PEP, December 2007: The tragedy continues

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

Louisiana’s governor pressed Washington to declare a federal emergency. Forecasts predicted New Orleans levees would not hold.

Then Katrina hit New Orleans on Sunday, Aug. 29, 2005.

AFSCME members Charssie Muse and Janet Thomas evacuated. Daryl Bushnell, a waiter, did not. He was stranded on a rooftop for two days until help came.

Two years later their stories are still raw. Their lives are broken. Their city is decimated. And they have returned to rebuild.

“Eleven days my house was under water,” said Muse. Her two-story St. Bernard Parish home was damaged by water and crude oil dumped from Murphy Oil refinery’s massive tanks. A makeshift sewer line blocks her front door. Parked on the lawn are the two trailers her family lived in until November, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency recalled 60,000 trailers contaminated by mold and the carcinogen formaldehyde. Charssie’s hands tremble as she recalls Katrina’s devastation.

“The wind took a baby from its mother’s arms. The mother dove in to save her child. Her husband dove in to save his family. They all drowned,” she said. “They were our friends.

“This is all the help we got,” said Muse pointing to 10 pieces of sheetrock in her living room. She is grateful for AFSCME’s Jerry Fidler and the $5,000 check the union gave. Insurance adjusters fault the flood and oil refinery spill and denied Muse’s claim. Murphy offered $2,500 per family member and a waiver to never sue.

“How do you get over this?” Muse asks.

Katrina blew across Lake Pontchartrain forming a 30-foot wall of water that wiped out the levees. It submerged St. Bernard, Jefferson and Orleans parishes in a toxic bath of industrial waste, crude oil, fecal matter, raw sewage, household chemicals, debris and decomposing corpses. Boxcars, boats, vehicles and houses floated away. Eighty percent of New Orleans flooded in the worst civil engineering disaster in U.S. history.
The natural disaster and the government’s lackadaisical response and push to privatize hinder recovery and strike a death knell for New Orleans’ working people and labor unions.

As Katrina barreled in, Mayor C. Ray Nagin requested 700 buses. FEMA sent 100. Thousands sought refuge at the Superdome. Two days after the hurricane, President Bush did a fly-by in Air Force One as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, shopped for Ferragamos on Fifth Avenue. Eighteen hundred people died.

Post-Katrina, New Orleans politicians all but wrote a blank check to giant contractors and opportunistic developers, who have spent $96 billion of the $114 billion committed to rebuild the region. The usual suspects, Halliburton and Blackwater, hired to patrol schools and neighborhoods, have no-bid contracts. Today, New Orleans, a city of drowned dreams and broken levees, still looks like a nuclear bomb hit it. No one demands, or accepts, accountability.

In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush made no reference to Katrina, New Orleans, or the Gulf Coast. Recently Bush tied recovery aid for the region to a bill for Iraq War funds. He vetoed a bill that would have sent $3.7 billion to rebuild the levees and infrastructure.
When Bush visited the lower Ninth Ward on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, block after block was empty, barren. Foundation steps lead to where houses once stood. Only 1,000 people have returned to the lower Ninth. Bush told residents they were not abandoned. Then he and the cameras left.

“There has been an assault on civil rights and social justice,” said civil rights attorney Tracie Washington, who stopped Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s attempted land grab of abandoned homes in 2005. New Orleans was 67 percent African American before Katrina. Hundreds of thousands New Orleans families were split apart and displaced. Fewer than half have returned.

“New Orleans is a very ugly social experiment,” Washington said. “We are the canaries in the coal mine.”

New Orleans was a plantation city of the Old South, trafficking slaves, cotton and sugar cane on the Mississippi. People revel in the city’s culture — a meld of French, African, Spanish, Italian and American Indian — that is uniquely American. Before Katrina on any corner in the Quarter bands of talented young men with horns, drums and tuba, would blow revelries emulating Louie Armstrong. It is a city of the working poor, who earn about $20,000 annually. The half-empty city’s economy relies on tourism more than ever.

Since Katrina, the people of New Orleans are battling to rebuild homes and re-open public housing. They fight for voting and workers’ rights. Unions responsible for creating a middle class, especially for Blacks, struggle to survive. They fight for jobs, public schools, of which five remain, and public hospitals, which the city shuttered.

Contractors swooped into the region winning contracts to build more casinos, luxury condominiums and golf courses. Some use fear, lies and rumors to drive down wages. They created a dual system of exclusion and exploitation that locks the people of the Bayou out of rebuilding their city and unknowing immigrant workers into an American nightmare.

City Park, a 1,500-acre public park, became a shantytown for migrant workers who paid Storm Force, a city-sanctioned contractor, $300 to rent a 40x50 foot area with a portable toilet, and $5 each time they showered. Exploited and cheated out of weekly pay, when workers demand payment they are arrested, jailed and for some, deported. Men and women who once supported families with union jobs that paid $20 an hour are forced to take $10, $8 or $6 an hour for the same work, or not work at all.

“After Katrina I received a letter from the city telling me I was fired,” said Janet Thomas, a custodian at Jean Gordon Elementary School. The city fired all unionized public employees. Thomas evacuated with her five children in two SUVs. It took 14 hours to reach Alexandria, 55 miles away.

Thomas is rebuilding the Ninth Ward house she paid $27,000 for with $125,000 from the Road Home program. After she paid a contractor $70,000, he disappeared. She is uncertain whether the Road Home money is a grant or a loan she must repay. AFSCME helped and Thomas counts herself lucky. Around the corner are a few houses Brad Pitt helped rebuild. The homes exemplify what could be in the lower Ninth — and all of New Orleans.

When Charssie Muse moved back from Baton Rouge, black flies and the stench of crude oil, decay and mold hung heavy in the air. Environmental Protection Agency samples show high levels of lead and arscenic in New Orleans sediment.

“You learn a lot: It takes about 70 years for benzene to kill you. Being alive is more important than what’s lost. Living in a trailer can really test your marriage,” Charssie Muse said.

“It’s failure of leadership. The people in power ignore us,” said Lionel, her husband. “We’re rebuilding. We’re doing it ourselves.”