NEW ORLEANS — Victims of Hurricane Gustav who can’t return to their homes over the next month because of storm damage or power outages can have their hotel costs covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, officials said late Thursday.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Wednesday that some evacuees’ hotel bills would be paid by FEMA, but it had been unclear whether that applied to those who fled for a few days, spent a few nights in a hotel and then returned home.
Officials held a telephone news conference to clarify who was eligible for the funding: Only those whose homes were rendered “uninhabitable” by the storm will have extended-stay hotel costs covered for a period that began Wednesday and ends Oct. 3.
“If an inspector goes out to their home during that period of time and determines that their home is in fact habitable, then we can terminate assistance for them prior to that 30-day period,” said FEMA Deputy Assistant Administrator David Garratt.
Having no power qualifies a home as being uninhabitable, but as soon as the power comes back on, eligibility for aid ends, he said.
It was unclear how much the program would cost or how many of the estimated 2 million people who fled the storm would be covered.
Widespread blackouts
Residents began returning to the stricken area as early as Tuesday, the day after the storm.
Steady streams of inbound traffic were reported Wednesday and Thursday, despite lingering widespread power outages in many areas and warnings that some areas lacked medical care, gasoline, ice and groceries.
Garratt said the hotel-funding plan was a pilot program that will be fine-tuned and evaluated in case it is needed again in other storms — such as Tropical Storm Hanna and Hurricane Ike, which are threatening the East Coast.
He stressed that individuals seeking aid would have to register with FEMA by phone or online and that their identification and dwelling addresses would have to be verified. He said the program was “an outgrowth of one of the lessons we learned from Hurricane Katrina” in 2005.
Garratt did not address whether gasoline costs or other costs of evacuating might be covered by FEMA aid.
Some evacuees wondered whether FEMA would cover their lost wages and other expenses after they returned to New Orleans.
The FEMA website says there are programs available to aid those who temporarily lose their jobs because of the storm.
Evacuees in shelters may opt to move to hotels if they cannot return home soon.
“You can just get cat naps here,” said Aaron Clark, 63, as he sat under a shade tree outside the convention center in Birmingham, Ala., which had been converted into a public shelter. “We didn’t get breakfast this morning because they said something was broke down. It’s just surviving, that’s all it is.”
Transmission towers down
While Gustav mostly spared New Orleans, much of the region around Louisiana’s capital, Baton Rouge, could go three weeks before electricity is completely restored because so many transmission towers were felled, a state utility regulator said Thursday.
After a helicopter trip over the area, Public Service Commissioner Jimmy Field said: “This was a perfect storm, if you wanted to destroy as much of the generation and the transmission alley that we have.”
Entergy Corp., the region’s top power company, said the area has never suffered damage as severe as that wrought by Gustav.
The Department of Energy said Thursday morning that 1 million customers were without power, including 925,963 in Louisiana.
That was down nearly 200,000 customers from Wednesday afternoon.
