Lots of Blame, But It's No Game
Rebuilding after Katrina will take time and money, but it won't be enough unless the nation finds out what went wrong--and fixes it
Disaster-relief work is a necessarily messy, seat-of-the-pants business, but even two weeks after the storm, the post-Katrina effort seemed wanting, and FEMA, once again, seemed to draw most of the finger-pointing. Last week, the agency directed dozens of medics to a hangar in Charleston, S.C., to meet 180 evacuees, but the flight was actually on its way to Charleston, W.Va. It was the second time in six hours FEMA officials mixed up the two cities. In Houston, Judge Robert Eckels, director of Harris County's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, told U.S. News , "We're frustrated with the speed at which FEMA is bringing up its systems." Registering evacuees, the judge said, was taking too long. "They told us they could process 50 people an hour--we've got 20,000 people, and at that speed, to process 1,000 of them is a 10-hour day," he said. "Instead of 50 computers, they're going to need 5,000 spread out around this city. FEMA is going to have to ramp up."
For all the continued problems, however, there were, too, as Vice President Dick Cheney pointed out during his brief tour of the region, many instances of selflessness, generosity, and even heroism, as neighbor helped neighbor, coast guardsmen and national guardsmen rescued the elderly and infirm from broken rooftops and stifling attics, and a nation literally opened its homes to the Gulf Coast residents who no longer had any. Average Americans set benchmarks for ingenuity and generosity, filling trucks with donated T-shirts, toasters, shoes, and socks, then driving overnight from hundreds of miles away. They came from Florida, New York, and Maine, saying, simply, it was the right thing to do, or that it was payback for the times when the country pulled together to help them. And they gave. Some $500 million and counting, nearly double the amount that poured in from around the nation in the 10 days following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The bureaucrats, too, having failed so miserably early on, finally seemed to be getting their collective act together. Sort of. Besides the $52 billion aid package approved by Congress, help of virtually all kinds was pouring into the storm-racked region, though even at week's end, many evacuees were still complaining of a confused and often frustratingly disorganized relief effort. Evacuees were often not even told where they were headed. "Many of the people who arrived in Raleigh thought they were going to San Antonio," Barry Porter, executive director for the American Red Cross in Raleigh, N.C., told U.S. News . On his way to Phoenix, Steven Phillips of the Bywater section of New Orleans was told that "we could be going to New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Utah, or Georgia, and they'd tell the plane in the air."
The price tag for Katrina, of course, is going to be huge, easily more than $100 billion, the "burn rate" of federal dollars already at some $2 billion a day. Then there are the long-term costs. Katrina is expected to cost the country 400,000 jobs and knock a full percentage point off America's gross domestic product. While President Bush has promised to reimburse state and local officials, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin estimated that the cost for every 10,000 evacuees the city takes in will be in excess of $1 million for housing, rent subsidies, and public transport. Meanwhile, she said, that doesn't include the cost of police, healthcare, or public schools. But from California to Maine, offers for jobs keep pouring in for the displaced, and states keep on welcoming them--1,000 in Oregon, 700 in North Carolina.
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