News: LA Have We Been Forgotten?

Bayouside Thrift Store
4317 Hwy 56
Houma, La. 70363
Phone # 985-872-9910
Thursday, Friday, Saturday 10 – 6
A New Discount Store You’ll Love
Antique Furniture | Designer Glassware
Browse through a fine selection of antiques, furniture, glassware, and decorations at our discount store in Houma, Louisiana. Bayouside Thrift Store is the area’s newest source for the best assortment of new and used merchandise. From home decor and kitchenware to porcelain dolls and bedding, we have something for everyone. New selection of merchandise arriving weekly.
Where Experience Counts
Backed by more than 12 years of industry experience, the owner pride herself in? personalized service and the vast assortment of products and? friendly down home atmosphere. Contact us today or stop by our convenient location near Captain Allan’s Bait and Tackle and find out what we have in store for you!

---

29 August 2009
I just sent an email to Charlie Melancon’s office yesterday about Southeast Louisiana not being mentioned at all anywhere when it came to Hurricanes Rita, Katrina, Gustav and Ike. All we hear about is New Orleans and Texas.. (Hurricane Rita followed about a month later, devastating a wide swath of the western Louisiana coast and east Texas, and adding more damage in the New Orleans area.) Terrebonne Parish got hit just as hard. We flooded with 6 feet of water in our yard for Rita and Ike. We had 3 feet of water in our house! Hurricane Gustav hit Terrebonne Parish directly but you don’t hear about any of that. When I put a full sheet of plywood saying “we have been forgotten” at the end of our street, I didn’t think we would be taken off the map!
R. Rowley

---

Government has forgotten about us

September 23. 2006

I put my plywood sign out at the front of our street a couple days after we flooded from Hurricane Rita. It read in big red letters, “Have we been forgotten?”

I feel we have been forgotten by all forms of government for long enough. When we flooded for Hurricane Juan 21 years ago in October, they did nothing. All this time they have done nothing but study after study. Now that we have flooded again, they want to try to do something that will take 15-20 years to do.

I feel that the people of south Louisiana have been forgotten about when it comes to getting anything from the state or federal government.

We have been through enough. We have waited too long. With the increase in the price for gas, insurance, lumber, utilities, groceries, etc., how much more do they want from us when we can’t get much of anything from them?

Now they want to burden us with this 1-cent sales tax for our levees. I don’t feel that the money will be spent on our levees and that the Houma Navigation Canal lock is only going to protect the west side of Houma. That water will have to go somewhere.

It seems to be a losing battle. We are undecided if we want to sell out or stay and put up with it. We shouldn’t have to be making that decision. We cannot afford to move, yet we cannot physically or mentally keep going though this.

I feel that if the federal government can send or spend money in Iraq, Afganistan, Indonesia, etc., then they can give us the money to build the levees and locks to protect us. Why do we have to fight tooth and nail to get anything from the government when all these other countries do nothing for us and they sure don’t pay their fair share of any taxes. They get a handout and we have to beg.

I don’t think President Bush even cares about what happens to the people of south Louisiana. His oil buddies are more important. He will never walk in our shoes or worry about any of the things we have to worry about.

I don’t know if my letters are getting through to anyone, but as long as the government keeps wasting our money I will keep wasting my brain cells and my wife’s time writing these letters.

Roy and Lori Rowley
Houma

---

Locals tell lawmakers they feel ‘forgotten’ after hurricanes

May 18. 2006
By JEREMY ALFORD, Courier Capitol Correspondent
BATON ROUGE — He would have otherwise been a prop simply pictured in a PowerPoint presentation, but the sullen-looking man standing amid debris and devastation hit home with the crowd because of the message he had scrawled across a plywood sheet he was holding up: “We Have Been Forgotten.”

“This sums up how we feel,” said Jerome Zeringue, executive director of the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District, before clicking to the next slide.

Participants at this year’s annual meeting of the Council of Bayou Chambers, gathered at the state Capitol Wednesday, just shook their heads in unison.

In the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, many in the Terrebonne-Lafourche region have expressed frustration over being left out of federal hurricane programs and state planning sessions. It seems as if the attention has been heading to the west and east of the area, but not along the central coastline, they argue.

This was the undertone of a set of hearings on hurricane protection and preparedness sponsored by the local chamber groups.

Yet ironically enough, elected officials and community activists in the region have traditionally led the charge on such issues. Prior to last year’s hurricane season, coastal restoration, flood control and hurricane protection were confined to being regional issues.

Now they’re statewide, if not national in certain circumstances.

“Everyone became brilliant after Katrina and Rita,” said Windell Curole, general manager of the South Lafourche Levee District. “Now everyone knows we need hurricane protection. It’s easy to be brilliant when you’re hit over the head with a 2-by-4.”

Still, even with that knowledge, Zeringue openly complained that Terrebonne Parish hasn’t seen any money from the federal government, despite hundreds of millions pouring into the state specifically for hurricane protection.

In Lafourche, where there is actually a levee system under construction that is eligible for federal money, only $4 million has made its way to the area in recent years.

“Overall, that isn’t a lot,” Curole said.

Maybe that’s why the region has been proactive in raising its own money for protection.

Voters in Terrebonne approved a quarter-cent sales tax five years ago to help fund a massive hurricane-protection system.

Today, that tax is raising about $4 million annually.

This fall, voters will again be asked to levy a new sales tax of up to 1 percent, and allow the local levee district to borrow money in the form of general-obligation and sales-tax bonds, to help pay for more.

The business community seems poised to support it.

“This is something that we all want,” said Kandy Theriot, president of the Houma-Terrebonne Chamber of Commerce.

A similar push is also planned for Lafourche and could be greeted with the same enthusiasm, especially since hurricane season is right around the corner.

“Everyone is thinking about June 1,” said Kathy Benoit, president of Thibodaux Chamber of Commerce. “Businesses are preparing for it right now.”

Local man’s sign to be displayed at Smithsonian

December 19, 2005
By KIMBERLY SOLET
Senior Staff Writer

HOUMA — As Hurricane Rita’s floodwaters rose around his Upper Little Caillou home, and at the peak of his frustration, 48-year-old Roy Rowley painted his feelings on a slab of wood and dragged the sign outside for rescue boats and passersby to read: “Have We Been Forgotten?”

The Rowleys had several feet of water in their upper-Chauvin home, but Roy said that wasn’t the reason for his desperate-sounding sign. He wrote the message to call attention to his neighbors’ plight, as people miles around him lost their homes, boats, fishing equipment, photographs and furniture to even-deeper floodwaters.

“I put the sign out because we were being passed up,” Rowley said. “We were not getting any help from nobody. The people on the street needed help.”

On Tuesday, Rowley gave his hastily scrawled sign to David Shayt, a curator with the National Museum of American History. Shayt had first seen the sign with photographer Hugh Talman in late September, right after Hurricane Rita struck, swamping an estimated 10,000 homes and businesses in Terrebonne. Of the 20 homes on Rowley’s street, only seven did not flood. The Chauvin man said he and his neighbors received no help from relief workers until he posted his sign and a truck showed up with bottled water and meals ready to eat.

The Smithsonian duo collected 17 objects and scores of stories during their visits, which included several stops at the Houma-Terrebonne Civic Center.

Besides Rowley’s spray-painted sign, other items collected include an upside-down toy castle trapped in mud in Lakeview, New Orleans; gear from a Vietnamese-American shrimper in Biloxi, Miss.; a kitchen clock stopped at 9:25 in Waveland, Miss., 35 minutes before Katrina’s eyewall passed over the town; a cot from the Superdome; a leather halter from a rescued horse in Gonzales; a broken “peace” ornament from the Lower Ninth Ward; and a pair of handmade lace window valances from a flooded New Orleans home owned by Bryan Williams.

Shayt and Talman met the Williams clan while they were seeking shelter in the Houma-Terrebonne Civic Center. The valances have a yellow stain that indicates how much water came into their destroyed 7th Ward home in New Orleans.

Earlier this month, the Smithsonian announced that historians, curators and photographers have started assembling Rowley’s sign and other artifacts from sites visited across the Gulf Coast to be preserved in the Smithsonian’s Washington, D.C., archives.

Museum staff members are looking for more objects to add to the collection; the hope is that 50 artifacts from the hurricane-affected region can be assembled. Topics of interest include police and rescue operations; citizen protest; construction and engineering; petroleum, seafood and coffee impacts; and political and civic responses.

A Smithsonian spokeswoman said curators are especially interested in rich stories, durable objects and evidence from the hurricanes and items that represent the Gulf Coast’s rich ethnic background.

Collected objects, pictures and documents will be preserved permanently at the museum to document the natural disaster and its long-term consequences. The museum also plans to exhibit the Hurricane Katrina artifacts for people visiting the National Mall.

The Smithsonian’s collection efforts are a joint project. Helping the museum gather hurricane artifacts are universities in Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere.

In a special partnership, the museum has collaborated with George Mason University, the University of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast museums to form the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank.

This is the second time the Smithsonian has collected artifacts from a national event, and the museum has not set a date for displaying the objects. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Washington, D.C., institution opened an exhibit called “September 11: Bearing Witness to History.”

People are invited to share their memories and upload personal pictures of the hurricane at http://hurricanearchive.org/.

Those who think they may have something interesting to share with the museum also are encouraged to send the Smithsonian a letter with a description, ownership information and photographs to: Smithsonian Institution Katrina Collection, P.O. Box 37012, NMAH-MRC 629, Washington, D.C., 20013-7012.

Dear Mr. Shayt,
I am writing this letter as you requested concerning my sign “Have we been forgotten.”

When we flooded on Sept. 24, 2005, from Hurricane Rita, we had 5 feet of water in our yard; 3 feet made it into our home. I, along with all my neighbors that live on our street, felt that we had been forgotten. My main reason for putting the sign at the end of our street was because we would see all the trucks going down the bayou loaded with bottled water and supplies. They wouldn’t even come down our street. Of the 20 homes on our street, only seven didn’t have water in them. We were hurting just like everyone else in lower Terrebonne Parish. But they kept passing us by.

I kept hearing about the people in Florida that were still waiting for help from the hurricanes last year. I figured the same thing was going to happen to us. After I put the sign, a truck finally showed up with the bottled water and MREs. A couple days later, they came with cleaning supplies and more water. When we thanked the driver, he said, “don’t thank me, thank (state) Sen. Reggie Dupre (D-Bourg) and Rep. Damon Baldone (D-Houma) and a couple others. Someone from Sen. Dupre’s had passed and saw the sign and called him about it.

Soon my sign took on a new meaning. We have been fighting coastal erosion for many, many years. We flooded for Hurricane Juan but only had 1 foot of water in our house. We got to thinking that if they — the local, state and federal government — didn’t do anything soon, we will get it again, probably worse than for Hurricane Rita. The water will only get higher and go further for every hurricane that passes to our west.

We feel that Terrebonne Parish has been forgotten and the government would rather give up and make us move or live on stilts than spend the money needed to make our levees stronger and higher. We have been paying a tax for the Morganza-to-the-Gulf hurricane-protection levee system. We are doing our part. Now they want to pass another tax for the current levees to be repaired. The levees we have now are only drainage levees. They are not built to withstand any tropical storm or hurricane that passes to our west.

We are tired of being forgotten about when the government can afford to send billions and billions of dollars overseas. The cost of the war in Iraq. The money sent to the tsunami victims and the earthquake victims. And so on and so on. We have to beg and wait and wait.

Terrebonne Parish has been so neglectful when it comes to doing what needs to be done with our flooding situation. Instead we needed a big Civic Center. We needed a state-of-the-art library. We needed a $7 million government building. But when it comes to our levees, they don’t seem to be doing everything in their power to get the federal government to help us.

We feel that when they redirected the Mississippi River and allowed the oil companies to start tearing up our marshes, that’s when our problems started. There use to be a lot of land between us and the Gulf. You used to have to go by boat approximately 30 minutes to get to the Gulf. Now all you have to do is drive 30 minutes by car. All you will see is water. The marshes and land that used to be there (are) totally gone.

We are tired of being forgotten about when our lives, property, livelihoods and culture are washing away with the tide. …

We haven’t heard anything from FEMA. We have faxed all our paperwork to them. We are still waiting for our camper. They came about three weeks ago and measured where they were going to put it. They called about a week ago and said it would be a couple days before they could bring it. They called again and said they were coming Tuesday, Dec. 13. Still no camper. There is way too much red tape.

We had no choice but to move back into our house. The walls are still cut open, and the flooring has been pulled up. The kitchen cabinets need to come out. What are we supposed to do? We couldn’t keep living on family members.

We just finished watching the news. There are people still living in tents and in cars in New Orleans. There are thousands of empty campers sitting up north. Why is our government treating us this way?

Sincerely,
Roy & Lori Rowley

To: The Smokers Club, Inc.
Date: February 3, 2006
Sender’s Name: Roy Rowley
Sender’s Email: rowleys7@bellsouth.net
Message: Hello…. People

I don’t know what it will take to wake more people up.
We pay more than our fair share of taxes. We pay taxes for the government to provide us with a service. Not to line the over paid welfare recipients pockets in Washington, D.C. or our State Capitols, and local governments.
They recently passed a ban here in Terrebonne Parish, La. I feel that they did not pass this ban because they are concerned for our health. It’s all a money issue. If someone does not know about the ban, ex: someone from out of town or state even, they will get a $100.00 citation.
I have been sending letters by email to find out who will give the government workers and the cops themselves a ticket? No one can answer that question. They pass the laws but don’t abide by them themselves. We are all for respecting people who don’t smoke. But they have the freedom of choice to move away from it. Our freedom of choice is being taken away from us everywhere we turn around.
If we don’t stop the government from taking away our freedoms then they will be coming into our homes and telling us what we can and can’t do. Which they practically do already. We, or should I say, President Bush sent our kids, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters to Iraq supposedly to fight for the freedom of the people of Iraq. At the same time our freedom is being taken away from us at every turn.
I am 50 years old. I am not a child and don’t like being treated like one. I know the difference between right and wrong. And the Government is dead wrong with what they are doing to us. Not just with the smoking issue but with every thing that they do. I don’t smoke anymore but my wife does. We have never had more than a parking ticket in all our lives. If she gets a ticket for smoking, things might change. If you are not a criminal the government will sure find a way to make you one.