Add to our dictionary of post-hurricane pain the phrase “major and severe.”
If you’re living on a tiny, fixed income, like many of the elderly victims of hurricanes Laura and Delta in southwestern Louisiana in 2020, major troubles come from "severe" damage to their homes — whatever the Federal Emergency Management Agency says that means.
The troubles have not abated in 2023 for many people who were hammered by Laura and then the second hurricane in the fall of 2020. Many residents remain falling through the cracks of programs meant to restore livability to modest homes throughout the region.
The residents say that a bewildering amount of bureaucracy, federal and state, continues to deny them aid. Reporter Alena Maschke chronicled for this newspaper the travails of homeowners in DeQuincy and north Lake Charles who either live in severely damaged homes, or wrecks that should not be inhabited.
Dartanyan Breaux has been living with his brother in Houston since the storm, coming to Lake Charles occasionally to check on his house that cannot be lived in. “If I didn't have family to live with, I'd be homeless,” said the 57-year-old Air Force veteran, who lives on a small monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
These and many other stories like them resound in neighborhoods as well as at public meetings, but is there a realistic alternative to the FEMA “major and severe assessments” as a basis for distributing aid? Probably not, Pat Forbes, of the state’s Office of Community Development, said.
Federal aid, which was late getting to Lake Charles anyway because of the pandemic and the 2020 national election clogging action in Congress, will run out quickly otherwise.
“Every disaster is like this: We have limited resources and much larger needs,” Forbes said. “The amount of money they gave us is based on major and severe (damage assessments). If we say, 'We're not following that; we're going to give money to everybody who said they had damage,' we'd run out of money.”
The $680 million allocated to residential rebuilding for the Laura-damaged region would not last long, Forbes said, even though the state regularly argues with FEMA about that agency's nightmarish process.
That process failed Lake Charles’ area in part because of the sheer bad timing of Laura, one of the worst storms ever to strike the United States.
During the pandemic, residents said, FEMA conducted exterior inspections. The agency provided the mandated emergency assistance after the storm, but Congress did not authorize additional long-term recovery money — like the residential assistance program — until many months later.
It was a poor record, even worse than Forbes and other veterans are used to seeing. After that, as usual, a slow-moving federal bureaucracy must approve large volumes of state-submitted paperwork before the aid can flow to residents.
A failure of this magnitude has led to calls in Congress, including from the Louisiana delegation, for providing for at least some of the long-term aid to be available in FEMA’s regular budget — avoiding the political trap of waiting on congressional action, that hurt Lake Charles’ recovery in a major and severe way.
Louisiana is a test case in how not to do hurricane recovery. The folks left behind in southwestern parishes can testify to that.