ANÁLISIS E INTERPRETACIÓN DE LA SIMULACION DE VENTAS EXONERADAS DEL IGV Y

When Greg returned to St. Bernard in March, the mud was gone, but not much else had changed.

The absence of anything was stark and stressful as he lived with his father in a trailer at the Port of St.

Bernard until he could afford to purchase a new car and rent his own place. St. Bernard had become a

place of temporary places.

There was just a sea of these office trailers. The park near the office building wasn’t there anymore. It was just a sea of FEMA trailers that people were living in. Obviously none of the restaurants. No grocery stores. I was buying groceries from Family Dollar, where, really the only meat you could buy was frozen chicken and things like that. Basically there were no amenities in St. Bernard at the time. Again, that’s what made Mid-City so attractive was that I moved here and I lived two blocks away from a very good grocery store and I lived three blocks away from this coffee shop. And restaurants and bars. There were things to do [in Mid-City], where in St. Bernard, there was nothing.

Slowly businesses began to return to serve those working on their homes and working at refineries.

Smaller companies, with fewer resources out of the impacted area often relocated, although, like the

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but up the road in Arabi, his mother-in-law worked on restoring her business, while doing business

elsewhere. While running her business out of a smaller facility on the North Shore, she put back their

Arabi facility and re-opened there when it was ready. With 50 years in business in St. Bernard Parish,

they were committed to staying.

Other business owners felt it was a bad business decision to return. Brian and Heather, both business

owners, did not think their businesses would thrive. Brian knew it first hand from his experience feeding

workers.

Being at Murphy, you could see how slowly recovery was going. From a business perspective there was no coming back. My customer base was gone. Emotionally I wanted to go back, but it wasn’t the best decision for my business. The demographics had changed.

Job security was not always enough. For Chief Sutton’s fire fighters, the need to make a home

elsewhere soon created high rates of attrition and early retirement. The force went from 116 to 90 in the

years just following Katrina, simply through attrition, and it was impacting the Department’s capabilities

to respond, and taking a toll on the mental fitness of the force.

We had people living from Poplarville, to Baton Rouge, to Denham Springs. And it began to cause a lot of problems for some of these firefighters who had 28-33 years on the job. What they were trying to do was have a normal life for their family. The St. Bernard Parish firefighters, we give our first-year firefighters more live fire training and certifications than any other fire department in the state of Louisiana. We’re proud of that. Not only do we have our older firefighters retiring, we had some of our younger firefighters transfer to other fire departments. … Just trying to rebuild the department was pretty difficult. We went from a department that could put a hazmat team on a hazmat incident to a fire department that struggled to put water on a fire. … If you look now, probably 30 percent of our fire department has less than 3 years on the job. That’s crazy, isn’t it? We had a great fitness program pre-Katrina where people had just made such improvements in improving their health to where post- Katrina we had an increase in people who were on medications we still had a lot of counseling that was going on years after Katrina we had people who had to be counseled. We still have some people we keep an eye on when different storms come in. The department was up and coming in fitness to a department that actually had people that were suffering from different types of illnesses a lot of psychological I guess you can call them an illness from the trauma of losing everything.

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Some businesses seemed essential as recovery continued. In 2009, Parish President Craig Taffaro

held a series of community forums in each of the communities that comprised the parish. In all five, he

was asked about the return of Wal-Mart and the hospital. Wal-Mart re-opened on February 3, 2010

(Tafarro and Dysart 2010). The hospital in St. Bernard Parish is scheduled to open on August 1, 2012, but

in the intervening seven years the residents’ medical needs are served in a series of clinic trailers, which

sat in front of the rising shell of a new, but down-sized hospital. When Chalmette Hospital was flooded

and closed, the jobs went. It also meant that ailing residents would need to drive farther to see familiar

doctors or would have to change to a new physician. Using phone listings for 2005 and 2012, I traced

where physicians, who were located in St. Bernard Parish prior to Katrina, were located in 2012, as

shown in Figure 7.3 (Yellow Pages 2005, 2012). Slidell, New Orleans and Metairie now have more pre-

Katrina St. Bernard Parish physicians than St. Bernard. The loss of physicians carries with it the loss of

nurses, office staff, administrators and service workers in the hospital. Earlier figures (7.1 and 7.2)

showed the precipitous drop in healthcare employment in the parish.

Figure 7.3 Departure of St. Bernard Physicians

Smaller businesses and retail firms have trickled back in. Each opening is an event. The parish

government posts photos for every ribbon-cutting ceremony, and no retail business is too small to warrant

Slidell 10 New Orleans 8 Metairie 7 St Bernard 5 Covington 4 Kenner 2 Luling 2 Marrero 2 Gretna 1 Hammond 1 Lacombe 1 Texas (various) 3

Source: Yellow Pages, 2005, 2012

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such an affair. Even six years after the storm, the April 12, 2012 opening of Little Caesar’s Pizza

maintained a line out the door well beyond dinner rush, demonstrating that it was not just the parish

officials that were excited for new shops.

Better than new shops, were old friends and neighbors. In the early days, it was difficult to tell who

was cleaning to relocate and who was cleaning to rebuild from a distance. People who were returning

were staying nights elsewhere, and people who planned to relocate were cleaning to put their properties

on the market. Ray said the way to tell was during personal interaction. Behaviors could indicate both

increased appreciation for friends and neighbors and plans for the future.

Hugs were different right after the storm, too. If you see someone you hadn’t seen in a while, and [if] you’re a guy and a girl, you’re going to give them a little hug and a kiss. It’s no longer a little hug and a kiss. It’s a hug like you’re saving them from drowning. ... And then they ask you if you’re coming back. Usually the people that were asking that were the people who were coming back. If they didn’t ask it, they weren’t coming back. And you could tell early on who was going to be around, who was going to be here.

Over time, more residents returned to St. Bernard, joining others who moved there for the first time.

In the first year, however, population was sparse. Figure 7.4 shows a graphical projection of the

population. Using a uniform dot-density model with each dot representing a household, the population of

St. Bernard is modeled using Census 2000, Louisiana Recovery Authority 2006, and Census 2010 data

(U.S. Census Bureau 2000; Louisiana Recovery Authority 2006a; U.S. Census Bureau 2010). Recovery

was not, however, uniform, with some places returning at faster rates than others. With an estimated

17,000 residents returning in the first year (Louisiana Recovery Authority 2006a), a once dense

population was sparse in the settled area, but five years after Katrina, the population is starting to fill in

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Figure 7.4 Uniform Dot-Density Models of St. Bernard population

School statistics can serve as a proxy for both population and employment. A unified school opened

in St Bernard after Katrina. A full school system was unnecessary at the time. There was a loss of about

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increase each additional year, bringing the enrollment to 71.4 percent of the Pre-Katrina enrollment

(2004), according to the Louisiana Department of Education, which looks at Oct. 1 enrollment figures.

Figure 7.5 Louisiana Department of Education Enrollment in St. Bernard Parish

School closures led to the loss of teachers. However, schools also serve as community centers where

families with children interact. Figure 7.6 shows the faculty counts in St. Bernard Parish public schools. It

shows a similar trend to school enrollment, with the faculty count rising to 70.2 percent of the 2004 figure

after a significant loss immediately after Katrina.

Figure 7.6 Louisiana Department of Education

Faculty Employment in St. Bernard Parish

Since Katrina, slow growth has led to reduced constraints on time as small businesses and retail have

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replace the old, including new schools and firehouses. St. Bernard Parish is slowly growing back into its

footprint.