After Baton Rouge Flooding, Learning Lessons From New Orleans

Those lessons include how to get money most efficiently from the federal government and ways to avoid leaving thousands of people for years in temporary shelters, like the notorious Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, as the rebuilding proceeds.

News Story (Louisiana)

Campbell Robertson, Alan Blinder
New York Times (NYT)
August 22, 2016
READ THE FULL STORY HERE

Tags: Hurricane Katrina

Organizations mentioned/involved: Southeast Louisiana Legal Services (SLLS)

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“The kinds of things you’re going to see early on are things like people facing a potential eviction because housing is scarce,” said Laura Tuggle, the executive director of the Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, which helped the poor after Hurricane Katrina.

She ticked off some more of what she expected: sudden sharp rises in rent, withheld deposits, increases in domestic violence for those stuck in close quarters and, for homeowners, complicated title problems that could jeopardize access to assistance. All of these are matters that lawyers with her group had to tackle after Hurricane Katrina. She has already gotten calls about some of them this time.

“You know what needs to be done,” Ms. Tuggle said, recalling the months during which she was unable to get back to her home in New Orleans in 2005. “Because we’ve been there.”