Post Katrina Update

This week’s news: Toxic levels of formaldehyde gas are affecting the health of FEMA trailer occupants, some at levels 40 times higher than normal exposures.

114,000 people remain in FEMA trailers along the Gulf Coast after nearly two and a half years since Hurricane Katrina came ashore.

Obviously the scope of need is yet beyond the imagination of many who might offer some elements of correction to these problems.

Resources have been expended at a significant level, but apparently large amounts of money have been diverted away from productive relief.

Baptists helped to rebuild more than 700 homes in the area and are to be commended for the outpouring of effort to make these improvements possible. At the same time, there is the simple human reality, that some folks are hard to help, some have not yet found their way to resources sufficient to meet their needs, and some people cannot and do not have the capacity to make those changes themselves without help.

The “safety net” for thousands in our nation has been the pattern of government to “send money” and assuming that will be sufficient to fix the problems. It never is. The realities lie even in the encounters we have had in our own disaster relief efforts. Elderly persons often do not have the physical strength to take care of what has to be done to rehabilitate a home and property after such a loss. Those without close family or friends who can assist simply are neglected, left without, and often in circumstances of great difficulty.

Similarly, those who have other physical or mental incapacities are often incapable of making the necessary adjustments to a radical change in their world environment. Coping with the loss of family members, their homes, or their livelihoods often leaves them without recourse to the most basic of services and provisions.

Rebuilding infrastructure in places that do not have the support of government, current policy, and planned effort, remains a cloud over the entire prospect of a future existence in those places. Decisions by large corporations, not to supply resources and reinvestment in those areas, leaves them destitute. It is one thing to tell the able bodied to“get out of Dodge” and rebuild your lives elsewhere, but short of the biblical accounts of the Babylonian Exile, there seem few parallels to the aspects of abandoning the poorest, the sickest, the oldest and least able to circumstances beyond their capacity to change…with no eye or aim to do so. America should speak up and take up the task.