Behind The Lens episode 264 Part II: ‘Our Katrina narrative’
The Lens spent January talking to Lower 9th Ward residents to tell their stories, narratives a Super Bowl committee wanted to control.
True Terror: New Orleans Likely Not Prepared for Much
"As a researcher who has closely observed, personally experienced local struggles," says the writer, Bethany Garfield, "it’s with a heavy heart that I say that investigations into the state of our city’s protective plans and systems will likely garner the following conclusion: New Orleans isn’t ready for much of anything.."
Behind the scenes of Super Bowl shelter planning
Emails show that state officials considered creating a shelter in a barge moored in Industrial Canal — and that prominent local developers knew about the shelter long before some city officials.
Behind The Lens episode 264 Part I: ‘Our Katrina narrative’
The Lens spent January talking to Lower 9th Ward residents to tell their stories, narratives a Super Bowl committee wanted to control.
Council condemns mayor’s threat to scuttle $20 million settlement with Orleans Parish School Board
OPSB had sued because the city was skimming a portion off of the top of its OPSB tax payments; district officials agreed to settle last year, when the School Board realized it was facing a $36 million deficit.
Super Bowl planners: ‘Anticipate any features of the [Lower 9] neighborhood which could be used by media to substantiate Katrina narrative’
Though she was an infant when Katrina hit, she still feels its effects today
Her family house has framed her world. With its doorway, marked with penciled hash marks to show her height over the years, the house tracked her growth at the same time she tracked its years of repairs after Katrina.
Thwarted from connecting the Lower 9 to its wetland roots
After Katrina, environmentalists built an overlook on Bayou Bienvenue to give the community access to the wetlands, which had been devastated by salt water from a now-closed canal called MR-GO. Recent construction threatens that key post-Katrina achievement, Arthur Johnson says.
She saw ‘a public-health crisis’ and opened a clinic in the emptied Lower 9
"Alice saved my life," neighbors say. In 2007, Alice Craft-Kerney helped to launch a post-Katrina clinic that was invaluable to neighbors. But it closed its doors after an inexplicably short time.
Planting a flag in the Lower 9 ‘wilderness’
Every year on August 29 – the day that Katrina hit, in 2005 – Green’s family gathers by the place where his mom's house once stood, in shirts that read “Roof Riders." Then they walk the two-block route taken by the floating house, to the oak tree where it stopped.
