February 28, 2007 now to continue my stories of Louisiana and the stories that Randy, Susie, Mark and Sue had told us. Of course sitting with them and since they live in Louisiana we talked about Katrina. We told them about while driving here there were still neighborhoods of FEMA trailers all over Louisiana, they said wait till you go into the out skirts of New Orleans, and they are still there too. When we did go into New Orleans, we had breakfast in the French Quarter which is just fine it’s the neighborhoods outside of the French Quarter that are still messed up. There the houses that were unlivable have trailers either in the front yard or side yard, but the people still haven’t done anything to fix their places up. It was a very poor area anyway, very low income, and these people just want to keep taking the handouts and not do anything to improve the area. It doesn’t help with the Louisiana Government, not just New Orleans Government being corrupt, that’s what Randy told us. So much money has been wasted here and still is. The trailers that FEMA has supplied have been trashed, the people were given a year to get there acts together and not rely on the government but that hasn’t helped to get them motivated, they were never motivated before why should they start now and their own government officials don’t help them but just pocket the money. FEMA wasted so much money at the beginning and it doesn’t help that the outside businesses that were hired by FEMA had taken advantage of FEMA too. It was so hectic here that FEMA kept throwing out money and had no controls of what was going on. People that had no damage at all and still applied for FEMA money where given it and some that needed it were turned down. The trailer park, Yellowstone where we were staying was taken over by FEMA for evacuees from New Orleans; they had put trailers all over the park and paid the park owners for all the spaces. They even had hired a company to come in and dump the trailer tanks of the waste, well after doing that NO EVACUEES ever occupied the trailers. The dumping company came in once or twice a week and pretended to dump the waste tanks and billed FEMA even though all the trailers were empty. The trailer park charged of course which they had a right to do because all of their spaces were taken up by the FEMA trailers. Supposedly in the outskirts of New Orleans, where the trailers still are and it has been over a year, FEMA went in to take the trailers out but of course the news media got wind of it and made the government sound like the bad guys for not doing more to help these people. So needless to say the trailers are staying and the people still don’t plan on doing anything to improve things. Just keep waiting for the handouts is what they plan on doing, poor me the government owes us, boy I sure get sick of hearing that. Some of the neighborhoods a little farther out have been working very hard to cleaning up their areas but it is a slow process but at least they are doing something.
This is a hard topic to write about, so much too say, it’s just easier to talk about and not write about.
This is a long blog so let me cut off now and start another one about Mississippi and the damage Katrina caused here.