San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
From COVID to Ida: Louisiana’s marginalized can ‘see no way out’
Chalmette, La. — Darkness set in for Natasha Blunt well before Hurricane Ida knocked out power across Louisiana.
Months into the pandemic, she faced eviction in New Orleans. She lost her banquet-hall job. She suffered two strokes. And she struggled to help her 5-year-old grandson keep up with schoolwork at home.
Like nearly a fifth of Louisiana’s population — disproportionately represented by Black residents and women — Blunt, 51, lives below the poverty line, and the pandemic’s economic fallout sent her to the brink. With the help of an aid group and grassroots donors, she moved to Chalmette, a few miles outside New Orleans, and started settling into a two-bedroom apartment. Using a cane and taking a slew of medications since her strokes, she couldn’t return to work. But federal benefits kept food in the fridge for the most part.
Then came Hurricane Ida.
Ida was the fifth-strongest hurricane to ever hit the U.S. mainland, wiping out Louisiana’s power grid before marching up the coast and sparking devastating Northeast flooding. Among survivors of the deadly storm, the toll has been deepest in many ways for people like Blunt — those who already lost livelihoods to the pandemic in a region of longstanding racial and social inequality. Advocates say the small wins they’d made for marginalized communities and people of color since the pandemic began have been quickly wiped out.
“The government is really disconnected from what it’s like for people who have little to no safety net,” said Maggie Harris, a grassroots organizer who created a fundraiser for Blunt. “You marginalize people; you don’t pay them enough; they have health problems and aren’t insured; you offer little cash assistance or rent assistance; and you allow them to be evicted.
“The message that people get is their lives are expendable.”
As Ida approached, Blunt evacuated to a hotel. She could afford only a short stay and had to return to Chalmette, despite warnings not to go back to humid cities without power.
Her apartment was pitch black. Ida had blown in the windows of her upstairs bedroom. Beds, clothing and furniture were waterlogged. She’d spent her last dollars getting to the hotel.
“It’s like I’ve got to start all over again,” Blunt said, sobbing as she surveyed her first floor, where she sleeps since the bedroom is uninhabitable. “Every time I get a step ahead, I get pushed back down. And I’m tired. I don’t see no way out.”
Blunt faces eviction for the second time in a year. Her only hope, she said, is Social Security and other disability benefits. She applied before Ida, she said, but hasn’t heard back — safety-net programs are often disrupted in disasters’ wakes.
Blunt wants to move, perhaps away from the storm-battered Gulf Coast — somewhere grandson Kamille can resume schooling without worrying about power outages. But she’s far from optimistic.
“This is the end of the road; I can’t go on much longer,” she said.
Anti-poverty advocates in Louisiana bemoan links between being Black or brown, living in impoverished areas, and being underserved by governmental disaster response. Available aid from anti-poverty programs often fails to meet storm victims’ heightened needs.
That’s what happened during Ida, advocates say. In Louisiana, where 17 storms that caused at least $1 billion in damage have hit since 2000, nonprofits see some of the most dire need and starkest divide along socioeconomic lines.
“One of the things that we get really frustrated about,” said Ashley Shelton of the nonprofit Power Coalition for Equality and Justice, “is people saying, ‘Ugh, Louisiana is so resilient.’
“We don’t want to be resilient forever,” she said. “When you force people to live in a constant state of resilience, it’s just oppression. Fix the systems.”