New Orleans debates Katrina anniversary plans

By Peter Henderson

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – The Hurricane Katrina anniversary
comedy night is off the schedule. Plans for celebratory
fireworks were cut, too.

Instead, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Wednesday stood
with religious leaders to announce a series of somber events a
year after the deadly storm swept into the city, sending nearly
all its residents into evacuation and flooding 80 percent of
it.

How to mark the anniversary of Katrina has been a matter of
great debate as August 29 approaches. New Orleans danced
through its pain earlier in the year, holding its trademark
Mardi Gras despite some calls for traditional mourning.

Now many want to ensure that the anniversary observation
makes it clear to the nation that New Orleans is still
suffering and much work remains to be done.

Major parts of a program issued by Nagin’s office have been
abandoned, most prominently the fireworks. Nagin, whose wife,
Seletha, is a chair of the city planning committee, said the
city had not been the organizer of those events.

Some residents are still angry, though.

“This man wanted to have a celebration. What are we
supposed to celebrate? That we lost everything?” asked jazz
station WWOZ disc jockey and musician Bob French, who derided
festive plans and Nagin on his morning show this week.

“We should line up that day, get about 10 black caskets or
more, put ‘em on the street, get about eight or nine jazz
bands, and do a funeral,” French told Reuters. “If we keep
going in the direction we are going in, we will be dead and
buried.”

In fact, a jazz funeral-style parade is part of the
emerging program, which will also include a march starting in
the Lower Ninth Ward, an area largely destroyed by flooding,
and a pre-anniversary human chain around the Superdome, where
many were trapped during the storm.

Bells will ring at 9:38 a.m., when the first levee was
breached on August 29. Katrina ended up killing 1,339 in the
region, according to the National Hurricane Center.

“You’ve got everybody on one agenda,” Nagin said of the
plans announced on Wednesday. “I’m absolutely ecstatic.”

Rev. Tom Watson of Watson Memorial Teaching Ministries
cautioned that the plan was more of a “gesture” toward unity
than a final product. Work was still needed to bring all parts
of the community together, he said.

A crucial issue for many, including Watson, is to use the
event as an opportunity to tell the nation that New Orleans
still needs help.

“It will send a signal that New Orleans has not yet arrived
in terms of recovery,” Watson said.

The city is still visibly mired in cleaning up from the
year-old disaster.

Most hard-hit neighborhoods have vast tracts of houses that
still need to be cleaned up, much less be rebuilt, and some
houses look like they have not been touched since the flood
waters subsided.

Nurse Frances Hawkins said that a party was not in order
since so much is left to be done but, like many, she endorsed
some sort of celebration that the jazz city had survived.

She had originally opposed holding Mardi Gras but changed
her mind, coming to the conclusion that people needed a chance
for release. “That is a good thing, to have relief,” she said.