Fourth Anniversary of Katrina: We're Still Here

 to Nordette and all of you for these excellent links. I have been in a sour mood all week thinking about all the work that is yet to be done. I have something that I am trying to do to focus attention where I think it needs to be focused. I do not refer to the tragedy as "Hurricaine Katrina." I call it the "post-Katrina levee breaches." This was no "natural disaster," and I think our language about it needs to reflect that. (Yet I know that my phrase of choice is unwieldy...)

I have heard it said that we are really good in the USA about charity, but not with social justice. NOLA post-levee breach is a social justice issue that cannot be solved just with donations of time, money, and other resources.

~~

This So-Called, Post-Post-Racial Life

http://postpostracial.wordpress.com/

It's a sad truth that many people, including myself, don't remember huge events unless we were a part of them. Every year when the anniversary of our tornado hits, I think about it. I can't remember the emotions that came with giving birth to my children, but I remember what it felt like to have nine people in my bathroom. There are many events that should be marked in my memory as important simply because they mattered so much to the people of my country. But most of the time I only remember what happened to me unless reminded of those other events. I cried....oh God how I cried...watching the reports coming out of New Orleans as Katrina wrecked so much of our coastline. And now, thinking about it because of your post, I'm emotional again. I saw so much stupidity from some of our government that it was almost unbelievable. I remember people being denied transportation out of there because they wouldn't leave their pets and I remember thinking, "What is WRONG with you people?" I did more than think it. I yelled about it. I remember the first views of living conditions inside the Superdome and wondering how anyone could think that was even remotely OK. I appreciate it when people remind of events like this because I need to be reminded.

I came away from that comment with some more ideas of how Rising Tide can better serve, how we can spread the truth. There needs to be a central place where folks can look up the facts about The Flood, a place to store the ammunition we need to fight the lies. I may end up repurposing some of it as a blog post. I hope you'll come next year and look forward to meeting you. :)

Nordette, I find that the feelings you describe when you sit down to write about New Orleans are ones I have quite regularly, myself.  I wasn't here when the storm and the levee breaches occurred, and we have fortunately not been in the position of having to completely rebuild our house, but I do revel in the knowledge that now, more than ever, I am here for this city when it needs me, even though I do feel beat all to hell by it at times.

Yes, there is a lot of work yet to be done here.  There are many battles that must still be fought involving our recovery on many, many fronts...but the population alone has grown much faster than folks thought it would four years ago, and it is those who keep the local traditions alive who are slowly prevailing despite it all.

And it is also those such as yourself who struggle inwardly and still keep on keepin' on through it all that are a part of this resurrection.  This particular anniversary has been a gift in that we have the time to contemplate what this day means...and what it doesn't mean.  I cherish this gift of yours, aka, this post, for embodying that spirit of contemplation.

I've added his post to the links in the main post. Thank you. I was glad to find your site as well.

Nordette Adams ( http://www.bookotopia.com ) is a BlogHer CE ( http://www.blogher.com/haystackprofile/viewprofile... ) & you can find her other stuff through Her 411 ( http://her411.com ).

Right. Not just Bush messed up. However, his answers made him look like he was out to lunch big time.  You are correct: "Government at all levels failed that city before and after the storm."

I still can't get over claims back then from governemnt officials saying they didn't see the flood coming. Perhaps we will learn from our mistakes, but I'm not sure the government is learning fast enough. Your brother-in-law sounds like he knew the score. In many ways the score's the same. If you read up on what's happening today, you'll find the real work of making better levees, a better system, still goes undone due to poltical maneuvering.

Thank you for reading and commenting. Make sure you get back to visit the city again.

Nordette Adams ( http://www.bookotopia.com ) is a BlogHer CE ( http://www.blogher.com/haystackprofile/viewprofile... ) & you can find her other stuff through Her 411 ( http://her411.com ).

You're talking about Black Kold Madina's Trouble the Water ( http://www.theroot.com/views/trouble-hits-hbo ).  Isn't her first hand video account amazing?

Deboarah, this is a great line: "NOLA seems to be a southern belle without a proper suitor." :-)

Nordette Adams ( http://www.bookotopia.com ) is a BlogHer CE ( http://www.blogher.com/haystackprofile/viewprofile... ) & you can find her other stuff through Her 411 ( http://her411.com ).

Thank you, Nordette, for a thoughtful post and for linking to NOLAFemmes. I haven't posted about the anniversary on NF as the words just won't come but I'm glad the other contributers have stepped in. As I said yesterday on a social site, everyone who lived through Katrina aka The Federal Flood deals with it in their own way. There is no right or wrong.

I agree with Sophmom and also *highly* recommend reading Rex Dingler's post which is pretty much how I feel too.

http://nolarising.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-i-will-... ( http://nolarising.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-i-will-... )

Red Beans & Ricely Yours (as Louis would say!)

Charlotte

Not only is there old fiction and nonfiction but tons of new fiction and nonfiction. I went nuts in the bookstore a while back, spending much more than I should have at a local bookstore. I could read nothing but books about New Orleans for a year and still have more for the following year.

Thank you for commenting.

Nordette Adams ( http://www.bookotopia.com ) is a BlogHer CE ( http://www.blogher.com/haystackprofile/viewprofile... ) & you can find her other stuff through Her 411 ( http://her411.com ).

Slowly I've been moving my old posts from my blog that's offline now but was written when I lived in New Jersey to an archive and making them visible online again. I have not done that with my many Hurricane Katrina posts from 2005.  One week I'll have to make a special effort to do that because being able to look back the way we can if we read your posts ( http://homepage.mac.com/elisa_camahort/iblog/C1830... ) is like going back in time. Through them we can recall how we felt and why we were so moved and horrified. Recalling the strong emotions, both the outrage over government response and pride at how ordinary people pulled together reinforces our stand to see recovery through.

Nordette Adams ( http://www.bookotopia.com ) is a BlogHer CE ( http://www.blogher.com/haystackprofile/viewprofile... ) & you can find her other stuff through Her 411 ( http://her411.com ).

Thank you for the Rising Tide blog list. I had them in my list from Twitter and somehow lost them while formatting.  Your other links also add a great deal to the conversation to educate others.

Nordette Adams ( http://www.bookotopia.com ) is a BlogHer CE ( http://www.blogher.com/haystackprofile/viewprofile... ) & you can find her other stuff through Her 411 ( http://her411.com ).

And I've been back several times since and yet even as a new visitor I still feel barely able to put my feelings about your hometown into words. Just always, when I leave, I hope I'll come back soon. And I can't imagine if I'd been born and raised, or even just lived in New Orleans for awhile, how I would have dealt with the losses that you experienced (psychic, anyway.) It is a place of amazing resilience and like Elisa I can't even get my head around how it was left to drown. 

There is still so much joy amid the sadness there. And, as you know, some of the most amazing fiction and nonfiction born in the city that it's a good and even more essential thing now, I think, that the story is written down from all manner of perspectives. 

I'll write about it more, hopefully, today. Thanks for this Nordette. I'm thinking of the collective you and just you too especially this season. 

Laurie

I went back and found my Katrina posts and collected them in a new post for this anniversary ( http://homepage.mac.com/elisa_camahort/iblog/C1830... ). I was a rage-filled linking machine. 

I've done the same each year with my 9/11 posts. And they are not so-rage filled, much more elegiac. I guess I was more angered by our own government letting its people down than by an outside force attacking us. It struck at the core of who I thought America was.

Elisa Camahort Page
BlogHer
elisa@blogher.com

My BlogHer profile ( http://www.blogher.com/haystackprofile/viewprofile... ) truly shows you everything I do online...Check it out!!

I loved NOLAREX's 4th anniversary post at Humid City ( http://humidcity.com/?p=2487 ):

In New Orleans, it wasn’t just the hurricane, but the resulting failures of the burdened and aging levee system and the subsequent failures of leadership. It was the emotional duress we endured internally and the apathy we experienced from externally.

There is something we can all do now, though. Every time we read someone who writes online or hear someone saying that New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt, that those people deserved what they got for living below sea level, that this sort of thing could never happen here, to us, we should arm ourselves with facts and prove them wrong until no one writes those things and no one says those things ever again.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish the lies from the facts, but it can be done. Start with this current evaluation of the Katrina Pain Index ( http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/katrina-pain-index-2... ). Then pay attention to the companies that have since been determined by Congress to have taken advantage of residents of the Gulf Coast during and after Hurricane Katrina ( http://katrinaaction.org/Katrina_contractors ).

Most importantly, learn the difference between Hurricane Katrina, which made its landfalls (both of them) on 8/29/05, huge and powerful, devastating the lower Louisiana Parishes and the Mississippi coastline (virtually all of it), and The Flood that occurred in New Orleans when the the city fell victim to the greatest civil engineering failure in our nation's history. Watch this interactive graphic from NOLA.com ( http://www.nola.com/katrina/wide.ssf?/katrina/grap... ) to see how the levees failed. Then read the Executive Summary ( http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/projects/neworleans/rep... ) of the Independent Levee Investigation Team Final Report ( http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/projects/neworleans/ ) to understand why the levees failed. 

If you're feeling particularly ambitious, then read John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America ( http://johnmbarry.com/_i_rising_tide__the_great_mi... ). This has added benefits. In addition to clearly explaining how New Orleans came to be vulnerable so folks in the Mississippi Basin, which covers a full one third of our nation, can buy and sell goods, so Tulsa can be a port, so Pittsburgh can be a port, so folks in Kansas and Ohio can be protected from flooding; Barry also shows us how the Federal Government became responsible for disaster relief, how FEMA came into being, even how Herbert Hoover was elected President. It reads like a mystery novel, fast and riveting. Then make your kids read it.

There are easier things to do too. Follow some of the more than 300 NOLA Bloggers ( http://risingtidenola.net/blogroll.php ) and resolve now to attend next year's Rising Tide Conference ( http://www.risingtidenola.net/ ). Read the Rising Tide Conference Blog ( http://risingtideblog.blogspot.com/ ) or follow RisingTide on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/risingtide ). Also, Crystal Kile's Vimeo post of a segment of Harry Shearer's 2009 Rising Tide Conference Keynote ( http://vimeo.com/6263430 ) is well worth the easy watch.

Finally,  in an effort to explain why this should matter so much to the rest of us, and forgive me for going so long, I'll quote Scout Prime's recent farewell post at First Draft ( http://www.first-draft.com/2009/08/scouts-farewell... ):

I am just an American who felt strongly about the necessity of this country to right the wrong that had been done to the Gulf Coast and in particular New Orleans. I believed and still do believe that it is a moral imperative and that in not doing so we, as a country, as a community, risk losing our soul. I would submit that as a society we lost our moral compass when bodies were allowed to remain in the streets of N.O. for days and weeks, or in homes for months and even a year in some cases, as the powers that be argued over who would foot the bill to recover the remains of the victims of the flooding of New Orleans. There is something very wrong when such a thing can occur in a great nation.

Peace, y'all.

Ms Lady Deborah

I just wrote my post about Katrina today. Yesterday was just too heavy for me to fully express how I feel about this particular subject.

NOLA seems to be a southern belle without a proper suitor. She definitely needs a person  with a plan and a large bankroll to help restore her.  Barack may be that suitor once the national health care debate is over.  Maybe not. 

There is another movie on Katrina that should be airing right now.  It was on HBO on Demand a couple of months ago.  A NOLA sista took extensive footage of what happened from the day Katrina hit NOLA.  It is one helluva of a documentary.  The footage had me sitting there cringing as the first floor of her home filled with water.  The documentary is titled Trouble The Waters.  Some of the footage in this film had my temper raising to total pissed in a matter of moments.

I believe that there should be a national push to mark August 29, as a day of remembrance for the people who were victimized and died in Katina's aftermath.  What happened afterwards changed my whole perspective on being disaster prepared.  In my part of the union we have major thunderstorms, blizzards and tornadoes.  I'm prepared for those conditions.  After we experienced what is known as an inland hurricane a couple of years ago-I became very focused on what I would need to ride out no electricity for more than a day.

I don't know how the people who survived feel about what happened.  Mother Nature is one of those forces you cannot under estimate.  I consider how the Bush Administration responded to be a second national disaster as well.

This is a great post!

I just watched "When the Levees Broke" last night for the first time. Makes you realize just how dependent we are in government. The horrific federal response to that tragedy was unimagineable -- it exposed just how inept Bush and his administration were. I had the pleasure of experiencing Mardi Gras during my college years and visited my brother-in-law who lived there just a few months before Katrina hit. During that visit, he and his wife told us just how vulnerable those Levees were. Government at all levels failed that city before and after the storm.

I appreciate the links you offered. After seeing the movie last night, I had intended to do some more reading to see just where recovery efforts are today. What a treasure that city is -- so rich in history and culture, so unique and distinct from anywhere else in the world. It's people who are so rooted there deserve to have their heritage restored.

Amy@UWM, Up With Moms ( http://upwithmoms.blogspot.com/ )