GREETINGS FROM KATRINALAND. Here, in New Orleans, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, there is nothing but Katrina to talk about today. There's plenty to talk about, and much of it distressing. There is still no electricity in the lower Ninth Ward, the site that generated the most horrific television images of the storm -- dead bodies riding the currents, people trapped on rooftops. With no public services, FEMA will not provide trailers to the people who once lived here. Without trailers, they can't rebuild. I've heard people speak with scorn of the city's call for residents to return home; return to what, they ask. According to Virginia Rep. Jim Moran (D), the Small Business Administration's emergency loan program is showing the lowest acceptance rate of any previous emergency to whose victims it offered loans. The rate of acceptance for Katrina-related loans, Moran told a local talk-show host here, is 38 percent. In the Clinton administration, he said, the rate was about 59 percent. Worse still, the actual pay-out on the approved loans has been only $1 for every $5 approved. Yesterday, I joined members of the House Democratic caucus on a tour of Katrina-related sites. Among them was University Hospital and Charity Hospital, which have been reduced to sharing a single makeshift emergency room in a vacated department store. FEMA is putting Charity through a process that will likely make it impossible to rebuild the city's only hospital for the uninsured poor. The hospitals requested a grant of $257 million to cover the losses wrought by the storm. They were initially approved for $23 million, according to Charity CEO Donald Smithburg, but when the grant came back from Washington, their grant was reduced to $16 million. The rather opulent Ochsner Health Care System Hospital, a not-for-profit private facility, has suffered some $70 million in losses due to the storm, according to CEO Pat Quinlan, largely because it was one of the few area hospitals that turned no one away and remained operational throughout the storm. It also sustained substantial damage. FEMA has approved a reimbursement of $2 million for that loss, and has yet to pay out a dollar of that grant. Make no mistake: These are the means by which the once majority African-American population of New Orleans is being kept away from its hometown. The population of New Orleans today is half of what it was pre-Katrina. And most of the people who have yet to return are believed to be black. Today, African-American community groups are marching from the Ninth Ward to Congo Square, the historic park where slaveowners once permitted slaves to gather to play the rhythms that form the roots of jazz. I'm headed there now.
--Adele M. Stan
