Former President to Attend Event Commemorating Katrina Anniversary

Over the past decade, New Orleans has shifted its focus to an overall prevention and wellness approach to healthcare across the board. Ten years later, it’s still an incredible story. It was weeks before the water receded and Chalk was able to return home.

The mold has been conquered.

Memorial Medical Center nurse, Mary Jo D’Amico, fanned a patient waiting in the hospital’s parking garage for helicopter transport from New Orleans. The one watermark that can not be scrubbed away. Reconstruction money matched pre-Katrina market values that didn’t cover rebuilding. But now visitors flock to the art houses on St. Claude Avenue too. Washboards. And nose rings. In short, it is still, and always, New Orleans.

-CBS News said it will report on the anniversary throughout its various broadcast and digital platforms, but didn’t offer specifics.

The New Orleans you visit today is a testament to resilience, and the human spirit. The concept has become so hot that, a few years after Katrina, Tulane University created the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy, which offers a master’s degree combining instruction in public health, business, law, architecture and social work.

There are the churches, school groups and other dedicated individuals who come back time after time. And Forbes magazine listed New Orleans as America’s No. 1 brain magnet.

It’s not all uplifting.

After Katrina, Congress authorized spending more than $14 billion to beef up the city’s existing flood protection infrastructure and to build a series of new barriers. But it also was a handsome place, both naturally and man-made, and home to creative, interesting people with a rare joie de vivre. “And that’s what the past 10 years have been about”, Landrieu said.

New Orleans capitalized on “the power and the spirit of the comeback”, said Michael Hecht of Greater New Orleans Inc., but most of the disaster relief and philanthropy has come and gone.

I cringed when I first heard about it. Seemed a bit. ghoulish.

New Orleans had just 3.7 million visitors in 2006, the first full year after Katrina. So I went. It was a natural disaster that no one was fully prepared for, in any capacity.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“Everybody else is welcome”, he says, but: “Don’t let everybody else come in and get in and take up parcels of land, and then the natives is on the outside looking in”. The French Quarter, while sustaining some damage, was spared the deluge that devastated 80 percent of New Orleans after Katrina overwhelmed the local flood protections. New Orleans is second only to Atlanta in terms of income inequality, where any discussion about the income gap is a discussion about race. Other specials through the years such as HBO’s Emmy winning When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts helped chronicle the effects on life in the Gulf in the immediate aftermath of the storm. It showed that even though we can prepare, Mother Nature is a force to be reckoned with. We’re different, and I think it’s unfair to ask if we’re better. “I just thought it was a handsome portrait of a family, of a city and its resonance in important places around the country”.

Still, the images remain. Over the last 10 years, hurricane path predictions have become more accurate on every timescale from hours to days in advance.

Ibry Smith (right) fell as he helped Norma Rankins out of a boat after they were rescued from a nursing home in the Ninth Ward. It’s one reason he is a bit reticent about the 10-year commemoration. He rattled off the social ills, the things that bother him.