Bush visits Katrina’s wake, 10 years later

NEW ORLEANS — Former U.S. president George W. Bush enjoyed sympathetic audiences in New Orleans and Mississippi on Friday as he returned to the region where hurricane Katrina sank his popularity 10 years ago.

Bush avoided parts of New Orleans that have yet to recover from the devastating storm, such as the Lower 9th Ward, where President Barack Obama mingled with hundreds of residents the day before. Bush did not tour the federally managed levees whose failures flooded 80 per cent of the city.

Instead, he visited a school rebuilt with support from former first lady Laura Bush’s foundation, then flew to Gulfport, Mississippi, honouring police and firefighters who saved lives after Katrina’s towering storm surge swamped the coast.

“The 10th anniversary is a good time to honour courage and resolve,” Bush said in Gulfport. “It’s also a good time to remember we live in a compassionate nation.”

Bush took no questions at either event, and made no mention of his administration’s lacklustre initial response to Katrina, which historians consider a low point for his presidency.

In New Orleans, he focused instead on promoting charter schools.

“Isn’t it amazing? The storm nearly destroyed New Orleans and yet, now, New Orleans is the beacon for school reform,” Bush said at the city’s oldest public school, which was badly flooded and almost abandoned before it reopened a year later as Warren Easton Charter High School.

The comeback from Katrina has been uneven. While Mississippi’s Gulf Coast recovered all its population and then some, Bush and his team have been so deeply resented in New Orleans that Carnival goers displayed them in effigy at annual Mardi Gras parades.

For days after the storm, bodies decomposed in the streets and thousands of people begged to be rescued from their rooftops in New Orleans. In Mississippi, relief came so slowly that Biloxi’s Sun Herald newspaper published a front-page editorial, titled “Help Us Now.”

Bush didn’t help his image by initially flying over the flooded city in Air Force One without touching down, then saying “Heckuva job, Brownie” to praise his ill-prepared Federal Emergency Management Agency director, Michael Brown, who resigned shortly thereafter.

Bush’s administration eventually spent $140 billion US on the recovery.