Governmental Gulf Coast Response To Hurricanes Katrina And Rita:
Release Date: October 25, 2005
Release Number: 1603-116
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BATON ROUGE, La. -- The number of Gulf Coast hurricane evacuees in shelters continued to drop at a precipitous rate during the past week, with only two percent still in shelters from the peak of 273,000 in shelters following Hurricane Katrina's landfall Aug. 29.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in conjunction with state and local governments and other federal and voluntary groups, is exerting maximum effort to aid the move of people from shelters to transitional and permanent housing.
As of Oct. 24:
- FEMA had distributed more than $4 billion to 1.3 million Gulf Coast households.
- Some 3,800 inspectors working in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas had inspected more than three-quarters of a million storm-damaged units - a key step in repairing, rebuilding and replacing storm-damaged structures.
- More than 600,000 people had visited 130 Disaster Recovery Centers (DRCs) across the Gulf Coast. Representatives of state, federal, and voluntary agencies, as well as Customer Service representatives from the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Disaster Assistance, are on hand at the DRCs to answer questions and to provide recovery information
- Fewer than 6,000 evacuees were housed in 169 shelters in six states.
- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) had installed 87,500 temporary blue roofs in response to its FEMA-assigned mission to provide temporary repairs to roofs damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
- Thirty-one million cubic yards of hurricane debris had been removed by the USACE and by state and local governments in the hurricane-affected areas - about 24 percent of the estimated remaining total.
Last Modified: Wednesday, 26-Oct-2005 07:06:22