Katrina recovery continues 10 years after storm

The storm is long gone, but Hurricane Katrina is still a disaster in Louisiana.

Katrina made landfall 10 years ago, killing more than 1,800 people along the Gulf Coast and leaving about 80 percent of New Orleans underwater.

The federal government has spent tens of billions of dollars rebuilding communities along the Gulf of Mexico, but the task is far from over. Louisiana is still uncovering hurricane-related damage that will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to repair.

Louisiana has doled out about $10 billion in federal recovery money for 24,000 reconstruction projects, ranging from roads to public buildings and utilities that were damaged by Katrina and Rita, the massive storm that followed a month later, state reports show.

But another $2.5 billion in federal aid for public reconstruction hasn’t been spent, and thousands of projects remain open.

And some projects are getting bigger as time passes.

“We have sink holes occurring all over the city,” said Freddy Drennan, mayor of Slidell, a city of about 25,000 across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.

Drennan noted the hurricane blew over thousands of trees and that as they fell, their roots tugged on the underground pipes they had grown around, causing small leaks that could go undiscovered for years. Those leaks erode the soil over time, creating unstable caverns beneath the city’s roads or other infrastructure.

Drennan said the Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to pay about $10 million for Katrina-related repairs to the city’s sewer system, and millions more will probably be needed.

He suggested this kind of ongoing recovery could take another 10 years.

New Orleans

New Orleans is undergoing a similar process with its roads. Cedric Grant, director of the city’s sewage and water board, said the city made millions of dollars worth of emergency repairs to roads after the storm, a process that lasted until about 2010.

At that point, the city began looking at longer-term damage, a process that “so far has produced $600 million to $700 million of additional work that needs to be done” and that number “is increasing daily.”

Louisiana has been criticized for the protracted pace of its recovery, particularly by FEMA’s inspector general’s office. In January 2012, the inspector general issued a report concluding that Louisiana had completed only 731 of nearly 13,000 Katrina-related reconstruction projects, while Mississippi had finished 80 percent of its 7,800 projects and Alabama had finished nearly all of its 1,100 Katrina projects.

Part of the reason for this low completion rate, the IG said, was because the federal government agreed to pay 100 percent of the repair costs for Katrina-related damage. “Because the state does not pay the project costs, it has no incentive to seek cost-effective replacement or repair solutions, close completed projects, or begin reducing the disaster workforce as work is completed.”

But Mark Riley, the director of Louisiana’s recovery office, says this criticism is simply measuring the wrong outcome. Completion is a bureaucratic process requiring the filing of final paperwork and auditing billings for each project — a labor-intensive process that Louisiana did not make an early priority.

Mississippi

Mississippi’s Gulf Coast communities were also devastated by Katrina, and that state is largely done with its recovery. The governor’s office reports that the state has paid out $2.8 billion of $3.2 billion FEMA has set aside for public reconstruction projects, and most of the remainder is for a $300 million reconstruction of the Biloxi sewer, water and gas system, which was declared a total loss.

Other than that project, which will take another two to three years, “we’ve pretty much completed everything else,” said Robert Latham, executive director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

But “it’s really unfair to compare Louisiana and Mississippi,” Latham said, because Mississippi was crushed by a hurricane that was gone in days while Louisiana was consumed by a resulting flood that inundated urban areas for weeks.