Cross-posted at the Orange Zone.
Forty percent of Katrina evacuees, two years later, are now living below the poverty line, according to a new Census Bureau report. In fact, they may be in worse economic straits than they were before they were dispersed all over the country.
There never was a honeymoon for many. I’m calling this The Long Return.
USA Today said:
[…The survey] found nearly a third of those who fled the hurricane could not find jobs last year, and thousands more weren’t trying.
[…]
The survey does not track people from year to year, making it impossible to determine if the people Katrina displaced were better off before the storm. Many left some of the poorest sections of New Orleans; about a quarter of the adults had not finished high school. But Katrina upended social networks “and left them to start over from scratch, which makes it much more difficult,” Brookings Institution demographer William Frey says.
Before Katrina, many black New Orleanians were working two or even three jobs, mostly in the service, hotel, gambling and tourist industries. To work two or three jobs was not anything new for them. I have read accounts of New Orleans blacks trying to make a dollar even during the Depression and onwards through the Fifties, when blacks began to move into the middle class. But having more than one income began to be a necessity, particularly when big industries and the military fled New Orleans, and the cost of living began to spiral. Contrary to erroneous belief spread by the likes of Fox News and other winger websites, few black families (about 4,000 people) were on AFDC.
But now, torn from New Orleans, thirty percent cannot find work, or have given up trying to find work, thus swelling the welfare and unemployment insurance rolls where they are now living. The median income for a typical American family is about $58,500; for Katrina evacuees, it is down to $35,000. Furthermore, families are doubling up with friends or other relatives in homes and apartments as they are in New Orleans, trying to save on costs.
Gilda Burbank fled with three grandchildren to Houston, where she has struggled to find work and sleeps on an air mattress in a government-subsidized apartment. “I was poor before Katrina, but I had food on the table, we went to Mass, we had clothes,” she says. “Now we’re poor poor. We’re worse off.”
One explanation, Baylor says, is that Texas employers were reluctant to hire people displaced by Katrina for fear they would soon go back to New Orleans.
So much for Texas hospitality, as evinced by the vaunted Silver Fox.
Earlier this year, on July 3, Matt McBride of the blog, Fix the Pumps, finally threw up his hands in frustration and despair at the incompetence, foot-dragging, lack of political will, and corruption occurring on his watch:
So this is my last post. For a while, I’d considered this a closed loop process, where a defined end would be reached at some point.
However, I’ve concluded “Katrina” will never end, and at this point the only way to find my end is to declare it.
I had thought about continuing for a while, despite some major transitions in my life, but I just don’t think it’s worth it. I’ve got to move on. I’ve put out as much information as I can get, and if people don’t understand the issues at hand by now, they’ll never understand.
I wrote this previous diary regarding the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) palling up with Bush crony J. David Eller’s Moving Water Industries Corp. (MWI) of Deerfield Beach, FL. to install a new drainage system for New Orleans. Alas, the pumps for this system turned out to be defective, and I said why:
The pumps are now being pulled out and overhauled because of excessive vibration, Corps officials said. Other problems have included overheated engines, broken hoses and blown gaskets, according to the documents obtained by the Associated Press.
Now comes word from the Office of Special Counsel that the Army Corps of Engineers indeed
[…] acted improperly in handling a politically connected Florida company’s $27 million pump contract in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
The pumps became a black eye for the Corps after The Associated Press reported in March that the agency installed 34 pumps despite knowing the equipment was seriously flawed.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent government agency that handles whistleblower complaints, has asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates to look into the matter. By law, Gates must investigate the complaint and issue a report within 120 days.
Interestingly, it was an ACE employee, Maria Garzino, who made the allegations.
In a May 2006 memo to Corps leaders, Garzino warned the pumps were faulty and would break down if put to the task they were designed for: draining water from New Orleans during a hurricane.
According to the Office of Special Counsel, Garzino alleges requirements to test the MWI pumps were eased without the approval of the contracting officer and that after she left New Orleans colleagues did “absolutely no further work” to fix problems she had found.
Instead, Corps employees apparently were “focused on meeting time-sensitive deadlines instead of getting the task completed properly,” according to the whistleblower disclosure report by the Office of Special Counsel.
The problems with the pumps are being investigated by the General Accounting Office (GAO). So far it has not faulted the Corps, which also exonerated itself for possible wrongdoing.
The pumps were placed at the mouths of three canals, the same canals that caused much of the flooding during Katrina when levees broke.
Garzino charges that despite repairs the pumps may not work and that “the risk to public safety remains high.”
The Corps, meanwhile, has added a new series of pumps on the canals built by different manufacturers to bolster pumping capacity. The Corps says the MWI pumps have passed multiple tests in recent months.
Whether they will hold according to an independent investigation remains to be seen.
MWI continues to slag Garzino’s allegations as “unfounded.”
Garzino, who’s been a Corps engineer for nine years and works in its Los Angeles district, said she could not comment because the matter is under investigation.
Apparently, the Corps is still hanging tough with MWI. No doubt they–the Corps–were arm-twisted to do as they were told, and to work with MWI regardless.
I wish Matt McBride could give us an informed, independent opinion once more, for old times’ sake.
