Three Years After Katrina, a City Holds Its Breath Again

NEW ORLEANS - The anniversary passed quietly last week — a few ceremonies, a bell rung at the moment the levees broke. Three years after Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,600 people, New Orleans marked the date by boarding its windows and leaving town.

The symmetry was lost on no one. Gustav bore down on the Gulf Coast on almost the exact calendar date as Katrina, over a city whose rebuilt neighborhoods sit beside blocks still empty and wild with weeds.

About 65 percent of the pre-Katrina population has returned. The Lower Ninth Ward remains a patchwork of vacant slabs and a handful of new, elevated houses built by a foundation backed by the actor Brad Pitt.

"We live here with one eye on the Gulf every August," said Robert Green, whose mother and granddaughter died when the floodwall failed in 2005. He evacuated to Nashville this time. "You don't forget. You just learn to leave earlier."

The Army Corps of Engineers has spent billions since Katrina repairing and raising levees, and installed massive gates that can seal the city's drainage canals against storm surge. But the full 100-year-storm system will not be finished until at least 2011.

The recovery's unevenness defines the city: the French Quarter and the Garden District hum with tourists, while whole sections of New Orleans East wait for promised redevelopment that has never come.

Whether Gustav spares the city or not, residents said the evacuation itself was a kind of verdict. "In 2005 we couldn't get out," said a bus passenger boarding at the Union Passenger Terminal. "This time the buses came to us. That's something."

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Associated Press writers contributed to this report.

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