Disaster Recovery Notes on the 6th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

Six years removed from Katrina, our community has undoubtedly learned and overcome many challenges, and continues working on the everyday long-term efforts to reform, rebuild, restore and re-create New Orleans. It is ironic that while we look back on these last six years, Hurricane Irene just completed its path through the East Coast, leaving tremendous amounts of destruction and uncertainty. Without a doubt, the disastrous government response, during and after Katrina, has taught officials at all levels that these kinds of mistakes will neither be forgiven, nor forgotten, for a long time. This seems to have actually aided disaster affected areas around the country, where the government has made a concerted effort to improve disaster preparedness, as well as implement plans for an expedient, immediate, and mid-term disaster response.

The need to have a plan in place even where there’s little threat of a natural disaster is key to minimizing the impact on the population. Working with “boots on the ground” to design systems and acting efficiently before and after the disaster, as well as being able to apply reasonable, executable programs, will have a great impact on the long term recovery. New Orleans has proven how successful a recovery process can be as long as the plan is put together, with the community’s voice as the main driver, to identify need, possible solutions and alternatives and, thereafter, inform and prepare the general framework and systems to be implemented both pre-and post-disaster.

Disasters bring an opportunity to invest in local leadership and build capacity in the affected communities. Engaged community residents and stakeholders are the ones who will actually carry out the evacuation plan, as well as organize the recovery from the ground up; their education and insight in foreseeing and solving issues and problems is vital to addressing potential issues and challenges. Major disasters that affect highly dense, urban areas drive such levels of civic engagement, which in turn is the major engine of recovery, social reform, and sustainability—the door to many opportunities the disaster will paradoxically bring with it.

While philanthropic and corporate financial resources, support from local and federal authorities, and civic involvement are ingredients that can drive recovery, the community’s resilience and ability to identify opportunities for reform will significantly determine the impact of the large amounts of resources flowing into a post-disaster environment.

In New Orleans, Katrina gave us space for new voices to be heard through civic engagement—a major opportunity to change the manner in which “we always did it this way things are done in New Orleans.” A galloping charter school movement has without a doubt improved the city’s public education system; neighborhood clinics are in the process of reforming the way we approach medical care and many opportunities still are “in the making” in terms of transportation system reform, and affordable housing availability and quality, among others.

A community’s ability to build up the recovery’s momentum andsustain it is probably the number one indicator of how fast it will recover and how large the impact disaster driven opportunities will affect it. Momentum is the force that emerges from putting two factors together: mass and speed. Keeping up New Orleans’s recovery momentum has probably been the major flaw in the last six years. Right after the storm, a large number of homeowners were desperately trying to come back, but were slowed down by the inability of recovery programs to process and disburse federal funds. At that point, philanthropic and corporate resources drove the beginning of the process and were the catalyst for recovery. Two years later, when we had the “mass” of resources being disbursed by the Road Home program, the factors inhibiting recovery were an insufficient governmental capacity to adequately enforce construction codes and good building practices, plus the lack of a skilled work force and programs in place to address the huge need for thousands of houses to be rebuilt. Now, where we still have many families struggling to come home and hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent recovery, keeping up the momentum seems to continue to be a problem that will impact long-term efforts.

Since 2005, many major disasters have taken place in the world. From Haiti to Christchurch, to Japan and now the North American East Coast, disasters that affect major urban centers teach us how key it is to be ready to deal with a disaster, administer efficient disaster assistance and expedite recovery work. While each affected area has its own set of challenges and opportunities, there are themes that all regions show as a common denominator: quality of housing available pre-disaster, poverty levels, access to education and health and quality of public infrastructure, amongst others, will be determining factors in the recovery post-disaster. The major driving force of the recovery process, however, lays in building and keeping up the momentum in all areas of recovery

Daniela Rivero
Director
Rebuilding Together New Orleans