As I wiped sweat off my brow I noticed a skinny black man in a pickup truck pull up to a stop right beside me. The man got out, looked over the massive pile of random debris on the sidewalk, and asked me if he could take the refrigerator I had just finished pulling out of the house. After agreeing, I asked him if he was in the city when Katrina hit. The tall old man shook his head, muttered some curses, and began to tell me his story. “It was raining hard when I first looked out the window of my house on the just right over there.” The man pointed down the street and continued.
“I went to my room to get a shirt, came back, and noticed the water was almost up to where my shins. By the time I got outside, the water was up to my knees. After walking about 30 yards the water was up to my chest. I managed to climb on top of a parked semi truck and I stayed there for four days before a boat with cops came by. They saw me waving my arms and came over, but then the police told me to stay where I was, and they left me!” The skinny old black man now lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his family; he had come back to his hometown to look for some metal to sell from gutted houses. Scenes and stories like this are common in New Orleans after Katrina hit.
After two years New Orleans is still wrecked. The Big Easy, what once used to be the most artistic of cities in the United States, is now struggling to get back to its former glory. The federal government is helping very little, because the higher authorities figure that the city is not worth it to save. The federal government does not care about New Orleans due to its poor inhabitants, terrible economy, and the fact that it costs too much money to protect from future floods.
One well known picture taken some weeks after Hurricane Katrina is that of a local police man carrying a handful of DVDs and some other materialistic goods out of a store. Looting was very common in New Orleans after Katrina hit, and the facts of the city population must be known for this to make sense. In 2005, an estimated sixty-seven percent of residents of New Orleans are African American and about thirty percent of the residents are below the poverty line, including half the children population. Katrina hit at the most inopportune time, three days before most poor residents would get welfare checks from the government. Approximately 134,000 people could not leave their homes because they could not afford transportation (from MSNBC). Such statistics make the government feel that New Orleans should not be rebuilt. The poverty rate of New Orleans also contributes to the meager economy of the city.
The economy of New Orleans before Katrina was one of the greatest in the South, mainly because of the city's location being so close to the Mississippi River Delta and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (known as “MR GO” by the locals, it is the rarely-used intercostal waterway that connects the Mississippi to Lake Borgne, which is part of the Gulf of Mexico). Coffee, bananas and sugar are some of its imports; exports consist of oil, petrochemicals, rice, cotton, and corn. There are also many factories producing a wide variety of goods such as wood, paper, metal products, food, beverages, building stone, medical and building equipment, communication systems, apparel, and airplane parts(from infoplease.com). The damage from Katrina's flooding resulted in an astounding $150 billion worth of damage to the Gulf Coast, the most costly natural disaster in the history of the United States (from USA Today).
The only money-making idea left to New Orleans now is tourism, which is usually considered the last thing on the list of ideas to boost a city's economy. Without this once fastidious economy, New Orleans is having a very difficult time getting important jobs associated with the recovery of the city, including protection from future hurricanes.
The tall skinny black man who told me his story of surviving the floods of Katrina also was positive of one thing: the levees were blown up by people working for the government. This idea is not uncommon in New Orleans, as it had actually happened in 1927. Whether the levees were blown up or not, one thing that is believed by everyone is that the levees were too weak and were made with poor engineering. On a good note, the Army Corps of Engineers has received $7 billion that is going towards rebuilding broken levees and installing new flood gates at Lake Pontchartrain. This work should be done by 2011, and it should protect New Orleans from future large storms (USA Today).
Of the $116 billion the federal government endowed upon the Gulf Coast for recovery, less than half has reached municipal projects after going through federal checks and balances, and $34 billion is being held over for long-term rebuilding (USA Today). Despite this lack of money, New Orleans is still being cleaned up, thanks to the millions of volunteers from all over the world since the flood occurred two years ago.
About 111 million cubic yards of debris has been cleared from the Gulf Coast communities, which is enough to fill the New Orleans Superdome twenty times. Running water and electricity have returned to practically every Gulf Coast city, and the population of New Orleans (approximately 300,000) is back to sixty-seven percent of what it was pre-Katrina (USA Today). New Orleans is recovering thanks to the many people who decided to stop watching about it on television and decided to go down there and work for change.
Upon coming home from New Orleans, people asked me if there is still a lot of work to be done down there. None of them would believe me if I told them, if I showed them my pictures and told them my many stories, because none of these people know what it is like to work for something that good. New Orleans is the one of the distinguished cities in the United States and the world. It deserves to be rebuilt, for the sake of the many people who live there and are unwilling to change for anything, even a Class 5 hurricane named Katrina. Though the government does not care about New Orleans due to the cities protection costs, poor people, and terrible economy, the rest of the world who have sent volunteers do care. It is up to the volunteers to bring New Orleans back, whether that be by hard physical labor or donations.
