Hurricane Katrina Coverage

Recalling family taken by Katrina

There is almost no trace of the house that once cradled a young family at 1908 Tennessee St. The concrete foundation has all but disappeared beneath vegetation that has buried a stretch of Ninth Ward neighborhood under a thicket of green.

HURRICANE KATRINA: ONE YEAR LATER

FEMA still recovering

Don’t tell Eddie Favre that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has turned itself around. Not yet, anyhow.

HURRICANE KATRINA: ONE YEAR LATER

Survivors' tales of life on the mend

One year after the most devastating storm in U.S. history killed more than 1,300 people and left more than three-quarters of a million people homeless, New Orleans remains a shattered city, its inhabitants still groping to gather the pieces of their broken lives.

HURRICANE KATRINA: ONE YEAR LATER

Saving New Orleans: Big, but not so easy

Bryan Block returned home in December, eager to be in the vanguard of the Big Easy's revival.

HURRICANE KATRINA: ONE YEAR LATER

A city forever changed

The most costly storm ever to hit the United States crushed homes a year ago, breeching levees, uprooting hundreds of thousands of evacuees and swallowing human victims in its surging floodwaters. The city of New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast lowlands are slowly regaining their balance, even as much of them remain in ruins.

Ousted from Big Easy, in limbo in Texas

Kemberly Samuels desperately wants to go back. Annie Johnson is determined to stay.

Ellis Henican: A Big Easy family's comeback story

Mardi Gras must have made a difference. Or else people just got tired of replacing Sheetrock and scrubbing mold.

REPORTING FROM NEW ORLEANS

Big uneasy: Rebuilding

It took Darrell Foy and his friends only a couple of days to rehabilitate the Bienville Street duplex where his aunt Leola Lions died after floodwaters inundated her Mid-City neighborhood.

REPORTING FROM NEW ORLEANS

A spirited Mardi Gras

The rumbling drums and cowbell clang produce hauntingly infectious beats that penetrate the soul and cause limbs to move uncontrollably.

Evacuees in the city face another move

After spending 40 nights at the Ramada Plaza Hotel near LaGuardia Airport, Justin Samuels, a Hurricane Katrina evacuee from Alabama, is happy to be moving into a studio apartment in Hell's Kitchen.

REPORTING FROM NEW ORLEANS

Mellow Mardi Gras

There was never any doubt Jim Thompson would ride atop a Mardi Gras parade float this year as he has for more than a decade. Or that he and his family would partake in the pre-Lent festivities.

City toasts its survival

The tuba thumps with might. The drums kick with authority. And the rest of the horn ensemble - pairs of trumpets, trombones and saxophones - blow with gale-force strength.

THE CHILDREN OF KATRINA

Saving storm's tiniest victims

Katie Thomas was one of several Newsday staff writers who reported from the Gulf Coast region on the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina six months ago. She told the story of seven children - all but one still in diapers - who were separated from their family for three harrowing days. Thomas brings the story full circle in her new book, "Waters Dark and Deep: One New Orleans Family's Rescue Amid the Devastation of Hurricane Katrina," published by Cold Spring Press. Here are excerpts.

Not as Big, not quite as Easy

When I planned my trip to New Orleans six months after Hurricane Katrina hit, I never worried about running out of things to do.

Prosperity's door opens for returnee

Returning home has been bitter and sweet for Calvin Edwards.

'You scratch your head and wonder'

The mobile homes started arriving sometime in October, pulling into a 282-acre site at the Hope, Ark., airport, one after another, row upon row. They kept on coming, week after week and month after month, convoys of sometimes 100 at a time lugged by trucks that clogged the roads into town, queuing up on a runway and on the adjacent gumbo-like soil, side to side, front to back.

Struggle to keep shelter

An estimated 12,000 families left homeless by Hurricane Katrina were dropped yesterday from the government's emergency program housing them in hotels in New York and across the country and faced a new struggle to find shelter after a federal judge in New Orleans refused to intervene.

Prevailing wage rule restored

The Bush administration yesterday announced plans to reinstate a rule requiring government contractors working in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina to pay employees a prevailing wage.

THE HURRICANES: THE AFTERMATH

Thousands remain without housing after Hurricane Katrina

When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore here on Aug. 29, it took crabber David Segrave's little two-story on a canal off Lake Pontchartrain's north shore and ate it. Nothing was left but a toilet bolted to a cement slab. He's put up a wood frame wrapped in a blue tarp around the toilet, and set up a little Eureka pup tent a friend gave him on the slab.

THE HURRICANES

Slowly, city starts recovery

One month to the day after Hurricane Katrina hit this city with savage fury and stranded thousands in the Superdome and adjoining New Orleans Arena, Paul Kowalenko stood in its shadow yesterday morning and got his crew of about 15 ready to go in and begin cleaning 300 toilets jammed and overflowing with feces.

Far from home when they were needed most

On Aug. 1, weeks before anyone had heard of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana National Guard Lt. Col. Pete Schneider complained to a local TV reporter that Guardsmen had been deployed to Iraq with "dozens of high water vehicles, humvees, refuelers and generators."

Water goes, questions stay

When he arrived three weeks ago, 80 percent of the city was under water and the devastation was unfathomable. The damage is still "apocalyptic," but as he watches the last pockets of water drain from New Orleans' Ninth Ward and anticipates a dry city by this weekend, Col. Duane Gapinski feels a certain sense of satisfaction.

New Orleans police chief resigns

Police Chief Eddie Compass, the up-from-the-ranks cop who became one of the public faces of the Katrina disaster here as his police force was shredded by desertions and his city careened out of control, resigned his post yesterday.

THE HURRICANES - THE AFTERMATH

Brown sees red

Michael Brown, the deposed director of FEMA, sparked a bipartisan firestorm yesterday by blaming Louisiana officials for bungling the multi-agency response to Hurricane Katrina while boasting he had done a "darned good job."

KATRINA

GOP uneasy on Katrina costs

Already getting low marks from voters on Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush now is coming under pressure from usually friendlier quarters - conservative Republicans in Congress challenging his whatever-it-costs approach to recovery.

Bush makes new tax vow

Faced with restive conservatives calling Katrina relief a $200-billion budget-buster, President George W. Bush on Friday ruled out raising taxes and pledged budget cuts to cover some of the tab.

ANALYSIS

Bush rhetoric evokes other Gulf

President George W. Bush last night elevated rebuilding the storm-shattered Gulf Coast into a central mission of his second term, echoing the rallying tone and even some of the language he used to describe the mission of the first, fighting the war on terrorism.

KATRINA

Bush on response: Blame me

With a rare but simple declaration - "I take responsibility" - President George W. Bush said for the first time yesterday that he would bear the blame for mistakes in the widely criticized federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA chief Brown resigns

Sent packing from hurricane duty three days ago, embattled FEMA chief Michael Brown quit the agency altogether yesterday, saying he didn't want the controversy dogging him to take away from FEMA's efforts.

KATRINA

Bush takes the ground tour

President George W. Bush, ducking low-hanging tree limbs and electrical wires, rode in an open truck yesterday for his first close-up look at the city's ravaged, trash-strewn, flooded neighborhoods. He denied that poor black victims of Hurricane Katrina were ignored because of their race.

KATRINA - FEMA

Effort mired in bureaucratic hash

When the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, promised $2,000 debit cards to Hurricane Katrina's neediest evacuees, Susan Anastassiadis, who was watching Brown's televised announcement Wednesday in her Deer Park home, sprang into action.

KATRINA

Other nations offer U.S. aid

Four days into the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, President George W. Bush assured Americans that "this country is going to rise up and take care of it."

NEW LEADERSHIP

Brown's out in New Orleans

The Bush administration moved Friday to oust embattled disaster-response boss Michael Brown from Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, and New Orleans officials said early indications are that the death toll from the storm may be dramatically lower than earlier estimates.

'Atta-boy' out of there as new questions arise

In the past week, FEMA chief Michael Brown went from being a little-known bureaucrat getting an "atta-boy" from the president to a man who was the embodiment of his agency's ills, in the eyes of his critics.

Departures in the Gulf: Some willing, some not

It wasn't the water that got to Hezron Williams or the rank, swampy smell or the lack of supplies or the corpses in the streets or the orders from the mayor to leave. It was the bugs.

KATRINA

A dubious resume

New questions surfaced yesterday about whether the White House inflated FEMA chief Michael Brown's past work experience when he took over the agency, where several of the most senior managers bring little or no disaster-response experience to their posts, including Brown.

KATRINA: THE OVERVIEW

Water pressure

Despite warnings they were in the midst of a "contaminated soup," thousands of stalwarts yesterday were resisting New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's order to abandon the flooded city, and nobody was forcing them out.

KATRINA THE OVERVIEW

Signs of hope amid dread

With troops patrolling the streets and pumping stations drawing down water levels in New Orleans yesterday, Mayor Ray Nagin said his city was starting to "turn the corner" but warned that receding waters would reveal a gruesome toll of decomposing corpses in the muck left behind.

KATRINA

Political peril hits Team Bush

President George W. Bush once had hoped to use this week to remind Americans of his handling of a national catastrophe. Now he'll spend it trying to make people forget.

KATRINA

Hurricane flags posted

Weather patterns indicate that the United States has entered an era of many more hurricanes than in recent decades, and disaster experts say the country is not ready for them.

KATRINA: THE SEARCH CONTINUES

Desperately seeking survivors

Scouring neighborhoods still submerged by filthy flood waters, rescuers yesterday embarked on a desperate door-to-door bid to save the last of Hurricane Katrina's survivors, many of them elderly or invalid left stranded in attics or on balconies.

KATRINA - WHAT WENT WRONG

Questions pouring through floodgates

Attending disaster conferences for 15 years as a state emergency director, Joe Myers sat in on dozens of discussions of the hurricane threat in New Orleans. And every time, the Superdome was described as the centerpiece of rescue and evacuation efforts.

KATRINA EVACUATIONS

'It's been hell' for them

Fires blazed in New Orleans' shattered downtown yesterday as rescue workers, some in water scooters, tried to reach people still stranded in their homes six days after Hurricane Katrina sent the waters of Lake Pontchartrain sloshing over the city.

KATRINA - HELP AT LAST

Aid, but little comfort

National Guardsmen finally hit the seething streets of New Orleans Friday, and efforts to clear Hurricane Katrina survivors from the uninhabitable city appeared to gain momentum. But progress was matched by new obstacles that underscored what many said was an inexcusably sluggish response by the Bush administration.

KATRINA

Black and white issue?

A growing chorus of black lawmakers, civil rights leaders and academics questioned Friday whether race played a role in the government's slow response to the crisis in the gulf region.

Bush: Help on the way

WASHINGTON - With the situation in New Orleans growing increasingly desperate, the Bush administration was forced to defend its hurricane response yesterday as local officials and residents blasted the federal efforts and pleaded for more help.