Obama Visits New Orleans to Push Katrina Recovery
Related subjects: Economic Recovery, Extreme Weather Events, Hurricane Katrina, Obama administration, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, U.S. news Comments (0)
President Barack Obama was in New Orleans yesterday to survey Katrina recovery efforts 4 years after the hurricane ravaged the city, expelling most of its population. Obama toured the only school reopened to date in the Lower Ninth Ward, the area mist devastated by Katrina’s storm surge, and met with Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, a persistent critic of key Obama policies, discussing the best ways to ensure effective delivery of assistance to the ongoing rebuilding efforts.
The Obama administration has sent top officials to Louisiana 39 times before this presidential visit and has pushed progress in efforts to rebuild the city, reopen its schools, distributing funds and taking a hands-on approach to ensuring the rebuilding and community regeneration are ongoing. Pres. Obama’s secretary for Housing and Urban Development (HUD) told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell there is “a high-level commitment from across the administration to achieve real results” in the restoration of the city of New Orleans and other areas hard hit by the Katrina disaster.
Hurricane Katrina marked a paradigm shift in public consciousness about the role of government in protecting against “unforeseeable” natural disasters or the exigencies of sudden mass-migration situations. Poor preparedness and a haphazard response to managing the emergency led to a city-wide evacuation turning into a full-blown semi-permanent mass migration, from which half the city’s population has not returned.
Much of the city’s low-lying areas have not been adequately cleaned up or restored, and whole communities remain dispersed and out of reach of reconstruction projects. Efforts to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward have included endeavors to implement sustainability enhancements and green building methods to give the ward a longer life and healthier living environment. Such projects also help derive Recovery amd Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding to add onto the Katrina recovery funds.
Obama reminded his audience at the University of New Orleans that “The damage from [Hurricane] Katrina was not just caused by a disaster of nature, but by a failure of government, a government that wasn’t adequately prepared and didn’t adequately respond.” Obama pledged that such a mistake would not be repeated while he was in office, saying:
And so I promise you this: Whether it’s me coming down here or my Cabinet or other members of my administration, we will not forget about New Orleans. We will not forget about the Gulf Coast. Together, we will rebuild this region, and we will build it stronger than before.
Funds have been slow to reach New Orleans, and much of the delay has been blamed on the Bush administration’s famous lack of interest in the post-Katrina crisis. But Bush himself had to wrestle money from Congress, and in better times than the nation is seeing now. The Obama administration is finding ways to speed funds to the Gulf region, and especially to help redevelop the most underprivileged, low-lying areas of New Orleans, but the president’s visit may be the single most visible and productive act of coalition-building to that end.
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