More Katrina Follow Up

After receiving a rather strong comment saying "Your lies disgust me" I decided to expand a bit more on the Katrina recovery effort. But first let me digress for a moment:

The person who left the comment (posted below unedited) starts out by saying he/she is a "white" and "conservative." For anyone else who may care to post comments in the future, your race means nothing to me and trotting out racial credentials like I would have a racial/ethnic litmus test for commentators to this site is frankly stupid and insulting. So save it.

On to post Katrina: my earlier blog was about whether or not there was a massive response to Katrina. There was.

Here in San Antonio we hosted a large number of Katrina victims (many of who carried on about the superiority of our schools, etc, compared to pre-Katrina New Orleans). Everyone from churches to private citizens to the Red Cross bent over backwards with kindness for the evacuees here (many are still here). I wonder if the indignant "white conservative" who blasted my post know that so many people in San Antonio donated clothing, bedding, toys and other materials to our evacuee guests that they had to start turning them away for lack of staff and storage to handle it all? Or that San Antonio hosted 25,000 + Katrina victims, 18,00 in shelters, the rest in private homes? Or that donations to our local food bank tripled the first month to six millions pounds of food?

More on this: San Antonio spent $37,000,000 on Katrina/Rita evacuee-related costs (the overwhelming amount on Katrina victims) and had been reimbursed or received approval for $35,000,000 by FEMA as of June 2006. So does FEMA just like San Antonio more or could it be a matter of competence? I would invite anyone who cares about the facts to read this report from the City of San Antonio (PDF). It shows a city and state government that knew how to interact with both private and public sectors to get things done fast and it should make Louisiana and New Orleans officials weep with shame.

Contrast that report with this:
New Orleans hires expert to tackle Katrina recovery04 Dec 2006 20:04:33 GMT04 Dec 2006 20:04:33 GMT . Notice the DATE on this Reuters report? A few excerpts for those who hate clicking links:

Fifteen months after Hurricane Katrina destroyed his city, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on Monday he has hired a disaster recovery expert amid widespread criticism that rebuilding has been too slow.
Edward Blakely, who worked in New York after the Sept. 11 attacks and in northern California after the 1989 earthquake and 1991 wildfires, will head Nagin's newly created Mayor's Office of Recovery Management.
Blakely, currently chair of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Sydney in Australia, has visited New Orleans several times since the deadly storm on Aug. 29, 2005. More than 80 percent of the city was flooded after water broke through the levees.
"This is the first city that I've been in that was totally devastated," Blakely told reporters at City Hall. "All the others, there was only a portion of the city that was devastated."
Blakely, 69, said he will coordinate all the pieces of the public bureaucracy and work with private plans for his long-term goal of bringing back those who want to return.
"I want to do that as soon as possible, because I think that's the stumbling block right now," Blakely said.

An observation or two: Fifteen months? This man with great credentials is out there for fifteen months before this idiot mayor (re-elected by the citizens of New Orleans, by the way) hires a coordinator? What is the first thing the man says he will do? COORDINATE between private and public sector - what a great idea! Too bad not a single politician in Louisiana had this thought prior to now. An entire city devastated - an entire city. It can take longer than fifteen months to build a hotel.

Nagin's answer for why it took him so long to make this appointment? Once again, from the Reuters story: "Nagin justified the delay in the hiring by saying that only now did the city have the "momentum and clarity" to take advantage of the expertise of someone like Blakely." Good answer, Zenmaster Nagin.

I've read comments about people not even applying for federal aid after 15 months because they do not have proof they owned or were paying on a house; if after 15 months, you cannot put pen to paper, send a certified return receipt letter to your lending company and get a payment record, well, I leave others to draw conclusions. Those lenders want that property paid for/rebuilt as well; If you can't get a response from your mortgage company after 15 months, hire a lawyer, there are more of them in any given city than refugees.

I DO agree the conduct of many insurance companies in the post-Katrina climate has been criminal. As a conservative in the legal field for many years, I have told my other conservative friends again and again that all of the "tort reform" and concessions to insurance companies would come back in a big way. I knew it did the day I saw that Trent Lott had filed suit against his insurance company. Good Trent, now you know the consequences of passing legislation without knowing what the hell you're talking about.

As far as FEMA trailers, I bet they suck. But once again, my point was in third world countries, people don't live in trailers provided for free, the sleep in tents or the dirt and the only way to get their home back is to rebuild it with their own two hands.

One last thing: the people of New Orleans have known, or should have known, for YEARS that those levees were a problem waiting to happen. Now matter who was in charge of them, the PEOPLE sat passively by and assumed the government who brought you medicare, social security and the levees in question would deal with it and fix everything lickity split. In 2002 THE TIMES-PICAYUNE ran a four part series with dire predictions of what could happen if a major storm hit the NOLA area. In 1965 Levees broke and 8 feet of water filled the lower 9th ward. Stories about corruption and shoddy building practices from levee contractors have been around for years. You can't just sit passively in a frying pan and then say it's all someone else's fault when you get burned - and please don't write implying that race or economic standing prevented New Orleans residents from demanding better.

Listen, lots of things were done wrong before and after Katrina and lots of people have suffered. Everyone from Bush to Nagin to New Orleans residents have to take their proportionate share of the blame. But to say it's dishonest to point out that the money is there and the people at the bottom have to take responsibility too is just plain wrong.