COMMENTARY
Shelter from the Storm
A fishing boat tossed a
quarter mile inland and
deposited on the roof of a
collapsed home. Mile
after mile, block upon block, of houses
and commercial buildings transformed
into splinters and rubble. Beautiful
coastal cities like Biloxi and rural towns
looking like they’ve been the targets of
wartime saturation bombing. The great
city of New Orleans turned into a fishbowl.
Scenes so terrible that they seem
almost surreal.
At press deadline for this publication
(Sept. 8), the nation is only beginning
to gauge the terrible toll of
Hurricane Katrina. The death toll is
already several hundred and could go
much higher as the flood waters drop
and rescue workers begin the grim task
of sifting through the wreckage. And
with property damage expected to
exceed $100 billion, this will easily go
down as the worst natural disaster in
the nation’s history.
The storm created a tidal wave of
homeless evacuees unlike anything our
nation has ever before experienced –
hundreds of thousands of people needing
shelter, food and the other necessities
of life as they await determination
of when, and if, they will ever be able
to return to their homes.
USDA Rural Development is playing
a major role in finding living quarters
for storm victims. Some 30,000 unoccupied
apartments in USDA-financed
multi-family housing developments (and
nearly 200 single-family homes) across
the nation were identified within days of
the storm, and are being made available
to shelter the victims.
Rural Development has waived security
deposits and offered rent abatements
for up to 90 days to help victims
and has fronted security deposits for
utilities. In the most heavily stormimpacted
areas, USDA Rural Development
instituted a 180-day halt on mortgage
payments for more than 14,000
housing customers.
Rural Development is also taking
the lead in coordinating available
housing from other federal agencies,
including Housing and Urban Development
(HUD) and the Veteran’s
Administration.
In disaster relief centers across the
impacted area, volunteers from USDA
Rural Development field offices are
staffing the desks to handle assistance
requests. Likewise, our rural utilities
programs staff is going all out to provide
supplemental financing and technical
help for repairs of electric,
telecommunications and water systems.
Other USDA agencies are likewise
involved in more ways than can be
addressed in this column. To cite just
one, the USDA Forest Service has 11
management/logistics teams and 37
labor crews of 20 people each undertaking
30 assignments at a cost of $28
million in storm-hit communities
along the Gulf Coast.
America’s cooperatives are also
sending aid in many forms. As they
have in so many other hurricanes in
recent years, rural electric co-ops are
sending repair crews to help get the
lights back on. Five electric crews
from Walton Electric Membership
Corporation (EMC) in Georgia were
dispatched to southwest Mississippi
just a day after the hurricane hit. A
few days later, it sent more crews to
an even harder-hit co-op, the Pearl
River Valley Electric Power
Association in Columbia, Miss. When
not working, crew members were
sleeping in a church there — the only
shelter available.
The Cooperative Development
Foundation quickly launched the
Katrina Cooperative Recovery Fund,
which will direct contributions specifically
to individuals and cooperative
businesses in the rural areas of the three
hurricane-ravaged states. See Newsline
(page 35) for more on this effort.
One good bit of news for farmer coops
at press deadline is that Port of
New Orleans authorities believe shipping
operations may be restored to a
semblance of normality much sooner
than had initially been anticipated.
One can almost hear an audible sigh of
relief throughout the nation’s heartland
from farmers and co-ops who depend
on the Mississippi River network and
the Port of New Orleans for shipping
their crops.
This recovery effort will last for
years to come. Whatever it takes, there
should be no doubt that USDA Rural
Development and the nation’s cooperatives
will do their part to help mend a
land, and lives, broken by nature’s fury.
Dan Campbell, Editor
