Five years after Katrina: The curse and hope of New Orleans

By Chris Cermak Aug 29, 2010, 13:45 GMT

New Orleans, Louisiana - One way of measuring New Orleans' comeback is by the mounds of trash: more than 8,000 tons of knee-high debris piled up on the city's streets after its famous Mardi Gras carnival celebrations in February.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast, tourists and locals cramming this year's parade gave long-suffering residents a feeling that their beloved city was finally returning to its old self.

Add to this the first-ever American football championship in January for the city's adored New Orleans Saints, and it would be fair to say the 'Big Easy' was on something of a high.

'This is the first year that it's really felt like pre-Katrina,' said Brittanie Bryant, 38, manager of a clothing and souvenir shop in New Orleans' affluent French Quarter.

One could forgive New Orleans residents for feeling cursed: the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in April triggered the biggest oil spill in US history.

Tourism in New Orleans plunged again by 12 to 16 per cent. Restaurants were left without seafood, and fishermen found themselves high and dry as crude oil washed up along the coast of Louisiana and three other Gulf Coast states.

'You feel like we have a bull's eye on our back,' Bryant said.

Still, it is clear that New Orleans has regained some of its swagger since August 29, 2005, when a category 3 hurricane struck the US Gulf Coast, killed 1,464 people in Louisiana and overran New Orleans' flood defenses.

The storm's destruction left some people questioning whether New Orleans should even be rebuilt. Katrina displaced more than 1 million people from the region and reduced New Orleans' population by half. More than 80 per cent of the city was flooded and 70 per cent of its buildings damaged, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Centre.

Five years on, the city's population is estimated at nearly 350,000, almost 80 per cent of pre-Katrina levels. A May-June poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 70 per cent of residents believe New Orleans is headed in the right direction, though 59 per cent said the city had yet to fully recover from the storm.

'For five years, we've been trying to get our head out of the water,' said Don Peneguy, 62, a building superintendent whose home escaped major damage on the North Shore. 'It's taking a lot of time. It's going to take a lot more.'

The recovery is uneven, as poorer neighbourhoods have typically taken longer to recover. Less than a quarter of residents have returned to the city's Lower Ninth Ward, a poverty-stricken district that was among the hardest-hit by the hurricane.

Income levels 'made all the difference in whether or not a neighbourhood would come back,' said Mark Schleifstein, environment correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and author of Path of Destruction. 'It's a very frustrating system, to say the least.'

New Orleans remains plagued by more chronic problems, most notably an out-of-control crime rate that existed long before Katrina or the BP oil disaster ever hit the region. The city has the highest per- capita murder rate in the country, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Racial mistrust still lingers, long after the heart-wrenching pictures of 30,000 people - mainly African-Americans - stranded beside New Orleans' Superdome stadium in the days after the hurricane.

The Kaiser poll found that 42 per cent of black residents said they had yet to fully rebound from Katrina, compared to 16 per cent of white residents. About one-third of African-Americans feel they are being given worse treatment than whites in the recovery process.

'They played mind games with us,' said Richard Louis, a 44-year- old African-American who battled one and a half years with insurance companies to rebuild his home in the West Bank-Gretna neighbourhood. Yet, despite all the problems, 'you can't keep people away from here,' he said.

The twin disasters of Katrina and BP's oil spill represent an opportunity to correct some past mistakes, argues Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who in May became the first white mayor of New Orleans in more than three decades.

Landrieu has asked the US Justice Department to help right the course at a police department that has 'lost its way,' and he insists even the poorest neighbourhoods of New Orleans must be rebuilt. He has pushed for a sustained financial commitment to protect Louisiana's fragile and eroding wetlands along the coast.

'We are not rebuilding the city we were,' Landrieu said in a speech last week in Washington, 'but creating the city we want to become.'