Katrina's Latest Damage

By Arian Campo-Flores
Newsweek
March 13, 2006 issue - In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, Houston earned a loving moniker among many of the evacuees who sought refuge there: the Big Heart. This, after all, was the city that housed, fed and mended more than 150,000 survivors in a herculean effort that won national acclaim. Houston officials mounted what is believed to be the biggest shelter operation in the country's history, including MASH-like megaclinics that took on problems ranging from emergency care to eyeglass prescriptions. Then, just as quickly, officials disbanded those facilities to usher evacuees into more-permanent housing, offering them generous vouchers that covered rent and utilities for a year. "No other city really provided the resources and assistance Houston has," says Angelo Edwards, vice chair of the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association. "If not for Mayor [Bill] White and his administration, a lot of us would've been lost."
But six months after the evacuees arrived, the city's heart seems to be hardening. The signs of a backlash are sometimes subtle. "You'll hear little snide remarks," says Edwards. "People will say, 'The reason you can't get a job is because you can't talk right'." Other times, the reaction is more venomous. Among the nasty examples Dorothy Stukes, an evacuee, cites: graffiti blaring F--- NEW ORLEANS in her apartment complex, schoolkids taunting her grandchildren to "swim in that Katrina water and die" and shopkeepers muttering about survivors' sucking the public coffers dry. Stukes, chair of the ACORN KSA, has become so concerned that when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin came to town recently, she begged him to hire a public-relations firm to repair the evacuees' image. But given all that Nagin has to contend with amid his own run for re-election, that is not likely to land high on his list.
Katrina continues to be a destructive force. The Bush administration found itself engulfed once again last week, after the release of some footage of the president at an August video briefing on the hurricane. The tape revived discussion of some of Bush's darkest days, when he seemed either uninformed or unable to respond to a national disaster unfolding on TV. But the tape wasn't the only thing fueling Katrina's return to the news. Stoked by congressional investigators, new details have emerged about the government failures that left so many people in mortal danger. Late last week retired Marine Corps Brigadier Gen. Matthew Broderick resigned his post as Homeland Security's operations chief amid accumulating evidence that the command post he directed as Katrina hit misjudged the early damage to New Orleans. (Homeland Security said Broderick left to "spend more time with his family.")

(to read the entire article, click on the title of the above thread. I personally am not tired of the evacuees. It's the crime that I'm tired of...)