Mississippians get Katrina aid, at last

WASHINGTON -- State officials in Louisiana are still struggling to ensure that the money to rebuild houses hit by Hurricane Katrina is fairly distributed, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast coordinator said yesterday.

Nearly a year after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, only $44 billion has been spent to get the battered region back on its feet, coordinator Don Powell said. Over $110 billion has been designated for the massive project -- $17 billion of which is to help rebuild an estimated 204,000 homes in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Money has begun to reach Mississippi homeowners, Powell said. But in Louisiana, state plans for distributing the dollars were delayed, in turn holding up the funding flow.

``There is always a balance and tension between getting the money out fast and getting the money out responsibly fast," Powell told reporters at a White House briefing.

``I have a sense of frustration. I have a sense of urgency all the time," said Powell, who stopped short of criticizing Louisiana's delay in distributing the funds. ``That money needs to get out because you'll see a lot of activity. But it doesn't serve anyone for them to be sloppy and haphazard in the administration of those moneys."

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development approved in one day Mississippi's plans for rebuilding housing and gave the nod to Louisiana's blueprint in 10 days, Powell said. Louisiana officials ``didn't get their plan into HUD until later, after Mississippi, thus the plan was not approved until later," he said.

Powell sought to spotlight successes in the Gulf Coast as the Aug. 29 anniversary of Katrina nears.

An estimated 100 million cubic yards of debris has been removed from the region -- more than all the combined wreckage caused by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and from the World Trade Center in 2001, which took two years to clean up, Powell said. The port of New Orleans ``is back," he said, with incoming tonnage equaling levels from before Katrina hit.

R. David Paulison, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, spoke bluntly about his agency's failures last year to track supplies, register storm victims for benefits, and help emergency responders communicate with one another. ``We need to make sure that we are going to be ready to respond to this next storm and not waste those opportunities, not waste those lessons learned," he said.

Earlier yesterday, the Army Corps of Engineers' chief engineer, Don Basham, said New Orleans-area levees might be overtopped by up to 4 feet of water in a hurricane of Katrina's size.

``Even if you had another Katrina event today, we do not believe we'd have any levees fail, as far as collapsing," Basham said. ``But you're definitely still going to have water that's going over the top of the levees. And people are going to be inundated and need to evacuate, get out of the area."

A Corps investigation of the city's levees after Katrina found that levees collapsed in only four spots along 160 miles of floodwalls that were damaged during the storm.

The walls were overtopped in 46 places, Basham said.