Students still recovering from Katrina’s effects

Emotional wounds re-opened after harrowing trip home

Sarah Siegel Guest Writer

When Danielle Morvant ’10 went home over winter break, she slept on a box spring. Lulu Caruso ’07 is on her sixth house in the past 18 months, and Jessica Muller-Pearson ’08 is living in a government trailer. These Vassar students are all from New Orleans, a city still filled with more wreckage than people, more people than housing, more need than assistance, and, in the first week of the new year, a higher murder rate than in Iraq. Its hospitals have not re-opened, its businesses are slow to return, and its public school system, rated the worst nationally before the storm, has lost thousands of teachers. House after house lies empty and ungutted. A Jan. 21 New York Times article reported that less than half the population has returned, and demographers do not expect many more to come back.

“It’s important that people realize that this is not something that happened a year and a half ago and is done,” said Caruso, “because it’s really incredibly not anywhere near done.”

Caruso’s family had just paid off the mortgage on their house in Chalmette when a levee broke three blocks away. The largest structure in her old neighborhood is now a displaced shrimping boat the size of the Villard Room. Rebuilding there would be impossible.

Don Everhard, director of a local community center explained that in a city where 60 percent of people rented before the storm, rates have ballooned. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development closed many of the city’s federal housing projects, offering alternatives for both the rich and poor mainly in the form of housing vouchers, due to expire soon, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers.

Muller-Pearson’s family got their trailer a full six months after the storm hit. The trailer’s plumbing has since subjected them to yet more flooding, and the toilet breaks regularly.

Residents characterize FEMA as so unreliable and unresponsive that local slogans give the acronym a new meaning: “Fix Everything My Ass.” Caruso’s friends and family spend hours every week phoning governmental agencies and insurance companies.

Morvant’s family thought they’d been lucky to only have a tree bash into their roof in a northern suburb. But in the months after moving back, Morvant visited nine doctors complaining of lethargy and respiratory distress before discovering that the fallen tree had spread mold into every wall of her home, forcing her family to gut and rebuild.

In all the strife, Muller-Pearson said that “Vassar has been very helpful.” Students raised money for victims through the African-American/Black, Latino, Asian/Asian-American, Native American (ALANA) Center, Poder Latino, the Black Students Union, the Caribbean Students Alliance, and Global Relief Effort. Victims were allowed to take lightened course loads, given access to counseling and SWAPR clothes, and the Office of Financial Aid accommodated storm-created needs. Caruso didn’t have time to ask for help before Associate Director of Financial Aid Ellen Shilkret told her, “We’ve got it covered.” When the Morvants realized they would need to rebuild, they got a revised financial aid package, but they are wary about next year.

Mentally, victims often suffer distress characteristic of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. “After the first semester, people didn’t understand why this wasn’t over,” said Muller-Pearson. “They don’t understand that it won’t be over for years to come.” Indeed, said Caruso, “I can’t tell you the extent to which it frames my life. I still think of Katrina as my primary identity right now.”

Victims said they feel both literally and culturally homeless. “It’ll never really be the same,” Caruso said. “It’s such a weird thing to go home to someplace you’ve lived your entire life and not know anybody.”

Socially, Katrina both exposed and exacerbated racial and class divides. Caruso explained that “It’s hugely about racism and classism…It’s about the fact that we allow the people who don’t have money to live in the most vulnerable geographies.”

While victims stressed that the storm ruined lives across socio-economic and racial boundaries, they emphasized that it hit the poor the hardest. However, they said that stereotyping victims as mainly black has probably blunted relief efforts. Associate Professor of Sociology Diane Harriford further explained that the black community has more obstacles than others: Even poor whites can rely on the color of their skin to feel comfortable approaching government agencies and potential employers, whereas blacks cannot.

Underneath everything else, the infrastructure that buckled under the storm itself remains unfixed. Tulane University Geology Professor Stephen Nelson says the levees have been rebuilt patchily, with original engineering mistakes largely intact. Environmentally, New Orleans is more vulnerable to storm surges every year as its protective wetlands disappear.

Moreover, when Murphy Oil Company didn’t follow hurricane regulations, it allowed an oil tank to overturn and add a million gallons of crude oil containing the carcinogen Benzine to the floodwaters in St. Bernard parish, the second largest spill in U.S. history. Caruso, who received a Burnham fellowship last summer to work with the only group addressing the spill, warned, “Twenty years from now it’ll be Love Canal,” referring to a town built on a toxic dump whose population suffered rare cancers. The prediction, while as yet unproven, is personal for Caruso. Her father was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia two months ago, some time after wading through the oil-topped floodwaters to gather documents from his small business.

The future remains uncertain for Katrina victims. While they say they feel largely abandoned by the government, faith-based groups and college students quietly gut and rebuild. But there is depressingly little progress. Caruso expects a minimum of a five-year wait to be something akin to stable.

Student victims ask other members of the Vassar community not to forget them and the gulf coast. Whether by continuing the conversation, helping to build a house, or visiting the beautifully restored bacchanal that is Bourbon Street, they ask that people be involved and remember that it is not an abstract problem.

“It’s not about politics…as much as its people’s lives that have been ruined,” Morvant said, “I feel like a lot of Vassar students want to look at it from a political standpoint like it’s something to be thrown around, when really it needs to be fixed.”