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Katrina: One Year Later
It's been a year since Hurricane Katrina, but hardly a happy anniversary. Seated far from the disaster, as many of us are, it's hard to draw a clear picture of what exactly is going on in the Gulf Coast. Every survivor has a heartbreaking story that looks up or down every day. Depending on where you look, there's hope for good things to come, or more frustration, more agony, more sadness. Happy or sad, hopeful or not, there are no happy endings yet.
Here's a loose collection of links from around the web that may paint a picture of progress in the Gulf Coast one year after Katrina. Everywhere you look, there's something else that changes the story. If you live in the area and have a blog, or just find a link of interest, please leave it in the comments section.
NOLA.com and the
Hurricane Digital Memory
Bank both offer browseable
collections of survivor's tales. Some are memories of life before the storm,
others are accounts of life afterwards. All are small, real snippets that
personalize history.
SunHerald.com offers photos of Mississipi before and
after Katrina, for
comparison.
The recovery efforts in New Orleans are not
completely without hope. The New York Times recently ran a really inspiring
piece about one family's efforts to restore their home: A New Orleans Home Is
Reborn, With Persistence
On the other hand, the Gulf Coast is filled with
desperation and despair. The area is in a mental health
crisis, and the results are
tragic.
Hurricane Katrina.org is offering a
series of pieces designed to help provide some sense of comfort and normalcy to
those suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), attempting to
coach people through their
emotions on the anniversary
of Katrina.
There is a growing blogging scene in Lousiana
that provides the pulse of the zeitgeist one year after recovery far better than
I can from a desk in Northern Virginia. This listing offers a guide to over 100 New Orleans
blogs. Here are a few that
I liked:
Moldy City
Humid
City
Building Big
Easy
Photos from the Rising Tide Conference over the weekend indicate that perhaps parts of New Orleans are
back on
track.
There's so much online about the Katrina aftermath, and no way to encompass it all. Everywhere you look, you can see despair, hope, sadness, and creeping joy.
Again, if any of you have links to content that helps paint a picture of life in the Gulf Coast a year after Katrina -- and ESPECIALLY if you blogged about it yourself -- please leave a note in my comments section. And if you're down there right now, please know that we're still pulling for you. --Jeff
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Hi, Jeff! Being in SE Texas, I missed Katrina's fury. I remember being paralized with fear at one point over all those people in the Superdome, when we heard the roof had collapsed. I was afraid it would become the worlds largest swimming pool. Praying for their safety. - I did sit 30 miles NE of Beaumont, TX through Rita. I recorded it in my journal: http://journals.aol.com/bhbne
r2him/LifeFaithinCaneyhead/
Then this past summer I put it in the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. Since we were approaching our own one year anniversary, I recently posted all my Rita related entries in one journal in consequtive order. http://journals.aol.com/bhbner2him/storm-stories---in-the-p ath-of-r/
You are welcome to take a sneak peek. I am announcing it in my regular journal nearer the anniversary.
Barbara -
I have to shamefully admit the devastation of Hurricane Katrina had slipped my mind. After watching Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke" on HBO tonight, I will be sure to never forget again.
Too many lives have been destroyed - families and homes torn apart. We cannot allow the government to forget or get away with this. The government's slow response was clearly a decision based on economic priority. Most of the 20% of the New Orleans residents who remained after the mandatory evacuation did so because they had no means to evacuate, or no place to go. The United States government should have made provisions for these people.
Let us not forget and surely not forgive until reparations have been made. -
I can't believe some of the comments that were left here in your journal. It's a shame that people feel that way about what happened. Not only N.O. was damaged by this storm it ranged from southern part of Louisiana all the way to Alabama. People forget that Lives were Lost and their lively hood. They should put themselves in other's shoes before speaking so badly about it. It is still a tragedy no matter who stayed and who left. There was just more than one city lost in this horrific storm. Katrina was a catogory 5.... there is nothing that has hit that is higher than that.
So sorry Jeff to be this way but I just wanted some of the people who comment know how I felt. It's people like that.... gets to me. Do they have any compassion at all? This is how I am treated on getting a Job because I moved from Louisiana. They don't care if your struggling to keep afloat.
I blogged about what I remember when living there.... http://journals.aol.com/oxobagladyoxo/TheBagLady/
Hugs,
Chelle -
below sea level elected ones in the state that only steal for a living
nothing more needs to be said other than i am tired of my tax money being flushed in no
10/14/06 12:56 AM
I have to say that NO was one that could have been remedied. Knowing the culture in NO and how the people think....I can say that alot of the claims made by the media were hogwash....and the politicians in NO and the rest of the USA jumped on board to ride the wave with the rest of the USA.....many of those people in NO have been warned so many times of hurricanes....and even if they did believe it was going to happen....the attititude there is that "I have lived here for many years and am not leaving my own home" Our relatives lost 5 homes there but headed the warnings given and left. Blaming Bush is just another way of squeezing funding out of the USA and the poor not gettting the benefit of it...