Almost two years after New Orleans was devastated by Katrina, officials have been highly criticized for their slowness in settling claims and distributing payments while nearly have of the city’s residents have not returned home to the ravaged area.
The July 31 deadline for accepting applications for the state's Road Home program was announced last week. The private company that administers the program, IFC International, had logged 1,850 new applications on the Road Home Web site by early Tuesday afternoon, according spokeswoman Gentry Brann.
"We've had a tremendous surge," she said. According to Brann, the last-minute applications were expected to increase the total number of homeowners seeking grants to more than 175,000.
To date, the federal government has appropriated $6.4 billion in money for the Road Home program, but state officials say this will not be enough and that as much as $11 billion could be needed by the time all the applications have been processed.
Brann stated that as of this past Monday the program had processed claims on 38,835 properties, with an average pay-out of about $70,000. The goal is to close on 90,000 claims by the end of 2007.