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New Orleans remembers Katrina
29/08/2006 11:30 - (SA)
New Orleans - A year after one of the worst natural disasters in US history, New Orleans turned its attention to rituals of mourning and celebrations of life.
In pockmarked neighbourhoods choked with weeds, in church pews and at city hall, residents prepared to gather for vigils marking the anniversary of hurricane Katrina.
They planned to remember the dead, ringing bells to mark the moment one of the city's flood walls breached and water engulfed the northern edges of the city.
Waves seven metres high
Katrina grazed Florida before making landfall at 06:10 on August 29, 2005, in Buras, a tiny fishing town south of New Orleans on one of the fingers of land jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico. Entire blocks of houses, bars and shops vanished, whipped into the Gulf by a wall of water seven metres high.
In New Orleans, the sun came out after the violent winds subsided, but the worst was yet to come: the industrial canal began to leak, and when two sections of the wall fell, a muddy torrent was released that yanked homes off their foundations.
Levees failed
Throughout the city, other parts of the levee system began to fail. With each breach came a cascade of water, until 80% of the city was submerged.
Nearly 1 600 people died in Louisiana, and the rest of the nation watched in horror as survivors begged to be rescued from rooftops or freeway overpasses. Forty-nine bodies remain unidentified in the city's morgue.
City still half-empty
Throughout the city, white trailers still line driveways in neighbourhoods where debris is stacked up in piles and unchecked weeds have overtaken abandoned houses.
Only half the population has returned.
Emergency medical care is doled out in an abandoned department store, while six of New Orleans' nine hospitals remain closed. Only 54 of 128 public schools are expected to open this autumn.
Survivors
The one-year mark is a reminder of how much needs to be done - and of how far each survivor has come.
"Only when it's dark can you see the stars," said the Rev Alex Bellow, at a gathering outside a school in the Lower Ninth Ward.
"So when they tell you, 'You're not going to make it,' you keep looking up."
- AP
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