Return of the Company Town

Where the government has failed to rebuild and restore basic services, some companies are taking it upon themselves to provide housing and other services. In order for these companies to remain in existence, let alone competitive, they've provided these services to their workforce so that they can get their factories up and running quickly.

The refinery is in St. Bernard Parish, a predominantly white and working-class community of 65,000 east of New Orleans, which suffered the hurricane's most thorough destruction. Water swallowed nearly every home, business and government office. Five months later, marsh grass grows inside abandoned houses, and a shrimp trawler is still beached in a subdivision. One school is functioning, but no grocery store has reopened; only a couple of honky-tonk bars near the oil refineries and a handful of restaurants serving plate lunches in their parking lots.

Yet inside the gates of Domino, the amenities multiply: electricity, water and a laundromat. A school bus arrives each morning for the children. Last week, Domino started publishing a newsletter for its residents.

After the hurricane, Domino needed to keep its place as the nation's largest cane sugar refining company, and needed its workforce to do it. "We are back to the days when the little towns were built up around manufacturing," says Pete Maraia, Domino's plant manager. "This the nucleus of how you rebuild a community."

An oddity of the post-Katrina landscape in Louisiana is that thousands of workers displaced by the storm are living in trailer parks set up by their corporations. Union Carbide, Murphy Oil and Exxon Mobil have set up encampments to get their workforces going again. The Folgers roasting facility in New Orleans set up 150 trailers but only for employees. Domino decided to house both employees and families.

And by getting these factories up and running, the local economies are on the mend - there are people who are able to spend money in the local businesses that have reopened, with gives hope to others.

UPDATE:
Obligatory Anecdotes provides some more information about William Jefferson's problems. That would be the Louisiana representative who happened to misappropriate National Guardmen and vehicles to drive him to his New Orleans home and assist him in removing personal items after the hurricane. He's the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (CBCF), which raised more than $400,000 in Katrina relief aid, but managed to not distribute it in a timely fashion all while accusing the Bush Administration of being slow to deliver. Well, it looks like Jefferson did manage to distribute the monies, but to Jefferson's own cronies. Go figure.

Meanwhile, Corbusier at Architecture and Morality has more about the rebuilding efforts and points out a New Orleans blogger covering the rebuilding efforts, Building Big Easy. In one posting, he looks at the imposition of a more stringent building code and some of the downside - the higher costs may cause some builders to balk.

Technorati: flood aid; hurricane katrina; katrina aid; slidell; biloxi; gulfport; pascagoula; nagin; blanco; barbour.