Odd then that the US government pays billions to rebuild Iraq (via GWB getting backhanders to award contracts) yet the same government won't rebuild New Orleans poor folks places, because they had no insurance and didn't ask to be flooded out.
Colin, I have to tell you that many of us here are asking similar questions. But government money is still available, it is just hard to get.
You must remember that Katrina devastated a densely populated area. The raw number of affected homes is staggering. When a few hundred homes are destroyed, it doesn't take that long to fix things up. For instance, when a creek overflows in Texas or Delaware, a small community of several hundred people is affected. But when the number of destroyed homes is more like a few hundred THOUSAND, it takes longer. You can talk about how long it takes to rebuild, but these are contributing factors that must be taken into account. (And where I can, I'll couch them in computing terms.)
1. There are only so many folks who are willing to come into a devastated area to do the work. You can talk about supply and demand, but this is really a lesson in
queueing theory. When service demand is way up (which it is, in our area) and the number of available services is limited (which it is, in our area), processing time goes way up. Hence the delays.
2. The reason you can't bring in more people to do the work is that there is no place for them to say that is close. For instance, one of our contractor's sub-contractors drives in from Prairieville, LA, which is well over 100 miles away. We have folks who came in from Texas and are staying in very crowded conditions. You can't bring in more people because the motels and apartment buildings were just as badly devastated as private homes, so there is no place for them to stay. The tent cities are full. The FEMA trailers can't be used for contractors. They are available only for victims.
We allowed certain of our contractors to sleep in one part of our house for a while, but there are limits to whom you can trust that way. We have reached the point that we don't want anyone there but family. And not many folks allowed as much as we did.
3. The normal way to improve service availability is to increase the price you pay. But insurance companies set the payout rates and not many folks can afford to pay the differential. We didn't pay a differential but got started late. That is why we got the contractor we did. He was finishing some other jobs and we caught him sort of "between" projects.
4. A very big part of the problem for the densely populated areas is not that the houses can't be renovated (well,... actually, it IS the problem), it is WHY they can't get in to do the work. When the flood soaked the ground and stayed for so long, it affected lots of things - including sub-surface infrastructure. Some parts of town have no potable water coming through the water mains because of serious breaches therein. No gas lines. No sewage lines.
The utility companies have the same labor problem as everyone else, so they cannot replace the sub-surface mains and branches any faster than they are already going, and you can't replace such things in the wrong order. (Think bottom-up tree traversal...) An article on our local news suggested that we were losing 85 million gallons per day from the city-wide water system due to leaks that hadn't been plugged or otherwise blocked by closing valves. And of course, the news media will show the protest marches for the folks in the area that has no infrastructure. But you can't speed that up any more than it already is going because of lack of machinery, workers, and raw materials.
5. Supply and demand applies to home renovation products, too. For instance, our insurance adjust said that in a memo she had seen, some USA suppliers of things like sheet rock (dry wall) committed the entire output of their factories to Katrina and their estimates were that it wouldn't be enough. Again, queueing theory...
So yes it is going slow, yes the feds are slow to act, yes there are a lot of very frustrated people. But yes, there is progress in many areas.
The biggest stumbling block is, I think, that some people are suffering from a form of PTSD - post-traumatic stress disorder. And no, I'm not being even slightly facetious. Our local newspapers discuss this at great length, adding the comment that with the loss of other infrastructure, we have lost a lot of our physicians and psychiatrists to less devastated areas as well. The ones who are left ARE diagnosing PTSD in many cases. Perhaps the poor are caught in PTSD and don't know how to climb out of the "pit of despair" associated with the situation. But in this case, it is not necessarily due to being poor. It is due, literally, to being in a state of shock.
Anyway, we're still here, just keeping a watching brief, but it seems that if Rich and I don't post, then the forum becomes somewhat static - presumably because unless prompted, the US posters have difficulty thinking of something to say
. I don't mean to get off on a rant here, but... I'm all for aid and assistance in the face of natural disasters, but there has to be a line drawn between disaster relief and welfare subsidies. It has been a year. Doc's well on his way to getting back to normal (glad to hear it, btw, Doc!) but it takes hard work and effort...those who put forth no effort deserve nothing in return. That's just common sense, not political rhetoric.
