How is New Orleans Faring?

August 18, 2009

Times Picayune slide show Video essays exploring the regrowth of Neighborhoods in New Orleans

In post-Katrina New Orleans, the question is asked “How did you fare?” This past Sunday a colleague asked me about New Orleans on my Facebook page:

How much longer until everything is completely normal around there, or has the definition of normal changed for them?

As an outsider to the Katrina disaster environment, having moved here 14 months ago, I wrote my response the next day:

New Orleans is where you'd expect it to be four years after total devastation. Improvements are visible everywhere, as are neglected and stalled projects. According to the post office 76% of area addresses are receiving mail, which means 25% of addresses are still to be inhabited. Some of the uninhabited addresses are empty lots which once housed families.

Has the definition of normal changed? Absolutely. Normal is

• people who still miss their neighbors who have not returned as well as those who have adapted,
• businesses once favored by the locals which are gone as well as new businesses which have taken their place,
• neighborhoods which have not fully returned to pre-Katrina status as well as neighborhoods that appear intact; and
• long-time residents who enjoy the company of people who have moved here post-Katrina.

In my opinion, New Orleans is exciting, vibrant, and sometimes sad and tired. Just wait til the next festival, though, when the fun infects everyone! The jubilant spirit is what New Orleans is all about.

My positive outlook is balanced by recent involvement with the Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership (GNODRP) and GNODRP Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (GNODRP VOAD). The GNODRP mission is “to regionally support long term recovery and preparedness”. Long term recovery for some New Orleans’ residents is mired in bureaucracy and financial woe. GNODRP member agencies are addressing these woes.

Through GNODRP and GNODRP VOAD, I have learned of several programs which are on the cutting edge of emergency management policy and practice. These include:

Business Emergency Operating Center (BEOC): The Louisiana BEOC follows New Jersey in the development of a business operations center. (New Jersey published its BEOC Concept Overview in February 2008.) This cutting edge collaboration provides multiple benefits:

• information exchange
• large scale donations management: e.g., tarps, food, water, ice, sandbags,
• fulfillment of mission requests
  
  

Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI): (quoted from their website) CARRI is developing a common framework including processes and tools that communities and regions can use to assess their resilience, determine a resilience vision and take concrete actions that will have positive economic and social results. The framework will be a national framework usable across the country but flexible enough to recognize the great diversity of the United States, its citizens, institutions, governments and organizations.

Case Management: Since my early days in emergency management, I have believed that case management is critical for those who must negotiate the plethora of programs to find their way back to some sense of a normal family life. Three pilot programs are currently underway. I will learn more about each one and share information with you at a later date.

As I learn more, future blogs will go into more detail about GNODRP, GNODRP VOAD, BEOC ,CARRI and case management . If you have knowledge of any of these programs, please share with me through this blog or through Facebook so that we all may learn.