When disaster strikes and creates multitudes of people in need, many of us respond with charitable donations, while others gather up useful items to send. A few put their home lives on hold and head out to offer, in person, what help they can.
It’s been that kind of year — the kind where you put your home life on hold — for Portola Valley resident Linda Weil. Between November and the first days of August, she was on the ground on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the wake of the destructive fury of Hurricane Katrina.
Working as a paid consultant, she focused on doing what she knows how to do best: helping people, through their local governments, make decisions about the future of their communities.
It’s work still very much in progress, given the level of devastation that occurred a year ago.
The eye of the storm, packing 130-mph winds, missed New Orleans and came ashore August 29 in Hancock County, Mississippi. A surge of sea water estimated at 25 to 30 feet high charged through the seaside cities of Bay St. Louis and Waveland, leaving a high-water mark several miles inland.
Homes, businesses and buildings were wiped away as if they’d never been there, Ms. Weil said, leaving neighborhoods of empty concrete slabs, nameless streets and trees denuded of leaves and re-foliated with debris.
A year later, many of those neighborhoods have changed only in that the debris is gone and the boats that survived are back in the water, she said. The communities, including their officials and decision makers, have been staggered by the cumulative loss of property- and sales-tax bases and damage to sewers, water lines, public buildings and other infrastructure.
Ranking priorities has been everything, said Ms. Weil, whose background is in public administration. Which utility should be repaired first? Where are residents without homes going to live? In light of new flood-zone maps, should they move or rebuild? How do you jump-start the local economy? Which state and federal agencies have money to give? And how does one get it?
Coming up with answers for such questions after a natural disaster is a bit new for Ms. Weil, but is in keeping with a 20-year career of steering communities through controversial and difficult projects involving public and private interests.
(One such project is now under way in Portola Valley. During the spring of 2004, Ms. Weil coordinated a series of community meetings meant to engage a divided public in shaping a new Town Center complex.)
She recently logged her ninth month in Mississippi, including six months in Hancock County on a subcontract to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where her assignments were to assess community needs after the storm and help develop a long-term recovery plan.
More recently, she worked with the nonprofit Living Cities to help the city of Biloxi develop a balanced rebuilding strategy amid the competing interests of hard-hit residents — Katrina destroyed or damaged 80 percent of Biloxi’s housing — and the gambling industry, an important and growing element of the local economy.
The Almanac caught up with Ms. Weil in early July during a break at home in Portola Valley.
Ready and willing
Ms. Weil went to Mississippi in November in response to an offer from FEMA via her employer, San Francisco-based CirclePoint Consulting, to be an agency liaison for the damaged communities in Hancock County at her current salary and benefits. The catch: She had to be there in 48 hours and stay for at least 90 days.In accepting the job, she had to quickly find colleagues to take over her current assignments and wrap up her life at home, including finding someone to care for her dog. Leaving on short notice “is a pretty tall order when you think about working (there) full time,” she said.
Ms. Weil’s background includes six years as an independent planning consultant in Wyoming, where she helped build community and legislative support for several large projects, including a 160-mile scenic highway and a 30-acre redevelopment project.
In the Bay Area, besides Portola Valley’s Town Center, she’s done community outreach involving desalinization plants, reservoir expansion, and redevelopment of the Oakland waterfront.
Ms. Weil, 50, has a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Southern California, and is trained in mediation. She served as a planning commissioner in Wyoming’s Teton County in 2001.
A fine mess
She recalled her arrival in southern Mississippi in a rental car. Nails littered the roads, traffic lights were out and debris festooned every tree, she said.“It was as if someone went to a landfill, had picked up everything … and strewn it over 70 miles of Mississippi coast, particularly in Hancock County,” she said. “I will never forget, that at about month seven (February), I saw a boat on the water. It’s so nice to see a boat on the water and not on land. … It’s nice to see signs of normalcy.”
New Orleans got most of the press coverage, she said. “People don’t realize that Mississippi was hit very hard and that Hancock County, in particular, is drowning in the disaster,” she said. “They are financially drowning.”
Her assessment resonated with that of Ryan LaFontaine, a beat reporter who covers Hancock County for the Sun Herald newspaper. He spoke with the Almanac in late July.
“More than half of the tax income in Hancock County was destroyed,” he said. The county is expected to be short $2 million for the 2005-06 budget year and $15 million for 2006-07, he said.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst, Mr. LaFontaine called the disaster a 10. “It’s still 10,” he added. “The same houses are gone, the same amount of trees are gone, the same buildings are gone. A whole section of businesses and restaurants are gone.”
For blocks and blocks in the seaside city of Waveland, where Mr. LaFontaine lives, “there are no sheds, no houses, no anything,” he said. “Just concrete driveways and slabs where houses used to be. Just streets.”
Sewer and water lines remain unrepaired or temporary; some public employees, including police and firefighters, have sought work elsewhere; and some public buildings and their records are just gone, Mr. LaFontaine said. In Waveland, only a staircase remains of the two-story Town Hall.
Grocery stores have not reopened, he said. A 24-hour WalMart, always crowded, is the only option for miles. The community is exquisitely attuned to the opening of a new restaurant, he said.
Talking it through
In representing FEMA’s Long Term Community Recovery program, Ms. Weil was a guide in understanding federal assistance options for overwhelmed elected officials and community decision makers.“It was very frenetic, the first couple of months,” she said. “I was shocked at how many people were still in tents and didn’t have emergency housing. (It) went on for months, and it was hard to believe. … Logistics in this kind of situation (are) hugely important.”
How to provide her guidance? Writing, whether by e-mail or in a report, was “ridiculous” given the time pressures, she said. She relied on talking.
She said she spent most of her days in meetings, and they ran the gamut. The head of a chamber of commerce wanted advice on finding funding to restart small businesses; recovery efforts were being duplicated, so she formed a group with the mission of avoiding that; city councils and the county Board of Supervisors needed advice on FEMA procedures; officials turned to her to explain new FEMA flood maps showing where it was OK to rebuild and where it was not.
“We were constantly in conversations having to do with infrastructure, housing, public services,” she said.
“There is a real challenge within FEMA in that their programs that are helpful … each of those programs is implemented in a stove-pipe way,” she said. People working in one FEMA program, perhaps fearful of being misinformed, won’t talk about another FEMA program, she said.
“There are not enough people looking at the big picture and creating an atmosphere of cooperation,” she said. “Everything is well-intentioned, but it turns into dysfunction at a certain point. I believe that, not everyone, but a lot of (FEMA) people suffer from that culture, that lack of cooperation and the desire to have complete control over their turf.”
Finding traction
Federal money is available to help rebuild, Ms. Weil said, but it’s often delayed and, with the damage to the tax-base, local governments are hamstrung by their lack of matching funds — sometimes as little as 10 percent — to qualify for federal money.“To have some financial stability for the next 12 to 14 months would be huge,” she said. “It’s a chicken-and-egg thing. To build homes, you need infrastructure. You need water and power. There are limited jobs. You need a home to stay in while you’re working. … This is so complicated. There are so many levels to it. You feel behind in every area. People want to rebuild. People want to repair. People want to come home.”
Such desires are now complicated by new flood-zone maps, new construction guidelines for hurricane zones, and likely steep insurance rate increases, not to mention the prospect of mortgages for people who had been living in mortgage-free homes handed down over generations.
“These are people who have lost everything,” Ms. Weil said. “People don’t know whether (their) neighborhood is going to come back. Are they going to be the only house there? … They’re having to make big decisions when most people are still suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and they are living in 18-foot travel trailers.”
About 37,400 Mississippi families were still in trailers in July, not counting families that have relocated to cruise ships, apartments and hotels, said Mr. LaFontaine, the Sun Herald reporter.
The U.S. Census Bureau lists the 2003 median income in Hancock County at $36,005 versus $43,318 nationally, with 15.7 percent of families living below the poverty line versus 12.5 percent nationally.
Asked for her impression after eight months, Ms. Weil replied: “I find it tremendously rewarding and tremendously challenging, and so I’ve chosen to continue working down there at least for the next year.”
And her emotional state? “Every once in a while, I’d be driving to the emergency operations center and I’d just start crying,” she said. “The problems are so huge.”
A December break back in Portola Valley was difficult. “It’s like you have a terminally ill patient and it’s like you’ve left them,” she said. “You’re constantly thinking of them.”
INFORMATION
To assist Hancock County in recovering from Hurricane Katrina, call or send e-mail to:• Tish Williams, Hancock Community Development Foundation, (228) 216-9048 or tish@hancockchamber.org.
• Jenell Tompkins, Hancock County Disaster Recovery Fund, (228) 861-2197 or jvt@co.hancock.ms.us.
• Buz Olsen, Bay St. Louis Katrina Relief Fund, (228) 493-2329 or stofbaystlouis@bellsouth.net.
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