Catch up on all the episodes of Breaking the Cycle.
More about our guests
- Go Green Army
- General Russel Honoré’s Twitter
- West Street Recovery
- Rice Design Alliance
- Article: After the Storm: Talking “Just Recovery” with West Street Recovery
Transcript
(Intro music)
Courtney Naquin: What’s up everybody? Welcome back to Breaking the Cycle, a podcast in conversation with frontline leaders, environmental experts, and advocates about the impacts of polluting industry on their communities from the Permian Basin all the way to the Gulf Coast, and how we can achieve a just transition from oil and gas. I’m your host, Courtney Naquin, recording in Bulbancha, also known as New Orleans, on the ancestral lands of the Houma, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Ishak, and Biloxi People.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a moment, you’ve probably heard us say, climate change makes natural disasters worse, from droughts to hurricanes, and even deep freezes. Sure, storms and extreme weather occur naturally, but when do we say, okay, this is definitely not normal anymore? In just two years, for example, the Gulf has seen seven major hurricanes, which are normally category three or higher. And the Texas and Louisiana coast have experienced Winter Storm Uri, a historic deep freeze, within that same time frame. We know that natural disasters are becoming more intense and frequent because polluting industry is driving climate change, which is here and happening now. Hurricane recovery is an incredibly complex issue and a largely inequitable process. So, to help make sense of it, and to draw the connection between recovery to fossil fuels, we spoke with General Russell Honoré, a retired veteran, leader of the Green Army, and is known for his leadership and aid in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
General Russell Honoré: I’m Russell Honore and I lead the Green Army. Our mission is to find solutions for pollution because pollution is exacerbating what many call climate change. Much of it is created by the fossil fuel petrochemical industry and the LNG export. Collectively, what that industry does is abuse the permits that they get. I gotta remind people, a permit is a permit to pollute. Whether it’s the runoff from the plant that goes into a bayou, that goes into a canal, that goes into a river, that goes into the Gulf, or whether it’s a flare that is burning off excess methane that we generally greenhouse gas. That greenhouse gas has a direct relationship to the severity of hurricanes. And I’ve been to and participated in the reporting of or on the ground for every hurricane since 2004. So, the warming of the earth’s surface, as has been explicitly said, the international call for controlling greenhouse gasses, which cause the earth to warm. When the earth warms, it reflects back into the ocean, which makes the hurricanes stronger, and make the hurricane bigger.
So, the intensity of the storm is directly related to the impact of greenhouse gas, which is exacerbated by the enormity of the amount of methane that is being released in the natural gas and petrochemical industry and, specifically, the LNG proliferation that is happening in the Gulf. So, good scientists have made that relation to the Earth’s warming, to the warming of the ocean, to the frequency and the size of the storms and the impact of the surge at landfall, a direct relationship. It also has proliferated in the sea level rise because of the melting of the ice cap, which is directly related to the warming of the earth as it related to greenhouse gas and methane is melting the ice caps which is causing the sea level rise to occur. So, it's a direct relationship.
Courtney Naquin: Can I ask you a followup question? During hurricanes, we know the impacts of SSM - which stands for Startup, Shutdown, and Maintenance - during these storms. In addition to suffering the impacts of the weather, people also actually suffer even higher levels of pollution as plants brace for impact, and they’re allowed to pollute even more during that time because they’re not being monitored. Can you talk a bit about how that impacts families and communities?
General Russell Honoré: Yeah, well we started off last year with Hurricane Ida. When Ida came ashore, it closed six refineries in Louisiana. Three of them did not reopen because of the damage. During the hurricane, there’s little to no monitoring of the amount of carbon that’s released pre-landfall or pre eye of the storm, the heavy winds that are coming in. The EPA attempt to come in with their technology and their planes, but now that we have sophisticated satellites, we can see the amount of methane, specifically, that’s being released from these plants. During Ida, it was significant, as reported by ProPublica. In Hurricane Laura, two years ago, the storm came and hit the Calcasieu and Cameron Parish area. Cameron Parish is the home of the first largest LNG plant in North America. It rattled that plant. That plant is built at about nine feet elevation. They predicted a storm surge of twelve feet. Thank God we did not get a twelve feet surge because the storm twisted a little bit. That plant went into emergency mode and released an untold amount of carbons into the air. And, again, methane is not measured because we have yet to be able to get the regulations to determine what is an acceptable level of methane to be released in the air in the production of LNG.
When you come up to Calcasieu Parish, in Mossville and Westlake, there are thirteen chemical plants. One of them being a chlorine plant, they made chlorine that’s used in pools. That plant burned for several days releasing chlorine residue as it burned. People were told to shelter in place. And that went on for days. The state monitors were broke because they’re not designed to stand up to 160 mile an hour wind. Days following, the EPA did send their monitors and airplanes in to try and pick up what was the level of release but it was all too little, too late. And there's untold amount of carbon that was released as the storm approached and the plants went into shutdown mode to survive the storm. In the case of Laura, it destroyed most of the infrastructure in Lake Charles. It closed every plant. Every plant had to go into shutdown and comeback mode because the infrastructure wasn’t built for that level of wind. In the case of Ida, we had not seen a storm maintain its strength the way it did coming through St. Charles Parish, where winds maintained a category 3 all the way up to New Orleans and caused, took the grid down. The grid from the electricity to drinking water and most of the cell service was taken down because of the intensity of Ida. So we’ve had three storms in a row here: Laura, Ida, and now Ian. And much of that is attributed to the warming Gulf, which is warm from the greenhouse gasses that reflects that heat back into the Gulf, and the rising sea level, even if it’s measured in quarter inches, makes a . difference in the height of the surge that come ashore. So it’s a direct relationship between the industry and our survival along the Gulf coast.
Courtney Naquin: Absolutely. You know there’s one thing that I think a lot of people in the Gulf Coast, especially the environmental community advocates, will say is that, you know, there’s a cycle of industries will develop in vulnerable places. They pollute a lot. They warm the climate with greenhouse gas emissions. They also, many of them require the destruction of wetlands to be built, which will destroy our natural barrier to storm surges. And then, you know, these really big storms happen, more land loss occurs. More pollution happens during these storms, and then, you know, it starts all over again. It’s an awful relationship where, you know, the same places that are the most polluted get the most impact. We see that now, right now for example, with LNG plants being built on the coast. For example, Venture Global is building Plaquemines LNG in a spot that was under twelve feet of water during Hurricane Ida. And This is dangerous for many reasons. Can you talk more about the risks this poses to people and families that live around it? So can you talk more about the risks?
General Honoré: We do not use LNG in America. We produce LNG for export. We use natural gas in America for heating and cooling and for manufacturing. So, this whole LNG endeavor is designed around a few corporate executives in America and hedge funds in collaboration with foreign countries to turn our natural gas into LNG, which emits an enormous amount of methane, adding to global warming. Then that LNG is shipped overseas to Europe and Japan and now, China. These people are unscrupulous. It’s all about them making money at the expense of the people along the Gulf coast who live near these plants. We have determined through some comparative analysis, the explosive impact if an LNG plant was to explode, it would be equivalent to the bomb that was dropped in Nagasaki or Hiroshima. They are very volatile plants. So, they’re not only a danger from the emission of methane and other carbons, they’re a very dangerous plant from the circular area of destruction if one of them was to explode. And to put them in a wetland is ridiculous, it’s stupid. Now the reason they go to the wetlands is because they have to have special ships to transport the LNG because we do not have pipes to transport this as a natural gas overseas. To add insult to injury, when that LNG is received in Europe and Japan, they get a carbon credit because they have reduced their carbon emissions from coal to LNG and we suck down the pollution and the impact of it, with a warmer gulf and more intense storms. Now we have an initiative to put an LNG plant which is very volatile, which is highly polluting, which is dangerous as hell, and we think you need at least a five mile radius, that there should be a minimum safety zone for people living there around the plant. And they’re putting it in a wetlands, in a place that’s known to flood. That is about as stuck on stupid as you can get.
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Courtney Naquin: Yes, yes I agree. You know, you hear that statistic that southern Louisiana has lost about a football field size of land every minute since like the 1930s. And then oil and gas developers are like yeah, let’s build there. I don’t think anybody can make it make sense to me.
General Honoré: On that point, we need to emphasize this: the reason we’ve lost so much of our wetlands in that period of time is because of the oil and gas exploration.
When they went in to get the oil, they built canals to get access by barges to do the drilling. When they signed their permit, the agreement was with the state of Louisiana and in particular, Plaquemine Parish, they do their own permitting, is that they would close these canals. These canals were never closed, and now they have become channels where fishermens go fishing. And, it’s open water. That open water from those exploration canals allows salt water intrusion. When the salt water come in, it changes the ecological balance of what lives there in term of fisheries and, and wildlife. It also reduced the sustainability of the marsh grass because it got too much salt. All because they failed to close those canals once they had extracted the oil. So, it is a gift that keeps on having a negative impact. They came in and got the oil, they left the canals open, which has further destroyed our wetlands. Which for decades have been the absorbing area so when a storm came ashore, it was absorbed into the wetlands. We’ve got less and less wetlands in Louisiana to absorb the strength of the storm. As was the case with Hurricane Ida last year, it made Category 3 almost near to New Orleans before it subsided to a Category 1, and it still had enough energy to leave Louisiana and go all the way up to the suburbs of New York and kill over a dozen people there from the flood waters.
Courtney Naquin: Man, yeah, thank you for raising that point too that, you know, the initial impact, of course, was really devastating still for Louisiana but hurricanes do travel once they make landfall. That’s a really tragic thing that happened. Um, I know that this particular, this particular episode is largely about Louisiana and the impacts here. But I do want to actually ask you a question about the impacts of oil and gas and storms or natural disasters in other areas because this podcast covers the entire Permian to Gulf Coast region, which we call the fracking cycle. So, like we were just talking about, we see increased hurricanes in the Gulf, but in the southwest region, that includes the Permian Basin of southeast New Mexico and West Texas, we see extreme heat and drought. Actually, now even pretty frequent earthquakes because of fracking. And I know that your focus has been on disaster relief here in the Gulf coast, but do you think you could say a bit about communities in the Permian that are suffering from extreme droughts and all that goes with it - the fires, loss of water resources, and so on?
General Honoré: The Permian Basin, when you look at it on a satellite, as far as methane emissions, is one of the largest in America. Fracking has just been a boon for a release of carbons, particularly natural gas into the atmosphere. Which, related to the warming of the earth and the warming of the seas to include the Gulf of Mexico. So it has a direct relationship, And it’s not regulated. The other thing that’s not regulated is the pipelines. I was in California several years ago, working with the power company PG&E, and I went to speak there about the leadership and safety. And they were having an issue with a burnoff from a cavern where they had stored natural gas. So I asked the gentleman, where do you get your natural gas from? He said, Cameron, Louisiana.
For over fifty years, they have had a major pipeline that runs from Cameron, Louisiana to California. That company has 22 million customers. They store that natural gas in caves and then they send it out to the citizens’ homes. That entire process from the time the natural gas is extracted at the wellhead, through the pipes to the point of use, is one giant polluter, specifically methane. That being said, we do not have the laws on the books to control the amount of methane that can be released. Until we get those laws written, we’re gonna have a hard time changing things.
Courtney Naquin: Definitely.
General Honoré: Because the company can say, we’re following the law. Well if the law isn’t sufficient enough to control the amount of pollution you’re putting out, you’re willingly polluting the Earth. And that’s what they do, it’s money over safety.
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Courtney Naquin: We also spoke with Alice Liu and Andrew Barley from West Street Recovery, a community-based disaster preparedness and recovery organization out of Houston.
Alice Liu: My name’s Alice. I joined West Street more recently than, uh, Barley. Um, I’ve been working with West Street for a little over two years now. I do a lot of communications work, writing, messaging, as well as leading our campaign that’s pushing for the city of Houston to improve their drainage. And I’m also trying to learn some home repair skills along the way. I started working in climate change and climate organizing when I was in college. When I was a sophomore, I was going to school in Houston and that’s actually when Hurricane Harvey hit. So I was a college student going out with other students and trying to help people who were flooded basically evacuate their homes and salvage what they could. And that was my first experience seeing how differently the storm had impacted different communities around Houston. In the year or so afterwards I would drive around and see tons of houses being elevated in rich neighborhoods, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. And on the other side of that, seeing people who really can't afford to replace any of their furniture, laying out vinyl floorboards on their driveway to try to salvage them. So, that was my first experience really seeing the inequities that occur in the wake of disasters, and what pushed me to really want to do community work when it comes to responding to climate change. Because unfortunately, more and more disasters are going to be the norm and the baseline, like something that we have to expect and prepare for moving forward. So yeah, I’ll pass it to Barley.
Andrew Barley: Hey, uh, so my name is Andrew Barley. I’ve got many titles at West Street, but the one that I use the most is Rebuild Manager. I am a native Houstonian. I started at West Street probably day three of West Street, in the middle of Hurricane Harvey. A friend of a friend told me that there was this guy who was going out with a beatdown Toyota Tacoma, a couple of rafts , and boats, and he wanted to do water rescues. So, initially we did water rescues in northeast Houston, starting in the Cashmere Gardens area, moving up north to La Mesa Tidwell section of Houston, which are bordered by Greens and Halls Bayou. You know, we did that for a few days and, as we did our work, we documented it and that brought more people and more volunteers and more money to the door. That allowed us to do more water rescues. We’d also pass out hot meals and it also allowed us to pass out clean clothing and baby diapers and baby food and formula. That eventually led us to pass out clothing, and that eventually allowed us to get the funds to muck and gut out people’s houses. That eventually allowed us to get to a point where we had name recognition with other groups like Houston DSA, even the Sierra Foundation. We eventually, we held a position in our community where we could take the necessary processes to become a formal 501c3, which allowed us to start a rebuild program, which allowed us to start our own disaster prep program, which allowed us to start our own community based advocacy program, which eventually led to a community-led organization called Northeast Action Collective, which is completely community ran and led. But, out of those waters of Harvey, we’ve been allowed to create a space where we have community-informed disaster response efforts. We have community informed disaster advocacy. So I think one thing at the core of West Street’s beliefs is that no one knows how to take care of themselves in natural disasters like the communities who experience them. And if nothing else comes from West Street, that’s the message we want to put forward.
Courtney Naquin: Right on, Thank y'all so much. Um, I want to ask you about why a just transition, moving away from fossil fuels and moving to a cleaner renewable source of energy, must also include a just recovery. Why is a just recovery a part of a just transition? If big NGOs and national and grassroots groups fight industry? In industry, why should we also focus on just recovery?
Alice Liu: There's a couple of things I want to touch on. Number one is that, in the wake of each disaster, there are billions of dollars that are spent on recovery. So, in that sense, when we talk about just transition, there's always a question of where is the money going to come from to make these huge infrastructural investments and shifts. And you know, the way that our society is built out right now, actually, in the wake of disasters there's a unique opportunity in terms of political momentum, as well as economic necessity and the reality that people have to build back their lives. It’s just a question of how we’re actually building back the energy infrastructures that’s often destroyed during storms, and also individual houses in neighborhoods. A good example of this is the way Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was built back in the wake of Maria. Instead of taking that opportunity to actually shift towards more distributed and more green and renewable infrastructure, which is massively more resilient in the face of high winds and in the face of flooding. Instead, much of the existing grid was built back the way that it was, which was a huge contributor to the devastation that happened after the most recent storm. And that’s something that we saw as well in Houston, And the issue is there's always this prioritization of getting people back into their homes and making their homes livable again as fast as possible, right? Prioritizing the immediate needs in the moment and balancing that with these long term shifts that we know need to happen for a more just future. So, I think, like, the opportunity there is really like you said, thinking about just recovery and just transition as actually one thing. So, instead of thinking of them separately, viewing the resources that become available in the wake of disasters and actually taking that proactive action in using them towards building back in a better way and a way that pollutes our communities less. That's something that West Street Recovery, in our own rebuild work, we’re trying. We have some resilient rebuilding techniques that make it easier to muck and build back homes once they’re flooded which Barley can talk more about. But the problem is actually convincing funders and convincing people who are doing the work to think of those two issues as connected.
Andrew Barley: Um, I think transition to renewable energy sources and just recovery go hand in hand for many reasons. What immediately comes to mind is that the neighborhoods we often work in are the portions of Houston that hold that infrastructure. These are places that are typically called sacrifice zones. These are places that, not just the workforce for these companies come from, but also where all of the pollutants are set up at. More importantly than that, it’s, we talk about prioritizing just, like, livability first and foremost at West Street Recovery. An issue that arises there is that, often, that the most people who are most impacted by the failures of current infrastructure are those people in these vulnerable communities. I remember sitting in my portion of Houston during Ice Storm Uri, and like, the lights were out and we were all cold and freezing, and we had to stare down at downtown Houston which was well lit. And, you know, I guess there are various reasons for why that’s the case. What came immediately to mind for me was that that’s the major storehouse for a lot of capital. But amongst communities in northeast Houston where I work, where a lot of the infrastructure that kept the power on over there in downtown Houston lies those people were freezing too and not only were they freezing, but we’re talking about families who had to sacrifice like keeping their own families warm to go out to jobs to try to maintain and restore that infrastructure. we’re talking about older communities where West Street had to actually go out in the middle of the storm and try to get people to hotels in the center of Houston where there was power. So, resiliency is a big portion of the work we do in Houston, both in advocacy and in the design of our homes. Um, but we can't be resilient with the power infrastructure that currently stands in Houston. One, it fails constantly. Two, it's part of the problem that leads to the environmental disasters that we’re seeing in the first place. You don't get a hurricane, an unprecedented storm like Uri, you don’t get a storm like Harvey out of nowhere.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah, totally, right on. Thank you both for those really thorough answers. In a similar vein, I sort of wonder, do folks that y’all work with make connections with, do they make connections between these facilities and the storms that impact their lives? I'm wondering what the relationship is between people and industry is like in Houston and in the communities y’all work with?
Andrew Barley: So, I think, to answer your first question, um, I think they do see the connection, they see it all the time. You know, we try to inform the research we do at West Street with historical knowledge of these communities. And when I’m often out doing work, I'll ask how things were 30, 40, or 50 years ago when they first moved to the community, and they’ll talk about how their father worked at Pacific Rail Union or their mom worked at Shell. Their families went out and worked out in these fields and had shorter lives that they thought they should have. Or They’ll talk about things like how on East Mount Houston Road in Houston, there’s one of the largest giant trash heaps in the entire city. From a distance, It looks like a mountain. But then you know, Houston’s flat, there are no mountains here. During storms are large weather events, you can smell the trash from East Mount Houston Road all throughout the majority of the neighborhoods we live in. People, they notice that, they make those connections. They’ll say things like yo if we went to the wealthier neighborhoods like River Oaks, we would never have to smell things like that. Whenever there's burnoff in their community, they say things like hey, if we lived in River Oaks, the city would not put up with this. That's there, they make those connections and they’re informed in that way even though I think a lot of us wouldn’t take to note like the small ways that all of this stuff impacts them. they see it firsthand and have this experience first hand. Yeah, they’re definitely aware that industry is hurting them. But they also know that unfortunately sometimes industry provides the best opportunity for them to get a decent paying wage.
Alice Liu: I think like, this contradiction between you know, Houston’s economic dependency on fossil fuels and it’s pretty devastating impacts that it has on the people who are living in the city is a contradiction that is very much understood and held by residents. You know, I talked with someone who used to work in the ship channel and he was telling me just about how immensely physically dangerous it is just on a day to day basis. Like, injury is almost expected. And so, I think that’s something to understand is that, like, it's not just the sort of externalized impacts of these industries on people in the rest of the city, but it's also the workers themselves, like as workers not just as residents who are also being harmed by the way that the fossil fuel industry and other polluting industries operate. These are very dangerous workplaces. I think we’re talking about just transition. The question is can we offer an alternative to what is happening right now, you know?
Courtney Naquin: Yeah, Absolutely, that's a theme that comes up often and it’s an important one to sort of reiterate a lot. Thank you both for talking about what recovery is like and I just wanted to continue to get more in depth about it, especially as Barley, you were talking about different inequities that people live with. So, I’d like to ask more about the inequities in recovery and also about FEMA’s role in recovery. Anyone who has gone through a natural disaster or has read about it in the news has probably heard of FEMA, which stands for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. So I’m wondering if you can talk about FEMA a bit more, why they are who they are and what West Street Recovery is, or what West Street recovery’s relationship is to FEMA and how the dynamic is like between an organization like West Street Recovery is between a big federal agency like FEMA.
Andrew Barley: So, FEMA often feels inadequate in its approach to hurricanes in this region. You know, one of the barriers for folks getting to FEMA often is where they are, whether they’re in a flood plain or not. They have to have flood insurance. Not only do they have to have flood insurance, but when the next hurricane comes, the amount of help they’ll receive from FEMA depends on whether or not they could get flood insurance. Well a lot of the communities that are most vulnerable are working class Black and Brown communities that are usually older. We’re talking about folks who are living on fixed incomes. So, if your grandmother has to make the choice between feeding herself or paying for flood insurance,in the moment that’s an easy choice, I’m gonna eat. But if a hurricane comes along during hurricane season and your grandma chose to let her flood insurance lapse and, you know, FEMA comes to town after the waters recede, what they often get is rejection letters. We’ve seen plenty of people get rejected for all kinds of weird reasons. Um, you know, like I said first and foremost as well, if they had lapsed flood insurance. But also, sometimes they never, they didn’t even get the money that they needed because their claims were unjustified in one capacity or another. Whether they would say that the flooding event was from rising waters, but they had damage from their ceiling down. That was a reason I’ve heard for people to get rejected in the past. Um, I've had people get rejected because they had previous issues with their home, like maybe a fire happened in their home prior to the storm and the first was associated with damages instead of the actual storm itself. There's a lot of tape that people have to climb through and they have to fight through rejections time and time again just to get in the program, even when they have insurance. And, you know, when they dont have insurance, that puts them in a vulnerable situation where they’re jumping from one nonprofit to the next, who often have standards just as high as FEMA to actually get any resources from them. And so, I think with the Rebuild Program at West Street, one of our purposes was to sort of fill that gap and catch the people who fall between the gaps. Um, I’ve seen folks who have had homes that were passed down in their family for generations, but the issue was that, you know, mom and dad didn't want to designate one person to hold the home, so the title of the home isn’t in one person’s name. So, they can’t get help elsewhere. They have to come to us because no one will qualify them for that reason. Undocumented folks come to us all the time because they’re afraid to go to FEMA or they dont think FEMA, like they think if they reach out to FEMA, it could put their status at risk. So this is a huge, I feel like, undercounted portion of our community that needs the resources of traditional nonprofits. And we do the best we can at West Street to fill that gap.
Alice Liu: Yeah, and I want to add, I mean, many if not most of those issues with how people are judged to be eligible for assistance, it’s not just coming from FEMA. A lot of, for example, bigger nonprofit agencies who are also in this bigger scattered disaster recovery and home repair network often actually adopt many of those same guidelines that FEMA does in terms of having an overly strict sort of burden of proof. You know, asking residents who are living in a home with mold to provide photos proving that they were flooded and that their house wasn’t like that before the flood, right? Um, there's this obsession with, like, with efficiency and with making sure that every penny of disaster recovery money is spent on people who really need it, when what that really does is exclude the people who actually are in the most need and who can't fulfill those bureaucratic requirements. So, the issues that Barley was talking about in terms of, yeah, nontraditional home ownership structures that don’t fall in the model of this white nuclear family where there’s always, the home is just neatly under the current resident’s name. It’s just basically punishing poor people for not having enough money to maintain their homes in ideal condition. A lot of these restrictions come from FEMA, but are also adopted in some way or other by many of the other nonprofit home repair agencies. West Street Recovery is one of the smallest ones on the scene in Houston. But in terms of recovery after Uri and recovery after Imelda, much of the repairs happened in this very scattered network of nonprofits because so much of the work that’s supposed to be done by the government falls on nonprofits unfortunately. And then, one other thing I want to touch on is, a lot of these inequities are also amplified by the way that flood insurance works. So, there's a study that was published after Hurricane Harvey that found that, on average, white families actually increased in wealth after disasters, whereas BIPOC families decreased in wealth. And the big factor in that was actually because of the payouts that middle class families were able to get from having flood insurance. So the national flood insurance program is actually going through a crisis right now because their rates are too low compared to how much they pay out in the wake of disaster. So, people who are able to afford these programs can get most of their money back but, like, almost none of the families that we work with are able to afford monthly insurance payments. That's another piece of this big puzzle that overall worked towards just amplifying wealth inequities and racial inequities in the wake of disaster.
Andrew Barley: One other aspect I'd like to add too is that, even if you somehow navigate your way through that entire process and you get into a FEMA rebuild program, or you get into a program funded indirectly indirectly by FEMA for the or CDBG funds through say the state or local government. Then you have to worry about the vetting process they actually have in regard to the contractors they use. Often an issue we had is that, in these low income homes, they were very quick about allowing people to be part of the program in regards to contractors, and then these contractors would go in and do shoddy work that we had come back, tear out shoddy work and replace it because it would put people’s homes at risk. There were fires or other damages that could potentially happen. So, even when you win, you can still lose.
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Courtney Naquin: What does disaster preparedness actually look like? What does “good” preparedness look like, and how has it changed since Hurricane Harvey? And how does West Street Recovery kind of fill in the infrastructural gaps or the bureaucratic gaps?
Alice Liu: I think something that we’ve seen in how the city of Houston is pushing the narrative of preparedness is that they're very much putting that burden of responsibility on the individual. So Houston has a disaster preparedness week. A lot of what we saw during that week was basically iInfographics about how each individual or each household can take steps in terms of like, of stocking up resources, to have that individual preparedness in advance of the next disaster. Something that West Street Recovery wants to emphasize as an organization is preparedness can't really happen in the way that it has to to make sure that people are taken care of at the individual level. It has to be a community effort, you know,ideally at the level of infrastructure. A lot of things we’re fighting for like having better flood mitigation, having better street drainage is essentially disaster preparedness. Um, but something we work on and that we’re able to give the resources that we have as a nonprofit in a grassroots group is community preparedness and what that looks like. A lot of it is actually just building out that network, which has been happening basically since Harvey. Um, and a lot of that work of coming together happens in terms of advocacy and pushing the city and the government to do better. But, on a day to day basis what that looks like is taking care of eachother. During Winter Storm Uri, West Street Recovery was actually able to be on the ground and help people so much faster than a lot of the bigger nonprofits because of how close of a relationship that we have with residents, but also that residents have with each other. It can look as simple as, like, we have a Whatsapp where we add all of the NAC members. So something as simple as just a group chat can make people feel so much safer in terms, both in terms of knowing that people actually know that a storm is coming, and being able to respond as quickly as possible, where like neighbors who actually live next to each other or live close enough to respond can help each other immediately.
Andrew Barley: Yeah, so a lot of the work West Street does in regards to community work is really done through the actions of the Northeast Action Collective, which is the community organizing group that came out of Harvey. Um, and so a lot of those members were folks whose homes I worked on in the early days. They worked side by side with me to pull out their drywall. And when I did their house, their neighbor would come over and they would help us do work. Afterwards we would hang out and talk to folks and actually be, in a way, members of the community. People saw our green shirts and said hey there’s those west street guys, let's sit down and talk with them. So though gaining their trust that way, we allowed them to naturally form their own group over time. I felt like they felt more power and agency, and wanted to do more things and they wanted to be more collective in their actions in regards to protecting themselves in line with other organizations trying to protect them. A lot of our folks tell us stories about how they try to watch out for themselves or individual families. Prior to forming the NAC, and we hear a lot of, like, really depressing, really sad stories. One of our community members, Billy, his family and his immediate cousins tried to stay together in two homes in northeast Houston. And at one point, one of his cousin’s wife and kids tried to leave the community and they ended up actually driving into flood waters and drowning. And so, that's something that really impacted Billy to continue working with NAC. Billy is, he’s so passionate about this cause that he’s showing in the flood commission in Houston. He gets his neighbors to come out with him and they go to town halls with him, they go to the county commission meetings. They do everything they possibly can to like, have a word in the room when flood mitigation, infrastructure comes up. They're part of those conversations. But, when it comes to natural disasters what they do, part of what they do is training with West Streets, they do training with other organizations. We have a project called Hub Houses, where they’re community garages are set up to protect people in various parts of their neighborhoods. When disaster strikes, you can go to the hub house and get a disaster go bag that has like a battery pack and candles and food and water for a couple of days. You can get that for your family members. You can go to a hub house and get boats if you want to go out and do rescues. You can go to a hub house and we have a power wall station, a power wall complete with power stations that you can check out and take to your own home if you want to reside in your own home. All of our hub houses have dual fuel generators on them, so they can run off of propane or gas. But you know, that allows you to stay at one of the hub houses and warm up if it’s during a winter event or charge your devices up if it’s a flooding event. We usually chose houses that are like, higher up off the ground so people can go to the high areas instead of staying in the water. You know, that’s one way we try to involve the whole community with an action plan that’ll protect themselves.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah thank you so much, that’s really something that's really interesting. I've never heard of something like that before, so that's really cool. Whenever a hurricane happens and it passes, what do you do? How do you assess the damage? How do you reach out to the families that you work with? What are the immediate things that you do have to respond to? How and when does “rebuilding” start?
Andrew Barley: Now we have a pretty well built up network of community members who, they’ll do assessments of their own blocks themselves. They’ll tell us the issues that are going on. They’ll tell us about that person who doesn’t have flood insurance or resources or family to fall back onto. That's how we get a lot of our cases immediately after a storm. It’s just that network, usually through the NAC, or residents whose homes we’ve worked in the past will tell us about their needs or their family members’ immediate needs, or their neighbors’ immediate needs. So, we try to address those first and foremost. If someone is having a health issue or anything like that, we try to raise emergency funds to ensure that it gets taken care of. And I think, after that point, that’s when we really start. We start making our spreadsheets about all the homes that need like repair work. Um, and so, at West Street, we have, we’re horizontally structured and we have a consensus minus one sort of system. So there will usually be a couple of days where we actually have to sit down as a group and prioritize which homes to attack first, usually based on the size of the home, the age of the people who live in the home, that sort of thing. But, once we get our lists together, we just go down the list, all of us in the rebuild department, and we just start working in those homes, knocking out those homes. And as we work in the homes, we’ll casually talk to other residents in the neighborhood and they’ll tell us about more homes that need to end up on the list. We just work our way through until our donations run out or we run out of homes. Usually it’s the former.
Courtney Naquin: Thank you. Yeah. I ask because I know that recovery and rebuilding takes time and a lot of people and labor. But it’s obviously one of the first things people think about when a hurricane happens, or any sort of other disaster. I was wondering also, just to follow up on burnoffs during recovery. Or after a hurricane such as Shutdown and startup events where you know, these big refineries in this area can during a hurricane. They're not monitored. The state doesn't look at them during this moment. So they can release a lot of pollution. I'm wondering if you can talk about how that impacts the communities that you work in?
Andrew Barley: Yeah, for sure.Um, you know, I have first hand experience of it during Harvey. My friends and I, we were wading through, like, water doing rescues and could smell the burnoff in the air. And you know, weeks after Harvey we were sick after the storm. We were sick enough to be off from work for like a week or so. And you know, a lot of our community members complained about that too. We have community members who have emphysema. We have community members who have, like, congenital breathing issues who have lived in these communities for years. And so, that's one of the things we’re worried about. We worked with our partners at Air Alliance Houston. We’ve done air quality tests in these neighborhoods and, you know, usually the results aren’t that surprising to us. They're usually worse off than other areas in Houston. But, it feels like to me, my experience with hurricanes, these O & G companies usually use these events to, like, burn off a lot, or at least it feels like they usually use these events to burn off a lot. And uh, all of our residents usually complained about those smells.
Courtney Naquin: I have actually just one last question that can take precedence over the other, is really, I know like, from talking to you both and reading about your work, is that West Street Recovery really emphasizes community involvement and organizing and also research, community based research. So I'm wondering how and why organizing within communities is crucial to preparedness, recovery, and resilience?
Alice Liu: I'll keep it brief, but I think sort of being on the ground doing disaster recovery work, seeing the need, seeing the homes that we’re still in-taking, and ongoing repairs from Harvey, or Imelda, or even storms before that. It's impossible to, not to understand the scale of the disaster and also to understand that, the work that West Street Recovery is actually able to do, in terms of material support for people, is really just a drop in the bucket and it doesn't even come close to the need that exists. When we’re talking about disasters and when we’re talking about climate change, there's always this question of scale. Like as an individual, how can we participate in and push for the change that’s actually necessary to address these structural level issues? So for me, that's where organizing comes in. I think that the core tenets of our work is survival, meeting those immediate material needs, pushing for mutual care within the community and mutual aid, but also always keeping in mind that it's not enough, and that we need to fight for what we deserve and what we need in terms of the government actually supporting its people.
Andrew Barley: I feel like a lot of these communities, like, in regards to just, like, coastal regions they’re the canaries. You know, we're already seeing these communities disappear slowly. We just read about a report last week where Harris County was buying out communities right outside of ne of the neighborhoods we work in off of Halls and Greens Bayou, which are bayous that continue to flood, a lot of the neighborhoods we work in. So, we’re starting to see these communities isappear and, I feel like historically, this has happened in America where communities disappear, and progress moves forward and American society as a whole moves forward and we forget about those most vulnerable. First and foremost, we know these folks know what’s going on. We know that they are aware of how they are more vulnerable than other portions of Houston society. We also know that they have the information required to build a just recovery for themselves. Part of why we do the research, we do informed research, and we collect data to back up those community stories is that, more often than not, these community voices aren’t believed. Despite knowing what’s going on, they’re not believed. But when they, when it’s backed up with data, it's hard for bureaucracies or just governments in general to ignore what they’re saying about their condition. So for us, more than anything, we just want to ensure that, you know, our folks can come with an informed voice to continue to tell people that, hey, we’re disappearing now, but this could easily be you tomorrow.
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Courtney Naquin: Just like a transition away from fossil fuels won’t happen overnight, climate change won’t stop overnight either. Intense storms will keep happening, and the communities that are most polluted and the most industrialized, are already dealing with them regularly. So when we talk about a just transition, or when we introduce climate bills supporting clean energy, the conversation is incomplete if we don't include a just recovery. In fact, what I’ve learned here is that a just transition can’t actually happen without a just recovery.
Thank you as always for listening. Thank you so much to Roddy Hughes, my coworker and producer of this podcast, Thomas Walsh, our editor, Natalie McLendon, our project manager, and of course, our cowpoke in residence, Purly Gates, for her music. See y’all next time.