Ten years after hurricane, relief efforts fall short
As city prepares to mark 10 years since Katrina, charity suing supplier
Scott and Kimberly Roberts clung to each other in the attic of their clapboard home, praying the galeforce winds and rising flood water would not carry them away.
With shaking hands, they captured the moment they were hit by hurricane Katrina — one of the fiercest storms in living memory — a $ 20 camera they had bought just days before.
“I decided to film because I realized we weren’t going to be able to leave,” said Kimberly Roberts, 34. “And just in case it happened how people said it was going to happen, I wanted to capture it. The water almost reached the ceiling, but I wasn’t afraid because I knew I could swim, but my husband couldn’t.”
As sheer luck would have it, the couple survived. Unlike many of the wooden houses around them in their poor New Orleans neighbourhood, the Robertses stood firm.
On Aug. 29 they will mark 10 years since the city was hit by the Category 3 storm — the costliest, and one of the deadliest, disasters in U. S. history. When the hurricane made landfall it broke the city’s levees and wrecked the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida; killing 1,833 people and causing more than $ 100 billion US in damage.
Television pictures showed children waist- high in fetid swamp water, waving at helicopters overhead as families waited on their roofs to be rescued from the scorching subtropical sun. The scenes — broadcasters back in the studios remarked — looked more like Haiti or the Philippines than their own first- world country.
The mayor of New Orleans had waited to order a mandatory evacuation while he conferred with lawyers; the director of the U. S. Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA) held back much- needed relief, and it was later found the floods had resulted largely from negligence on the part of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers which had built the levee.
More than 1,000 of those killed were from the Lower Ninth Ward: a predominantly African- American, working- class neighbourhood which lies below sea level and closest to the levee.
Nearly a quarter of a million homes were damaged or destroyed, and more than 800,000 people displaced.
And while millions of tourists now stream through the city’s French Quarter each year for Mardi Gras and other annual jazz and food festivals, its population is still not back to pre- Katrina numbers. More than 25 per cent of those who fled the city — some 100,000 — never returned.
In response to the floundering recovery effort, Hollywood star Brad Pitt set up his own charity, the Make it Right foundation in 2007, pledging to build 150 new sustainable, flood- proof houses for those displaced from the Lower Ninth Ward. Pitt’s scheme allowed residents, many of whom had little or no insurance, to pay what they could and take out zero- interest loans to cover the rest.
But his well- meaning plan has seemingly fallen foul of its own grandiose ambitions.
Nearly a decade on, the foundation has spent $ 26.8 million US on construction and completed 109 homes.
And despite high- profile celebrity backing and Hollywood fundraising galas, it is struggling to finance the remainder. In a further setback many of the homes already built have begun rotting.
“It’s just not a great solution to affordable housing issues,” says Laura Paul, of charity Lower Nine, which organizes volunteer labour and donations to help former residents in the district rehabilitate their homes.
“If I had that money, I could run my organization, at its current capacity, for 170 years.”
Vanessa Rogers, 57, says her stairs and floorboards had to be replaced because of decay.
“A lot of it got rotten really fast,” the mother- of- two said. “It got so bad, I fell down the stairs. All the back porch and the deck’s got to be replaced, up and down. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done because of the kind of wood it is. It’s really bad.”
Make it Right say they were supplied defective “glass- infused” wood by the company TimberSIL, claiming it was unable to withstand the humid Louisiana climate. Almost all of the 39 homes built using the wood between 2008 and 2010 are said to already be displaying signs of rot and damp, despite the company’s 40- year guarantee.
Pitt’s foundation is now suing the company for $ 500,000 — the cost of the replacement wood.
TimberSIL did not respond to request for comment.