Instead, he and former first lady Laura Bush greeted students and administrators of Warren Easton Charter High School, which Mrs. Bush’s foundation helped rebuild after it closed due to storm damages.
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Clinton told audience members they should celebrate the progress that has been made in the past 10 years.
The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is a chance for America to reflect on its costliest natural disaster.
Leading the wreath-laying ceremony at a memorial that contains the remains of 83 unclaimed or unidentified victims of Katrina were mayor Mitch Landrieu and the governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal.
But numerous hardest hit areas like in New Orleans East; there are pockets of debris and destruction that have been here now for more than a decade. Before Katrina, there were more than 5,300 households in the Lower Ninth Ward. The media coverage of Katrina did a lot to deepen the divide between the African-American and white citizenry of New Orleans. New Orleans remembered the dead and celebrated its painstaking comeback from disaster on Saturday, a decade after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the “Big Easy” leaving devastation and chaos in its wake.
“There aren’t enough words to describe the loss, especially for the people of the Lower Ninth Ward, because the breach that drowned their neighborhood was the worst in the city”, said civic activist Sandy Rosenthal on Friday, just after she had walked in a second-line parade through the ward.
Chad Peterson, a 29-year-old trumpet player with one of the brass bands, was upbeat. Everyone felt her pain. New Orleans isn’t there yet, but there’s hope that it’s on its way. They will be participating in artistic responses to the displacement, a mass march, a tent city, and much more. The disruption Rita’s advent caused in the recovery process after Katrina had considerable impact across the state.
A parade commenced after the speeches with some of the participants dressed in colourful Mardi Gras costume.
“It is kind of bittersweet”.
“And we housed the 280 evacuees we received there and we took care of their needs as best as we could at that time”, said Alan McKinney with American Red Cross Disaster Services. “The pain never goes away, but it helps to know that loved ones who were lost are being remembered”. They would leave for a few days as the storm blew over.
In the evening, former President Bill Clinton will headline a free concert-prayer service-celebration at the city’s Smoothie King Center.
Neighborhoods across New Orleans held events to commemorate the storm, and thousands of volunteers spread out across the city in a day of community activism.
Many black residents still struggle and the neighborhood still has some of the lowest rates of people who returned after the storm.
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is neither fully healed nor truly at ease with the legacy of the storm that for many people in the United States became the first undeniable example of the critical intersection between climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice on a grand scale. She says people were gasping in horror and she was in disbelief.
New Orleans was plunged into a nightmarish scene of death and looting after Katrina barreled her way through and government help was painfully slow to come, something which still rankles in the city.
In a speech, he said he would never forget the images of “misery and ruin”.
In Mississippi, church bells rang to mark when the storm made landfall.
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In Biloxi, clergy and community leaders gathered for a memorial to Katrina’s victims and attend a concert celebrating the post-storm recovery.
