The Forgotten Tent City, page 1

Tent City for the Forgotten

It's been nearly two months since Katrina leveled much of east Biloxi, Miss., where weary residents are tired of FEMA's promises.

BILOXI, Miss. — In the afternoon, when it is warm, Valentina and Gary Stilwell can almost forget there are no walls around them. Valentina has hung one of her paintings on a tree, and there is a bowl of hard candies on the coffee table. The concrete slab beneath them is as spotless as linoleum.

But Sunday night a cold wind shuddered through east Biloxi, shaking their tent so badly that Gary had to get up several times to drive the stakes back into the ground. Gary and Valentina slept in half-hour lulls between the gusts of wind, and in the morning the weight of what they had been through bore down hard.

"There's nobody that can do anything for us," said Gary, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran. Valentina, 44, put it more bluntly.

"I said to the FEMA guy, if you can't bring me my trailer, just bring me a .38 and a bullet," she said.

Nearly two months after Hurricane Katrina passed over the Gulf Coast, stretches of east Biloxi resemble shantytowns.

In the Point Cadet neighborhood, known as "the Point," hundreds of people are sleeping on the ground beside the rubble of their homes, living in tents that poke out from piles of debris.

On some lots, listless residents begin drinking hard in the morning so that by evening they can drop into a drugged sleep. On others — like the Stilwells' — families are trying to hold on to remnants of the life they had before the storm. But even the Stilwells began to feel hopeless when the temperature dropped this week.

"What people don't understand is that it is an emergency situation," said Bill Stallworth, city councilman for Biloxi's Ward 2, which includes much of east Biloxi. "You don't have any place to go, and you're sitting there, and you're starting to freeze."

The residents of New Orleans' poorest neighborhoods were evacuated to hotels or temporary shelters until they could face the staggering question of whether to return to a ruined place. But in impoverished east Biloxi, many residents never left or returned to stay beside their modest homes and wait for the delivery of a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

There is no count of how many people are living in tents, but aid agencies have distributed more than 1,000. Stallworth estimated that 1,000 to 1,500 people were living in tents, even as temperatures began dropping into the low 40s at night.

Michael Beeman, FEMA's district director for Harrison County, said he wished local people had used federal rental assistance or stayed in safer environments — in shelters or with family members — instead of returning to neighborhoods that could be dangerous.

"The people you find here are proud individuals who do not want to leave their property," he said. "They come back, they want to stay. The challenge for us is being able to give them something that will be better."

Residents interviewed said they thought they had no choice but to stay on their property, in some cases because they feared it was the only way to expedite the delivery of a trailer.

"FEMA, when we went and signed up for a trailer, told us, 'You have to be on your property' " in order to receive keys, said Valentina Stilwell, an artist who works seasonally as a tax preparer. "I've had a lot of FEMA people come to my property and not call me prior. What are we supposed to do?"

Beeman said FEMA crews were under orders to contact residents by phone before they traveled to a site.

So far, FEMA has provided about half of the trailers requested by households in Mississippi — 10,641 of 22,515 requests — and hopes to supply all of them by Dec. 1, Beeman said.

Delays, he said, can be attributed to several factors: communities have not yet granted permits to place trailers; sites are in flood zones; municipal crews have not cleared debris; and newly delivered trailers must be inspected by their manufacturer.

FEMA officials were not aware until recently that people were still living in tents in east Biloxi, Beeman said. Since learning of the encampments, Beeman has sent community relations teams out to determine which households should be a priority.

"It may have been an oversight on our part that we were not going back in there," he said...

(Oh, so much more...)

This is simply infuriating. Moreover, where is the media now?

Meanwhile, this moron gets a contract extension...

FEMA Extends Ex-Chief's Contract

I say send him down there with his family to live in a tent! He obviously needs the experience.

EDIT:

Short memories or indifference?

U.S. totally unprepared for disaster, Senate committee told

A U.S. Senate subcommittee heard stinging criticism Wednesday of the nation's lack of readiness to respond to terrorist attacks or natural disasters, but administration officials who would be most responsible for correcting the problems didn't attend.

The federal government's "utterly inadequate" response to Hurricane Katrina "calls for dramatic changes," former U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton testified.

Katrina made clear that "we have not heeded the lessons of 9/11," said the Washington state Republican, who served on the commission that investigated U.S. weaknesses in detecting, stopping and responding to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001.

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who chaired the hearing, also bemoaned the nation's slowness in solving problems certain to arise in extreme emergencies.

"A moderately sophisticated terrorist attack could easily replicate the type and amount of damage caused by this natural disaster," Kyl said.

But with an attack, he warned, "the response would be even more difficult to coordinate because we would have little or no warning about the type of attack, or when, or where it would occur."

The hearing by the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on terrorism, technology and homeland security emphasized that the government must take preparedness much more seriously.

Kyl said in opening remarks it was "highly regrettable" that no representatives of the departments of Homeland Security and Defense attended...

Simply pathetic!

[edit on 28-10-2005 by loam]