By Anderson Cooper

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This article has a date of August 29, 2010, I suppose that means that the 29 will be the day it will be on US Weekend magazine. Check it out.

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Katrina 5 Years Later

By Anderson Cooper • 8/29/2010

My father once said to me, “New Orleans is a city of memory.” He was born on a farm in Mississippi, but his mother had moved the family to New Orleans looking for work during World War II. He loved New Orleans and brought me back several times.


Anderson Cooper returns to New Orleans'
devastated Lower Ninth Ward.
As a child, I didn't understand what he meant. Now, after having made dozens of trips here in the five years since Hurricane Katrina struck, I think his words provide an important clue to the way people here respond to disasters and recover from them.

My father graduated from Francis T. Nicholls High School on St. Claude Avenue. It's now called Frederick A. Douglass Senior High, but the old name is still etched in stone over the school entrance. Nicholls was a former Confederate soldier who became governor of Louisiana in the late 1800s.

In any other city, the name would have been chiseled off the building, an ugly reminder of the city's segregationist past. But New Orleans does not rewrite history. Even that which is painful is not erased. A new name, a new layer is simply added onto the old. Walking the streets, looking at buildings, it's like reading the rings on a tree.

Much of the country may have moved on, but the people here have not forgotten what this place has been through — the lives lost, the families who have not returned. The city is still scarred, still battered, but it's back, on its feet, alive and moving forward.

The spirit of New Orleans

The Spotted Cat is jumping. The small music club on Frenchmen Street reopened last year, and the New Orleans Cotton Mouth Kings, tonight's band, are seated in the front window, singing, sweating and playing their hearts out. A handful of young couples swing dance, while dozens of others stand nearby, talking, drinking and tapping their feet.


Shrimper Darren Martins business
was hit hard by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
(Melanie Stetson Freeman, Christian Science Monitor)
All along Frenchmen Street, locals, eager to avoid tourist-clogged Bourbon Street, stroll from bar to bar, band to band. It is a quintessentially New Orleans scene: sultry, slightly seedy, but authentic and pulsing with life.

Five years after Katrina, and facing yet another disaster, the beat may have changed in New Orleans, but the music goes on.

Resilience. Restoration. Renewal.

Despite new hardships created by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Katrina's fifth anniversary should be a celebration of how far New Orleans has come. Tourism has finally been bouncing back. More restaurants are open in the Crescent City than before Katrina, and conventions have rediscovered New Orleans as an economical destination.

The city is smaller by about 100,000 residents than it was in 2005, but thanks to $30 billion in federal reconstruction aid, unemployment is low compared with the rest of the recession-hit country. Many city-owned properties are still flood-damaged and vacant, but construction is booming. Hundreds of miles of levees and floodwalls that make up the flood protection system around New Orleans have been rebuilt or repaired.

The public school system also has been undergoing a transformation. More than half the city's public school students are now enrolled in charter schools. Test scores are rising. And this year, the long-losing Saints won the Super Bowl, allowing many here to believe the good times were rolling once again.

Some neighborhoods have bounced back better than others, of course. The Lower Ninth Ward, which was devastated when the levees broke, has seen very little new construction. Brad Pitt has built a number of new “green” houses here, but they are the exception, and on many blocks in the Lower Ninth, the only new thing you'll find is waist-high weeds.

Crime is still a major problem. The per-capita murder rate is 10 times the national average, and the health care system is inadequate. There is a new mayor in town, however, who was elected with widespread support.

Coping, hoping again

While the region continues to recover from Katrina, it now faces the cleanup from the oil spill. More than four months after the well exploded, the full economic and environmental effect of the disaster is still unknown.


New Orleans' iconic street parades are back. Members of the
Original Big 7 Social Aid and Pleasure Club join in.
(Mario Tama, Getty Images)
“When the hurricane hit, it did its damage,” says jazz legend Terence Blanchard, “but this oil disaster is an ongoing tragedy.”

Mitch Jurisich would like his son to follow in his footsteps. A third-generation oyster farmer, he goes out every day to check on the 14,000 acres of oyster beds that he and his brother lease. He is worried that several generations of oysters may have been killed off.

“You're sad, you're angry, you're frustrated,” he says, examining oysters for any sign of oil. Like many in Louisiana, Jurisich has no doubt he will survive one way or another, but he wants his culture, the way of life passed down to him by his father, and his father's father, to survive as well.

“Katrina changed our way of life, ” he says. “We adapt. But we take a great sense of pride out here in our heritage. It cannot be replaced.”

City of Memory

More than 1,800 people died during Hurricane Katrina, and 11 men perished when the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up. New Orleans does not forget, and neither should we.

We all must continue to bear witness to what happens here. We must visit New Orleans, walk the streets, hear the music. This still-great city has much to teach us about survival, resilience and moving forward while still remembering the past.

Cover and cover story photographs by H. Darr Beiser for USA WEEKEND.