Willhub, I think you’re underestimating the predicament that these people are in. It’s not simply a case of “losing their stuff”, these people have lost everything. It’s not just some furniture and a few computers, rather try to imagine this:
Your house is under water - stagnant, polluted water at that. That means that everything in that house is likely to be irretrievably destroyed by water damage. What isn’t prone to water damage is likely to be looted before you get the chance to salvage it.
Your neighbourhood is gone, all the people you knew are now scattered around the neighbouring states, if they are alive at all, many of them you’ll probably never see again.
If you owned a business, maybe a shop or a garage, that’s gone. Maybe it was a family business that you inherited and hard to work hard to make a success, all that work has now been wasted. If you didn’t then you worked somewhere and put in a lifetimes effort into the job trying to make enough to give yourself and your family the best you could provide, that’s now gone and all the fruits of your effort along with it.
Your town is gone, maybe it was the place you grew up in and have lived in all your life. If so you probably have a lot of friends and family there, as above they’re now gone. Even if there still alive you may never see many of them again. It will be months at best before the town becomes inhabitable again but many of the people you once knew may decide that it’s not worth going back and will move elsewhere.
You have no money whatsoever, no posessions, no source of income. For the forseeable future you will be homeless and peniless, relying on the good will of others for bare survival. Even if you were fairly well off and had a good job you will have a difficult time getting a new job. You have no paperwork at all. The last place you worked no longer exists so proving your credentials will be very difficult indeed. Even if you had a bank account how are you going to prove your identity?
Consider also that most of the people affected are poor or low-income families and you’re looking at a living hell. The rich people, as usual, will get off fairly lightly. While they were packing up all their credit cards and heading for the hills the people who were too poor to afford the bus fare out and who didn’t have a second home somewhere or rich friends they could move in with were left to fend for themselves. Right now they have NOTHING, no home, no posessions, no life, no future. Quite frankly if I had been in that position I think I’d take my chances with the storm, the looters, the pollution, the anarchy, the disease, the food shortage, and everything else that the people who are refusing to leave are having to deal with and cling onto what little I have left of my life.
As for financial aid, yes, I’m all for it. However let’s not forget what country we’re dealing with here. I reckon that it the top execs at Microsoft, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Starbucks, etc were to chuck the loose change lying around on the dashboard of their Ferraris into a kitty bag then they would raise enough cash to rebuild the whole city with enough leftover for a signinigant compensation package. However, whatever our opinions are of the people that run the country, that should not prevent people from showing basic human decency to the people affected by this disaster.