The Old Man and the Storm - Frontline

January 4, 2009 by Curt Siters

PRESS RELEASE

Six months after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, producer June Cross came across 82-year-old Herbert Gettridge working alone on his home in the lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood devastated when the levees broke in August 2005. Over the next two years, Cross would document the story of the extended Gettridge clan--an African-American family with deep roots in New Orleans--as they struggled to rebuild their homes and their lives. Their efforts would be deeply impacted by larger decisions about urban planning, public health, and the insurance industry, by the decisions of policymakers about federal funding for rebuilding the Gulf, and state and city plans for dispersing those monies. The moving personal story of Mr. Gettridge and his family reveals the human cost of this tragedy, the continued inadequacies of government’s response in the aftermath of Katrina, and how race, class, and politics have affected the attempts to rebuild this American city.

FRONTLINE FOLLOWS ONE NEW ORLEANS FAMILY AS IT STRUGGLES TO REBUILD AFTER KATRINA

FRONTLINE Presents
The Old Man and the Storm
Tuesday, January 6, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS

www.pbs.org/frontline/katrina

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005, the U.S. Congress appropriated an unprecedented $116 billion for relief, recovery and rebuilding efforts. While it seemed that sweat equity and billions of federal dollars would have been sufficient to bring back New Orleans, years later, much of the money committed to its residents had yet to reach them.

In The Old Man and the Storm, airing Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE correspondent and filmmaker June Cross journeys with the Gettridge family of New Orleans for 18 months as they endure devastation, political turmoil and a painstakingly slow bureaucratic process to rebuild their homes and their lives.

Filmmaker Cross meets 82-year-old Herbert Gettridge during the 2006 Mardi Gras celebration. He is skipping the festivities, choosing instead to clear debris from his front lawn. Not one of his neighbors for blocks has returned, and he is camping out in his house without electricity, gas or water.

A master plasterer and experienced builder, Gettridge is working to get the house in good enough shape for his wife, Lydia, who is staying with their daughter in Wisconsin, to return. “It took me too long, and I worked too hard to build what I had here to just pick up and leave like that,” Gettridge tells Cross.

Herbert and Lydia Gettridge raised nine children in the mostly African American neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward. Their house, which Mr. Gettridge built on land he purchased in 1943, took on 10 feet of water when the levees breached. Five of the Gettridge children also owned homes in New Orleans. They all lost everything. While some of the Gettridge children and grandchildren have decided not to return to New Orleans, three of them--Leonard, Ronald and Gale--have forged ahead with gutting and rebuilding their homes, even as the future of the city remains uncertain.

Over the year and a half that Cross follows him, Mr. Gettridge battles with the city to get his electricity turned on. He worries about bringing his wife, Lydia, who is in poor health, back to a city with a broken health care system. Dealing with insurance underpayments and skyrocketing rates, Mr. Gettridge navigates the bureaucracy and waits for federal rebuilding money promised through the state-run Road Home homeowner assistance program.

By the winter of 2007, 18 months after the flood, Herbert Gettridge and more than 100,000 other Louisiana homeowners had applied for money from the Road Home program, but fewer than 500 had received a check. Application rules seemed to change monthly as federal agencies argued over regulations. At one point, the whole program seemed in jeopardy after Housing and Urban Development (HUD) told the state that each application required an environmental impact review.

Additionally, the Road Home program, relying on FEMA’s statistics, underestimated the amount of help needed. This led to a $2.9 billion shortfall. Donald Powell, the former federal coordinator of Gulf Coast Rebuilding, tells FRONTLINE, “That shortfall ... was based upon expanding the program unilaterally by the state to include wind versus just those homes that were destroyed by the water.” Louisiana Recovery Authority’s Sean Reilly replies: “It came as a bit of a surprise. The Road Home had been in design and implementation for ... almost 15 months, and all of the language in the HUD application said that damage from whatever source, whatever cause was going to be covered.”

Meanwhile, ICF Consulting, the company then-Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco had chosen to run the program, revealed in public filings that more than $2 million in bonuses had been awarded to its leadership team. ICF declined to be interviewed, but in an e-mail to FRONTLINE, the company defended its overall performance and justified those bonuses by saying that its executives get paid less than the average industry standard.

In June 2008, nearly three years after Katrina, Herbert Gettridge brought his wife home to New Orleans. Returning to a place that was decidedly different in structure and in spirit, Lydia Gettridge’s homecoming was bittersweet. By sheer force of will and without the hundreds of millions of dollars promised to Louisiana, her husband had managed to rebuild their home of more than 65 years, but the Gettridge home remains a lonely monument.

Would he do it over again? “I’m kind of skeptical about that now,” Herbert Gettridge replies. “Once upon a time, I could answer that question in a split second for you; I can’t do that now.”

The Old Man and the Storm is A Faith Project Production for WGBH/FRONTLINE and the Independent Television Service (ITVS). The producer and writer is June Cross. The co-producer is Julia Elliott. FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation. Additional funding for The Old Man and the Storm is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Ford Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Twenty-First Century Foundation, the National Black Programming Consortium and the Open Society Institute. FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and described for people who are blind or visually impaired by the Media Access Group at WGBH. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. The executive producer for ITVS is Sally Jo Fifer. The executive producer of special projects is Michael Sullivan. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning.

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Press contacts
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diane_buxton@wgbh.org

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Curt Siters is an Independent Associate for Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. He is also aYoung Living Essential Oils Independent distributor and publishes articles on YourWebReference and at TheVeryEssence. He also does web work such as website design, website maintenance and SEO for websites.

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