President Barack Obama says New Orleans is “moving forward” a decade after Hurricane Katrina dealt it a devastating blow, and has become an example of what can happen when people rally around each other to build a better future out of the despair of tragedy.
As The Associated Press reports, Obama is marking the storm’s 10th anniversary today by meeting with residents who continue to rebuild their lives and communities. He is also scheduled to deliver remarks at a newly opened community center in the Lower 9th Ward, a largely African-American neighborhood that was one of the hardest hit by the storm. It is still struggling to recover.
“Not long ago, our gathering here in the Lower 9th might have seemed unlikely,” Obama says in speech excerpts released by the White House. “But today, this new community center stands as a symbol of the extraordinary resilience of this city and its people, of the entire Gulf Coast, indeed, of the United States of America. You are an example of what’s possible when, in the face of tragedy and hardship, good people come together to lend a hand, and to build a better future.
“That, more than any other reason, is why I’ve come back here today,” Obama plans to say on his ninth trip to the city. He also visited on the hurricane’s fifth anniversary in 2010.
Obama was in the first year of a U.S. Senate term when Katrina’s powerful winds and driving rain bore down on Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005. The storm caused major damage to the Gulf Coast from Texas to central Florida while powering a storm surge that breached the system of levees that were built to protect New Orleans from flooding.
Nearly 2,000 people died as a result, mostly in New Orleans, 80% of which was flooded for weeks. One million people were displaced.
In his prepared remarks, Obama says Katrina helped expose structural inequalities that long plagued New Orleans and left too many people, especially minorities, without good jobs, affordable health care or decent housing and too many kids growing up in the midst of violent crime and attending inefficient schools.
