 million that the people of this nation gave to my community for housing for Katrina victims, people just like little Blake, and turning it over to the business interests at the port of Gulfport, about 30 miles away — so Dole Pineapple and other multi-million dollar business entities could have that money instead of Blake. You think maybe the people of this nation expected the money given for housing following Katrina would be given to Blake, and not Dole Pineapple?

The people of this great nation gave the victims of that horrible storm $5 billion so we could provide housing for the children like Blake. But it hasn’t happened that way. Five billion dollars is enough money to buy 60,000, $80,000 homes — we lost 65,000 homes (and yes, one can still buy a home for $80,000 in Mississippi). I invite you to drive around my community and I ask you if you see anything that looks remotely like 60,000 homes. Or 30,000 homes. Or even 10,000 homes. Our governor has been so busy passing out money to his friends and cronies, he has managed to build not a single home to cover the needs of a child like Blake — and there are thousands of children in just the same situation as Blake. The governor gave a lawyer friend of his in Moss Point $1 million. Northrup-Grumman, a major defense contractor was given $250 million. The Hancock Bank, our largest, got the benefit of hundreds of millions. The business entities at the port of Gulfport, $600 million. All diverted from the funds intended to provide housing for Katrina victims.

There are flowers on the side of the road marking the spot where little Blake was killed — a tribute of sorts I guess. I started crying when I saw them. Oh the horror, the horror. I’m so sorry little fella. I’ve tried so hard. I’ve written letters to the editors of dozens of newspapers. I’ve called Congressmen, Senators. But I am an old man now — I am tired — and for the first time in my life I have to own up to it — I am beaten — I have failed. I am so sorry Blake. My governor went to Washington, D.C., and got $5 billion. But all he got for you was those damn flowers.

(Source)

The following is section III of the comment to the MS Development Authority and HUD, by Gulf Coast and national advocacy groups:

MISSISSIPPI HAS FAILED TO ADDRESS THE HOUSING CRISIS
ESPECIALLY THE DIRE NEED FOR AFFORDABLE RENTAL UNITS

The State’s hurricane recovery strategy has played a major role in the rental housing crisis. Only $358 million of the $5.4 billion emergency CDBG grants, or 6%, has been allocated to rental housing, i.e. the public housing program and the recently approved small rental assistance program. Such a small percentage of the allocation of CDBG funds for rental housing cannot be justified when the impact of the storm fell so disproportionately on rental housing and low and moderate income persons.

Moreover, the State has sought and been granted waivers of the CDBG requirement that 50% of the funds go to the benefit of low and moderate income people for 80% of the CDBG hurricane funding. Even putting the best light on all programs of the State plan for meeting the rental property needs (which includes programs beyond the CDBG money), its strategy will restore at best only 51% of the known rental need. Only 11,730 rental units are forecast to be built by the Small Rental Program and the GO Zone Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program. When one adds 316 destroyed public housing units and a projected 1,275 units under the MS HOME Corp. set-aside the total of rental units projected is 13,321 which only meets 51% of the reported rental housing loss — the 26,037 damaged units reported in the July, 2006 FEMA/HUD report. As for units severely damaged, the small rental program will restore only 43% of them.

The State is fully aware of this shortfall. Advocates have urged the State to enlarge both the Small Rental Program and to increase funding sources for other rental programs, including making CDBG funds available in combination with GO Zone tax credit funds for affordable housing projects, but these requests have been rejected. For example, the State rejected proposals to enlarge the size the Small Rental Program.

The State’s recovery plan also leaves out Mississippians who suffered wind damage to their homes. This includes almost 34,000 households who suffered severe to catastrophic wind damage, including 10,300 who had no insurance. Costs to repair for major damage range between $33,000 and $53,000. Costs to repair for catastrophic damage range between $70,000 and $201,000. Insurance settlements did not cover the full cost to repair: The average wind insurance settlement along the 3 coastal counties was $15,869, and did not cover the full cost to repair the full cost of repair.

For wind-damaged households, subtracting out $15,000 in insurance, the unmet need starts at $17,000 for moderate damage and $54,000 for catastrophic damage and goes up. Lower income African American households in many coastal Mississippi communities suffered exclusively wind damage because segregated patterns of settlement placed them on the north side of the railroad tracks which functioned as a levee. Many of these residences were of older construction, with greater deferred maintenance and greater vulnerability to more severe windstorm damage than residences generally. Unlike Louisiana, these Mississippians are left out of the so-called “comprehensive” recovery plan. The State is aware of this unmet need for it has rejected repeated calls to include wind-damaged households in the home grant programs.

In sum, the continuing housing crisis is to a great extent caused by the failure of the State’s plan to address it.

The signing groups are:

• The Steps Coalition, Inc. (an alliance of 35 member organizations and 16 affilliated
  allies)
• Mississippi Conference of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
• National Low Income Housing Coalition
• National Fair Housing Alliance
• Alabama Arise, a coalition of religious, community and civic groups
• Sisters of Mercy
• Mississippi Human Services Agenda
• National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness

Research was provided by:

Mississippi Center for Justice, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, National Fair Housing Allliance, and National Low Income Housing Coalition, and Oxfam America

Download the full comment:

Re: Amendment 5 Port of Gulfport Restoration Program (PDF)

A Mississippi agency wants to divert $600 million in federal funds from a housing program created to help low-income homeowners who suffered losses in Hurricane Katrina and use it to spruce up the State Port at Gulfport, the Associated Press reports.

The MDA claims that the housing program has more than enough money to meet demand, making the diversion possible. “This funding will be an important part of helping the State Port Authority restore and enhance port infrastructure for economic development initiatives that will create jobs and improve quality of life for the citizens of the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” Gov. Haley Barbour said in a recent statement.

The outrageousness of this proposal needs some elaboration.

Facing South has previously noted that of the $16.7 billion dollars of Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money set aside by Congress for the Gulf Coast “only $1 billion — just 6 percent — had been spent, almost all of it in Mississippi” (emphasis added). This and other comparisons of the respective federal funds allocated to hurricane recovery efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi lead well intentioned social justice advocates to buy a false picture, of Mississippi’s recovery. The implicit logic seems to be that if Mississippi is getting so much more federal money than Louisiana, then it stands to reason that “recovery ‘is well underway’ in Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula.”

There is a recovery underway in Biloxi and other parts of coastal Mississippi, but it is a recovery for casinos and resorts, not for people and communities.

Standing inside the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino in downtown Biloxi, Mississippi, you’d never guess that you are at the epicenter of a town that lost over 5,000 homes in the flood. In the crowded lobby, guests drift past lush banks of flowers toward the retail promenade, where a store called the “Jewelry Box” displays Rolex watches, gold chains and flashy rings. Inside the gaming rooms, business is booming: Players pack the high stakes poker rooms and the aisles lined by 25 cent slot machines.

Just blocks away, the working class neighborhood of East Biloxi is still a wasteland of bare concrete slabs, where homes were washed entirely off their foundations. On many lots, front steps lead to nowhere. Local activists say that government assistance has been very slow in coming to this community, which was primarily populated by low-income African-Americans and Vietnamese.

Across the Gulf Coast, examples of the uneven recovery are everywhere. In most towns, families and businesses with private resources are rebuilding, while the poor are often still waiting for the government assistance they were promised. Nowhere is this contrast more glaring than in Biloxi, Mississippi….

The Biloxi casinos have made record profits in the past year, as contractors with money to burn spend their evenings at the new Hard Rock Casino, or the deluxe Beau Rivage. But the industry clearly thinks there’s still plenty of room in the market. In mid-August, construction workers broke ground on the new Margaritaville casino and resort, a 46-acre complex of shops, restaurants and entertainment facilities. The project, which is expected to cost upwards of $700 million, is a joint venture between pop star Jimmy Buffett, a favorite son of Mississippi and Harrah’s Entertainment. Based in Las Vegas, Harrah’s earns billions in revenues from casinos, hotels and golf courses around the country. According to the company website, the $700 million Margaritaville Casino and Resort project “is the first phase of a development that will represent an investment of more than $1 billion when completed.”

Margaritaville is going up in East Biloxi, at the foot of Oak Street, the heart of Biloxi’s Vietnamese community, and home to both its Catholic Church and its Buddhist Temple. Yet Biloxi city council members and Harrah’s officials have recently discussed the possibility of closing Oak Street to cars, in order to offset the new traffic brought in by the casino.

Bui says the small businesses along Oak Street don’t know how much energy they should put into trying to rebuild. “They want to stay, but the signals they’re getting from the government is, “We’re waiting for Harrah’s, which will be our savior. Don’t talk to us,’” he says. Bui says most small business owners are waiting nervously to see if the new, rebuilt Biloxi still has a place for them.

While some might argue for the trickle down approach that prioritizes industries and the tourist economy, neoliberal economic theories cannot justify Haley Barbour’s gross misappropriation of federal CDBG dollars. CDBG funds by definition are supposed to support low-income housing. Yet, as noted by the Mississippi Center for Justice [PDF]:

Over $3 billion of the $5.4 billion Congress gave Mississippi has been granted waivers from the requirement to serve the needs of low and moderate income residents. Only $1 billion has been devoted to programs that serve these same residents. Two years later, less than $100 million from those programs has been paid out.

With over 17,000 households (close to 50,000 persons) still in FEMA trailers and others doubled up with relatives or friends, Mississippi’s housing recovery is far from complete two years after Hurricane Katrina.

Less than $100 million has been paid out to address the needs of low and moderate income hurricane survivors in Mississippi. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities [PDF], it will require at least $700 million to restore public housing and HUD-subsidized housing damaged during Katrina. The Mississippi Center for Justice estimates over $900 million worth of needs unmet for low and moderate income residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Even if there were good reason to believe that the port expansion proposal will “improve quality of life for the citizens of the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (I am hardly convinced it will), how long will the project take and when will the supposed benefits reach the 50,000 Mississippians currently living in FEMA trailers?

This slide show from the Steps Coalition details Governor Barbour’s criminal misuse of CDBG funds.

I am critical of Facing South for using Mississippi as a foil for Louisiana’s problems post Katrina (and Rita) and thereby contributing to misconceptions about the needs of coastal Mississippians. Nonetheless, the Facing South blog provides important reporting and analysis of the post-Katrina/Rita crisis in the Gulf Coast region. Facing South’s recent two-year report profiles a diverse array of Gulf Coast activists, organizations, communities and issues and should be read.

The promise of renewal is fading with each passing anniversary. As a nation, we must lend a voice and a hand to help end the suffering among families who survived the hurricane but cannot find a path homeward.

It is unconscionable that a teenage boy in Pascagoula must crawl into his front door because the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not issue his family a handicapped-accessible trailer. Or that a mother in D’Iberville, whose home was reduced to rubble in the storm, cannot rebuild or reunite her family until she resolves a dispute with FEMA over her right to emergency assistance. Or that the lethargic pace of state recovery assistance means that an eligible Mississippi homeowner may lose his home through foreclosure while awaiting a homeowner assistance grant.

These are but a few examples of a continuing storm that has besieged the Gulf Coast. The road home rests with all of us.

This continuing storm is not a natural disaster:

In Mississippi alone, 70,000 homes were destroyed and 160,000 were damaged by the storm. Low- and moderate-income families occupied the majority of the homes affected by the hurricane. Affordable housing is desperately needed to help families rebuild their lives, but the state and federal governments have failed to deliver assistance to those most in need. Although Mississippi has received $5.4 billion in federal Community Development Block Grants, the Mississippi Development Authority has so far paid only $55 million to 787 lower-income households under the only income-targeted program for homeowners.

Mississippi has strayed far from Congress’s goal to spend half this money on lower-income storm victims’ needs. A recently released report authored by Mississippi Center for Justice for the Steps Coalition details how Mississippi has underfunded the lower-income population’ recovery by $1 billion and what it would take to restore balance. See http://www.stepscoalition.org/news/article/steps_coalition_cdbg_report

More than 2,500 public housing units were damaged or destroyed on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Two years later, HUD and the Mississippi Regional Housing Authority have not replaced the damaged public housing or provided a sufficient number of Section 8 vouchers.

16,000 FEMA trailers still serve as homes for many Mississippi families, and even this temporary housing may soon disappear. Local governments have begun the process of prohibiting FEMA trailers without offering housing alternatives to families living on the verge of homelessness.

The storm rages from southeast Texas, through southern Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Two years and the government still has no plan for the devastated Gulf Coast region.