The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officially declared Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi federal disaster areas the day before Katrina hit. Once the storm had done its damage, FEMA began declaring the areas that were hardest hit eligible for individual assistance and the rest as areas of public assistance. Individual assistance areas (IAA), directly in the path of Katrina, were profoundly affected. Public assistance areas (PAA), though affected, were not as hard hit.
Based on the Heating, Air Conditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International's (HARDI) membership rolls, approximately 36 percent of HARDI member locations in Alabama were located in the IAA. Louisiana's IAA accounted for approximately 70 percent of HARDI member locations. And almost all of Mississippi's HARDI members were located in the IAA.
With an estimated 87 HARDI member locations in the tri-state area, about 60 of them were located in the IAA. Roughly 69 percent of the three states' HARDI members' locations were in the hardest hit areas of Hurricane Katrina.