10th Anniversary of Katrina

It's ten years since Katrina occurred.

Apart from the disaster of the hurricane the failure of local and national government made it very much worse. New Orleans has still not recovered and some areas are still being ignored!

The effects of the hurricane were worsened by the poor engineering of the barriers and the lack of foresight of the planning and execution of defence mechanisms. I think that, according to what the locals told me, it was also a mixture of incompetence and corruption.

The barriers weren't constructed properly which contributed to them failing and the system of canals and pumps were not only unable to cope with the deluge (understandable to a certain extent) but the pumps didn't have independent back-up power. So when the hurricane took the power lines out, the pumps couldn't work.

We arrived there in 2006 (the year after the disaster) to try and support the locals. They told us that they needed tourism to pick up again to help boost their economy and bring them back towards being self-sufficient. By the time we got there they had no American tourist (of any significant number) but were getting quite a number of Brits and some Scandinavians.

At the time we were there they had set up a museum of the disaster and it was very scathing of the lack of help. That museum was, eventually, forced to close.

The current publicity for the anniversary has signs saying that the people of New Orleans thank the Americans for their help. That's not what they said at the time!
The streets were covered in banners saying the opposite.


We learnt about the big mistakes made, the horrendous delay in government disaster aid due to political wrangling, the 700 people that were stranded in the buildings by the docks (in temperatures in the 90's) that were totally overlooked by the 'rescue' people, the lack of space (according to the politicians) to put the displaced people whilst the hotels were full of politicians and media people and a lot of other things.

There's no doubt that the emergency experts and the volunteers did a wonderful job but so much more could have been done. We learnt about the symbols that the first emergency people painted on the flooded properties to show where injured people were, uninjured people were, bodies were, pets abandoned etc. This was so that the rescuers could prioritise.

You would think that after 10 years they would have at least helped the destitute people to rebuild their homes. According to what I saw last night, from New Orleans, the better off people have been provided for by either insurance or government but a lot of those with nothing, still have nothing.

The politicians are boasting of how the place has recovered but some of the problems are still being 'swept under the carpet' and this report about the Lower 9th Ward is typical of the problem.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/10-yea...ing-to-rebuild-and-draw-people-back-1.3198232

I deleted my photos of the disaster areas as they were too upsetting! So I can't show you any.

That's got it off my chest top some extent