President Barack Obama arrived in still-struggling New Orleans on Sunday to join residents marking five years since flood waters driven by Hurricane Katrina inundated the famous jazz capital.
Obama flew straight from his beach vacation in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts to the storied city, which was plunged into chaos on August 29, 2005 when water driven by Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed its levees.
Although 1.4 million residents and visitors were ordered to evacuate as the monster storm approached, many could not or would not and were left stranded. More than 1,500 died. "It's recovering, but there's some more work to do," said White House spokesman Bill Burton of the city, whose population is only 80 percent what it was before the Category 5 storm.
During his visit to mark the anniversary, Obama "will commemorate the lives lost and the shared sacrifice that the Gulf Coast experienced because of Katrina," the White House said. The president will also pledge to "recommit the nation" to a region that more recently has struggled with the worst accidental oil spill in history.
Ahead of his arrival, the White House touted its commitment to the area, citing efforts to "cut through red tape," and help families still in temporary shelters find more permanent homes.
The administration said it had provided grants to bolster the local justice and health care systems, set up programs to improve handling of emergencies and rebuilt 220 miles (350 kilometers) of levees to pre-Katrina standards. But many in the city argue that the flooding that caused most of the devastation came after the storm, when the pre-Katrina-standard levees failed, and that rebuilding them to the same specifications is pointless.
"It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a man-made disaster," Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu said Sunday on NBC, slamming both the infrastructure and the government's limp response.
She called for more government-backed reconstruction, noting that of the 200,000 homes destroyed, non-profits had rebuilt only 5,000.
The government's failure to help residents left behind in the flooding horrified people at home and abroad, as news shows broadcast footage of men hoisting women, children and the elderly onto roofs to keep them from drowning.
In the Lower Ninth Ward, the poorest part of the city, built in a basin and 99 percent black, bodies drifted lifelessly with the floodwater.
Many survivors fled to the Superdome, the American Football stadium where 10,000 people displaced by the hurricane had already sought refuge, but it too became cut off by the water.
Rescue services were overrun as the disaster that reached deep into neighbouring Mississippi and Alabama unfolded, an entire region deprived of electricity, communications and drinking water.
Finally, the National Guard was deployed, with orders to "shoot to kill" looters. They presided over the airlift and bus evacuations that scattered survivors across the country. Six days after disaster struck, they finally cleared the Superdome.
It took two months for the floodwaters to subside, and rescuers were still finding bodies more than six months later. Five years on, whole neighbourhoods in The Big Easy remain abandoned to rot and ruin and the intervening years have brought new storms, economic crisis and recently the BP oil spill.
In the Lower Ninth Ward, grass and wild plants surround concrete foundation slabs - stone memorials of the houses that were washed away.
Actor Brad Pitt has spent several years in the city, working to rebuild low-income housing there through his Make It Right Foundation.
"There's a feel and a smell and a sound that permeates this place that I just find intoxicating," he told NBC. Five years ago, Robert Green was stranded on his roof. He lost his mother and his granddaughter to the floodwaters as the house broke apart underneath his feet.
He now lives in a Make It Right house built on the site of his old home.
He would like to see the city claim the homes of those who have yet to return, even if that means changing the character of his historic neighbourhood. "The bottom line of it is, we need families, we need young life, young blood," said Green. "We could sit around and wait 20 years for people to come back, or we could realise and say 'So what? I have a Hispanic neighbour, a Vietnamese neighbour,' we've got to open it up."
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