Five years after Hurricane Katrina’s wrath, US President Barack Obama sought to reassure disaster-weary Gulf Coast residents on 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 were still too many vacant lots, trailers serving as classrooms, displaced residents and people out of work.
PHOTO: REUTERS
However, he said New Orleans residents have showed amazing resilience.
“Because of you,” the president 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 757 million liters of oil surged into the Gulf of Mexico before the well was capped in the middle of last month. New Orleans’ economy, heavily dependent on tourism and the oil and gas industry, was set back anew.
Standing in front of a large US 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.”
However, Obama’s speech 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 Obama would take the opportunity to announce an early end to the deepwater drilling moratorium he enacted after the spill, but he made no mention of the moratorium, which people here say is costing jobs.
Obama did offer a list of accomplishments on Katrina recovery he said his administration has achieved, including helping move residents out of temporary housing, streamlining money for schools and restoration projects and working to rebuild the poorly maintained levee system that failed the city when Katrina struck.
He 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.”
Implicit in Obama’s remarks was an indictment of sorts against former US President George W. Bush’s administration for its handling of the crisis.
Obama called Katrina and its aftermath not just a natural disaster but “a manmade catastrophe — a shameful breakdown in government that left countless men, women and children abandoned and alone.”
However, Obama has faced questions of his own about how his administration handled the Gulf spill, including accusations officials moved too slowly and deferred too much to BP. The White House has scrambled repeatedly to right the response, pleasing Gulf Coast residents with a US$20 billion victims’ compensation fund Obama pushed BP to establish. However, there is still plenty of skepticism among Gulf Coast residents about government promises, and Obama sought to alleviate that.
“In Washington, we are restoring competence and accountability,” he said. “We’re putting in place reforms so that never again in America is someone left behind in a disaster.”
Arriving without any new policy announcements or benefits for the city, Obama appeared to hope in part that his mere presence would reassure residents they were not forgotten. For some, it might have been enough.
Obama toured Columbia Parc, a development of attractive new townhouses that’s replacing the St Bernard Housing Development that flooded during Katrina. He met with a long-time resident who had to be rescued from her home in a boat after Katrina struck.
Obama also 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.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS