News Digest

10 years on from Katrina, Obama lauds New Orleans’ ‘extraordinary spirit’

Barack Obama says New Orleans is “moving forward” a decade after Hurricane Katrina and has become an example of what can happen when people rally around each other to build a better future out of the despair of tragedy. The U.S. president’s remarks came as he marked the storm’s 10th anniversary on Thursday by meeting residents who continue to rebuild their lives and communities. He was due to speak at a newly opened community center in the Lower 9th Ward, a largely African-American neighborhood which was one of the hardest hit by the storm. He will say: “Not long ago, our gathering here in the Lower 9th might have seemed unlikely. 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.

Barack Obama

Mr Obama was in the first year of a U.S. Senate term when Katrina’s powerful winds and driving rain bore down on Louisiana on August 29, 2005. The storm caused major damage to the Gulf Coast from Texas to central Florida while powering a storm surge that breached the system of levees built to protect New Orleans from flooding. Ten years on, the rebirth under way in New Orleans has been helped by billions of dollars in federal recovery money, much of it funneled to the city under Mr Obama’s watch. The city has recovered much of its pre-storm population, new businesses are opening faster than the national average and better flood protection plans are in place. But Mr Obama said the rebuilding was not simply to restore New Orleans as it had been. He said: “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.”

We do this not in order to dwell in the past, but in order to keep moving forward. Because this is a city that slowly, unmistakably, together, is moving forward.

Mr Obama