On the morning of Aug. 28 last year, as Hurricane Katrina closed in on the Gulf Coast of the US, building contractor Vincent Whittaker nailed shut his home in Waveland, Mississippi, climbed into his old red Ford truck and fled for his life with his nephew Vincent.
Sitting in the north-bound bumper-to-bumper Interstate 59, they became part of the largest one-time displacements of people the US has ever known. More than 1 million people were uprooted by one of the worst natural disasters in American history -- a catastrophe which cost 1,815 lives, caused an estimated US$125 billion in damage and devastated a region the size of Britain.
"I thought I would be back in a few days," Whittaker said this month, nearly a year after the storm.
"Now I don't think I'll ever go back again. There's nothing left there for me now," he said.
Whittaker, 52, seems older than his years. You can see he was once handsome. There's still no fat on him, but his face is heavily lined, his hair a dirty grey and his mouth has no teeth. He is a black man who moves slowly, as though every step is painful.
In February he went back to Waveland, a small town of 7,000 on the Gulf Coast that was pummelled by 280kph winds.
It was a wasteland.
"I watch the TV like everyone so I knew not to expect much," he recalls.
"But the place I lived in was dead. That place was my soul and everything was gone. Just a heap of stinking trash and cars," he said.
Still, some of his former neighbors have gone back. Many live in government trailers on their property as they negotiate the cumbersome bureaucracy of insurance and permits and finance. Retail stores like Wal-Mart have reopened.
Nevertheless, Whittaker says he's "staying right where I am, thank you sir."
He landed on his feet, 650km from home in Huntsville, Alabama, a booming southern town with its own Toyota plant. There he drummed up business as a building contractor, and has since bought his own home.
"This place is good. It don't make no sense to go back to all that danger out there," he explains.
While many other evacuees were fortunate, like Whittaker, as they scattered across the US, hundreds of thousands of others remain in limbo amidst Katrina's destruction or displaced in strange communities, with few family members nearby. Many are single mothers.
As of April, the last time such figures were compiled, there were still 750,000 displaced by Katrina and the two hurricanes that followed, Rita and Wilma, according to Bob Howard, communications director for the Washington-based Red Cross Hurricane Recovery Program.
There are 100,000 evacuees in Atlanta, Georgia, and up to 150,000 in Houston, Texas. Many are blacks from the disadvantaged neighborhoods of New Orleans who remain jobless and will run out of federal disaster assistance in March, when they could quickly become homeless
"These families consist mostly of women, generally poor and uneducated, with children," said an editorial in the Houston Chronicle.
"Almost all are still reeling from their losses. They are uniquely ill-prepared to start anew in a city so much larger and more complex than New Orleans," it said.
There has been a backlash in some host communities. A Houston police report this month blamed the influx of hurricane refugees for the 17.5 percent rise in the city's homicide rate this year.
One in five murders involved an evacuee as suspect or victim, it said.
New Orleans, which bore the brunt of the storm and public interest, is slowly getting back on its feet. The mayor's office says the city's population is already "north of 250,000" out of the pre-storm population of 455,000.
But given the scale of destruction, it will probably take decades rather than years to recover. Decisions still haven't been made about which areas can be rebuilt, and which are still at risk of flooding. A total of 1.7 million families registered for help at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has paid out some US$6 billion in personal aid.
The Red Cross provided emergency assistance to 1.4 million families and an estimated 4 million people, Howard said. "We are still trying to deal with infrastructure issues and the ability to provide basic services," he said.
Prior to Katrina, the largest Red Cross operation ever was providing assistance for 70,000 families after four hurricanes hit Florida in 2004.
"We went from supporting 70,000 families to 1.4 million. It was 20 times larger than anything we had faced in our 120-year history," he said.
Ultimately, it's up to each individual family to determine their own recovery, he said.
Some will be like Nathan Whittaker -- who now plans to take additional relatives into his flourishing construction business.
But others will never get over Hurricane Katrina, Howard says, "not in one year or 10."
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry