By Guy F. Smith
September 29, 2008

Testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery September 23, mayors from Houston and Galveston (TX), and Shreveport (LA) sought federal aid following the devastation of Gulf Coast cities after the impact of Hurricane Ike.

The Subcommittee Chair is Senator Mary Landrieu (LA), daughter of former New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu, a past President of The U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The mayors – Bill White of Houston, Lyda Ann Thomas of Galveston, and Cedric B. Glover of Shreveport (LA), gave personal witness to the impact of Ike on the Gulf Coast.

Thomas said that 10,000 to 20,000 of the coastal city’s 57,000 residents saw their homes demolished by the September 13 storm. She estimated that one-third of the city will not be habitable for months. Throughout Texas, evacuees remain in shelters as the need for temporary housing escalated.

White, no stranger to his city’s disaster recovery efforts to help evacuees after Hurricane Katrina, said Houston – the nation’s fourth largest – could be best served by an infusion of rental voucher program for renters and homeowners.

Glover, head of an inland city, said following Hurricane Gustav, his city joined by Bossier City and Northwest Louisiana housed more than 13,000 persons in inland shelters. He listed some steps that could be implemented by FEMA including the federal response to requests for commodities, equipment and supplies. Even such basics as shower facilities became a priority, the mayor said, with the city building, on short notice, became a shower facility. He also called for permanent, well supplied shelter facilities, help in returning evacuees to their homes, better coordination of volunteers and donations.

Following are excerpts from Senate testimony.

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss with you Galveston’s most immediate needs in response to Hurricane Ike, one of the city’s most devastating natural disasters since the 1900 storm, which took 8,000 lives.

The city’s structures – its port, University of Texas Medical Branch, historic downtown business district, and east end, even its condominiums and second homes built according to our strict building codes – have withstood a surge equal to a Category 4 hurricane, virtually submerging the entire island in depths ranging from three to 18 feet. Although damaged, these structures stand testimony to the fact that Galveston Island is a viable, valuable piece of real estate that proudly, this day, flies the flag of the state of Texas and the United States of America.

We will require billions of dollars to rebuild all our infrastructure, which took a terrible beating, strengthen our port and repair and shore up the university of Texas Medical Branch, its hospital, medical school, research labs, and especially the Galveston National Laboratory.

The citizens of Galveston have suffered severe losses. One whole section of town north of Broadway may be uninhabitable. An estimated the to 20,000 citizens lost their homes and possessions.

We need help – lots of it – but first and foremost, we need you to continue your support and cooperation extended from the President, members of Congress, Homeland Security, FEMA, the Corps of Engineers, HUD, Red Cross, Salvation Army, Small Business Administration, volunteers and many others as well.

Hurricane Ike hit the Houston metropolitan area, one of our nation’s largest, with hundred mile-an-hour winds, a massive storm surge, and left us with the tasks of cleaning up tree-strewn streets and storing our power and water and wastewater utilities.

With neighbors helping neighbors and mobilization of resources at all levels of government, we are coming back. But thousands have been left homeless; over a third of the people in the metropolitan area still do not have power; and our local governments must meet payrolls with massive amounts of needed overtime in the next ten days. Walls of debris line most thoroughfares and streets. The financial and human resources of our local governments have been stretched to the maximum.

We worked to provide initial shelter for hundreds of thousands of Americans at the time of Katrina. We received one-tenth of one percent of all federal grants made to state and local governments for housing and community development, even though we provided apartments to approximately 100,000 evacuees in southern Louisiana for more than a year after Katrina. We had to raise private funds to make up for the many shortfalls. Because federal funds at that time were allocated based on where the storm hit, rather that based on where the evacuees lived. Our citizens bore much of the burden for policing, uninsured health care, and many other needs of those who still live among us who sought refuge from devastated areas. We were told that those funds were allocated to the places physically damaged by the storm, not where the Americans were hurt by the storm chose to live afterwards.

Now we have been hit directly and we need the federal government’s financial help.

In the city of Houston, there are well over some thousands of homeowners and vendors with severe roof and structural damage. Please make available a program of individual assistance in the form of housing vouchers for those whose owner-occupied residents were rendered not functional. We also need a short-term transitional program for those who lost their apartment and all or much of the contents of those apartments.

Communication between FEMA and the state of Louisiana appeared to be much improved over Katrina and Rita. FEMA did not appear out of touch, as they had three years ago, but rather were on the ground before the storms arrived.

When hurricanes threatened, the residents along the Interstate 10 corridor moved toward the Interstate 20 corridor for shelter. This includes Dallas, Shreveport, Jackson, Birmingham and Atlanta. This is part of our inherent responsibility due to our geographic location.

These shelters need to be equipped to shelter large numbers of people for both short and long periods of time. They need to have the infrastructure to meet basic human needs – indoor restrooms, showers, water, diapers, eating facilities, places to perform rudimentary medical care and safe, well-organized places to sleep. These hard assets do not need to be on a truck coming from far away and arriving well after landfall. They need to be in place from Day One.

Shelters cannot just be big empty boxes, waiting to be filled with people. In addition to the things I just mentioned, shelters need security, medical care, lighting, access to transportation, janitorial services and access to communications and the outside world. All of those arrangements need to be made before the storms come.