Political Mess May Outlast the Flood

In Louisiana, the Political Mess May Outlast the Flood

A feud over federal relief looms in Washington, but first the country just needs to pay attention.

By Andrew Vanacore

Imagine everything you own, dunked in dirty water and mounded on the curb outside your house. Old VHS tapes, the piano, the wardrobe, the family photos. The water came up so quickly you couldn’t save anything. Now, imagine the same thing at the house next door and the one across the street. All the way down the block and the block after that. Ramparts of debris, piled head-high in front of every home. That’s how things look right now across whole neighborhoods of Baton Rouge and the surrounding counties, or parishes as they’re called in Louisiana. It’s all the more breathtaking because it wasn’t supposed to happen here. This isn’t below-sea level New Orleans caught in the path of a hurricane. This is the high-and-dry state capital. This is where people fled after Hurricane Katrina, and, ironically, where many stayed, thinking they were finally out of harm’s way.

And yet here we are, with 13 dead and perhaps 40,000 homes damaged (the estimate keeps climbing) after a storm that dropped more than 20 inches of rain in some areas over the space of a few days. Meteorologists pegged the odds of seeing an event like that in a given year at between 0.2 percent and 0.1 percent—a once-in-a-1,000-years storm. Nearly a third of the state has been declared a federal disaster area.

Two weeks after the rain finally stopped and the flooding began to recede, a reflexive need to help has taken hold. Co-workers, church groups and perfect strangers are still turning up to help stunned flood survivors tear out sodden drywall and insulation. Neighbors downriver, who have done all this before, are eager to lend a hand. As are the nonprofit groups that sprang up in Katrina’s wake, with intimate knowledge to pass along about battling the red tape of the recovery bureaucracy and the black mold endemic to water-logged houses. While the flood was still rising around people’s homes, a fleet of good Samaritans with fishing boats, known locally as the Cajun Navy, came to the rescue. In Lafayette, a city to the west of Baton Rouge where low-lying neighborhoods had been swallowed by the Vermilion River, I ran into a couple who had driven a half hour from Opelousas with a boat in tow. They were sick of watching the disaster unfold on Facebook and the TV news. “People need help,” they said.

But this kind of goodwill is going to do only so much for beleaguered flood survivors. And that’s where the politics of America’s latest natural disaster will get dicey. Start with the local officials in charge of hauling off all of that putrid debris—the contractor in charge in Baton Rouge says he has enough trucks; we’ll see—and go all the way up to Louisiana’s new Democratic governor and the Washington lawmakers holding on to the federal purse strings. Data from the local chamber of commerce show there were twice as many homes inundated in the region as active flood insurance policies. Local officials estimate that nearly half the homes that took on water in East Baton Rouge weren’t even inside areas where mortgage companies require flood coverage. If these people are going to fully recover, it will be up to state or federal taxpayers to bear the burden.

First, the good news. The man in charge at the Federal Emergency Management Agency these days is Craig Fugate and not Michael Brown, who became the face of a botched federal response after Katrina. Brown still argues—as recently as last year in this magazine, actually—that he was not to blame for the ghastly suffering that took place in the Superdome and elsewhere, saying the important decisions were out of his hands. But it’s hard not to feel better about the new guy’s track record. We learned in 2005 after Katrina that Brown, before his time at FEMA, used to work for the International Arabian Horse Association. Fugate’s résumé is basically just a list of dozens of storms that he helped respond to while he was an emergency manager in Florida, first at the county level and then for the state. So far, he hasn’t had a “heck of a job” moment damage his career the way Brown did.

A speedy, competent response on Fugate’s part may redound to the benefit of his boss, although President Obama has already caught criticism for deciding not to cut short his vacation when the flooding hit. Donald Trump beat him to the ground and got his picture taken handing out supplies from the back of a truck. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who represents a congressional district near New Orleans, promptly issued a statement calling on Hillary Clinton to make the trip as well. And he made sure to point out that Clinton at the time was on a fundraising swing through “Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Silicon Valley and the Hamptons.”

Scalise may have more of a role to play than issuing partisan news releases, however, which brings us to some of the problems Louisiana might run into should the state come to Congress for extra recovery dollars. The FEMA response is just a first step. The agency helps shelter flood survivors in the immediate aftermath of a storm and pays for some other incidentals. But up to only about $33,000 per person. The average is typically much less, say around $8,000. That won’t cut it for people trying to replace a house without flood insurance. So it may not help that Scalise and two of his Republican colleagues from Louisiana voted against the $50 billion that Congress set aside for survivors of Hurricane Sandy in early 2013. They opposed the Sandy bill on grounds that it was stuffed with “pork barrel” spending unrelated to the storm. And granted, the package certainly did stretch the definition of emergency aid. Millions of dollars were set aside, for example, for projects aimed at mitigating the impact of future storms. And conservative groups were aghast at the $2 million earmarked to repair the roof at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

But the dust-up also reflected a new political reality. In 2005, a similarly-sized aid package for the states walloped by Katrina passed the Senate with a unanimous vote and drew opposition from only 11 House members. President George W. Bush was signing it a little more than a week after the storm. The states hit by Sandy, which killed 117 and did $70 billion in damage, had to wait three months, in part because Scalise and others pushed amendments to offset the relief by cutting other areas of federal spending. More than 200 Republicans voted against the final bill. (A year later, the conservative Heritage Foundation came out with a report bemoaning how often the states have come to rely on the federal government to pick up the recovery bill, and recommending the feds cut back on how frequently they declare official disasters.) No one from the New York or New Jersey delegations is threatening to derail future aid for Louisiana, but things could certainly get awkward in the next few months. Our state’s Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, has already presented Obama with a wish list, and it includes forgiveness for the money the state owes the federal government for improvements to the levees around New Orleans.

Here’s another potential problem for Louisiana. By any definition, the flooding that hit Baton Rouge and other parts of Louisiana was a major event. But the storm—there doesn’t seem to be another way to put it—has a bit of an image problem. For starters, it didn’t have a name. Andrew, Sandy, Katrina. These are monikers that strike fear, at least for people of a certain age from certain parts of the country. What happened in Louisiana this month was an anonymous rainstorm. There was no edge-of-your-seat buildup as it crossed the Gulf of Mexico and took aim. There were no dramatic cable news images of sandbags being dropped into a breach in the levee. The New York Times got a scolding from its own public editor for failing to devote more resources to the coverage. It must have been hard for the rest of the country to sense any kind of emergency going on in the first place. And it will be the rest of the country devoting tax dollars to the cleanup, if Congress steps in.

Which, as anyone who lived through Katrina or Sandy knows, is only the start of what can go wrong. If Louisiana’s delegation in Washington steps up and wrangles the extra money, it’s likely to be the state’s governor who handles getting it to the right people, a job that could be legacy-defining for him. Edwards pulled off a stunning upset to win office last year. He is the only Democrat elected to statewide office in Louisiana, a state whose shade of red has been deepening for a generation. And so far, his time in office has been devoted almost entirely to the state’s woeful budget situation. Now, the governor’s office is likely to be consumed by recovery efforts for the foreseeable future. The potential pitfalls are legion, and familiar in New Orleans: contractor fraud, grants that don’t cover the real cost of repairs, confusion about the strings attached to federal dollars. Louisiana’s last Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco, was widely criticized for the headaches that plagued the Road Home program after Katrina. She declined to even run for a second term. If Edwards wants one, he may have to do better.