STAND AND EVACUATED NEW ORLEANS RESIDENTS RELEASE SHELTER CONDITIONS REPORT AND GAIN CITY SUPPORT FOR RESIDENT DEMANDS

CONTACT: SAKET SONI 504 8816610

STAND / NEW ORLEANS WORKERS' CENTER FOR RACIAL JUSTICE


STAND AND EVACUATED NEW ORLEANS RESIDENTS RELEASE SHELTER CONDITIONS REPORT AND GAIN CITY SUPPORT FOR RESIDENT DEMANDS

Never Again: Lessons from Louisiana's Gustav Evacuation

On a rainy Monday morning, less than one week since returning home from state-run warehouse shelters, over fifty evacuees with STAND and The New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice exposed Louisiana's differential shelter policy and the sub-human condition in press conference on the door step of City Hall. Upon the release of a comprehensive reports on Louisiana's warehouse shelters, entitled "Never Again: Lesson from Louisiana's Gustav Evacuation," STAND and residents demanded an end to the inhuman shelters condition and state policy that forces mother to bath their newborn in dirty portable toilet using bottle water.

As resident marched into city hall to delivering over 1500 petition signatures and the report, they demand their city Leaders Mayor Ray and Council Member Fielkow to take a public stance. What residents discovered where two different responses. Upon arrival to Mayor Ray Nagin office, residents and supporters were immediately met with close doors and arm security guards. While the mayoral staffs agreed to set up meeting with evacuees, Mayor Ray Nagin continued to avoid taking a public position by choosing to dine out at "Little Dizzy" instead of receiving New Orleans evacuees in a meeting. Still determined, Stand and New Orleans residents immediately met with City Council Member Arnold Fielkow and asked that he take a public stand on whether he support residents' demands to revoke the state differential treatment policy that forced the most vulnerable New Orleans' residents into inhumane shelter conditions.

As evacuated New Orleans residents took their demands to City Hall, they saw the beginnings of public recognition of the state's failures. Louisiana Department of Social Services Secretary Ann Williamson resigned and Governor Jindal finally publicly stated his disappointment with aspects of the Gustav Evacuation. They continue to put pressure on local and state elected officials to revoke the differential treatment sheltering policy, apologize, and involve affected residents.

The newly released report, Never Again: Lessons from Louisiana's Gustav Evacuation exposes Louisiana's differential treatment sheltering policy which directs that in disasters, the state shall segregate evacuees relying on city/ state transportation in state-run warehouse shelters separate from evacuees using their own cars. Pursuant to this policy, the state advisory system directs self-transporting evacuees to separate parish, Red Cross, and church shelters with better conditions. Those who evacuate by bus are primarily the residents who do not have the economic means (or the cars) to self-evacuate, including homeless residents, public housing residents, low-wage workers, low-income renters, and their families – almost all African American.

This report's findings are based on assessments of the state-run warehouse shelters and extensive interviews of hundreds of affected residents. The findings expose startling inequity. In the Gustav evacuation, the state's differential treatment policy subjected the most vulnerable state residents to extremely inhumane shelter conditions. In each of the four state-run warehouse shelters, over a thousand evacuees were housed in a single large one-room space. Women, infants, children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled were all using the same space, without privacy, and sharing the same bathrooms – outdoor portable toilets. They had no access to running water inside the facilities. The only showers-- until close to the end of the evacuations-- were the portable toilets outside, in which mothers were washing themselves and their babies with bottled water. Residents had limited access to medical care, and no access to counselors or to news from the state about the hurricane and its aftermath.

KEY FINDINGS OF THE REPORT:

• As Gustav approached, the poorest communities had no choice but to place themselves in the hands of the state at their most vulnerable moment. They trusted that Louisiana's plan for evacuation, sheltering, and return was designed for their safety. Communities counted on the state for access to humanitarian relief in a time of disaster.

• The state's plan achieved the very opposite result. The Department of Social Services sheltering policy had profoundly inequitable impacts on the poorest evacuees – blocking them from humanitarian relief. The policy forced those who were worst off into the worst shelter conditions.

• The inequitable impacts persisted well beyond the disaster. The state policy drove residents into cumulative disadvantage: over the course of seven days, residents became poorer and sicker as a direct result of shelter treatment and conditions. As a result, residents returned home to New Orleans in greater economic disadvantage and more vulnerable that when they left.

• In large part these were residents who were already disadvantaged as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Three years after the breach of the levees, these residents were still profoundly experiencing displacement and poverty as the result of the failed governmental response to Katrina and its aftermath.

• These residents are now deeply unwilling to trust the state or to participate in future evacuations. Almost without exception, residents expressed their preference to risk staying even as a hurricane approaches rather than to evacuate into the deplorable and humiliating conditions they had to face during Gustav.


CONCLUSIONS:

• Louisiana Governor Jindal and DSS Sec. Williamson should revoke the differential treatment sheltering policy, apologize for the suffering it caused vulnerable residents, and direct DSS to work with directly affected communities and their representatives to develop a new sheltering policy.

• The state's new shelter plan must be based on principles of inclusion, access, and equity for poor and working class African Americans and for all communities in Louisiana.

• The state must include the directly affected communities-- those who have the hardest time evacuating-- in creating the plan for shelters during disaster.

• A state shelter plan must give the hardest-hit communities equal access to humanitarian relief during every phase of disaster-- because they need it the most.

• The state must ensure that the policy is equitable. The present differential treatment shelter policy plays out to proactively disadvantage poor and working class African Americans – whether by intention, or by impact. The state must instead adopt an equitable disaster policy that proactively advantages the poor by prioritizing them at the precise time that they are most vulnerable.