4 Years After Katrina: Lessons from the Gulf Coast
Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. As the Gulf Coast struggled to keep its head above water, the rest of us were glued to the news - astounded at first by the awful destruction, and then by the inadequate response to so much human suffering.
In those days, our TV sets became microscopes ─ magnifying in shockingly clarity the divide in our nation between those who could afford to escape and those who could not. The Gulf Coast continues to be a microcosm for a nation in search of economic recovery.
What can New Orleans tell us about how to rebuild, revitalize, and recover?
Root economic recovery in clean energy
In the quest to rebuild, New Orleans has become a leader in energy saving and clean energy, from solar-powered streetlights and hybrid city buses, to building energy-efficient homes for residents who were made homeless by Katrina.
Why choose clean energy? For one thing, clean energy means jobs for a devastated region. A $615 million investment in clean energy is projected to create over 6,000 jobs in New Orleans, according to a recent report from Green For All and the Natural Resources Defense Council. In fact, clean-energy investment creates roughly three times as many jobs as the same level of investment in fossil fuel technologies, and the jobs generated are more accessible to workers with relatively low levels of formal education.
With the challenge of rebuilding much of the city's infrastructure, New Orleans is finding that clean-energy projects make the most sense in the long term - by benefiting the environment, and the local economy.
Jobs must be good and accessible to local residents
The Gulf Coast recovery, however, has seen its share of challenges, particularly in ensuring that recovery plans create quality jobs for the community.
Many of the rebuilding jobs in the Gulf region are going to two groups: professionals from out-of-state and undocumented workers, mostly from Latin America. The first group is made up of mostly highly-educated, highly-paid professionals in fields like urban planning. The undocumented workers, meanwhile, face temporary, dangerous jobs with dismal pay and no benefits, and have no way to address these issues for fear of being turned over to the authorities.
This lack of standards is leading to low-road jobs that don't benefit workers or the local economy. Similarly, the professional jobs are drawing new people to the region, but doing little for the folks who lived in New Orleans before the storm hit.
The Louisiana Green Corps, in contrast to this trend, provides real opportunity and access to the job market for local residents, many of whom have few other options. The Corps teaches practical job skills in green construction, weatherization, and energy-saving techniques to local youth who have had trouble with the law. Another successful project, Make it Right, is building energy-efficient homes in the Lower 9th Ward, a working-class New Orleans neighborhood. Make it Right is not only providing homes for families that have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. It is also providing jobs and much needed entrepreneurial opportunities.
The Louisiana Green Corps and Make it Right are now partnering with the City of New Orleans to create more jobs, homes, and local opportunity - using President Obama's Recovery Act. The partnership is jointly applying for Recovery funds to expand the number of workers it trains and energy-efficient homes it builds.
Lessons for Washington, DC
The challenges and successes Louisiana has faced offer important lessons to the nation, and particularly to our leaders in Washington.
The Senate is now crafting a crucial clean-energy bill that could create hundreds of thousands of American jobs. It is absolutely essential that the Senate legislation include investment in green-collar job training so that programs like the Louisiana Green Corps can prepare America's workforce for new jobs across the country. Equally important are standards to prevent a low-road economy that excludes local workers. The Green Construction Careers Demonstration Project is a key provision in the clean-energy bill that ensures that green construction jobs have quality standards and are accessible to local workers.
Both of these provisions were included in the clean-energy bill the House passed this summer. They must also be included in the Senate version. America's workers and middle-class depend on it.
The rebuilding in New Orleans is far from done. There are thousands of people who still need homes, jobs, and health care - thousands who need their communities back. But in the past four years we've learned a lot about the right and wrong ways to help the region rebuild and thrive.
It is time as a nation to put these lessons to use.
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I remember Katrina so well. I sat there day after day glancing at the television set when I could watching the people outside the Superdome knee-deep in water. i wondered when the federal authorities would finally arrive. Finally, after almost a week after the levees failed a Bush aide finally showed him a tape of the devastation and action was taken. Buses arrived and carried people off to shelter. It is almost impossible to consider that Bush did not glance at the devastation of Katrina on his television set for an entire week, while he sat vacationing on his ranch. Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland security did nothing, either. Forget about heck-of-a-job Brownie! The Bush administration was a fiasco in every way!
Once again, a reply to you and martinfrosa: an administration successful in detecting the possibility of terrorist attack and, when it occurred, using it to generate overwhelming popular support for a completely unrelated long-standing neocon foreign policy objective. Successful in breaking the collective national perception of the federal government's responsibility to protect its people from natural disaster and to effectively assist them in its aftermath, achieving a long-standing neocon social policy objective. Successful in continuing to dismantle any semblance of government regulation of businesses and financial markets, achieving a long-standing neocon economic policy objective. Selfish and wrong, perhaps, but not inept or incompetent.
Yes, just evil.
Yes, you are right! They all along want people to despise government and function to make sure people do.
How about the biggest lesson of all? Leave when there are evacuation orders and don't expect the Government to endanger other's lives to save yours when you don't heed the warnings.
More than anything, if we want to get serious about protecting low-lying areas from floods, then we need to build a system like they have in the Netherlands. The whole "those Yurra-pee-unz iz a bunch uv soshulists" mentality can only doom us further.
Here is two lessons you forgot:
*
1. Don't build housing below sea level on the coast.
*
2. Don't use the National Guard to fight outside this country. We might need them.
*
3. Don't expect insurance companies to rebuild housing in flood plains an infinite number of times.
www.dutchdialogues.com - we are looking at other ways to do things. It is absolutely possible to live below sea level, if proper engineering is employed.
Also, given that the oil & gas companies are destroying our wetlands that provide a natural barrier, & that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet was responsible for much of the flooding...one has to look at other factors that contributed to the devastation.
Louisiana only receives a 25% tax on oil, while booming Texas receives 35%. Perhaps if we raised your price at the pump a bit more, we'd have more funds to repair the levees properly ( a FEDERAL job that was done badly by the Army Corps of Engineers before, & is being done badly AGAIN).
You have no idea of the local spirit here & the commitment to helping each other. I grew up on the east coast in a suburb outside of Washington DC; a place where you could walk down the street with your arm cut off & would be lucky if someone bothered to call 911. We rarely knew the names of our neighbors, & there was zero sense of community. I moved to NOLA for college, & fell in love with a place that provides a quality of life unmatched by the far wealthier DC suburbs. This is a place worth saving.
The primary lesson from Katrina? That an incomptent U.S. government cannot be trusted with anything of importance.
New Orleans is not the only city that will be facing flooding. It's a pilot project. Let's use what we learn in N.O. to rebuild our country. Local workers, local solutions, and minimal Federal involvement are the ingredients for success.
Consider the Connection to:
Going in a POSITIVE Direction
We all inhabit different moral galaxies,
'yet' we are all interdependent pieces of
the same puzzle inhabiting the same planet.
Search 4:
Sen. Ted Kennedy on health, environment, energy, economy
CTC123GREEN
A Hurricane Katrina evacuee New Orleans La.
I'm glad this was posted, but am still amazed that there is still so much essential, humane work to be done in the wake of a tragedy which few but those who lived through it can understand the enormity of. Please keep us posted on the progress of this worthwhile effort.
Contrary to the information contained in this article, more than just New Orleans was damaged by Katrina. The rest of the Gulf Coast is rebuilding, and restarting, also.
Bye all. We will see you again in a year when it is the 5th anniversary of Katrina. In the meantime, we will do what we have done for the last four years. Rebuild our homes, lives and communities while America is on to ....well, other things.
The lesson from Katrina is that you are on your own. Government is useless. We only have each other to depend upon. After Katrina, each time I sent my quarterly taxes in, I wanted to include a note that said "For what?".
Great article & perfect way to commemorate the 4th anniversary of Katrina, Ms. Ellis-Lamkins. We all have many lessons to learn & much work to fulfill in ensuring that clean-energy jobs become the norm, particularly for those communities traditionally marginalized & under-served. Thank you for doing your part to inform and lead the way!
Before "investing" more than a half-Billion dollars in NOLA, a fundamental question should be asked and answered. Should we rebuild NOLA. Because it was, a desperately poor, violent and politically corrupt city that wouldn't justify the enormous expense to rebuild and repair.
There are many cities in the old industrial states that have fallen into such decline that there is no serious effort to rebuild them. Likewise, cities contaminated by toxins, blighted by crime and deserted by commerce are also left to fail. Heck, huge swaths of the farm belt, and the former Dust Bowl states have been abandoned.
So why invest billions in a city that had extraordinarily high rates of concentrated urban poverty, nation-leading homicide rates, crumbling infrastructure (not including the levees), a deficient educational infrastructure and embarrassing corruption at all levels of government. The citizens still in NOLA, and those dispersed by the deluge, ought to be supported in a more cost-efficient and productive way, than just left in place, high and dry.
I am a New Orleanian and I send and have sent $40,000 a year to the US government in taxes for the last 30 years. Am I the desparately poor American you are calling to abandon? New Orleanians, rich and poor, will NEVER let their city go without a fight. We would like to have the support of our fellow citizens, but that is not the America that exists today. We are not going away. Get use to it.
Well, doc, I don't blame you for wanting to save your hometown. And I readily acknowlege the unique cultural contributions NOLA has made to America. But you picked the wrong issue upon which to stake your claim--tax contributions.
Louisiana is the fourth highest NET RECIEVER of federal tax reciepts. You contribute only $1 for every $1.78 you receive*. Now, I'm not calling for you to give our money back, I'm just asking that you consider that NOLA may not be worth rebuilding AS IT WAS. Not for the projected capital outlays, not for the long-term levee costs, not to rebuild the decrepit infrastructure (structural and cultural) and not for the opportunity costs of devoting scarce resources that might be better deployed elsewhere.
Perhaps areas at and below sea-level will have to be surrendered. Maybe the city has to be smaller than it was. And maybe, it has to be left to time.
*source: http://www.taxfoundation.org/press/show/22659.html
Keep fighting and never give up, doctor. NOLA is an American historical and cultural institution. But because a bunch of poor people lived there, the 7 to 10 thousand white(yes, I am white too) fat cats who run this country could care less. Look at Senator Kennedy's wake, God bless him, there was so much money in that room just passing the hat could restore Nawlins
GREAT blog -- great information on a city we still have put on the back-burner. We need to make those in power listen to these ideas...but not just listen, IMPLEMENT them.
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