Hurricane Sandy Fiasco: Interview with Evacuee who was about to be kicked out in the street
Channel: Elephantroom
Date: 2012-11-12

ABC News reported that Hurricane Sandy evacuees had been kicked out in the street. I am a former web producer from Congressional Quarterly who was also affected by the hurricane and lost my home. I was in the shelter and having an understanding of policy and government, I understood what was going on. A year after Katrina, I went to New Orleans to understand what really happened and my tour guides were the family which owns Sinatra's Grocery; this same family owns the warehouse where the Mardi Gras floats are stored. Tracy Wattingly, the wife, took me on a tour and also explained how a very small section of New Orleans was affected. Since I had seen Katrina through the eyes of a long-time New Orleans family, I knew Sandy was about to become -- as a blogger for the Daily Kos who was also in the Atlantic City evacuee shelter -- the 'White Katrina.' Some are calling this Obama's Katrina but it is, indeed, the white Katrina because the people most affected are middle class and upper class white people who have had the bottom completely fall out. 
The Atlantic City evacuees were painted by the Atlantic City government as ner do wells. As this brief interview shows, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, many were the invisible working poor or lower middle class who lived in residential hotels along the Black Horse Pike, the old main artery that went in and out of Atlantic City before the nation's highway system was constructed. 
This interview was conducted right before Atlantic City Police found out I was a journalist in a previous career and set out to kick me out of the shelter and intimidated me in the process. They took down the names of the publications I had worked for, Congressional Quarterly, The New York Sun, The Daily Southtown and the Isthmus. The police told me they were going to call these publications to stop any stories about the secret shutting down of Atlantic City shelters. They told me that they would tamper with my FEMA application. Their concern was I had been developing a story about both Atlantic City and New Jersey State workers who were using the Sandy shelters to run up overtime. How gross was this? At one point, they had a police officer guarding the coffee carafes. 
I was trained in advocacy journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison under Anthony Shadid. Hence, I did not just gather this for reporting, I have already informed the Federal Bureau of Investigations about the state workers running up overtime. 
An important thing to understand is these were not FEMA shelters, they were run by the localities, the city of Atlantic City and the State. During my time in this transitional shelter located in the Atlantic City Convention Center, the city and state workers prevented the Red Cross from doing their job; they also turned away volunteers at the door. People were also prevented from helping themselves. From November 5 to November 8 in the morning, evacuees in the Convention Center Shelter were told they could not leave or they would not be let back in. As a reporter, this seems to be behavior which indicates that the city workers did not want any evacuee going to the media, who were hovering at the nearby Starbucks, mostly right-wing media who were ready to tell the story of Obama's Katrina and relieve President Bush of any fault by showing that the problems in New Orleans and Atlantic City were at the local level and the fault of a mismanaged municipality.