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New Orleans debates Katrina anniversary plans

Posted on: Wednesday, 9 August 2006, 17:08 CDT

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.

Source: REUTERS

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