Four Years After Katrina the Recovery Continues

Bay St. Louis, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina

Four years ago the largest natural disaster in the history of our country slammed into the Gulf Coast. MPB’s Phoebe Judge reports on how far the Coast has come in its recovery from hurricane Katrina and what lessons have been learned in case another were to strike again.

On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of Mississippi dead on, leaving thousands homeless and billions of dollars in damage in its wake. Former Mississippi Governor William Winter says the devastation was so great he didn’t know if the Coast was going to be able to recover,

“The impact on the oCast is almost impossible to describe even at this day. I came down the week after the hurricane and I looked around and I didn’t identify where I was. I have been coming to the Coast my whole life, I didn’t see any landmarks. I could not comprehend how the Coast was going to be able to put itself back together.”

Four years later the recovery of the Gulf Coast is not complete, and while progress has been made it has been much slower than many would have liked to have seen. Marty Wiseman, director of the Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State says one of the biggest reasons for the slow recovery is that no one was prepared to handle a disaster of this magnitude,

“I think the best of intentions were there at every level, but all that people had practiced for, people had gotten rules and regulations ready for, in many cases clashed. At the federal, state and local levels, one would cancel out the other and it was a very clumsily, cumbersome response.”

For the past four years the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York has been studying the recovery of the Gulf Coast from Katrina, in an attempt to understand what went wrong and what went right. At a presentation held yesterday, the researchers presented their final paper exploring the role of the federal government in mega disasters. Mark Landy is, a professor at Boston College and one of the authors of the report,

“The federal government has simply not found a way to organize itself such that the locals and people at the state level can make the most responsible and sensible decisions about how to proceed with recovery. That’s the single biggest thing I’ve learned.”

The Stafford Act is the basic federal law which defines the federal government’s responsibilities in responding to disasters. Richard Nathan, co-director of the Rockefeller Institute, says the single biggest recommendation the study finds is that the Stafford Act should be amended. Allowing for the president to appoint an officer in charge who would be placed on the ground immediately following a disaster. That officer would have the discretion to make decisions working alongside state and local governments to expedite the recovery. Nathan says this person would streamline the whole recovery process,

“There are regulations, reams of paperwork, officials that say you can do this, others that say you can’t. So you need to have a way to look hard at this to see-- well does it have to be this way, is this a priority area where we need to change the way we operate. Can the rules be bent.”

The officer in charge would operate on the president’s behalf and would also have access to up to 100 million dollars in funds, which he or she could distribute as necessary to take care of immediate needs. So that local governments could start recovering without worrying whether the federal government would pay them back for the effort. Les Fillingame, the newly elected mayor of Bay St. Louis is all for the recommendations. He says the sooner the community has an opportunity to build back stronger the better,

“In going forward, the outfall of all of these expenditures that have come to rest in communities like Bay St. Louis is that you do have a great opportunity starting with a blank canvas to kind of paint a kind of picture of your city the way that you would have painted it had you had that opportunity in the past.”

But it still remains to be seen just how long it will take for that new painting of the Coast to be completed.