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By: raechal (follow this member)
Fri, 01/09/2009 - 01:00

A few days after Hurricane Katrina, I interviewed from south Louisiana who'd fled the storm for shelter at the Louisiana state fairgrounds in my hometown of Shreveport.

Strangely enough, because I'd spent so much time in vibrant New Orleans, I couldn't really comprehend the depth of the damage. But I snapped out of that way of thinking that day at the shelter when a man from Jefferson Parish told me in detail about how he'd tried for days to hunt down his adult daughter, but had no idea where she was — trapped in her home, also in Jefferson Parish, or probably worse, trapped in the Superdome?

"How old's your daughter?" I asked. She was my age. Suddenly, I saw my dad in this nameless guy sleeping on a cot in a coliseum. He had a real face wet with real tears, and I couldn't turn him off like I could CNN or NPR.

If you're still waiting for that moment, if you have any problems at all understanding just how catastrophic Hurricane Katrina was for the people of Louisiana and how much the city still struggles, you need only to watch PBS Frontline's The Old Man and the Storm. Producer June Cross spent an hour telling the story of one New Orleans family and its patriarch, Herbert Gettridge.

We watched as Herbert, age 82 when the story began in 2006, tried to rebuild a home on the land that his ancestors worked as slaves, a few blocks from the devastated Lower Ninth Ward. He slept in a house without electricity for what appeared to be months and wrangled with pages and pages of paperwork for a chunk of money from the government that he hoped would cover the gap between the amount his insurance company gave him and what his family home was worth.

All the while, Herbert's wife, Lydia Gettridge, was across the country in Wisconsin. His children were scattered, mostly in Louisiana and Texas. The separation from family was the worst, most heartbreaking part of the whole thing, family member after family member said.

He did all this, he said, because he had worked all his life to create the home Katrina ruined. He couldn't cut off his roots.

We heard about the government stuff, too, the disasters of the Road Home program, which is paid for by the federal government and run by Louisiana, and other parts of the botched response to the Gulf Coast. The late 2006 report from the Government Accountability Office that a lot of the federal money for help was wasted. The painfully slow process of distributing the money set aside for help, which meant that by early 2007, just 2.5 percent of applications for Road Home money had been funded, according to Frontline's timeline.

But as depressing as it was, the show somehow made me a little optimistic, because someone outside of New Orleans and the other affected areas was still paying attention. It made me hopeful that we won't get so caught up in the politics of the day that we forget about people like Herbert Gettridge and about government disasters like Katrina. It's up to us to keep reminding our government and the people high in its ranks that they screwed up and still have a mess to fix, just as Cross has done.

 Raechal Leone is The Loop's senior editor. She writes the Inside The Loop blog.