Gulf Coast region marks 10 years since Katrina hit

NEW ORLEANS — As the church bells rang marking the decade since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the 80-year-old woman wept softly into a tissue as she leaned against her rusting Oldsmobile near a Catholic church in Mississippi.

“I feel guilty,” said Eloise Allen, whose house in Bay St. Louis was damaged but inhabitable after the storm. “I didn’t go through what all the other people did.”

Yesterday was a day to remember what “all the other people” went through. Those who were lifted from rooftops by helicopters, those who came home to find only concrete steps as evidence of where their house used to be, those whose bodies were never claimed after the storm.

But the mourning yesterday was balanced by a celebration of how far the region has come since Hurricane Katrina.

The storm killed more than 1,800 people and caused $151 billion in damage, in one of the country’s deadliest and most costly natural disasters. The dead were not far from anyone’s thoughts yesterday, from Mississippi where church bells rang out to mark when the storm made landfall to a commemoration at the New Orleans memorial containing bodies of people never claimed or never identified.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu spoke of the dark days after the monstrous storm and how the city’s residents leaned on each other for support. “We saved each other,” the mayor said. “New Orleans will be unbowed and unbroken.”

Glitzy casinos and condominium towers have been rebuilt. But overgrown lots and empty slabs speak to the slow recovery in some communities.