Katrina plus one year

As everybody who doesn't live under a rock knows by now, today is the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall. News stories and TV specials will run all day long recounting the horror of that day one year ago: when 80 percent of New Orleans flooded, coastal communities of Louisiana and Mississippi were devastated, and 1,700 people lost their lives. For hundreds of thousands of other people who were displaced by the storm, their lives have changed forever.

Even though it's been an entire year, it's obviously much too soon to evaluate the full effect of Katrina. It will be many more years before a clear picture of the hurricane's true consequences are understood. The Gulf Coast is still in flux; the rebuilding effort, long and painful as it might be, continues.

As I noted when I visited New Orleans two months ago, the pace of recovery in that city is slow. Large parts of the city are still abandoned; the city's population today is only half of what it was a year ago. Only half of New Orleans schools have reopened, and only three of the city's ten hospitals are operational. As I noticed when I was in New Orleans, the city's culture now revolves around Katrina and its amftermath. Any conversation you have with a local resident will eventually turn to a discussion of where that person evacuated to and what condition their home is currently in. The local newscasts are dominated by stories about rebuilding efforts, FEMA reimbursements, canal reconstruction or other storm-related matters. It's clear that, regardless of how successful the rebuilding effort might be, the city will never be quite the same. The French Quarter, the food, the jazz, the Sugar Bowl and Mardi Gras might always be there, but the city as a whole will be different. The only question is how different "New New Orleans" will be from the city that existed pre-Katrina.

While so much attention has been paid to New Orleans, it's worth remembering that several other cities were changed by Katrina as well. For example, Louisiana's capital of Baton Rouge became the largest city in the state following the storm, and there's been widespread speculation that this change is permanent. Some analysts say the Katrina will have the same affect on Baton Rouge as the Galveston hurricane of 1900 (which is still the nation's deadliest natural disaster) had on Houston. Before the storm, Galveston was the state's largest city. After the storm, Houston took that title and continued to grow such that it is now the fourth-largest city in the nation.

And then there's Houston itself. The city was a refuge for hundreds of thousands of Katrina refugees, and upwards of 150,000 displaced New Orleanians remain in the city one year later, putting stress on the local school and hospital systems and placing upward pressure on the crime and unemployment rates. As this Christian Science Monitor article about Katrina's effects on Houston notes, the economic burden of accomodating these refugees - many of whom still have no homes or jobs to return to a year later - is significant, and getting assistance from the federal government has not been an easy task:

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) of Texas said one of the most difficult challenges she's faced has been convincing her congressional colleagues and the Bush administration that a hurricane that didn't actually hit Texas has had profound financial implications for the state.

Katrina had a variety of psychological effects on the local population as well. Houstonians opened their arms and their wallets when the first busloads of refugees - many having lost everything except the clothes on their backs - began arriving a year ago. So many Houstonians volunteered to help at the Astrodome or the George R. Brown Convention Center that people were turned away. There was an overwhelming sense of civic pride; people were proud of their generousity. However, the destruction wrought by Katrina also gave Houstonians a newfound sense of vulnerability; people realized that what happened in New Orleans could also happen in Houston and that realization became apparent less than a month later when Rita threatened and the local population, in a panic, took to the evacuation routes leading out of the city. The usual four-hour drive to Dallas became a 30-hour ordeal; the 2.5-hour trip to Austin became a day-long nightmare in the sweltering September heat. In the months following the Rita exodus, local leaders and citizens alike realized that their own evacuation plans needed to be rethought.

Indeed, the entire Gulf Coast - not just Louisiana or Mississippi - has been affected physically, economically and emotionally by the storm that landed one year ago today. As we remember the catastrophe and take inventory of all that has changed since then, we much understand that the process of rebuilding, recovering, and re-adapting has only just begun.