Dramatic pictures show New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina struck

The catastrophic storm made landfall on August 29, 2005, ravaging New Orleans in what U.S. officials have called the most devastating natural disaster in the nation’s history.

Maureen Jennings, an attorney, and Jeff Jennings, an artist, evacuated to Houston after Hurricane Katrina, but returned to New Orleans by the end of the year.

My original idea when returning to New Orleans, where I documented events 10 years ago, was to look for the people I photographed back then.

Museum Curator Stan Amerski, who assembled much of the exhibit, is the only employee on the current staff who worked there before Katrina.

The pledge was announced Friday in honor of the 10th anniversary of the hurricane, which ravaged New Orleans.

“Do I want people to remember what happened in Katrina?” he asked.

“Katrina is a story that’s still unfolding”, she said.

The Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church has provided sanctuary for its members in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward since well before Katrina came and decimated their community and destroyed their house of worship.

Still, the rate of homelessness here remains higher than many other American cities with about 47 homeless people per 10,000 residents in 2014, the report said. Johnson said that there are stories of determination to be found in the wake of Katrina, but “to truly appreciate them, you have to go back”.

“What I’ve seen in the community is not people reminiscing about how it used to be but imagining what it can become”, said the Rev. David Faulker, of Trinity Episcopal Church in Pass Christian, Mississippi, part of a network of faith groups that helped bring stability to the region after Katrina.

All in all the storm caused 1,833 recorded fatalaties, with more than one million people displaced.

“So tonight our mayor, the mayor of our beloved New Orleans, Louisiana“, he said to applause.

Protecting against the potential devastation of those changes will require the building of more artificial barrier islands and wetlands south of New Orleans, experts say, a work in progress that will take years to complete.

Abbott Rolland, 59, lost his home during Katrina and has struggled ever since. New Orleans has a brand-new, state of the art, $14 billion dollar flood protection system, but there’s another potential danger lurking just outside the city – Louisiana’s coastline is disappearing.