POOR HIT HARD BY HURRICANE KATRINA

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Date: Thursday September 1, 2005 11:07:00 am
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    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.

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