More Katrina -- 8/30/06
Lots of coverage of the President’s commemorative trip to New Orleans; most discusses the political aspects I noted yesterday. But check out a couple of pieces in this morning’s Washington Post on the cleanup/reconstruction effort (the first thread I talked about in the previous post.)
One article (Spencer Hsu, First the Flood, Now the Fight) does a nice job of showing the bureaucratic haggling and problems within FEMA that have slowed down much of the recovery effort. Based on what you have read (or will read) in Chapter 9 of KTR, would you expect this to be an area where government can get the job done?
Another piece (Dean Starkman, The Legal Storm in Katrina’s Wake) documents the troubles that residents are having navigating the insurance industry, and the difficulty they face getting their claims met. What’s interesting is that these pieces point to problems that are devastating to gulf residents and presumably have been all year long, but have not been receiving much national attention until the impending anniversary shown some light on them. Would more national attention from the media help these problems get solved?
If politics is about who gets what and how they get it – why would you say the gulf residents aren’t getting more help, resources, and attention?