New Orleans mourns, celebrates 10 years after Katrina

NEW ORLEANS: New Orleans will mark the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Saturday with solemn memorials and boisterous brass bands as the “Big Easy” remembers those lost to the devastating storm and celebrates its resilience.
“Come hell or high water — and we have had both — New Orleans is coming back,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said at one of many memorials this week. “And we are coming back strong.”
More than 1,800 people were killed across the US Gulf Coast when Katrina struck on August 29, 2005. A million people were displaced and the financial toll topped $150 billion.
Landrieu and other dignitaries will mark the moment when the first levee was breached with a wreath-laying ceremony in the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward at 8:29 am (1329 GMT).
Later in the morning a “Resilience Fest” will feature a New Orleans-style “second line” marching brass band.
Other neighbourhoods and cultural centres are scheduled to hold their own parties and parades before former president Bill Clinton speaks at an evening commemoration, with performances by a number of Grammy-winning musicians.
The events commemorate the destruction of New Orleans — and the botched government response to the mounting crisis — which shocked the world.
Some 80 percent of the low-lying coastal city was swallowed by floods which rose as high as 20 feet after the coastal city’s poorly-built levee system burst from the pressure of a massive storm surge.
The water came up so fast some people drowned in their homes. Hundreds more were stranded on their rooftops.
The few dry spots in the city descended into chaos as tens of thousands of increasingly desperate people with little food or clean water waited day upon day for help to finally reach them.
“All of us who are old enough to remember will never forget the images of our fellow Americans amid a sea of misery and ruin,” former president George W. Bush said in a visit to a New Orleans school on Friday.