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Oversight of Katrina Rebuilding Progress
Rep. Wamp and Majority Leader John Boehner
talk to a FEMA worker in Pass Christian,
Mississippi - photo courtesy Dave Purdy/Sun Herald |
While streets are passable, neighborhoods and homes still need to be put back together and many residents go home at night to a small FEMA-provided trailer home. |
| March 3 - “Six months after the most devastating natural disaster in the U.S., the parishes in Louisiana hit by Hurricane Katrina seem to be frozen in time,” Zach said touring the storm-ravaged area as a member of an official delegation headed by House Leadership to inspect the progress of the rebuilding process. “Block-after-block, the carnage is still present with cars left upside down, houses off their foundations and debris virtually everywhere.”
Government agencies have enormous resources and can do a lot, but since volunteers are not victims, agencies responding to Katrina have no directive to support them and virtually no restaurants survived the storm. Even an army of faith-based disaster relief volunteers – who six months later are still a huge part of the good being done in hurricane zone - travels on its stomach. Set up in a mobile home by members of Christian Fellowship church in Indiana, God’s Katrina Kitchen now sits in a city lot filled with donated refrigerated trailers, storage containers, and a big tent dining room with the motto "Not One Church, But One God."
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God’s Katrina Kitchen in Pass
Christian, Mississippi feeds volunteers
and storm victims |
Children play at recess during school, one
of the few signs of life-going-on-as-usual in the
areas devastated by Katrina and flood waters. |
| Some residents of the hurricane-ravaged region have returned and are going to school and trying to find work, but not as many as should be. It is hard to return to normalcy when there is little economic base and your neighborhoods consist of tent cities and small mobile homes supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Those whom I spoke with are still in need of help and asked me personally to “keep fighting the good fight” and to not let Washington forget them. |
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