Why New Orleans Was Not Helped

As I wiped sweat off my brow I noticed a skinny black man in a pickup truck pull up to a stop right beside me. The man got out, looked over the massive pile of random debris on the sidewalk, and asked me if he could take the refrigerator I had just finished pulling out of the house. After agreeing, I asked him if he was in the city when Katrina hit. The tall old man shook his head, muttered some curses, and began to tell me his story. “It was raining hard when I first looked out the window of my house on the just right over there.” The man pointed down the street and continued.

“I went to my room to get a shirt, came back, and noticed the water was almost up to where my shins. By the time I got outside, the water was up to my knees. After walking about 30 yards the water was up to my chest. I managed to climb on top of a parked semi truck and I stayed there for four days before a boat with cops came by. They saw me waving my arms and came over, but then the police told me to stay where I was, and they left me!” The skinny old black man now lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his family; he had come back to his hometown to look for some metal to sell from gutted houses. Scenes and stories like this are common in New Orleans after Katrina hit.

After two years New Orleans is still wrecked. The Big Easy, what once used to be the most artistic of cities in the United States, is now struggling to get back to its former glory. The federal government is helping very little, because the higher authorities figure that the city is not worth it to save. The federal government does not care about New Orleans due to its poor inhabitants, terrible economy, and the fact that it costs too much money to protect from future floods.

One well known picture taken some weeks after Hurricane Katrina is that of a local police man carrying a handful of DVDs and some other materialistic goods out of a store. Looting was very common in New Orleans after Katrina hit, and the facts of the city population must be known for this to make sense. In 2005, an estimated sixty-seven percent of residents of New Orleans are African American and about thirty percent of the residents are below the poverty line, including half the children population. Katrina hit at the most inopportune time, three days before most poor residents would get welfare checks from the government. Approximately 134,000 people could not leave their homes because they could not afford transportation (from MSNBC). Such statistics make the government feel that New Orleans should not be rebuilt. The poverty rate of New Orleans also contributes to the meager economy of the city.