Second Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

Today marks the 2^nd anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. Since that landfall made such a large impact on the Bay Area Food Bank, our Mississippi service area and the rest of America in the weeks that followed, I figured it was a good theme to lead off my September update. Today lots of media will cover the recovery efforts still going on, work still waiting to be done and work already completed. It will largely focus on possessions lost and possessions gained and ignore all the things it took to get to the state we are today. Not so this time two years ago. In the weeks following landfall people worried about just finding a place to sleep, a meal to eat and a way to contact loved ones. People thanked strangers for simple gestures of kindness and shared whatever they had with others. Today arguments swirl around the level of preparedness individuals should be expected to take, the height to which homes in the flood plain should be elevated, whether insurance, the government or the individual should pay for damage and how much money should be spent protecting homes built on barrier islands, the city of New Orleans and/or the coastal swamp communities of Louisiana.

For me the good news is that our job at the Food Bank does not involve working among the anger over not being helped enough, arguments about placing blame, legal decisions related to blame or the task of finding the billions of dollars for a government solution that may or may not be government’s to solve. We deal in stage one- getting food to people who need it now. That’s no small challenge in itself and involves preparation at our warehouse, the organizations we support and among the staff of America’s Second Harvest-The Nation’s Food Bank Network. The millions upon millions of pounds of food distributed in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita allowed people to move beyond a simple need for food and shelter. We can be proud of the effort thousands of people undertook in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with no expectation of gain, except the satisfaction of helping someone who needed help. Having spent the past 15 months working with members of the national staff and staffs from other Food Banks on improvements in our network disaster plan, I can say that America’s Second Harvest is ready to help again if needed. The construction at our Theodore warehouse undertaken to expand our capacity along with the 20 emergency response pantries we’ve placed along the Alabama and Mississippi Coast are the Bay Area Food Bank’s effort to do more, faster in the future. Today may be a time when most look back. We’re focused on looking forward, continuing our day to day mission while preparing for a future storm. No major depressions forming in the tropics today, that’s good news!