After the Storm: Rebuilding the Rural Gulf Coast

Short Synopsis

The goal of this project is to ensure that the experiences of rural Gulf Coast communities inform private and public institutions as they consider issues such as community development, disaster recovery, and neighborhood investment. The project seeks to keep the stories and voices of the rural Gulf Coast in the public eye so that 1) these communities receive due consideration in philanthropic and governmental policy decisions and 2) so the nation as a whole may benefit from the lessons and experiences of the rural Gulf Coast.

Description/Treatment

“After the Storm” is a set of film documentary programs and products designed to tell a broad public the layered story of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and their aftermath along the 300-mile rural Gulf Coast.  

"Be real gentle with the debris, because that debris is people's lives.  It's the bronze baby shoes, it's the wedding pictures, the china that great-grandmother gave, and it was the crucifix you got at First Communion."  Sister Martha Milner, Mercy Housing, Gulfport MS 

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita provided a one-two punch for communities stretching across the rural Gulf Coast. Most of the world knows the devastating story of New Orleans, the broken levees, the Superdome, floating bodies, and the cataclysm that followed.  What few know is that that the storms uprooted and injured one million more coastal residents living in hundreds of small towns and villages. Along the way, it created the largest American Diaspora since the Great Depression.

Nearly four years ago a pair of social-justice organizations working on coastal recovery contacted the Center for Rural Strategies to ask that we come with our cameras and tell the rural story that no news outlet was covering. Our terms were that if we came we would produce documentary segments that look at the full force of the storms and their aftermath, warts and all—the recovery, the failures, hope, despair, race, religion—and ask questions that examine the essence of community. We also said we would attempt to connect the experience of the rural Gulf Coast to the reality of post-Katrina New Orleans.

"During the relief stage, the people as individuals [have] responded with billions of dollars of individual giving.  And then we came to the recovery stage, and the government responded with billions of dollars.  And then we think about reform, and there's no money for reform.  … The government's not going to fund reform, because reform means changing the policies of government."Ambassador James A. Joseph, Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation 

Our documentation looks at private efforts to build utopian green villages on abandoned farm land and at local government blocking new mixed race neighborhoods. We look at families that lived without shelter for months after the storm, and others that lived cooped up, 18 to a small shotgun house, while FEMA horded 11,000 empty trailers across the state line.  And we hear stories like the one of a father stranded on his housetop in the flood who each night nailed his toddler's pajamas to the roof so the child would not roll off into the water. And of the immigrant mother who, after 19 years in America and with a son fighting in Iraq, was threatened with deportation if she complained about being stiffed by corporate subcontractors who hired her to clean out casino debris.

Stylistically our approach to the documentation has been to create a context for local people to tell the stories that must be told.  They are witnesses to something far bigger than themselves. They approach the camera with a sense of urgency.

"The worst about it was you knew that they had worked all their lives to get whatever it was, and there it was just stacked up on the road.  And their houses were still filled with mud and mold, and it's an unbelievable sight. You cannot understand it unless you've seen it." Lorna Bourg, Southern Mutual Help Association, New Iberia, LA  

We capture first-hand accounts, spending time with a diverse range of storm victims, policy makers, activists, and volunteers who have come to clean out muck, hang drywall, and rebuild neighborhoods. The imagery of the Gulf Coast provides a varied backdrop for the story. Real mountains of storm debris and 50-mile stretches of demolished houses are juxtaposed with the strikingly rich blues and greens of bayou sanctuaries and gulf fisheries. We move from the stunned silence of towns reduced to little more than gutted shells of schools and churches, to noisy second-line celebrations and public groundbreaking ceremonies.  All the while we unfold a character-driven story as big, musical, and diverse as the Gulf.

“After the Storm” exposes the misfeasance of government and commercial storm profiteers, and it looks at the overwhelming physical and financial obstacles that remain.  It also chronicles the everyday heroism of neighbors helping each other, of thousands of far-flung volunteers who put themselves at risk to help folks they have never met, and of diverse, ordinary people whose commitment to rebuilding their community is extraordinary and defiant.

“After the Storm” is told in the interweaving voices of the witnesses. Among them:

• Katie Arias, who reopened a restaurant in a fishing village before the water receded so the relief workers would have something to eat.
• Vietnam war refugee Joseph Doan, who is struggling to save his shrimping business and jobs for dozens of local workers.
• Vicky Cintra, an organizer with the Mississippi Immigrants’ Rights Association, fighting exploitation of migrant workers living and working in the toughest conditions.
• Lorna Bourg, a long-time housing activist, whose organization has rebuilt and rehabbed 1,000 homes since the hurricanes.
• Sister Martha Milner, the Sisters of Mercy nun who faced the military juntas in Central America to return to Mississippi and confront the storm devastation.
• Trula Thornton, a lay minister who survived the storm to face challenges of swindlers, homelessness, her own transplant operation, and a son's return to addiction.
• Rosina Phillipi, Attackapas tribal leader fighting regulation and governmental indifference to return to the ancestral land lost from the storm. 
• Bill Quigley, the Loyola Law School professor and New Orleans' people's lawyer who rode out Katrina marooned for days in a hospital without power or supplies.
• Keith Calhoun, the lower ninth ward photographer who documented the dockworkers of New Orleans and their rural roots as small farmers and sharecroppers.
• Dirk Powell and Christina Balfa, Cajun musicians who build the connections and explain the role of art and culture in disaster recovery.

“After the Storm” is an appropriate and important documentary approach to present to a wide public via broadcast television and a series of shorter webcasts. The programs tell a Twenty-first Century American story. How do we make sure government works for those who need it? What makes a community worth hanging on to? How do communities in need bounce back despite their internal differences?