Huricane Katrina | One Year After

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Tuesday was the first anniversary of Huricane Katrina - by far the largest disaster which New Orleans has ever seen, as well as one of the largest disasters the US has ever seen.

Marked with a moment of silence, wreath-laying, the tolling of church bells and, in true New Orleans fashion, a wailing jazz funeral through the potholed streets for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Many local jazz musicians marched ahead of a horse-drawn hearse - a symbol of the city's watery death. They played a dirge for the more than 1,800 people killed when Huricane Katrina came ashore on August 29th, 2005. But the ensemble soon exploded into a joyful rhythm, the marchers opening colorful parasols and hoisting them toward the hot sun as they danced New Orleans back to life, in a way that only New Orleans could.

In baron neighborhoods choked with weeds, in church pews, and in gutted community centers, local residents held many vigils to remember the dead. They rang bells to mark the collapse of New Orleans' biggest levee and laid wreaths at the site of each successive break in the cement structure that one year ago failed to protect the city.

Mayor Ray Nagin told the city it was time to take responsibility for rebuilding the city, at a midday interfaith prayer service.

"If government can’t get you your check on time, it says you need to do something," Nagin said. "It says your neighbors need to come together and all you need to do is cook a pot of red beans and they’ll bring over the hammers and the nails."

Nagin met with President Bush, who bowed his head for the dead in St. Louis Cathedral, the city’s mother church, and made an impassioned plea for the living.

"I know you love New Orleans, and New Orleans needs you," the president said. "She needs people coming home. She needs people – she needs those saints to come marching back, is what she needs!"

On his way out of the city, Bush's motorcade drove to the shattered Lower Ninth Ward, where water from the toppled levees tore homes away from their foundations and spit them into the street. He stopped at the ruins of the home of New Orleans rock 'n' roll legend Fats Domino.

Not far away, people danced, sang, wept, and cried in anguish at the new concrete levee that replaced one that had split open on the Industrial Canal in the Lower Ninth Ward.