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KATRINA UPDATE 15
By Sherry Stultz
<sherjs@...>
Wednesday, October 16, 2005

My Katrina blog took a small hiatus. I think about writing and then I get
sidetracked with my own personal struggles. Last week I took a hard knock to
the head -- I think it's called shock -- when the news broke that it would
be Summer 2007 at the earliest before the new bridge was completed from
Ocean Springs to Biloxi. I never realized what the bridge represented --
freedom of Mobility -- or how crucial it was to the infrastructure in this
region. It becomes painfully obvious when life is supposed to be returning
to normal that life isn't normal anymore and the catastrophic reverberations
will be felt for years to come.

The traffic here is such a deterrent to any kind of travel. We are extremely
limited in how we get to the places that are still available for human
habitation and use, such as businesses, hospitals, schools, and insurance
agents offices. Last weekend I took my daughter and a friend to the only
theater able to reopen to see "Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Wererabbit"
and the traffic on Friday night was so uncharacteristically chaotic I have
decided not to venture out there except in the off hours.

Virtually any place that is open for business is crowded from the time it
opens to the time it closes; around our house we are drawing straws for who
goes to the grocery store or the bank. I have yet to enter our bank at any
time since the storm and not see 30 people in line and the drive windows
backed up with 8 cars per lane. We only have a few places open to buy goods
and I enter Wal-Mart as a last resort, but unfortunately I have to go to
several places in order to get items I need, since no grocers are able to
get the same goods they carried prior to Katrina. Wal-Mart is so crowded,
with deep lines and general confusion that when I finally get out I feel
like I've been sucked by a dementor.

FEMA as an agency is measuring up poorly for several reasons. Aid was given
early on to displaced people who phoned them from their evacuation locale,
$2,000.00 at least, but those displaced people who returned and decided to
call FEMA after the fact to get assistance for aid while they were displaced
(as credit card bills come calling) are denied their claims. At the onset
FEMA was passing out money like peppermint candy and now some people who had
the same situational criteria as their friends and neighbors are denied
assistance. The purse is tighter now that the media heyday has subsided.

Some people who had little or no home damage were given aid, simply because
they called early on in the post-Katrina aid frenzy and now others who need
aid because they have lost their homes cannot get approved for FEMA
trailers; the process being lengthy and little rhyme or reason as to who
gets assisted. (I will reiterate from an earlier post that the local FEMA
workers are entrenched seven days a week and work very hard, but the
organization itself is frayed, inconsistent, and a bureaucratic dinosaur in
need of restructure or perhaps more structure.)

The people here may learn this lesson and heavily invest in local
infrastructure for future emergency management. At best, my advice to any
community that may be at risk for a natural disaster: be prepared to handle
your own crises, especially for the first week, alone with little or no help
from your federal government.

I would also suggest that it is the responsibility of each person to take
care of their friends families as best they can and not assume someone else
will assist in aiding you. I have been quiet with my criticism because I do
know many people could not evacuate because they had no monetary means to do
so; however many who could have left chose not to leave. Some of them died;
some survived horrible ordeals that will haunt them the rest of their lives.
The beauty of a hurricane is that we can see it. We know its coming.

Private, public, religious or other entities should be aware that for the
foreseeable future local, community networking is crucial to providing any
kind of aid to citizens. I suppose I'm casting a cold eye at the federal
response, but it has been the reality here, shockingly enough and it's
likely to be repeated.

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PREVIOUS KATRINA POSTS FROM SHERRY (& PHOTOS):
http://www.nhne.com/specialreports/ss_katrina/

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