Snow, Snow, and more Snow

My Snow Day has been very bittersweet. Unfortunately it seems like the snow plowers that I see on TV clearly forgot about us because it took them forever to clean up this part of Queens. I woke up very early this morning because I knew that I had to go to church, because if it were school or work I know I would still go. So my brother and I were shoveling the yard and then we tried to get the cars out. Sounds easy enough right? WRONG I never realized how hard it is to drive in snow... especially snow that is so high already. No one never explained to me the concept of 4 wheel drive but I understood the importance today. No matter how hard i pressed the gas the car was just skidding. Very annoying and very frustrated but eventually we got the cars out. My brother and I did a donut with the car...probably not the smartest idea but it was still fun :)

When we finally got back home the sanitation workers passed through our street but the downside is that when they clean they just push it to the side to clear a path. So it was hard to get into the street and then all our hard work from this morning was blocked by the Snowplows so we couldn't get back into our spot or our driveway. So instead of getting angry we just made the best of it... had snowball fights with the people on my block and I played in the snow with my little cousins. It made me feel like a kid all over again. I love snow =D But now that that's finished... it's time to get back to reality and finish studying for my finals that I have tomorrow...how exciting...

What went wrong???

Hurricane Katrina may have very well been one of the worst disasters to ever hit America. As stated in Jenni Bergal’s The Storm “New Orleans wasn’t devastated by an act of God. It was devastated by the inaction of man.” Unfortunately we are a reactive people and it takes the event of something really terrible for us to actually do something. What we should be is more proactive, so that we can be equipped in case of an emergency. After the levees gave way, 80% of the city was flooded. Thousands were stranded for days at the Superdome and at the New Orleans Convention Center, all in filthy conditions. They were literally abandoned with the lack of water, food, ice, and essentials that would allow them to survive. The citizens of New Orleans continued to be filled with empty promises that someone will be there to rescue them. When a situation as bad as this occurs the million dollar question of course is…What went wrong? There are many different factors that you can take into account to answer this question, but I will focus on what went wrong with the rebuilding effort. In Gernsteins Flirting with Disasters he states that we should “pay attention to weak signals and early warnings.” If only people took heed to the many warnings pre Hurricane Katrina we would have avoided a lot of pain as a country.

After the Civil War the country had what was called the reconstruction period. After The Great Depression they implemented The New Deal and even after World War II, The Marshall Plan. These were all efforts to show that the government will help and rebuild after a tragic event. Yet in the country America, you have an entire city that is being treated as a third world country. There hasn’t really been any huge effort made in rebuilding since the Hurricane in 2005. In an article written in Baruch’s newspaper the Ticker, one student clearly expressed her disappointment in the rebuilding efforts. She said “We passed countless neighborhoods of rotting houses with garbage, cars and debris littered everywhere. My throat clogged up…Where was the federal aid? Why did the city look like Hurricane Katrina struck weeks ago instead of almost two years ago?"

Repairs from Katrina were estimated to cost $200 billion, making the storm the most expensive relief operation in US history. As The Frontline video states, “This is a high cost to pay for being unprepared.” One problem with the rebuilding effort was that the victims needed more. More than 136,000 people applied for the road home assistance program and less than 17,000 received money. Many people are looking to rebuild but cannot find the resources necessary without aid. They cannot come home because as described by many, ‘It no longer feels like home.’ I watched a documentary called the ‘Nightly News: Hurricane Katrina (Long Road Back)’ with Brian Williams and he discussed the rebuilding process in the South. In one segment of the video he focused on the Convention Center which they spent $60 million to rebuild. Sadly about 7 miles away on Fillmore Ave. there was nothing being done. Two years after Katrina, the city was still in ruins. Fire Departments were still living in trailers. The city still has 16,000 FEMA trailers. It is hard to rebuild a city when a majority of the middle class has moved to somewhere else. Two years and many of the stores and companies have yet to come back. Many families had to be relocated and forced to start a new life with hopes of one day returning to their home in New Orleans.

The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there have scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white and more affluent areas, streets are dry and passable. In areas where the water was deep (pre-dominantly black areas), little recovery or reinvestment had taken place. The pictures to your left show a contrast in rebuilding efforts between two neighborhoods: The top picture shows Lakeview which had 8 to 10 feet of water. The city officials just put up survey cards on abandoned houses to see if people would return. The bottom picture is from Chalmette where residents have started repairing while they live in FEMA trailers. By early October 2006, displaced individuals were located in 369 different cities. Many were in large southern cities such as Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, and Baton Rouge.

In the Frontline video The Storm, I learned a lot. The more I watched the more I became interested as to know what really happened and I even grew really sad to see what took place. They stated that maybe the government “was indifferent to poor and black victims” or that FEMA was poorly led. Perhaps it was because of failure to plan or that the military took too long. Whatever the exact reason, no one deserved to be abandoned like that.

Since Hurricane Katrina, many victims have lost homes, schools, jobs, shops, places of worship, and networks of family and friends. Of New Orleans’s 73 neighborhoods, only eight neighborhoods did not flood. Thirty-four were completely flooded. Many neighborhoods remain uninhabitable because of damage to residential structures. A year after the City of New Orleans still didn’t have a comprehensive rebuilding plan. So many rebuilding efforts have failed. Congress assigned over $100 billion to rebuild the Gulf Coast. But there is little evidence of actual reconstruction. There are many examples of fraud and waste. There were opportunities to avoid such a terrible outcome and they were ignored; now the country has the opportunity to rebuild the city and they continue to move slowly and make errors. We continue to be saddened “not by the natural disaster wrought by Katrina but by the human disaster that followed.”