Federal Assistance Post Katrina

By Hemant G.

Hurricane Katrina is considered to be the most devastating Hurricanes that hit the United States. It was recorded as the sixth strongest hurricane. The Katrina hurricane started in the month of august during the Atlantic Hurricane Season 2005 and the north central Gulf Coast of US got totally destroyed. The catastrophic effects on New Orleans and Mississippi were the most notable coverage made by the media. Katrina formed on Bahamas during august and den later it was formed on Florida leading to some floods but it strengthened as it reached the Gulf of Mexico and then caused lot of destruction there which made a record.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency started the Disaster recovery program even before the storm. When the storm made landfall a number of volunteers started providing assistance to the local residents and the ones coming from New Orleans and other surrounding areas. The Coast guard rescued about thirty five thousand people out of sixty thousand who got trapped in New Orleans.

About seven lakh families and individuals got housing assistance form the Federal Emergency Management Agency. However there was severe shortage of housing in the New Orleans as only one fifth of the trailers requested by them were supplied there. In addition to all this the Federal Emergency Management Agency also managed the hotel cost for over twelve thousand people who lost their homes during February 2006 when a deadline was declared to end the hotel cost coverage. Even after the deadline was over these individuals were eligible to receive assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency which they could use in fixing their destroyed homes or for paying the rents of any apartments and FEMA stopped paying for the hotel bills directly. Even in July 2006 as many as one lakh people were staying in the trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Two weeks after the storm got over nearly half of the states were trying to provide shelter to people who lost their homes in the storm. After 4 weeks these individuals got registered in fifty states and around eighteen thousand zip codes which is approximately fifty percent of the nations post codes. After the storm most of the evacuees stayed within 250 miles but few of them moved to areas over 750 miles away and some moved to Houston.

Thus the FIMA did a spectacular job in providing assistance to the individuals who lost there everything in the storm.