What is happening, still, in New Orleans is a tragedy, one from which Sacramento needs to learn the value of achieving 500 year flood protection and settling for nothing less, except as a step in the process of achieving it.
An excerpt
Hurricane Katrina: One year later: Recovery slow, painful
Gulf Coast stirs, but the task ahead is staggering
By Chris Adams, Jack Douglas Jr. and Sharon Schmickle -- McClatchy Newspapers Published 12:01 am PDT Sunday, August 27, 2006
NEW ORLEANS -- A year ago, Hurricane Katrina wiped away Clement Richardson's apartment in New Orleans East. Today, he lives 11 miles away in a gleaming white government trailer in his parents' front yard. He's in a different neighborhood, but one equally devastated by the hurricane.
He's all alone in a place once teeming with people. His parents, 67 and 70 years old, aren't coming back. They're in Baton Rouge, sick of hurricanes, and his siblings are now in Nashville, Tenn. Richardson still plans to renovate the family house in the historic Holy Cross neighborhood in hopes that his daughter may live there someday.
On a sweltering morning in August, he pointed to the solitary street light that works on his block. "It's like an old Western town," he said. "No stores, no restaurants, no gas, no washeterias, nothing on this side of the bridge. Everything you know -- your job, your house, your school, your friends -- changes. Everything is gone. Everything."
Hundreds of thousands of lives are on hold throughout New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. One year after Katrina devastated the area on Aug. 29, 2005, huge swaths of the region are barely beyond the basic cleanup stage.
In neighborhood after neighborhood in New Orleans and adjoining St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, a few houses on a typical block may be gutted, the rancid furnishings and carpeting and walls dumped onto the curb as it's stripped to the studs and, perhaps, rebuilt.
But the majority of the estimated 78,000 New Orleans homes and apartments that were destroyed or severely damaged sit silent, their owners waiting for rebuilding money -- or trying to decide whether they even want to rebuild. Progress in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes also is grim.
