Responding in Faith to Hurricane Katrina

November 2005

by Rev. Jim McDonald

“Sometimes I feel like a motherless
child…a long way from home.”
– African-American spiritual

“Lord, when did we see thee?”
– Matthew 25: 31-46

What Hurricane Katrina Did

Elizabeth Victor’s father has lived in New Orleans his whole life and had never left for a hurricane.

Until Katrina.

Gerard Victor had worked for the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board for 27 years and previously resisted the pleas of others, including his own family, to evacuate as hurricanes approached. But when the mayor issued the first-ever mandatory evacuation, he began to pack. An hour later, he, his wife Evita, and three other family members headed east. Eight hours later they arrived in Pensacola, FL, normally a three-hour drive.

The next morning Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, breaching the city’s levees and flooding most of the city. One hundred thousand residents, many of them poor and African American, were trapped in their houses without food, water, electricity or the means to communicate with the outside world. Katrina wreaked havoc all along the Gulf Coast states of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama – three of the poorest states in the United States – affecting some 10 million of the 12 million people living there.

Economically, the storm destroyed the fourth largest port in the world. It wrecked the region’s infrastructure. It shattered the New Orleans tourist industry and the historic multicultural community
that underpins it. Just three weeks later, Hurricane Rita hit Texas. Rita did much less damage, but this second storm also smashed homes and hopes. It added to the burden of reconstruction.

Five days after the Victors fled their home, they left their Pensacola motel and drove to Detroit to stay with family. They later resettled in Baton Rouge, from where Mr. Victor is helping direct the drainage of storm water, restoration of water service and the repair of damaged wastewater treatment plants for New Orleans. He and Evita, a doctor at Tulane Medical Center, are still in Baton Rouge, their prospects for returning home uncertain.

Evacuees wait in line to leave in buses from the Convention Center area in New Orleans, LA, September 3, 2005 during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

The extent of the human devastation, dislocation and trauma visited by Katrina is difficult to comprehend. Not only were houses, cars and trees turned upside down, so were communities, families and lives. Close to 1,000 people died. Approximately 1 million residents were displaced. Families were torn apart. Homes were destroyed, legal papers lost. Thousands of children have enrolled in public schools in neighboring cities and states, placing new strains on already underfunded state services and educational systems.

The Victors were among the more fortunate. Most of Evita’s extended family was in Mississippi, where they have lived for generations – first as slaves, then as sharecroppers, finally as landowners and citizens. But family members scattered, and Evita’s parents still have not heard from some relatives. They worry about many of their lifelong neighbors.

Many people will be unable to return home for months, possibly years. Many will likely make a fresh start in new places. And even for those who can return, the prospects are grim. Up to 1 million Americans will be left jobless from the storm. The unemployment rate in the Gulf Coast region is expected to reach
at least 25 percent.

There was a second disaster as well: the inept and inadequate federal response. After inexplicable delays, a series of massive logistical failures on the part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) created an additional nightmare for the storm’s victims.

During and after the hurricane, 25,000 residents – most of them women, children, elderly, and frail, nearly all of them poor and African American – packed the Superdome stadium, suffering in the heat, darkness and stench. Another 25,000 poured into the Convention Center, where similar conditions prevailed.

These evacuation centers became places of desperation, fear and brutality. For five days, these 50,000 people waited for buses.

Two weeks after Katrina hit, Bread for the World President David Beckmann received a call from Sister Jane Remson, who leads Bread for the World New Orleans. Her convent, five blocks from the levee, was under 15 feet of water. The roof was blown off. Fortunately, none of the sisters were injured.

She and one other sister had gone to stay with Sister Jane’s brother, who lives in a rural area outside New Orleans. She was now back on the edges of the city, mainly making sandwiches for people and working with a food manufacturer, Cajun Kettle, to set up a much larger system of emergency feeding.

“The federal government just failed us,” she says, “and it’s got a lot to do with the fact that we’re a poor city. We’re too poor to matter down here. FEMA was way too slow. Communications failed within the city. The Army Corps of Engineers just sat by and watched the city flood.”

A lesson of both Katrina and the Asian tsunami last December is that poor people, whether they live in Biloxi or Banda Aceh, are the most vulnerable when disaster strikes. One in four New Orleans residents lived in poverty, and 84 percent of them were black. Noting that more than 46 percent of the city’s children lived below the poverty line, a 1997 hunger survey by Bread for the World New Orleans found that 86 percent of food stamp recipients reported that their monthly allotments lasted only two to three weeks. Hurricane Katrina revealed the faces behind the statistics.

What God Is Doing

In and of themselves, “acts of God,” as they are called in legal jargon, are not events with easily discerned messages. But disasters – whether “natural” like Katrina and the Asian tsunami, or “man-made” like the September 11 terrorist attacks – shake us personally and as a nation. They compel us to think anew about ourselves and the world.

As Christians, we are invited to think and pray about what God is doing in such situations. Some Christians believe that God singles out people for judgment and visits disaster upon them as punishment. But the Bible includes stories of natural disasters in which God is “not in the earthquake, wind and fire”
(I Kings 19), and we should avoid the error of “blaming the victim” in the manner of Job’s “friends.”

Rather, the God we know in Jesus Christ is graciously present in disasters, sharing in the suffering and calling us to become a new creation. God’s heart was the first to break when Katrina struck and people’s lives were torn apart. God’s healing presence is at work among all those who are still afflicted in mind, body and spirit.

God’s anger burned at the indignities perpetrated in the shelters after the storm. And God is desperately determined to open our eyes and ears to the cries for justice from poor and hungry people in this country and around the world. God wants to shake us from our complacency and materialism to seize the opportunities we have to foster justice in our nation and worldwide.

What We Can Do

Disasters bring out the best and worst in people. Communities pull together, people reach out, heroes emerge. At the same time, there are those who take advantage of the chaos, prey on vulnerable people, zoom in to profiteer and gouge.

The Bible shows us that in Jesus Christ we are one human family, rooted and grounded in love. “When one suffers, all suffer together. When one is honored, all rejoice together.” (I Cor. 12:26)

Most people want to help. The heart-rending pictures from the Gulf Coast brought offers of assistance from around the world. Charitable donations to relief agencies from U.S. citizens surpassed those in the aftermath of both September 11 and the Asian tsunami, reaching more than $1 billion. Another $1 billion
in foreign aid poured into the United States from nearly 100 countries.

There is now a dizzying array of efforts to respond to Hurricane Katrina. In that light, we offer two guiding principles:

• Stay focused on the needs of the people who were hurt by the hurricanes, especially poor people. So far, Congress has approved $62 billion in Katrina aid, and spending may approach $200 billion. But if the relief and reconstruction effort just seeks to restore the ports, repair the energy infrastructure, and rebuild the tourist industry, an important opportunity to address the social inequities along the coast will have been lost. Including those most adversely affected by Katrina in the plans for reconstruction
  provides a special opening to address the pervasive issues of poverty along the Gulf Coast.
  
  Some of the early reconstruction decisions – e.g., suspending the requirement that federal contractors pay workers the average or “prevailing” regional wage for public construction projects
  – should be challenged.
  
• Reconsider our nation’s priorities. Just before Katrina hit, the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. poverty rate had risen for the fourth straight year, reaching 12.7 percent, even as the economy grew. More than 37 million Americans now live in poverty, 1.1 million more than the previous year.

Before Katrina, Congress was looking to cut social spending, including food stamps, Medicaid and other anti-poverty programs, and to give the wealthiest Americans another $70 billion in tax cuts. Even now, post-Katrina, the Republican leadership in Congress is pushing to enact these measures. In fact, they have asked committee chairs to make yet deeper cuts in spending to help pay for Katrina. In the midst of all these decisions, those concerned about hungry and poor people – both those directly affected by Katrina and those beyond – must express their concerns to their members of Congress.

Rev. Jim McDonald is Bread for the World’s vice president for policy and programs.