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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Photo by David Weir
Real hurricane relief for the poor is coming not from the government or big charities but the kindness of strangers. It was always thus in America.
Dec 13, 2005 | More than three months after Hurricane Katrina's jagged front edge tore into Mississippi's Gulf Coast like a runaway chainsaw, East Biloxi remains a shattered community of poor people living amid their ruins, facing an uncertain future.
Those who survived the mighty storm still talk about the roar of the wind, followed by a 30-foot-high wave that surged in from the Gulf of Mexico, only to crash head-on into a second wall of water rushing out of the Back Bay from behind.
They say that the two massive waves met with a force that turned this entire slender peninsula neighborhood inside out. It remains so today: piles of rubble, cracked trees, crushed houses, rusting cars, refrigerators, stoves and fishing boats, bits of plastic shredded into the bushes and trees.
"My house just exploded from the wind," says Biloxi City Councilman George Lawrence, who represents the hardest-hit ward in East Biloxi. "Then came the water, and it swept everything else away."
Stark remainders of death are still on display everywhere. On warm days, the stench of undiscovered pet carcasses still seeps out from under the ruins, and mud litters the landscape like dried lava flows. Sheets of plywood buckle over gashes in homes that stand split and crushed, their contents splayed about like guts from rotting bodies.
Someone's desk, its fake wood paneling peeling off, peeks out the side of a torn home that is crumpled into an accordion-like sculpture. The sides of another house are ripped away, improbably leaving a clothes closet unscathed, its garments arranged on hangers as neatly as the day their owner disappeared.
Bits of dried cloth, their colors faded and coated with dried muck, hang rigidly over the trees, acting as sentinels guarding the ruins below. Birds don't land here anymore.
At first glance, East Biloxi looks like a ghost town. But poke around a bit and people start emerging from inside their crushed houses, from tents pitched out back, or from some of the new FEMA trailers that have recently arrived. Most of the survivors still seem to be trying to just grasp the scope of what has happened to them. They are confused as to why so little help has yet arrived. And they're angry.
Despite the rhetoric of government leaders, and large relief organizations, not to mention the massive media coverage in the weeks following the disaster, these people sense now that they are the leftovers, the ones who, if they are going to rebuild their lives, apparently will have to do it on their own.
Lee Smith is one of the locals who's been waiting for months for help to arrive. "Till last week, every time you call them, they got a different lie to tell you," says Smith, 55, recounting his efforts to get answers from his insurance company and from officials at FEMA. "I've just been waiting on them for something to happen."
As others have noted, Katrina laid bare a dirty secret in America -- a secret with many names. We know it's about race and class but it's about other things as well, things less easily labeled. The storm provided a visible reminder that progress in this country for some always comes at a cost to others. One thing about living in a society that regularly scrubs itself of its collective memory is we keep having to relearn the lessons of the past.
East Biloxi, and the other small towns of the Gulf Coast, as well as the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, are places where the poor are poor in so many ways. They can't read or write well, and don't have the skills or clout to get what they need out of government bureaucracies or private insurance companies. They can't see a way out of their traps. Lacking much effective political leadership or advocates, they are dependent on the good people still showing up, willing to help.
Smith, a homeowner, a single dad and a former construction worker, stands next to his small three-bedroom house, where -- until the storm -- he lived with his two teenage daughters. Now the house sits cracked and twisted on its foundation, filled with jumbled and ruined piles of his possessions. The sour odor of mold drifts out of his screened windows, causing him to edge further downstream.
Smith is a diabetic with high blood pressure and suffers from cancer that he has been told is terminal. He needs pain medications and oxygen canisters for breathing. Because of the mold, he can't enter his house to take inventory of what is missing and what remains, for insurance claim purposes.
Looters stole one of Smith's cars and ransacked his house after the storm. Knowing how ill he was, he'd recently poured his life savings into refurbishing the house ("so my girls would have something to fall back on") and on rebuilding several vintage cars and trucks that are one true passion in his life.
But Smith says his insurance adjuster has told him his policy won't cover most losses because the damage was caused by flooding, not the storm itself.
Smith's case is hardly unique. Mississippi state officials estimate that there are 35,000 homeowners whose houses were damaged or destroyed but who did not have flood insurance. Meanwhile, the post-storm grace period for not paying their mortgages has ended, and efforts to extend them federal relief are stalled in Congress.
"The insurance companies, including mine, are telling us it was a flood," says Councilman Lawrence. "But how can you have a hurricane without the wind? This isn't a flood zone. It was wind-driven surge that did this damage."
