World

New Orleans sells itself to the world as the Big Easy. But one year after Hurricane Katrina there’s nothing easy about life in New Orleans.
The hurricane swept past the city in a matter of hours, but New Orleanians will be living with its legacy for years to come.
True, the photogenic French Quarter and the grand homes of the white establishment in the Garden District have regained much of their former charm but don’t be fooled – even on Bourbon Street amid the jazz clubs and stores touting souvenir kitsch there is a pervasive sense of desolation.
And elsewhere in the city, away from the expensive real estate on the higher ground, the physical recovery from the catastrophic flooding has barely begun.
More than 1,000 people lost their lives to Katrina – the floodwaters left the city uninhabitable.
A year on and still New Orleans is eerily empty. Of a pre-Katrina population of half-a-million fewer than 200,000 have returned.
Ken Wilkens, social worker by day and a rapper known as Snoop by night, is one New Orleanian who made it back. In May he took me on a drive down Interstate 10, into the Ninth Ward, the heart of the city’s black community.
“Katrina still has a smell,” he said and he was right.
Sickly sweet, fetid fumes were still coming up from the residue of filth left behind when the floodwaters receded.
“There’s no sign of life in a neighbourhood that used to be thriving,” Snoop reflected. “We’re in an American city and there’s just miles and miles of devastation.”