The
Forgotten Katrina Refugees
By Elizabeth Schulte
01 September, 2007
Socialist Worker
When
Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast two years ago, 79-year-old Carrie
Lewis had to flee her assisted-living home in New Orleans. Two years
later, she’s still living in a trailer, 100 miles northwest of
New Orleans.
“I want to go home,”
Lewis told a reporter. “They don’t have places for old people
in New Orleans yet. What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to
die in a little trailer in the middle of a field somewhere.”
When Katrina hit, 65-year-old
Phyllis Taylor also had to evacuate. But for Taylor, that meant leaving
behind her downtown penthouse apartment for her 40,000-acre ranch in
Foxworth, Miss.
Taylor is the richest woman
in the second-poorest state in the country. She became chair and CEO
of Taylor Energy company — the largest privately held oil and
gas company on the Gulf of Mexico — after her oilman husband died
in 2004. In 2007, Forbes magazine estimated her net worth at $1.6 billion.
After the storm, a window
was broken in Taylor’s penthouse, and the air-conditioning was
out. Carrie Lewis lost everything.
The aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina exposed to the world the reality of two Americas, standing side
by side — one rich and one poor. Two years later, that harsh reality
remains — but Katrina’s victims are gone from the media’s
attention.
Carrie Lewis is like tens
of thousands of people still living in trailers supplied by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — 45,000 trailers in Louisiana,
20,000 in Mississippi, 17,000 in Texas and 400 in Alabama–because
there is nowhere else for them to go.
Pamela Lomis lives in a FEMA
trailer with her two children at the Sugar Hill trailer park, in the
middle of the cane fields near Convent, La. Somewhere between New Orleans
and Baton Rouge, she’s 20 miles from the nearest grocery store.
There’s only one bus that goes there. It leaves at 9 a.m. and
returns at 4 p.m.
“We just sit around
here with life slipping by,” Lomis said. “We’re just
on hold. Just waiting for something that never comes.”
With no homes to go back
to — since no one put a priority on rebuilding the low-income
housing that many of the poor and elderly once lived in — many
are reaching the breaking point.
“I want out of this
trailer, out of this place,” said Helen Felton, a resident of
Renaissance Village trailer park. “But I get my little Social
Security check. Do you know how far $660 goes?”
And the Katrina refugees
can expect matters to get worse–people still living in trailers
in 2008 will have to start paying rent to FEMA.
If the trailers don’t
kill them, that is. As if their living situation wasn’t bad enough,
more and more trailer residents are reporting health problems as a result
of formaldehyde poisoning.
In early August, 500 people in New Orleans filed a class-action lawsuit
against trailer manufacturers, making the case that the 14 companies
providing some 120,000 trailers for FEMA ignored regulations on formaldehyde
levels, which is resulting in illnesses.
Formaldehyde, a chemical
usually associated with embalming dead bodies, is widely used in pressed
wood products, particleboard and plywood — which are typically
part of FEMA trailers. High levels of formaldehyde are dangerous, causing
respiratory diseases, bloody noses, burning eyes, headaches and insomnia
— even low levels can cause respiratory problems and exacerbate
already existing conditions. The International Agency for Research on
Cancer classifies it as a human carcinogen.
Nancy and Michael Sonnier
were glad to get their trailer just before Thanksgiving, after their
home was destroyed in Hurricane Rita. When they told a FEMA representative
about the fumes in their trailer, “One of them laughed out loud
and said, ‘We hear that from all kinds of people. Just open your
doors and windows,’” 63-year-old Nancy told Amanda Spake
for her article “Running on Fumes,” in Louisiana’s
Independent Weekly.
According to evidence introduced
at a congressional hearing in mid-July, when trailer residents reported
health problems from formaldehyde fumes in their homes to FEMA field
workers, top FEMA officials did their best to sweep their complaints
under the rug. The House Committee on Oversight and Government made
public some of the more than 5,000 internal e-mails that revealed a
pattern of cover-ups and denials — what Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)
called “an official policy of premeditated ignorance.”
One man, dying of non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma, was forced to move into a motel after he couldn’t breathe
because the formaldehyde had caused his lungs to swell. FEMA agreed
to pay his motel bill — but only after a FEMA staff member wrote
to superiors, “He said he had nowhere to go, and he was dying
with cancer. He would not go back to the travel trailer as he had a
violent reaction to the formaldehyde.”
Later, a FEMA attorney cut
off the motel payment before it was set to end, suggesting the man try
a charity.
“One of the things
that we’re seeing is that there are more and more children who
are having allergy problems and respiratory problems,” Lourna
Bourg, executive director of the New Iberia, La.-based Southern Mutual
Help Association, told Spake. “Because of the closeness and smallness
of the FEMA trailers, there’s a number of people who just can’t
tolerate the fumes. We even had one lady who was living in a shed to
get out of it.”
But while some former residents
are desperate for a safe place to live, people like Phyllis Taylor see
dollar signs when they imagine the new New Orleans.
Last year, she told the Dallas
Morning News, “We have an opportunity of a lifetime to build an
urban Eden.” Earlier this year, she added, “Our challenge
is the rebuilding of New Orleans, especially taking advantage of the
opportunity to rebuild in a better way.”
A better way — meaning
one that doesn’t include poor people.
Some people are profiting
big-time from the Katrina disaster. The Bush administration saw the
opportunities right away — and assigned billion-dollar contracts
for cleaning up the Gulf Coast to corporate friends like Bechtel and
Halliburton.
When it came to retrieving
dead bodies, FEMA hired Kenyon International Emergency Services, a subsidiary
of Service Corporation International, a Texas-based funeral services
company run by Robert Waltrip, a close friend of the Bushes and major
campaign donor, according to CorpWatch.
The federal government claims
to have earmarked millions to rebuild the area, but there’s little
proof of that on the ground. The federal government has supposedly promised
more than $116 billion for rebuilding the devastated region. But according
to a report from the Institute for Southern Studies, less than 42 percent
of that money has actually been spent.
The report found that the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received $8.4 billion to restore needed
storm defenses. But as of July, less than 20 percent of the money had
been spent.
“Included in the oft-cited
$116 billion spending figure is $3.5 billion in tax credits to jump-start
business in Gulf Opportunity or ‘GO’ Zones across 91 parishes
and counties in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi,” noted the
Institute for Southern Studies’ Blueprint for Gulf Renewal Report.
“But many of the breaks
have been of questionable benefit to Katrina survivors. Take for instance
the $1 million deal to build 10 luxury condos next to the University
of Alabama football stadium — four hours from the Gulf Coast.”
Meanwhile in New Orleans’
Ninth Ward, some homes still have the “X” painted on them
by the National Guard to signal that there was a dead body inside.
The federal government is
failing New Orleans — and that means the workers who are rebuilding
the city, too. During the initial cleanup, dangerous work was subcontracted
to companies who regularly abused workers, failing to provide them protective
gear and underpaying them afterward.
That’s if they paid
them at all. Undocumented workers reported companies that called in
Immigration and Customs Enforcement when workers tried to demand the
wages they were owed. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center,
which spoke with more than 1,000 Gulf Coast workers, the majority didn’t
receive overtime pay, despite the fact that many worked 80 to 100 hours
per week.
While all these abuses were
happening, the federal government looked the other way. Two years after
Katrina, we are still seeing the divide between rich and poor exposed
by Katrina–and it’s growing worse all the time.
* * * *
What Else to Read
The Institute for Southern
Studies’ report, “Blueprint
for Gulf Renewal: The Katrina Crisis and a Community Agenda for Change,”
identifies the failures in the federal government’s rebuilding
effort, two years on. For a detailed article on allegations that FEMA
trailers are contaminated with formaldehyde, read the “Running
on Fumes” in the Independent
Weekly.
One excellent source of articles
on Katrina is the Justice
for New Orleans Web site, run by the Loyola Law Clinic.
Also, see the Web site of the Common
Ground Collective, a community-initiated volunteer organization
offering assistance, mutual aid and support for Katrina survivors.
One of the best books on
New Orleans and Katrina is Michael Dyson’s Come
Hell Or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster.
The International Socialist
Review has had excellent coverage of the Katrina disaster and its aftermath.
Read Mike Davis’
“Who killed New Orleans? Questions for an autopsy”
and “Open
letter to the residents of Gretna,” by Larry Bradshaw
and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, two EMTs from San Francisco who were trapped
in New Orleans during Katrina.
Elizabeth Shulte
is a correspondent for Socialist Worker, where this article first appeared
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