I Remember. Do You?

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With everything from freshman year to frat parties to the War in Afghanistan clouding our minds, many Cal students may have forgotten that this week is the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

For those of you with a shorter memory span than others, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast this week in 2005. The storm left a battered trail of mass destruction, FEMA failures and patriotic volunteerism in its wake.

However, while our country flocked to the rescue of hundreds of thousands of people left stranded or homeless post-storm, it seems today that we've all but forgotten the thousands of families still struggling to survive. Four years has not been long enough to rebuild lives

This past January, I spent a few weeks in Mississippi and Louisiana with Berkeley Hillel gutting homes that have still barely been touched since the Hurricane hit. Roughly twenty of us worked in St. Bernard Parish, a county Southeast of New Orleans in Louisiana. This suburban blue-collar community was racked to its core when the levies on its border broke and flooded the town with
14 feet of water.

Sadly, of the 70,000 people that lived there pre?Katrina, less than half have returned home today. Many cannot return due to housing prices, a lack of economic infrastructure and broken community ties. Others choose not to return in fear of another storm or from the pain of the recent and localized memories. For a record two months after the storm, homeowners were not even allowed near their homes because the Parish Council declared every single one unlivable and toxic.

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