Trying to make it right
Most people have heard by now that the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was too little and too late for many of the hardest-hit residents of New Orleans.
Kathy Greer wants you to know it still is.
“They are not getting the help they need,” said Greer, an emergency room nurse at Spokane’s Sacred Heart Medical Center. “I don’t want them to be forgotten.”
Television images of Mardi Gras revelers last week might have given the mistaken impression that things are getting back to normal in the sunken city, said Greer, who recently returned from two weeks volunteering at a clinic in St. Bernard Parish, one of the hardest hit areas of New Orleans.
When Katrina’s storm surge breached the levees lining the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward were flooded with as much as 10 feet of water. Chalmette Hospital and 25,000 homes in the parish were destroyed. Out of 130 doctors, three stayed to open the St. Bernard Clinic in a triple-wide trailer in a Wal-Mart parking lot where Greer worked 12- to 20-hour days last month.
On her one day off she toured the neighborhood.
Six months after “the storm,” as local residents refer to it, Greer said cars still sit atop houses and houses atop cars. Most houses are uninhabitable and one was only recently bull-dozed off a major street. When it was shoved aside, 12 bodies were found in its attic. There remain 1,500 people missing in St. Bernard Parish, Greer said.
One day, a New Orleans police officer came by the clinic where Greer was working. It was his first visit to the parish since he helped rescue victims immediately after the storm. He said he had avoided the area because of the memories.
He had seen the body of a boy, perhaps 3 years old, floating in the murky water, and had to let it float by, she said. He was on a rescue mission, not a retrieval mission. He went back once in a futile attempt to find the boy. Then he never returned, until last month, Greer said.
“The devastation is unbelievable, and nothing is happening,” she said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency didn’t come through for New Orleans last August, she said, and it still hasn’t today. The people are still living in trailers, tents, even on a pair of commissioned cruise ships.
One of her patients, a 77-year-old man who lost his wife, his house and everything he owned has been trying to get a FEMA trailer for six months, Greer said.
“No one is helping these people unless a private agency comes in, like a church,” Greer said. “It’s unbelievable we are treating Americans like this.”
Like a lot of people immediately after the hurricane hit, Greer wrote a check to the American Red Cross. She thought the $500 gift would make her feel better.
“It didn’t,” she said.
So she volunteered to work in the clinic, which saw 150 patients a day. Most patients complained of “the Katrina Crud,” a constant cough resulting from the ubiquitous black mold. It was her second trip to the region, having spent three weeks in September at refugee shelters in Texas when Hurricane Rita struck.
The 44-year-old mother of three plans to return to New Orleans after she spends time with her family. She said she is haunted by the visions of people living in squalor in her own country. She said she is compelled to do “whatever I can do to make their lives better.”