![]() The multidimensional challenge for New Orleans was not just to rebuild neighborhoods and strengthen levees and improve the decrepit sewerage and water system. I have my kids, from private school before the storm, in public school now and couldn't be more proud.īURNETT: What's more, there are many more restaurants in town today than before Katrina, though some are currently shuttered because of the COVID shutdown. What it also did was produce a restart in many places, sad as it is to say. VORKAPIC: Katrina caused unspeakable damage, unspeakable death. And our motto was, we don't hold anything back.īURNETT: Rudy Vorkapic believes that New Orleans has come back stronger and better than it was before the storm. RUDY VORKAPIC: I was the editor, publisher, founder and delivery boy of a newspaper called The New Orleans Levee newspaper. But you will not find one single expert who will agree that the flood protection that was built since the levees broke is adequate for a city of New Orleans' size, infrastructure and importance to the nation.īURNETT: In the years after Katrina, New Orleanians could read a satirical tabloid that helped them cope with the tragic comedy of rebuilding their beloved city. ROSENTHAL: By every measure, the flood protection is better than it was when Hurricane Katrina arrived. SANDY ROSENTHAL: Well, I feel that that depends on who you ask.īURNETT: Cannon's friend, Sandy Rosenthal, has been a tireless advocate for stronger flood protection through her website,. Katrina hit, I feel the Lower Ninth Ward was forgotten about.īURNETT: It's a tough question, is New Orleans better now than it was before Katrina? Down here in the Lower Nine, the memory of Katrina is everywhere, from families like hers that only recently completed repairs and moved back into their damaged homes to the jungles that have overgrown vacant lots.īOYD-CANNON: You had a lot thriving - doctors' offices, pharmacies, grocery stores, meat markets. She did her thing.īURNETT: Tonya Boyd-Cannon is a professional singer and head of the Lower Ninth Ward homeowners association. And then all of a sudden, here comes Katrina. I was working at the time at the sheriff's office, had come home, and then we hadn't decided what we were going to do. TONYA BOYD-CANNON: This is pretty much how it was the day before Katrina. We're standing at a memorial plaque that marks the spot where the floodwall breached and nearly washed away the Lower Ninth Ward. ![]() It's late August, shirt sticks to your back kind of weather in New Orleans. JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: The subtropical sun blazes, and a steamy wind stirs the banana leaves. New Orleans suffered the storm's mightiest blows, and NPR's John Burnett reports from that city 15 years on. At the time, it was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. The storm and its catastrophic aftermath caused more than 1,800 deaths. Fifteen years ago today, it was Hurricane Katrina that struck the Gulf Coast further east. Coastal communities near the Texas and Louisiana border are now cleaning up after a punishing blow from Hurricane Laura. ![]()
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