When a disaster hits, like a powerful tornado in the Mississippi Delta this week, everyone knows who to turn to for disaster recovery expertise.
Yes, right here in Louisiana.
The sad history of the working class communities in the Delta farmlands is something we can identify with. This is true even when the effects of tornadoes are naturally more geographically limited than those of hurricanes.
Communities living paycheck to paycheck are particularly at risk in the face of nature’s fury. Unfortunately, when it comes to helping those who need it, this country still doesn’t get it quite right, despite improvements by the US government since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
In response to concerns in Mississippi, The Associated Press turned to Louisiana for expertise on tragedy.
Denise Durel runs United Way in southwest Louisiana, where residents are still recovering from Hurricanes Laura and Delta, which hit three years ago. Durel’s organization has helped people rebuild damaged homes, some of which were uninsured or had insufficient coverage.
“Just drive around town,” she told the Lake Charles AP. “Blue tarps are still there. The houses are in worse condition.”
Louisiana has finally—and we stress, finally—received an infusion of federal funds to help those still grappling with the hurricanes of 2020. Laura was one of the strongest storms to ever hit the United States.
As a practical matter, Durel said people who didn’t register with the Federal Emergency Management Agency shortly after the storms won’t qualify for this new money.
She said FEMA’s application process is difficult and requires internet access, but many families in her area were initially focused on gutting their homes and may not have known about the registration deadline or understood its importance.
“The people of Mississippi need to understand loud and clear: Somehow you have to find a way to register these people with FEMA,” Durel said.
That’s good advice, and we’re happy to admit that FEMA has improved since the dark days of Katrina and Rita. But the post-storm relief process, like the long-awaited one in Lake Charles, is still unnecessarily difficult — and subject to the actions of a slow Congress.
The sensible suggestion is that Congress set aside money with FEMA to begin the recovery process quickly. That can still happen, but requires a change in the law.
Like Louisiana, Mississippi is largely rural, and rural America is in bad shape on several fronts. If you draw a map of U.S. counties and municipalities that are steadily declining in population, much of Louisiana is in the red zone of decline. This is, of course, the result of more than disasters, but disasters place a crippling additional burden on the people of these areas.
That’s happening now in the Mississippi Delta after the tornado devastated Sharkey and Humphreys counties, which are economically disadvantaged by national standards.
A competent FEMA director under President Obama, Craig Fugate, told the AP about the realities of slum aid: Good luck.
The agency will not cover all costs, and long-term recovery depends heavily on funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development bureaucracy.
“The money isn’t going to flow quickly,” Fugate said.
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