NEW ORLEANS - Donald Johnsen is trying to hold it all together. "I found my truck on top of my car,” he remembers. “My car was in my kitchen."
Hurricane Katrina not only destroyed his house, but wiped out a third of the Louisiana businesses he supplied with coffee. "I haven't had a salary since Katrina hit, Johnsen says, “and I don't see getting a salary until probably the end of February, if even then."
To keep small businesses like Johnsen’s alive after a disaster, the Small Business Administration provides low-interest loans. But of the more than 326,000 applications in the four months since Katrina, only 37 percent have been processed and only 7 percent — just over 24,000 — of loan applicants have gotten any money at all. [Read more - MSNBC]
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