NEW ORLEANS — Five years after Hurricane Katrina’s wrath, President Barack Obama sought to reassure disaster-weary Gulf Coast residents Sunday that he would not abandon their cause.
“My administration is going to stand with you, and fight alongside you, until the job is done,” Obama said to cheers at Xavier University, a historically black, Catholic university that was badly flooded by the storm.
The president said there are still too many vacant lots, trailers serving as classrooms, displaced residents and people out of work. But, he said, New Orleanians have shown amazing resilience.
“Because of you,” Obama said, “New Orleans is coming back.”
Obama spoke five years to the day from when Hurricane Katrina roared onshore in Louisiana, tearing through levees and flooding 80 percent of New Orleans. More than 1,800 people along the Gulf Coast died, mostly in Louisiana.
Even as the region struggled to put despair behind it, hardship struck again this year in the form of the BP oil spill. More than 200 million gallons of oil surged into the Gulf of Mexico before the well was capped in mid-July. New Orleans’ economy, heavily dependent on tourism and the oil- and-gas industry, was set back anew.
Standing in front of a large American flag with students arrayed behind him, Obama boasted of his administration’s efforts to respond to the gulf spill, saying one of his promises — to stop the leak — has been kept.
“The second promise I made was that we would stick with our efforts, and stay on BP, until the damage to the gulf and to the lives of the people in this region was reversed,” Obama said. “And this, too, is a promise we will keep.”
But Obama didn’t offer any new plans for restoring the gulf, bringing New Orleans’ fast-disappearing wetlands back to life or cleaning up BP’s spilled oil.
Some residents had hoped he would take the opportunity to announce an early end to the deep-water drilling moratorium he enacted after the spill. But he didn’t mention the moratorium, which people on the Gulf Coast say is costing jobs.
Obama promised that work on a fortified levee system would be finished by next year, “so that this city is protected against a 100-year storm. Because we should not be playing Russian roulette every hurricane season.”
But there is still plenty of skepticism among Gulf Coast residents about government promises, and Obama sought to alleviate that.
He toured Columbia Parc, a development of attractive new townhouses that is replacing the St. Bernard Housing Development that flooded during Katrina. He met a longtime resident who had to be rescued from her home in a boat after Katrina struck.
Several dozen demonstrators, protesting a shortage of affordable public housing, chanted nearby: “Housing is a human right.”
Obama then dropped in at the Parkway Bakery and Tavern, a local institution known for shrimp and roast-beef po’boys, which was underwater after Katrina.
“I appreciate you coming here,” one woman told him. He responded with a hug.
