WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama will celebrate New Orleans’ “extraordinary resilience” and progress and reflect on the “failure of government” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in a speech on Thursday commemorating the 10th anniversary of the storm.
“We acknowledge this loss, this pain, not to harp on what happened – but to memorialize it. We do this not in order to dwell in the past, but in order to keep moving forward,” he is expected to say in his speech. “Because this is a city that slowly, unmistakably, together, is moving forward.”
Obama will give the speech at a newly opened community center in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, which was among the hardest hit by the storm. He will also discuss the racial and economic inequality that came into full view in Katrina’s aftermath, and criticize the government response to the storm.
“What started out as a natural disaster became a manmade one – a failure of government to look out for its own citizens,” he will say. “This was something that was supposed to happen somewhere else. Not here. But what that storm revealed was another tragedy – one that had been brewing for decades. New Orleans had long been plagued by structural inequality that left too many people, especially poor people of color, without good jobs or affordable health care or decent housing. Too many kids grew up surrounded by violent crime, cycling through substandard schools where few had a shot to break out of poverty.”
In 2007, two years after the storm, Obama visited the city while a candidate for president. In a notable speech, he denounced the government response and promised to help reform the city’s failing infrastructure, health care and education systems.
“America failed the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast long before that failure showed up on our television sets,” he said. “America failed them again during Katrina. We cannot — we must not — fail for a third time.”
On many levels, Obama fulfilled most of those promises, and the city has invested large efforts into new industries and entrepreneurship, which has created an economic upswing. In addition, as HuffPost’s Kate Sheppard reported, the city has become a model for climate resilience, taking steps to protect its coastline and wetlands and modernize its levee system.
Obama will give the speech at a newly opened community center in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, which was among the hardest hit by the storm. According to White House officials, during his visit to New Orleans, Obama will also visit families affected by the hurricane and participate in a roundtable on disaster preparedness and lessons learned from Katrina.