Hurricanes Katrina and Rita left a mess beyond destroyed houses and leveled neighborhoods in the Gulf Coast region. They ruined records, policies and inner workings of cities.
“It really is the forgotten part of the destruction,” University student Diana Pierson said.
Pierson was one of 11 students from the University School of Law who spent spring break doing free legal work in hurricane-wrecked areas of the Gulf Coast. Many of the students worked with evacuees, lawyers, local agencies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
They saw at least one person having her belongings given away during an eviction, FEMA workers poorly surveying which hurricane victims need federal aid, people staying in jail too long because their court documents were destroyed and defendants getting legal representation from overworked attorneys.
Law student Erin Fair said there is a huge clash between state and federal laws, especially about tenant-landlord regulations. The conflict is centered on who’s in charge of regulating policies and exactly what those policies are, Fair said.
“All the questions are really wide open and no one knows the policies,” said Fair, who went to her hometown of Pensicola, Fla., to work. She finished a master’s degree from Tulane University last summer and moved to Oregon three weeks before Katrina hit.
One woman Fair worked with had been living in a trailer provided by FEMA. She received a 30-day eviction notice. The woman did not receive notices after the first, so she remained in the trailer after the 30 days had expired. When she returned from a weekend out of town, she discovered that all of her possessions had been given to Goodwill Industries.
Fair helped the women figure out how to file a lawsuit against FEMA for violating tenant-landlord rules, which requires multiple notices of eviction leading up to the date, Fair said.
Adam Guenther, Will Macke and Faye Miller worked in the eastern Texas areas of Beaumont and Port Arthur, which were hit hard by Hurricane Rita. Guenther said that the people hired by FEMA “did a crappy job” in deciding who should receive aid in that area.
A final report released Thursday by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees said the flaws of FEMA are “too substantial to mend” and the agency should be dismantled and rebuilt, according to a report by The Washington Post.
Guenther worked with The Lone Star State Incident Management Team, an agency serving southeast Texas that compiles information and interviewing evacuees to better determine who should receive federal funding.
Attorneys for the Lone Star Team are currently putting together appeal cases for people who should have received federal funding but didn’t.
Pierson compiled a database of arrests for The Justice Center in New Orleans. Many criminals have been in jail too long, a violation of their constitutional rights, because their arrest records were lost, Pierson said. Her agenda, and that of the people she worked with, was to get those people out of jail.
One of the biggest problems in New Orleans right now is the lack of professionals working in the area, Pierson said. Because of a lack of attorneys, for example, one public defender had 21 first-degree murder cases when Pierson talked to him.
Lack of funds also affects FEMA, Fair said. Hurricane Ivan destroyed her parents’ neighborhood in 2004, and FEMA gave copious funds to rebuild the towns, resulting in a tight budget for the 2005 hurricane season. Fair said if the 2006 hurricane season is bad again, things will only get much worse.
Fair said she plans to continue visiting the Gulf Coast with University students to help sort things out, including a trip next winter. Some students are organizing a trip this summer.
The group of University students did some fundraising to help pay for trips, but most expenses came out of their own pockets, Fair said.
Guenther said he thinks it’s sad to see “Katrina fatigue,” becoming more lackadaisical with relief efforts, set in with people around the nation.
Pierson said that everyone she worked with, including numerous judges, agents and attorneys, were all very happy and thankful for the work she was doing.
“They’d tell me, ‘Go tell your friends to come down and help,’” Pierson said.

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