A National Shame that two years later, New Orleans is in the shape that it is.
Another in a long, long list of failures by George W. Bush!
"On 2d Katrina anniversary, prayers and disappointment" by Mary Foster/Associated Press August 30, 2007
NEW ORLEANS -- Prayers, protests, and a lingering disgust with the government's response to Hurricane Katrina marked the disaster's second anniversary yesterday, with a presidential visit seeming to do little to mollify those still displaced by the storm.
Clarence Russ, 64, took a dim view of politicians' promises as he tried to put the finishing touches on his repaired home in the city's devastated Lower Ninth Ward.
Russ, whose house was the only one restored on an otherwise desolate block:
"There was supposed to be all this money, but where'd it go? None of us got any."
Not far away, President Bush visited a school, before heading to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, also devastated by Katrina:
"We're still paying attention. We understand."
But Gina Martin, who is still living in Houston because Katrina destroyed her New Orleans home, was unconvinced:
"Bush was down here again making more promises he isn't going to keep. The government has failed all of us. It's got to stop."
Martin was among an estimated 1,000 people taking part in a protest march that started in the Lower Ninth Ward. It was a uniquely New Orleans-style protest: There were signs accusing the Bush administration of murder and angry chants about the failure of government. But marchers also danced in the street accompanied by two brass bands.
[Better than the dead protests around here!]
Katrina was a powerful Category 3 hurricane when it hit the Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, broke levees in New Orleans, and flooded 80 percent of the city.
By the time the water dried up weeks later, more than 1,600 people in Louisiana and Mississippi were dead, and a shocked nation saw miles of wrecked homes, mud, and debris from one of the worst natural disasters in its history.
In New Orleans, recovery has been spotty at best. The historic French Quarter and neighborhoods close to the Mississippi River did not flood and have bounced back fairly well. The city's population has reached an estimated 277,000, about 60 percent of its prestorm level of 455,000. Sales tax revenues are approaching normal, and tourism and the port industry are recovering.
But vast stretches of the city show little or no recovery. A housing shortage and high rents have hampered business growth. The homeless population has almost doubled since the storm, and many of those people are occupying an estimated 80,000 vacant dwellings. Violent crime is also on the rise, and the National Guard and state troopers still supplement a diminished local police force.
[There's a taste of your police state right there.
Shit government that ain't gonna give a crap about you, either!
Takes all the monies for wars, and gives backs diarrhea shitshakes.
Drink up, Amurka!]
Bells pealed amid prayers, song, and tears at the groundbreaking for a Katrina memorial at a New Orleans cemetery.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who famously cursed the federal response in a radio interview days after the storm:
"We ring the bells for a city that is in recovery, that is struggling, that is performing miracles on a daily basis."
The memorial will be the final resting place for more than two dozen unclaimed bodies.
David Kopra, a volunteer from Olympia, Wash., who was holding back tears:
"The saddest thing I've seen here is that there are 30 human beings who will be buried here one day that nobody ever called about. It says something to my heart. This city needs so much care, and that's why I'm here."
Churches throughout the region held services, including historic St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter. At the Claiborne Avenue bridge over the Industrial Canal, mourners tossed a wreath into the water near the spot where a levee breach led to the inundation of the Lower Ninth.
In Biloxi, Miss., about 100 people prayed and sang in the shadow of a Katrina monument.
Mayor A.J. Holloway: "God has been good to Biloxi and its people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We have a new outlook on life and a new appreciation for what's really important in life. It's . . . knowing the importance of family and friends and knowing that we all have a higher power."
In Gulfport, Miss., Governor Haley Barbour urged people to see the positive. About 13,000 of his state's uprooted families are still living in trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but that's down from a peak of 48,000. Barbour said he expects they could all be out of the temporary housing in a year."
[Yeah, turns out Haley and his family made out fine on all this.
Got a that and a great lobbying firm going, too!]
"Commemorations for a City 2 Years After Storm" by Adam Nossiter/New York Times August 30, 2007
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 — This city remembered Hurricane Katrina’s second anniversary Wednesday with sadness, hurt and flashes of anger over a recovery that has returned it to only a portion of its former self.
President Bush stopped in, dining at a famous Creole restaurant and visiting a restored school in the Lower Ninth Ward. But his brief visit appeared to mean little to citizens still focused on day-to-day struggles and mourning the storm’s continuing losses.
There were ceremonies — marches, Masses and speeches — all over town Wednesday. But the city hardly needs an anniversary to help it recall a disaster that upended the life of virtually every resident here. The still-ruined neighborhoods and, beneath the surface, the mental scars, are merely exclamation points for what Hurricane Katrina has become for people in New Orleans: a fixed point of reference around which conversations and lives continue to revolve.
At a memorial ceremony at the Charity Hospital Cemetery, Mayor C. Ray Nagin choked up, evoking “the young who cry every time there’s a hard thunderstorm, because they’re afraid another storm is coming.”
Mr. Nagin rang a bell at the precise moment a major levee broke two years ago, and the musician Irvin Mayfield, who lost his father in the storm, played a raucous and angry dirge on his trumpet in the sweltering heat.
On a forlorn street at the edge of the Ninth Ward, Darrel Ellis, a truck driver, sat on a stoop, ignoring a nearby parade protesting the lagging recovery:
“It’s a depression going on. It’s not like the ’20s and ’30s. It’s right here,” he said, tapping his temple. “Let the world know, the depression is on.”
At the historic St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, its cream interior brilliantly illuminated in the gloom of a summer thunderstorm, parishioners who lost homes and friends found solace in a gentle memorial Mass.
Cliff Sanders, 74, who lost his house in a fire after the storm:
“It helps a bit, to think about things in a calmer vein. Most of my good friends are not here any longer. That’s one of the things that’s wrong. The fabric of this city will never be the same.”
Earlier, and several miles away, Mr. Bush paid a quick morning visit to the gleamingly refurbished Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology, traveling past boarded-up houses and empty lots to get there. The president briefly greeted students in several classes at the school, which had been inundated with up-to-the-roof water, before pushing on to Mississippi.
Government at all levels is not popular here, viewed as having failed citizens who have been forced to rebuild largely on their own. Mr. Bush is no more and no less a target than other officials... though he showed some awareness Wednesday of an uneasy feeling common in New Orleans: that Washington, and the rest of the country, have grown weary of the city’s troubles.
Mr. Bush, referring to his visit immediately after the hurricane that has been derided as simply an orchestrated photo opportunity:
“It’s one thing to come and give a speech in Jackson Square. It’s another thing to keep paying attention to whether or not progress is being made. And I hope people understand we do; we’re still paying attention.”
[What kid glove treatment by the Times. Are you kidding me?]
Still, as the modest protest march from the Lower Ninth Ward made clear, Mr. Bush remains the favored target of the fervent activist community that has blossomed here in the wake of the storm. “George Bush, you can’t hide!” the marchers shouted, though Mr. Bush had already left town by then. Onlookers peered curiously from a fried-chicken restaurant as the protesters, led by a clownish figure on stilts, made their way up St. Claude Avenue; some along the route hung back.
[Yup, the protesters are clownish!
So sick of the disrespecting, stinkfuck elites at the Times.
Fuck that dogshit paper!]
Levon Leban, one of the marchers:
“This is a purposeful noise we’re making here. If nothing else, I hope people around the country will understand it’s not over, just because the water has receded.”
A man held a sign out of a car window that read, “The Right of Return for Everyone,” and anti-Bush slogans resounded.
Robert Goodman: “Nothing’s changed in two years. Everything the mayor and president do, that’s just for show.”
At the Industrial Canal, which obliterated the Lower Ninth Ward two years ago when its levees failed, political figures and religious leaders dropped flowers into the murky waters from the Claiborne Avenue Bridge.
Reynard Green, a waiter in the French Quarter who lost his house in the upper Ninth Ward, who showed up to be a part of it:
“It’s still a struggle. I’ve got a job, but my family’s not back yet. It’s hurting. They want to come back, but there’s no place for them to stay.”
Some scoffed at the day’s ceremonies — “It’s just another day, to God, that’s all it is,” said Mr. Ellis, the truck driver — but others suggested that they felt the intense need to memorialize the disaster that is common here.
Earl Wadsworth, after the Mass at St. Louis Cathedral: “To come down here in the pouring rain for the Katrina victims, it’s the least I could do.”
At the cemetery, officials were breaking ground on a permanent memorial that will also contain the remains of several dozen unclaimed bodies. New Orleans, Mayor Nagin said at the ceremony, is still “struggling,” a “city that is in recovery.”
In the cathedral’s vestibule, Al Bernard said it had been:
“A very spiritual trial we went through. [Wednesday was] a special day. We suffered so much, and we are still suffering.”
[No end in sight!]
