Five years later, Katrina legacy lingers

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/hotbutton/Five_years_later_Katrina_legacy_lingers.html?cmpid=44065997

ALMOST EVERY week, I get a letter from Dot McLeod. And every time, my heart breaks.

Dot is 80. For 75 of those years, she lived in New Orleans. Then Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home and her life.

Her back was permanently injured when the helicopter basket carrying her away from the flood waters struck the side of a building. After a stay in a military hospital, she moved to a Fort Worth, Texas, retirement community, waiting for her chance to go home to Louisiana.

Instead, she's been in Texas ever since. Her letters are always the same: "No one cares anymore. No one remembers."

(snip)

Dot cries a lot. She still mourns the loss of her house and neighborhood. She still weeps for her beloved cat - "my boy," she calls him - who died in the days after the storm.

I comfort her as well as I can but the truth is, she'll never go home again. She will die in a state she doesn't know, surrounded by people who she feels do not care.

(end snip)

There has been some recovery in NOLA. For business. The poor neighborhoods are still devastated. Five years out. The people who lived there once are still scattered. And no one still knows exactly how many people died. I remember they were still finding bones two years out. I was there recently, in NOLA. In talking to people anecdotaly in restaurants, cabs, buses, most of them believe that the government blew up the levees like they did once before. They believe that the government sacrificed the poor to save the city, again. How do you recover from that?