New Orleans, Gulf Coast Mark Katrina Milestone

NEW ORLEANS— The Gulf Coast and New Orleans observed the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest storms in American history, in ways both devout and festive. Church bells rang and brass bands played as people across the storm-rava...
New Orleans, Gulf Coast Mark Katrina Milestone
Rizzo Santana, 2, walks with his mother Sierra Santana during a second-line parade to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Saturday, Aug. 29, 2015. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
The Associated Press
8/30/2015
Updated:
8/30/2015

NEW ORLEANS— The Gulf Coast and New Orleans observed the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest storms in American history, in ways both devout and festive. Church bells rang and brass bands played as people across the storm-ravaged coast remembered the past and looked to the future.

“Some people said that we shouldn’t come back. Some people said that we couldn’t come back,” said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. “Yet 10 years later here we are. Still standing.”

The storm killed more than 1,800 people and caused $151 billion in damage, in one of the country’s deadliest and most costly natural disasters. Many of the dead came in New Orleans when levees protecting the city burst, submerging 80 percent of the Crescent City in water.

The dead and those who still struggle to rebuild were not far from anyone’s thoughts Saturday, from Mississippi where church bells rang out to mark when the storm made landfall to a commemoration at the New Orleans memorial containing bodies of people never claimed or never identified.

As the church bells rang, 80-year-old Eloise Allen wept softly into a tissue as she leaned against her rusting Oldsmobile.

“I feel guilty,” said Allen, whose house in Bay St. Louis was damaged but inhabitable after the storm. “I didn’t go through what all the other people did.”

Saturday was a day to remember what “all the other people” went through. Those who were lifted from rooftops by helicopters, those who came home to find only concrete steps as evidence of where their house used to be, those whose bodies were never claimed after the storm.

But the mourning Saturday was balanced by a celebration of how far the region has come.

1737470[/morearticles]

Once a bastion of black home ownership, it still hasn’t regained anywhere near its pre-Katrina population. But a day of events illustrated how attached the residents who have returned are to their community.

After the speeches were done, a parade snaked through the neighborhood while music played from boom boxes and people sold water from ice chests under the hot sun.

Clarence Davis’ family home was four blocks from the levee. He evacuated before Katrina and eventually returned to the region, but now lives in the suburbs. He came back Saturday just to find old faces from the neighborhood but he couldn’t bring himself to see the vacant lot where his house used to be.

“The family home is what kept us together and it’s gone,” he said. His family is scattered now in Houston, Atlanta and Louisiana as are many of his neighbors.

Thousands of volunteers spread out across New Orleans, echoing the volunteers who helped the city and region recover after Katrina and still come to the city to this day.

In a city where people form strong bonds over neighborhoods, from the Lower 9th Ward, to Broadmoor, to Gentilly and Lakeview, many choose to stay local on Saturday in one of the many neighborhood events across the city.

“New Orleans will always be in my blood,” a silver-haired Juanita Fields said Saturday in what was the badly flooded Pontchartrain Park, an African-American neighborhood near Southern University New Orleans.

She recounted her post-Katrina experiences — fear and thirst in a sweltering Superdome, eventual transport to Kansas — with humor, grace and at times defiance. She finally returned in 2012. She is happy about the city’s recovery, but not about the unevenness of that recovery that saw the city’s poorest suffer. She believes some “grieved themselves to death,” over the destruction and their inability to return or rebuild.

But she’s optimistic that the city will continue to recover. “It will. It’s going to take us a while.”