[StBernard] Sarasohn: Katrina left a deadly legacy

[Westley Annis]

Sarasohn: Katrina left a deadly legacy
David Sarasohn, THE OREGONIAN
Tuesday, July 24, 2007

As a politician, Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La., reads local papers closely,
and he's found a frequent cause of death.

"So-and-so died," he reads, "as a result of Hurricane Katrina."

On the calendar, Katrina is coming up on its second anniversary. In
Louisiana, and in the state's mortality charts, it seems it never ended.

"There is no doubt in my mind that Katrina is still killing our residents,"
Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Frank Minyard told The Associated Press last
month. "People with pre-existing conditions that are made worse by the
stress of living here after the storm. Old people who are just giving up.
People who are killing themselves because they feel they can't go on."

Melancon, whose district stretches south, east and west of New Orleans, has
seen it all. He sees old friends burst into tears when he meets them, and
hears from the president of St. Bernard Parish, southeast of the city, that
his prayer group has recently prayed about three suicides, including one
barely into his teens.

"The frustration that you hear in my voice," Melancon said recently, "is
just a resonance of what I hear on the ground whenever I go home."

Melancon is in the House majority now, although earlier in the year he was
complaining that the Democrats newly in control of Congress weren't any
better for his area than the Republicans had been. Now, he says, "we've seen
some progress. We still have a long way to go. We have this thing called the
Senate."

Worse, "this administration, these agencies, don't seem to have any urgency
at all."

New Orleans and southern Louisiana still resemble a disaster area,
desperately short of the elements of a modern society. Only three of 10 area
hospitals are functioning, Melancon reports, and in St. Bernard Parish, only
three of 30 physicians remain.

Many schools are still closed, utilities are uncertain, and nobody's
confident about sewer and water pipes after the land above them was under
water for as long as six weeks. The congressman says he urged one local
official to "do like Yellowstone, and charge people to come see the
geysers."

New Orleans has 220,000 residents, less than half its pre-Katrina
population, and St. Bernard Parish is down from 65,000 to 30,000. Before
families come back, Melancon figures, they want to know that there are
schools, medical care, utilities and housing.


He worries the trend is running the other way. "I'm concerned that with the
end of school," Melancon said, "parents are picking up their children and
getting out of Dodge."

Housing has been the biggest problem, with huge areas still devastated, and
homeowners getting little help. The federal-state plan to rebuild houses,
The Road Home, has reached hardly anybody.

"The Road Home has been just another debacle," says Melancon. "There's
plenty of room to blame both federal and state people."

The end of this month is the deadline for accepting claims; he hopes things
will start to move after that.

Meanwhile, locals still in temporary housing have their own problems. Under
pressure from a House committee, FEMA Administrator David Paulison agreed to
warn tens of thousands of residents that their agency trailers may be
contaminated with unsafe levels of formaldehyde.

Nobody, apparently, asked him whether the government was aware that the
people in those trailers, and the rest of southern Louisiana, were American
citizens, and his employers.

Meanwhile, the region is back into a new hurricane season, with slow and
uncertain levee rebuilding and pumping capacity.

"If we get a category 2 or 3 storm, or some levee breaks, that makes a
problem," Melancon said. "We watch the weather every day, hoping there isn't
a tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico."

Southern Louisiana already has enough depression.

And, it seems, you can die from it.
 

  
 
  
 

  
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