Latest News Update About katrina: NEW ORLEANS — Five years after Hurricane Katrina’s wrath, President Barack Obama sought to reassure disaster-weary Gulf Coast residents Sunday that he would not abandon their cause.
“My administration is going to stand with you, and fight alongside you, until the job is done,” Obama said to cheers at Xavier University, a historically black, Catholic university that was badly flooded by the storm.
The president said there are still too many vacant lots, trailers serving as classrooms, displaced residents and people out of work. But he said New Orleanians have shown amazing resilience.
“Because of you,” the president declared, “New Orleans is coming back.”
“When I first came down, it was right after the storm,” said Matt Walenciak, who originally came as part of a college volunteer project. “People have lost everything — their houses, their cars, their jobs, even family members. And they would just welcome you with open arms. They’d scrap together whatever money they could to buy food to feed the volunteers that were down there.”
The hospitality, gratitude and self-reliance exhibited by Mississippi residents in the wake of Katrina also inspired Andrew Thompson to stay on the coast, where he eventually met his wife Kathryn, a fellow volunteer.
“Seeing people who we’ve helped build their house turn around and want to help us with other people’s houses, that was really a turning point,” Mr. Thompson said. “Instead of everybody (needing) help, they’re starting to help each other.”
Starting with Katrina, the Gulf has also shown us that assertions that we have arrived in a post-racial era, where the color of her skin no longer factors into the quality of a person’s life or the prospects of her children, are woefully premature. People of color have taken the worst of these disasters, and have gotten the least support in their aftermath. Indeed, a U.S. District Court recently ruled that the funding formula used to provide grants to New Orleans residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita very likely disadvantaged black homeowners. Read More. Stay with us for more hot news.
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