In the wake of a financial meltdown at the hands of greedy creditors, lenders and consumers, Congress has demonstrated unusual speed and cooperation in putting together a $700 billion bailout bill. In the coming weeks, a trillion dollars may be allocated toward economic recovery. In eastern Texas, far from the boom and bust of Wall Street and the marble halls of Congress, it’s taken months for funds to arrive, though the amount of money is much smaller.
This past Intersession, 17 Princeton students, myself included, traveled to Galveston on a Student Volunteers Council trip to help in the recovery effort. I imagined a bunch of egghead Princeton students awkwardly wielding hammers, building a house while discussing the irony of structuralism.
When we arrived in Galveston, the once vibrant city had become a ghost town. There were no houses to be built.
The hurricane left a series of strange miracles. Entire housing developments were sucked into the sea save for a solitary shack, completely untouched in a field of broken glass and garbage bags strewn in trees. Shops were closed, houses boarded up and abandoned, and sidewalks torn apart. There was nowhere to build because houses — or what was left of them — were crumpled heaps in garbage-filled lots. A hotel propped on massive concrete stilts at the end of a pier appeared intact in the front, but giant chunks of concrete had fallen off the sides of the building. There was more work to do than any of us expected.
Instead of helping rebuild, we helped citizens perform simple tasks like cleaning out garages, tearing down sheds, moving debris and gutting a house. We were finishing what the hurricane started and, in the process, helping people find out just how bad the storm hit them. After reading “WE SHOOT LOOTERS” spray-painted on the siding of a boarded-up house, I wondered: Where are the people to fill this empty city?
During a brief meeting with an assistant city supervisor, we learned of the problems facing the citizens of Galveston and other nearby regions devastated by flooding. In her assessment, the state was prepared for the evacuation but woefully unprepared to handle the recovery effort. It took nearly two weeks for sewage and water to become fully operational, and houses sat molding in the mean time. The Hurricane Ike Impact Report, a collaboration between 17 federal and state agencies, estimated that the total damage would cost billions of dollars. But only $800 million was allocated to the entire region, so the Galveston government is currently fighting with other equally distressed cities to provide housing and aid economic development.
With a demonstrated need in the tens of billions and a lackluster federal response of less than $1 billion, the prospect of a full recovery is bleak. It has taken over four months for the paltry amount to be allocated, and it will take months more before that money is actually spent on citizens. The housing bubble and risky investments by financial firms were addressed in a matter of weeks. The people of Galveston, three years after the governments’ catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina, are part of an increasing pattern of people who are marooned by the federal government.
The lack of interest in a long-term recovery is not only a failure of politicians and bureaucrats but also of citizens who have not made disaster recovery a national priority. Some of the slow response is due to legitimate discussions about where to rebuild, but cities like Galveston, unlike below-sea-level New Orleans, rarely see serious flooding. Without public interest in rebuilding the towns, economies and lives destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Ike, the many affected Americans will be left behind.
Our campus has been swept up in the financial storm but has forgotten about the victims of actual storms. Lunchroom discussions and Daily Princetonian articles focus on the end of the financial world. But outside our narrow purview lies real catastrophe that is difficult to quantify.
My brief trip to Galveston highlighted the massive scale and scope of devastation wrought by natural disasters. Closed schools, bankrupted businesses, abandoned homes and families living out of suitcases all stood as reminders that hurricanes may come and go in a matter of hours, but the damage left behind them lingers for months and years.
Michael Collins is a sophomore from Glastonbury, Conn. He can be reached at mjcollin@princeton.edu. For more coverage, see Collins's related audio slideshow.
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