New Orleans Housing Faces Another Flood Wipeout

19 September 2008

New Orleans-Many New Orleans residents who lost homes to Hurricane Katrina could have that deja vu feeling in the future.

"USA Today" reports at least 23-hundred homes destroyed by the wind and flooding of Katrina have been rebuilt "on the cheap," skirting requirements that newly-built homes be elevated.

Larry Larson, head of the Association of State Floodplain Managers says if homeowners don't elevate, "it's the federal taxpayers who pay to fix it, time after time." The hurricanes of 2005 caused so much damage that taxpayers were forced to pony up 20-billion dollars to bail out the federal flood insurance program.

Homeowners themselves aren't necessarily to blame.

A 2006 report by the Homeland Security Department's inspector general found after Katrina, local officials would lower damage estimates so they'd fall just below a level requiring elevation for a rebuild.

Even homeowners who want to raise their homes are having difficulty.

Louisiana has spent less than ten-percent of the one-and-three-quarter-billion dollars the federal government gave the state to elevate homes damaged by storms three years ago.

K.C. King who lives in a previously flooded section of New Orleans says about 125 of his neighbors have rebuilt but only about a dozen raised their homes.
he says, quote, "if that's not a portrait of failure, I don't know what is."