The hitch? The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s rules allow the city to rebuild the St. Bernard sewers only as they were, not to upgrade them into a more modern system that officials want. This regulation on disaster assistance—which authorizes work “on the basis of the design of such facilities as they existed immediately prior to the disaster”—is hindering rebuilding efforts. “President Bush came down here and said we were going to bring back the Gulf Coast … better than before,” Rodriguez says. “I think he forgot to talk to FEMA.”
FEMA, which got slammed for its failings in early relief efforts, says it’s doing the best it can. The agency has put up some $5 billion to help rebuild the state’s education, criminal justice and health-care systems, as well as its roads. The St. Bernard Parish case “is really an example of what we’re seeing in a lot of places,” says Gil Jamieson, FEMA’s deputy administrator for Gulf Coast recovery. “Communities are looking at the public assistance program as a pot of gold.”
Such division suggests that efforts to continue to rebuild Louisiana after Katrina are even more complicated than anyone could’ve imagined. Local officials complain bitterly that FEMA is still a bureaucratic mess. In the first year after Katrina, the agency sent a new group of representatives to St. Bernard nearly every six weeks. Linda Collier has worked for two of the three contractors paid to pump the parish sewers. She recalls one FEMA employee so inexperienced he didn’t know what a sewer truck looked like. He followed “an oil tanker back to the fuel company, demanding to know where his [FEMA] placards were,” Collier says.
Another point of contention: cost estimates. A FEMA employee must sign off on the details of any project costing more than $55,000 in federal funds. “They’ll come in and say something costs $4 million that costs $40 million,” says Rep. Charlie Melancon, whose district includes St. Bernard. When FEMA does sign off on a project, it doesn’t distribute the money directly. It “obligates” it to the state, which releases funds to local governments. The process is impractical and sometimes petty, according to Linda Daly, who manages St. Bernard’s water and sewer systems: “We put in one sewer using 4-inch pipe where the work order called for 3-inch [pipe] and the state wouldn’t pay.” FEMA says it has to guard against corruption. “In disasters, there are stories of unscrupulous contractors coming in who know how to work the system,” says John Connolly, who manages FEMA’s Louisiana public-assistance projects. But is the system even working?
