NEW ORLEANS: US President Barack Obama heralded the progress New Orleans has made rebuilding since Hurricane Katrina battered the area 10 years ago but said more needed to be done to overcome poverty and inequality.
On his ninth trip to the city that made worldwide headlines in 2005 after a devastating flood and slow government response, Obama toured a neighbourhood of colourful new houses and a new school and community centre.
“Just because the houses are nice doesn’t mean our job’s done,” Obama told reporters after shaking hands with residents and holding children from the community.
As a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama sharply criticised Republican president George W Bush for his administration’s handling of the aftermath of the storm.
Donna Brazile, a Democratic political strategist and New Orleans native whose father was stranded during flooding from the storm, said the city has begun to address inequality and make greater strides toward recovery.
Levees have been made stronger, homes have been built higher, and jobs are starting to return, Brazile told reporters traveling to New Orleans with Obama aboard Air Force One. “We still have a long way to go,” she said, estimating that it would take another five or 10 years of hard work.
Obama travelled to Louisiana to mark the rebirth of a city eulogised by Tennessee Williams as the “last frontier of Bohemia”, but which in August 2005 became a nightmare of death and looting.
Welcoming Obama at Armstrong International Airport was Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican presidential candidate, Senator Bill Cassidy and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
“This new community center stands as a symbol of the extraordinary resilience of this city and its people,” Obama is expected to say according to excerpts released by the White House.
“You are an example of what’s possible when, in the face of tragedy and hardship, good people come together to lend a hand, and to build a better future.”
More than 1,800 people were killed and one million more displaced when Katrina barreled in from the Gulf of Mexico, destroying levees and submerging 80 percent of the city in effluent-tainted storm water. Americans watched shocked as stranded survivors waited day after day on rooftops for government help that was painfully slow to come.
“What started out as a natural disaster became a manmade one — a failure of government to look out for its own citizens,” he is expected to say.
Obama is expected to echo words he spoke as a senator: “New Orleans had long been plagued by structural inequality that left too many people, especially poor people of color, without good jobs or affordable health care or decent housing. Too many kids grew up surrounded by violent crime, cycling through substandard schools where few had a shot to break out of poverty.”
Ten years on, like the rest of America, the gap between rich and poor — and often white and black — has only grown.
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