New Orleans mayor touts city’s progress
For New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the recovery in the 10 years since Hurricane Katrina can be defined in one word: resilience.
Landrieu spoke to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, where he emphasized the city’s progress a decade after the devastating hurricane, which struck on Aug. 29, 2005.
“The people of New Orleans took up the challenge that fate had laid at our feet,” he said.
When Katrina hit, Landrieu was Louisiana’s lieutenant governor and second-in-command at the state’s Emergency Operations Center. He succeeded New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who was found guilty in February 2014 of accepting bribes, committing wire fraud and filing false tax returns. Nagin was sentenced to 10 years in jail.
Katrina is among the costliest disasters in U.S. history. It took more than 1,800 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Landrieu revisited the moment when the hurricane hit and the levees broke, submerging miles of the city under as much as 15 feet of water. He used these images to emphasize the progress the city has made since 2005. He pointed to improvements in several areas: education, women’s health, hospitals, business, emergency preparedness and infrastructure — as well as drops in incarceration, homelessness and crime rates. These indicators, he said, have improved drastically since the storm, and made New Orleans a leader in the “new South.”
“The old South of slavery, Civil War, Confederate flags, monuments that revered the Confederacy, separate but equal, ‘I’ll go my way, you go yours’ — that South is gone,” he said. “The new South is a place where diversity is our greatest strength — not a weakness.”
But Landrieu said the devastation of the hurricane was not just due to the levees breaking, but also to larger problems, such as high crime rates and racism.
He likened the scenes of mostly African-American evacuees, stranded at the Superdome in New Orleans, to “the more recent unrest on the streets of Baltimore, Ferguson and across America.”