NEW ORLEANS — Part of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe lives on, in abandoned homes still bearing spray-painted circles indicating they had been searched and whether bodies were found inside.
The Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood has seen little of the recovery touted by some officials Sunday, and it was the failures that seemed more apparent to residents.
“It don’t seem like much is getting done,” said Charlene LaFrance, a 42-year-old teacher who watched commemoration events on Claiborne Avenue.
Many of the more than 1,800 people killed by Katrina died in the Lower Ninth Ward, and only about a quarter of the 5,400 homes there before the storm have been rebuilt.
Marc Morial, a former New Orleans mayor and the president of the National Urban League, told a jubilant crowd that the Lower Ninth Ward can be rebuilt.
“All it needs is decent, strong levees that don’t break,” he said.
The Army Corps of Engineers is nearing completion on a levee system for New Orleans that the agency says should be able to withstand a Katrina-like storm once it is finished next summer.
