Word: fema
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...After the storm, FEMA cleaned up to the refuge's property line - and stopped. Congressman Charles Boustany (R-La.) blames the Stafford Act, which doesn't allow FEMA to work on government land. "We had the Army Corps of engineers and the EPA down there, but they couldn't go on federal property," he says. "You could see where the cleanup work was being done, and 100 yards over, there's horrendous debris and hazardous tanks - and nobody's touching...
...Sonny says a FEMA inspector cried when he saw the devastation of Holly Beach. Yet, his claim was ruled "insufficient damage." His wife, Loretta, says they have appealed four times, but she's giving up. She sits on the steps of their trailer, drowning a new avocado tree with water from a garden hose. There used to be 40 palm trees bordering the property, she says. Now there are two. Loretta says she's having a bad day. All she can think about is moving - but they don't have anywhere else to go. "Hurricane Rita never happened," Sonny says...
...that his Gentilly neighborhood home - situated between the London Avenue Canal and Lake Pontchartrain - was destroyed. A licensed social worker, Hayes found that his clients and livelihood were gone too, so he began showing his resume around Atlanta, and today is the Fulton County Supervisor for Project Hope, a FEMA-funded mental health program within the Georgia Department of Human Resources, where Hayes now numbers fellow Katrina evacuees among his clients. "I'm going to stay in Atlanta," he says. "I would have had to start from scratch in New Orleans, so I can start from scratch here...
...told, 400,000 people fled or were evacuated out of the city of New Orleans, where the current population is still half the pre-Katrina level. Taking in those who also left Mississippi, Alabama and other regions of Louisiana, 1.5 million people have applied for FEMA relocation assistance, according to the Appleseed study...
...Also, according to the report, Atlanta did a better job than some cities at managing the influx by setting up "megacenters" that combined FEMA, housing, hospital referral and medical services in centralized locations. The city's expanse of shelter space and existing plans to house natural disaster victims in them helped too, and Atlanta got "extremely lucky" that hospitals had few scheduled surgeries due to the upcoming Labor Day weekend last year...