Katrina Survivors: By “Helping” FEMA Isn’t Helping
Trav makes some excellent commentary about government intervention after the Katrina hurricane.
for want of a heavy rain a few billion dollars were lost
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05t…
many of the children of Hurricane Katrina are behind in school, acting out and suffering from extraordinarily high rates of illness and mental health problems. Their parents, many still anxious or depressed themselves, are struggling to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked.
Oh, good, a new victim class, ripe for dependency on the federal government, and the leftists who run it, and who profit from broken people and broken habits!
You know what the Germans were doing three years after we smashed their state, fire-bombed Dresden, and occupied their country?
They were rebuilding, and getting ready to become the best economy in Europe.
You know what the Japanese were doing three years after we burned Tokyo to the ground, nuked Hiroshima, nuked Nagasaki, and killed the better part of a generation of young men?
They were rebuilding, and getting ready to become the best economy in Asia.
You know what the residents of New Orleans are doing three years after it rained ?
Bitching, and moaning, and not accomplishing jack.
Ptooi.
For some, like Kearra Keys, 16, who was expelled from her Baton Rouge school for fighting and is now on a waiting list for a G.E.D. program, what was lost may be irretrievable.
I blame Bush.
More than 30,000 former trailer residents landed in apartments paid for by the federal government until March 2009,
WT* ?!?!?!?
I’m glad my tax dollars are paying for people so stupid that they lived below sea level to now live in taxpayer funded housing for four years.
I’ve read and heard several reports of people that were put into FEMA Katrina relocation camps trailer parks. Every report I heard was mind-bendingly bad. For example: suicide attempts at the parks are 79 times the national average.
Here is a local copy of the NPR radio audio story, Stuck and Suicidal in a Post-Katrina Trailer Park. it’s 20 minutes long.
Here is a transcript excerpt.
Look on the NPR website for more stories.. Stuck and Suicidal in a Post-Katrina Trailer Park
All Things Considered, August 8, 2007 · The first morning of my visit to Scenic Trails, I was walking the path between some trailers when I bumped into a man named Tim Szepek. He was young, tall, and solidly good-looking. I asked if I could speak to him for a moment and he agreed. We found a spot of shade beneath a tree, and I started with what I considered a casual warm-up.
“What’s it like to live around here?” I asked.
“Well,” he replied, “I’ll be honest.”
“Ain’t a day goes by when I don’t think about killing myself.”
And so began my time in Scenic Trails, a FEMA trailer park deep in the Mississippi woods where 100 families have lived in near isolation for close to two years.
Though Szepek was the first resident to tell me he wanted to commit suicide, he certainly wasn’t the last. The day I spoke with him, three other residents confided the same.
The second person was Stephanie Sigur, a 28-year-old mother of two. She was sitting in front of her trailer at a picnic table, her daughter on her lap, when she explained that if it weren’t a sin, she would have blown her brains out months ago.
“I know it’s a bad thing to say because I’m a parent,” she told me as her toddler played with her hair, “but I can’t live like this no more.”
Stephanie Sigur and Tim Szepek aren’t alone. According to a recent study of 92 different Katrina FEMA parks published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, suicide attempts in Louisiana and Mississippi’s parks are 79 times higher than the national average. Major depression is seven times the national rate.
When I first read those numbers, I found them hard to believe. But after three days at Scenic Trails, they made a lot more sense.
The residents there, in essence, are trapped. It is no longer possible for them to live outside the trailer parks. Prior to Katrina, most of the people who now live in the parks were renters.
Along the Mississippi coast, a family of four could rent a two- or three-bedroom apartment or small home for around $500 a month. But when the storm wiped the Mississippi coast clean, it took out all the housing infrastructure that supported these people. Most of them are minimum-wage workers who live paycheck to paycheck. Today, a two- or three-bedroom apartment in Hancock County, where Scenic Trails is located, costs $800, $900, even $1,000 a month. This is an impossible amount of money for the people who live in the parks, and there is no immediate end in sight. FEMA says it would like to close the parks, but state and federal government plans to rebuild low-income housing for Mississippi coast residents have yet to break ground. Housing experts says it will probably take years to produce enough low-cost housing to move people out of the parks.
And so they are stuck. And the place they are stuck is not the kind of place you would want to spend an extended amount of time. For two years, many have lived in travel trailers intended for weekend use. Families of four housed in a space the size of most people’s living rooms.
Worse, as time wears on, the communities around them seem to be falling into a kind of madness. At Scenic Trails, almost everyone at the camp has been burglarized at least once. Meth and cocaine addiction is rampant, and residents seem to be turning against one another.
Recently, the park has seen a rash of animal mutilations. One resident told me that her cat had come home bleeding – a long, thin razor cut along its leg. Another resident said his dog’s throat had been cut, and several people reported that someone in the camp had been feeding anti-freeze to dogs.
No one seemed to have a particular suspect in mind. There was no specific theory of why. That was just the way things went at the camp nowadays. With no way to leave, people were angry and frustrated, and so they act out.
On the animals. On each other. On themselves.
The government is not helping by “helping”.
