Fall Bulletin 2006 Vol. 22, No.3

Articles:

Introduction
The Gulf: One Year Later
Plenty Belize GATE Program
News from Plenty Austin (includes an update on Central American projects)
Kids to the Country
Growing Plenty

After more than a year of providing relief and support to hurricane Katrina victims in the Gulf, we’re continually amazed by the inability of government agencies to meet their obligations. The more we learn about where the responsibilities for this disaster lie, the more we realize that although Katrina was a big and powerful hurricane, it should not have been the “worst natural disaster” in US history, and it wasn’t all that “natural.” The shrinking of the wetlands and barrier islands has left the coast extremely vulnerable to storms while, at the same time, contributing to the intensity of the storms that do reach the coast. Environmentalists, ecologists, and coastal land management experts have been warning of the consequences for decades. Whenever there was a choice between wetlands protection or more development, development always won.

The levee protecting New Orleans failed because, as we now know, they weren’t even built to withstand a category 1 hurricane, much less the category 3 as was claimed by the Army Corps of Engineers. They should be built to withstand category 5. Most of the damage to New Orleans was caused by flooding and the flooding was the direct result of levee failure. The levees simply collapsed at several places from the surge of the water, and 85% of the City of New Orleans was flooded. Human error.

All the government agencies weren’t completely inept. The Coast Guard and Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries did their jobs and saved hundreds of lives, as did numerous public servants, police, firemen, and officials of all stripes along with hundreds of private citizens who were in the right place at the right time to rescue people who otherwise might have drowned. The Mayor of New Orleans has admitted he should have ordered a mandatory evacuation at least 24 hours sooner than he actually did. And where were the hundreds of buses and drivers and police to manage and perform the evacuation of people who had neither the means nor the ability to evacuate on their own? Inexcusable.

Even now, whole sections of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the City of New Orleans look like hurricane Katrina and the flood must have happened very recently. Trash in the streets, trees on houses, cars in trees, block after block after block of ghost neighborhoods, empty apartment buildings, abandoned shopping malls, and collapsed houses. Inexcusable.

When Plenty went into the Gulf in the beginning of September 2005, we said we would simply try and fill in the cracks left from the work by the big relief agencies. We soon discovered the “big relief agencies” weren’t able to begin to cope with the size of the disaster. There weren’t just cracks. There were canyons to be filled. Over the next six months we were sending down our school bus, along with van loads of volunteers and relief supplies, medicines, food, water, cleaning supplies. Plenty was just one of hundreds of small groups from communities across the US who were doing the same thing, and we were only scratching the service. At one point the rock group, Nine Inch Nails, sent a fully loaded semi trailer to the Veterans for Peace Camp where we were based and those supplies were gone within a couple of days. Today, in September 2006, thousands of residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and New Orleans still need food and potable water because basic services have not been restored. Jobs are scarce. Accessible health care is less than half of what is was. Too many people are living in uninhabitable, moldy houses and flimsy, formaldehyde-spewing FEMA trailers.

Plenty is still bringing food and relief supplies to the Gulf region but over the past four months most of our effort has been providing skilled labor to help people repair their homes (cleaning, roofing, plumbing, sheetrocking etc.) so they can move back in.

Recent Slidell camp crew

We want to acknowledge the generous grants to Plenty from Veterans for Peace, the Philip R. Jonsson Foundation, DreamCatchers, and the Rick Foundation. Thanks to the partnerships with United Peace Relief, Common Ground, Emergency Communities and Bayou Liberty Relief. Thanks to Mike Wells and Daniel Evans Farkas for your vehicles and Kevin Curley for the use of your land. Thanks to the hundreds of individual Plenty donors that helped to make Plenty’s Katrina Relief Project the most highly funded Plenty project for one year in our history: more than $100,000.

As we came up to the one-year anniversary of Katrina our funding for the relief work began to dry up and we were looking at the possibility of shutting it down. We decided to produce a DVD which focused on the efforts and experiences of grassroots volunteers including some of our own. (As of Oct. 1st the DVD has helped raise over $10,000. Watch 5 minutes of the DVD here). The truth is, it has been the citizen volunteers, motivated by conscience and compassion, who have made the most difference for the most people affected by Katrina and we want to thank them and honor them. Due to recent new pledges and donations, Plenty’s work in the Gulf will continue.