Those Affected By Katrina May Have To Pay Back Thousands A Piece

Ever since 2005, those that were hit by Hurricane Katrina were hit pretty hard. Hurricane Katrina which was classified as a category 5 hurricane ravaged the Gulf Coast of both Louisiana and Mississippi. However, most of the media coverage had been directed towards Louisiana with little to no attention in Mississippi.

Post-Katrina recovery was the top of the minds of Democratic primary voters in Mississippi. On a side note, US Democratic co-frontrunner Senator Barack Obama of Illinois took victory in the Mississippi primary.

The recovery from Hurricane Katrina has been going slow. Most of the Katrina victims have been trying to get their lives back together. There was the recent report from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) that the trailers provided by FEMA had given off toxic formaldehyde fumes.

Now, a private contractor known as ICF International of Fairfax, Virginia, is under investigation for the compensation it received to use to help the Katrina victims. This contractor now wants to collect in overpayments of grants to the Katrina victims.

The Citizen’s Road Home Action Team has criticized ICF for incompetence.

“They want people to pay for their incompetence and their mistakes. What they need to be is aggressive about finding underpayments,” said Frank Silvestri, who is the co-chair for The Citizen’s Road Home Action Team. He adds: “People relied, to their detriment, on their (ICFs) expertise and rebuilt their house and now they want to squeeze this money back out of them.”

This incident strengthens the notion that post-Katrina recovery could possibly take more time. There is a high chance that there is going to be plenty of fallout from this. In a sense, this is the case of who got "overpaid" and "underpaid."

Post-Katrina recovery looks to be one of the hot topics in this year’s US presidential elections.

Overall, the ones that look to be paying the most will be the Katrina victims as if they had not paid enough. There is still much that has to be done in terms of post-Katrina recovery.