In this post, we will visit the recovery of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina.
In March 2009, Planetizen reported that Citizen Recovery Efforts Hit Government Barriers in New Orleans. It was a traumatic story about two New York architects wanting to do something to help the recovery that ran into a wall of dysfunctional government.
Roberta Brandes Gratz wrote, “When architects Anne Van Ingen and Wes Haynes set out to aid the New Orleans recovery effort by restoring a home in the Ninth Ward for low income buyers, they thought their work would be welcomed. But bureaucratic interference and misguided policies have turned a good deed into a nightmare.”
China earthquake response, faster than US Katrina response
On August 29, 2010, the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, News Ahead.com reported, “President Barak Obama acknowledged that recovery has been slow. He vowed to see that turf wars and red tape didn’t hamper recovery, and the 5th anniversary of the storm offers a measuring stick.
“New Orleans appears to be returning to its old self, but throughout the region, boarded-up houses, overgrown vacant lots, homelessness and a lack of essential infrastructure tell a story of continuing impediments to recovery.”
This link to the Documenting Disaster timeline provides a glimpse of the pace of reconstruction and challenges that New Orleans has faced since the hurricane hit New Orleans on August 25, 2005.
There is a “+” or “-” bar on the left of the screen that allows you to move the timeline from when the hurricane hit to when the only movie theater reopened in Chalmette on July 29, 2010.
Then on March 30, 2011, The Northerner, The Independent Student Newspaper of Northern Kentucky University (NKU) published a piece by Jill Liebisch about Kelsey Robinson and Stephanie Mathena and how they assembled a group of eight NKU students to travel to New Orleans to film a documentary and aid in various rebuilding efforts.
Their conclusion, “There is still a lot of work to do in New Orleans.”
Continued on June 26, 2011 in Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 3 or return to Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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