NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 27 (UPI) — President Barack Obama is set to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina during a visit on Thursday to New Orleans, where he will meet with residents and deliver a speech.
This is the ninth time Obama has visited New Orleans since taking office in 2009. In a speech, he will comment on the failure of government both before and after the levees collapsed, but will also add that the city is building toward a brighter future.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall Aug. 29, 2005, and as New Orleans’ levees failed, about 80 percent of the city flooded. More than 1,800 people died.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu will accompany Obama as they travel through different neighborhoods to meet with residents who have rebuilt their lives since the disaster.
Obama will deliver the speech at the Andrew P. Sanchez Center in The Big Easy’s Lower 9th Ward in the afternoon after meeting with the residents.
“Not long ago, our gathering here in the Lower 9th might have seemed unlikely,” Obama will say during the speech, according to excerpts prepared by the White House.”But today, this new community center stands as a symbol of the extraordinary resilience of this city and its people, of the entire Gulf Coast, indeed, of the United States of America.”
“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,” Obama will add. “That, more than any other reason, is why I’ve come back here today.”
Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will join also join Obama during the visit. Fugate was a leader in coordinating much of the $120 billion in FEMA aid after the hurricane.
Obama will discuss the failures of the administration of former President George W. Bush to respond to the natural disaster, where it took days for federal aid to reach the citizens of the city.
Obama will also comment on the larger socioeconomic and racial problems of the city.
“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,” Obama will say. “Too many kids grew up surrounded by violent crime, cycling through substandard schools where few had a shot to break out of poverty. Shortly after the storm, I visited with folks in a shelter in Houston. And one woman told me, ‘We had nothing before the hurricane. And now we have less than nothing.’”
The governmental failure to respond adequately to the disaster was denounced worldwide, where even the former President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, a controversial figure and staunch critic of Bush, said that it was “incredible” that the “government had no evacuation plan… the first power in the world and it left its own population adrift.”
Obama will hail the progress of the city, stating that it will not be restored as the city it once was, but as the city it “should be.”
“We acknowledge this loss, this pain, not to harp on what happened — but to memorialize it. We do this not in order to dwell in the past, but in order to keep moving forward,” the president will say. “Because this is a city that slowly, unmistakably, together, is moving forward. Because the project of rebuilding here wasn’t simply to restore the city as it had been. It was to build a city as it should be –a city where everyone, no matter who they are or what they look like or how much money they’ve got — has an opportunity to make it.”
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