Remembering Hurricane Katrina: Four Years Later

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.

While in Louisiana, the other student volunteers and I spoke with Ray Gremillion, an amazingly sweet elderly resident of the Parish, as well as Colonel Dysart, who runs the St. Bernard Parrish Recovery effort. Both men, full of Cajun pride and Southern hospitality, made my heart swell with their wrenching tales of survival and heroism.

Nevertheless, my heart then broke as I watched both men break into tears while telling their stories. I could never do their stories justice here, but I can relay to you, my fellow Cal students, their pleas for ongoing help. They told me, and now I tell you, that the recovery effort is not over. We need you to stand up and help.

Just this past year, the vast majority of students on this campus and countrywide dropped everything to fight for the change we wanted to see in our country. We demanded that our voices be heard at the very top of the totem pole and learned November 4th, 2008 that Yes, We Can. We joined together in a way that made me proud to be part of our generation and part of a community that changed the course of the future.

But what will we do about our present problems? Just because many more tragedies have hit this country in the past four years does not mean we can overlook the oversights of our past.

Management of the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort was and still is a complete mess and impending failure. Now, of the generation that started a grassroots revolution to change our future, I ask-what are you willing to do to affect our present? The thousands of students that will read this paper today have the power to make a difference.

Help is needed. Ray Gremillion, Colonel Dysart and myself, along with the hundreds of thousands of current volunteers and victims of Katrina agree: we need the youth of this country, who made such an amazing impact on our country last Fall, to take a stand this autumn and fight for a real recovery for those affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Write letters to your representatives or blog about your thoughts. Twitter the fourth anniversary of the storm and send out a facebook note to friends and family. Volunteer with Berkeley Hillel, Cal Corps, or any of the other campus or community organizations still working in the Gulf. Do what you can; do anything at all.

I'm not one for cliché's but sometimes they ring true: Together we can be the change we hope to see in the future, today. Yes, we can.

Tags: HURRICANE KATRINA