[StBernard] FEMA closing volunteer camps

[Westley Annis]

FEMA closing volunteer camps
Critics say housing needed for recovery 
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
By Robin Gaby Fisher
Newhouse News Service 

Thursday is the start of the new hurricane season. It also is the day the
Federal Emergency Management Agency will begin dismantling camps that have
housed and fed 40,000 volunteers who came to Louisiana to help salvage
blighted areas in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 

FEMA previously had said it would tear down its last four Louisiana camps in
April, but it extended the deadline when local officials and charities
pleaded for more time so the volunteers would have a place to stay. 

The new date is nonnegotiable, FEMA spokesman Ross Fredenburg said. 

"We are firmly committed to shutting down the camps by June 1," Fredenburg
said. "Demand has diminished to the point we feel we can do that. State and
local entities can take up whatever needs remain." 

FEMA will continue to fund housing assistance programs and public rebuilding
projects, but local officials and charities say closing the camps now
threatens the region's recovery by taking away the only conveniences the
depressed areas can offer volunteers: a place to stay and decent meals. 

"Without volunteers, we're out of business," said Col. David Dysart, a
Marine reservist in charge of the recovery project in St. Bernard Parish,
where 67,000 people live. 

Plaquemines Parish President Benny Rousselle said, "We'll have to find
alternate housing for any volunteers to come down now -- and that will be a
difficult task, because we don't have anything here." 


Housing for volunteers 

The withdrawal has brought about the latest criticism of FEMA and its
handling of Katrina, the most expensive natural disaster in the nation's
history. 

During the past nine months, FEMA has operated as many as 40 camps in the
region to support state and local recovery efforts since Katrina, which made
landfall on Aug. 29, and Rita a month later, agency officials said. The
camps have provided shelter and food for the swell of first-responders,
National Guardsmen and FEMA workers in the weeks after the hurricanes. 

Only four remain; they are in New Orleans and St. Bernard, Plaquemines and
Cameron parishes. They house volunteers who provide substantial cleanup and
building labor and some government contractors. 

The camps are equipped with climate-controlled tents, cots, mess halls and
bathroom and shower facilities. They house between 500 and 2,500 people at a
time. 

FEMA would not disclose how much it spent to erect or run the camps, except
to say the cost of bedding and feeding occupants averages $110 per person
per day. But Dysart said Camp Premier in St. Bernard Parish cost the federal
government "millions per day" because it was mismanaged by FEMA. 

"We believe we could manage that same camp for a fraction of the cost, but
FEMA wouldn't let us do that," Dysart said. 


Free labor 

Volunteers give significantly more in free labor than the cost of housing
and feeding them, said Habitat for Humanity Executive Director Jim Pate,
whose group has recruited 21,000 volunteers to the region since January. 

"It's not even close," Pate said. Government contract workers are paid an
average of $10 an hour to do the same work volunteers do, Pate said, and the
paid workers also stay at the camps for free. 

Most volunteers commit to at least one week of work in exchange for a pass
to one of the FEMA camps, Pate said. 

Until FEMA first announced its intention to shut down the last four camps,
they were usually full, according to Michael Hayes, Habitat's special
projects coordinator. 

In mid-March, Hayes said, "Volunteers had to be turned away from Camp
Premier in St. Bernard Parish because every cot was occupied." 

Dysart said, "At one point, during spring break, we had 2,500 volunteers in
St. Bernard. 

"Then we stopped recruiting, because with the possibility of the camps
closing, we didn't know if we could support the people coming down. As we
speak, we have close to 1,000 volunteers in the parish. After June 1, I
don't know." 


Nowhere to go 

Dysart said St. Bernard, the hardest-hit parish in the region, with all of
its 40,000 structures seriously damaged or destroyed, has no way to house or
feed volunteers. 

"In St. Bernard, we have no infrastructure. Nothing," Dysart said. "All of
our churches are devastated. We have no hospitals. No supermarkets. The
schools are destroyed." 

Camp Premier is about all there is in St. Bernard, except for a dollar
store, a Home Depot and a few bars. 

"We literally have nowhere for volunteers to go," Dysart said. 

Samaritan's Purse, an organization based in North Carolina, usually has its
volunteer disaster teams stay at local churches. 

"But church buildings were not spared in this flood," said Luther Harrison,
Samaritan's regional director for volunteers. Most of Samaritan's 7,786
volunteers in the Gulf Coast relief effort stayed at the FEMA camps, and
they performed 283,000 hours of free labor. 

Volunteers have cleaned and gutted hundreds of homes, but the amount of work
still to be done is mind-boggling, Pate said. 

Parts of New Orleans continue to be without clean drinking water or
electricity. Fewer than half the residents of the city have returned because
their houses are wrecked and much of the infrastructure is severely damaged.


Officials expect the recovery effort to take years. 


Hope for the future 

Churches in New Orleans are scrambling to find space for "three hots and a
cot" for volunteers, Pate said. Habitat is helping Plaquemines Parish to
find suitable housing for volunteers. St. Bernard Parish is racing to
rehabilitate an abandoned school. 

If the parish is able to open the school, each volunteer would be asked to
donate $50 to $100 toward the cost of its upkeep, Dysart said. 

"We are in the process of trying to save this volunteer program even without
FEMA support," he said. 

The new camp will be called Camp Hope. 

"We hope," Dysart said, "that people will continue to come and support what
we're trying to do here. 

. . . . . . . 

Robin Gaby Fisher is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. She
can be reached at rfisher at starledger.com.