A Katrina Rebuilding Update

So, people affected by Katrina want to be told whether to rebuild or not.

New Orleans' elected leaders need to make tough decisions now about what areas of the flood-ravaged city can be rebuilt, about 150 Hurricane Katrina evacuees from across the city and some of their religious leaders agreed Saturday.


Making a statement that directly counters the insistence by residents of many devastated neighborhoods that they should be able to control their own recovery, members of the Jeremiah Group and the Industrial Areas Foundation Katrina Survivors Network said they want the mayor and City Council to "tell the truth" about which neighborhoods may perish because public services, such as trash pickup and basic utilities, probably won't be available there.

People aren't completely stupid. They may want to rebuild their homes but if the municipalities simply aren't willing, prepared, or capable of providing basic municipal services, these people want to be able to get on with their lives and go elsewhere.

That means they want to hear from folks like Mayor Whiplash Nagin whether they should rebuild the Lower Ninth and other heavily damaged areas. Of course, listening to Nagin may cause the listener grievous bodily harm from the flipflops on such key issues, but he's the guy in charge for the moment.

And the pace of cleanup isn't helped by the fact that there are still lawsuits and other delays to the razing of buildings that are an ongoing danger - from the structural deficiencies, the discovery of additional hurricane dead, and from the toxic hazards that they may harbor.

Demolition of many heavily damaged Lower 9th Ward homes, including those barely standing seven months after a levee breach during Hurricane Katrina flooded the neighborhood, must move forward for both financial and moral reasons, some neighborhood residents said Saturday.


Others disagreed, saying they still aren't ready to let their homes be torn down.

On the minds of the residents was a looming June deadline to ensure that the federal government pays for demolition and the knowledge that human remains -- including those of a girl between age 6 and 10, found Friday -- continue to turn up in debris piles.

"They are finding so many bodies that don't belong to the houses," state Rep. Charmaine Marchand, D-New Orleans, said at Saturday's weekly meeting of Lower 9th Ward homeowners. "They floated in from somewhere else."

Marchand, who lost her house to the flooding, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency won't pay for demolitions past June. Homeowners need to make the difficult decision now to have collapsed, and nearly collapsed, houses razed, she said.

Meanwhile, Louisiana still hasn't figured out how to deal with nursing home evacuations. Seven months after Katrina killed at least 70 residents at nursing homes (at least 30 in St. Rita's Nursing Home), and the state can't get its act together.

The nursing home industry and its legislative allies want the state to assume much of the burden and cost of evacuations, while Gov. Kathleen Blanco's administration is pushing a plan that would provide new state oversight but ultimately leave nursing homes responsible for carrying out their own emergency plans.

It's a debate that will play out during the 85-day legislative session that begins Monday. Lawmakers will be tackling an issue that drew international attention last fall when 34 people died in a St. Bernard Parish nursing home that didn't evacuate for Hurricane Katrina. That and other tragedies have drawn scrutiny from congressional committees that found the state's emergency procedures sorely lacking.

As we saw in Katrina, there was little or no state oversight, and some nursing homes were criminally negligent in their care of patients resulting in needless deaths from the storm.

As can be expected, people are having their fill of FEMA trailer life. And with the 2006 hurricane season around the corner, these folks are staring down the barrel of a gun because those trailers aren't the place to be should another hurricane come ashore. Permanent solutions to housing is still a distant dream for many.