Are things really getting done?

A dear friend asked me what was really going on with Katrina down here...are things really getting done? Though there has been a remarkable effort made, I feel that it's only the tiniest fraction of what needs to be done. Here is my response to my friend:

From my viewpoint, things are bogged down with recovering from Katrina. They did some remarkable work cleaning up the less damaged areas in preparation for Mardi Gras. Uptown and the French Quarter look almost normal, except for the trees with about 1/3 the branches they used to have, and the 1/3 to 1/2 of the businesses and homes still sitting empty. But it looks pretty.

As far as the rest of it goes, I don’t see a lot of real progress. The cleanup efforts sort of reached a plateau...i think they have to really address where all the debris is going. They estimate about 50 million cubic yards of debris that needs to be removed. So far, they’ve only removed 6.9 million cubic yards.

They don’t know what to do with people’s homes. It’s a delicate situation, complicated by some stupidity and politics. Right now, they don’t want to rile up people by doing anything drastic, and besides, they have no clue what to do with that land. I guess it’ll end up being decided by whomever has the money.

The main thing that is going to dictate what happens is what will happen with the levees. They claim they’re going to get them to at least the strength they were before Katrina hit, by hurricane season this year. Duh....like that helped much last year. People are very scared of this year’s season. Weather goes in cycles...remember how Florida got pounded year after year?

So I believe the determining factor is what will happen with the levees. If they get funding (and some intellligent decisions) and build the levees up a lot stronger, then I think development will happen.

If they don’t, who knows?

Till then, there are little pockets of areas that are sort of back in business, but thousands of miles of devastation. It’s truly like a war zone down here. In the French Quarter and Uptown, things look good, and they’re hoping some tourism will come back. But just a short distance away, there are areas that have been mainly untouched since the hurricane, and are just covered with debris and languishing and decaying.

Honestly, I don’t think anyone REALLY knows what to do. The obvious, most practical actions would cause a huge uproar.

I predict that it’ll be at least 10 years from now before the area can really be recovered. I recall when I lived in Washington D.C. in the late 80s. Entire blocks of neighborhoods were still sitting untouched after the Martin Luther King riots in 1969. Houses were still burnt out and trashed. And in the Gulf Coast, there are thousands more square miles than there were in D.C.

It’s like someone who has suffered a stroke. They’ll never be the same, and though they can recover to some degree, it’s a long, hard road.