Obama to visit New Orleans for 10th anniversary of hurricane

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, President Barack Obama will visit the city next week to tour neighborhoods and meet with families still recovering from the devastation.

Landrieu thanked individuals and civil and religious organizations who opened their arms to the displaced residents of New Orleans.

Not a Subscriber? Get a digital subscription at 99¢ for 8 weeks. Almost 2,000 people died because of the storm, majority in New Orleans. Obama will try to stress the city’s rebirth and “what’s possible when citizens, city and corporate leaders all work together to lift up their communities and build back”, the White House said. It also caused $108 billion in property damage, making it the nation’s costliest natural disaster and one of the United States’ five deadliest hurricanes.

Mayor Landrieu said more than $14 billion has been spent to reinforce levees that spectacularly failed to protect the city when the storm slammed ashore on August 29, 2005, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans underwater. Some considered this breakdown in the government a tragic failure of the Bush Administration.

Obama will be joined by Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In a report on a subsequent hurricane, a national media weather report described Mississippi as “the land mass between New Orleans and Mobile, further angering Mississippians”. More than 200 million of gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico in the months before the underwater well was capped.