Poor Hit Hard By Hurricane Katrina
sept, 2005 – Hurricane Katrina ravaged much of the Gulf Coast, but it was especially cruel to the poor.
In flooded New Orleans, one-third of the residents live in poverty, and
the poorest live in the city’s lowest-lying areas.In New Orleans, a
third of the residents live below the poverty line.
The very poorest live on the lowest land, south of Lake Pontchartrain,
where the floodwater is now up to their rooftops.”It’s just a thing
that always happens,” said resident Joanne Murphy. “The ones that has
the least, get hit the most.”Rebuilding will be challenging since most
of the families don’t have any insurance.”If nobody gets me any kind of
assistance,” said Timothy Andrews, who
lost his home, “I’m just going to have to do it piece by piece, wood by
wood, paycheck by paycheck.”No Money or Means to Evacuate
More than 700,000 people in the region live in mobile homes. Unlike
wealthier residents who lost boats and beach houses, one in six has no
car and no way out of town. They are mostly black, and have since
filled the Superdome and every available shelter from New Orleans to
Pensacola, Fla.”This means they are vulnerable in lots of ways,” said
Louis Kincannon,
director of the U.S. Census Bureau. “They live in substandard housing
that is not as resistant to damage.”In housing projects in Mobile where
there is no power and little money
for generators, some residents used a car radio to keep up with
developments.”I used to live with my mother years ago,” said resident
Vera-Jean
Jordan, “and we never did have no generator and no lights, so we just
have to deal with it.”Mobile home resident Jalonna Long sought refuge
in a hotel with spotty
electricity. She has a 7-month-old baby, born premature, who needs a
heart monitor and an oxygen machine.”They are all running on batteries
now, but batteries don’t last that long,” she said.With no health
insurance, no hospital will admit them.”You can’t let that control
you,” sad Anne Prince, the baby’s
grandmother. “You’ve just got to keep trying to find other options.”The
hotel where the family was staying did lose power, and they were not
seen again.
They are like many of Katrina’s victims who were already hard on their luck, now struggling to get by one day at a time.