A combination of civic boosterism and excessive faith in engineered water-control systems led New Orleans to keep reclaiming swampland for housing, building canal systems for commercial ship traffic, and dredging spillways that were supposed to draw floodwater away from the city when the need arose. These systems all failed during Katrina. The storm caused massive, sustained flooding. Two hundred and sixty thousand people had to leave their homes. An ambitious long-term hurricane-protection plan passed by Congress and signed into law by Johnson was never completed.
Katrina flooded out many white people as well as Black people, and, within Black New Orleans, many working-class and middle-class people as well as poor people.
But the dynamic of recovery was all about race. New Orleans is a Black-majority city. Nagin was later convicted of taking bribes from city contractors. The committee soon unveiled a plan that entailed not rebuilding some of the Black neighborhoods that had flooded.
Many residents were outraged; on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead, the idea was that every homeowner should get prompt and generous help in order to return and rebuild. New Orleans has a large racial gap in resources—the Black poverty rate is triple the white poverty rate—so whites were able to move back more quickly and with less hardship.
For a decade after Katrina, New Orleans was a whiter city than it had been before. That fed into a venerable tradition, in Black New Orleans, of suspicion of what white New Orleans might be up to. A direct hit on New Orleans by a large storm could cause widespread deaths if the most vulnerable parts of the city were not evacuated, Jacobsen said.
In the Lower 9th Ward, one of the neighborhoods devastated by the flooding after Katrina, residents biked around or lounged on porches, blocks away from where a flood wall collapsed and inundated the neighborhood 15 years ago. Rainy said he remembers wading through chest-high water after Hurricane Betsy flooded the neighborhood in He's seen the teams of workers strengthen the nearby levees and flood walls after Katrina.
This is the most confident he's ever been in the neighborhood. Still, if a Category 3 or 4 hurricane aimed at New Orleans, he wouldn't stick around to see if everything worked. Facebook Twitter Email. Show Caption. Hide Caption. Hurricane expert weighs in on Laura and Marco outlook.
Fifteen years after the flood, very little recovery money flows into the city, and that is why Rebuilding Together is committed to its work. Vietnam War veteran struggles to rebuild. Felix Lewis, a Vietnam veteran, poses in front of his newly renovated home with volunteers from Chevon who helped complete the work. Lewis, affectionately called "Mr. Felix," is a Vietnam veteran and year resident of New Orleans.
He spent years trying to piecemeal his house back together after it was flooded following Katrina. Stoudt said Lewis used what little insurance money he received to reframe the house, replace siding and do electrical and plumbing work, Stoudt said.
Finally, in , Lewis connected with Rebuilding Together. But he confessed that he was still struggling with it. The question he asked was simple but profound: Should the authorities rebuild all of New Orleans after the flood? Bush, to the panel he assembled to put together a plan for rebuilding New Orleans, where , homes and 20, businesses had flooded. I would demur on that day.
Coming up with the right answer is for me as difficult today as it was then. Those who argued in favor of shrinking usually began by citing census figures. By the time of Katrina, New Orleans had an estimated , residents — and with maybe , left a few months after the storm, who knew, Canizaro and others were asking, if the population would get back to even ,? Craig Colton, who taught geography at LSU, heard from colleagues around the country in the weeks after Katrina.
Sharky, too, said he thought it would be irresponsible to rebuild all of New Orleans.
0コメント