It would be slightly amiss if I didn’t write something about the two year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall into the Gulf Coast region.

What have we learned in the last two years? I would venture to say: not very much.

While the news coverage will concentrate mostly on the “feel good” stories, and they no doubt deserve to be told, we still have a long way to go before we can even think about considering New Orleans “back”. The Lower 9th Ward is still an unimaginable mess, and it was only recently that new housing started being rebuilt in an area that took an absolute beating at the hands of the storm and its subsequent floods.

In consideration of the entire bumbling of the relief effort by FEMA, I think we can put the conspiracy theories regarding FEMA taking over the country to rest for a bit. It’s safe to say FEMA isn’t going to be taking over anything much larger than a child’s sack lunch anytime soon.

Environmentally, Katrina caused as much devastation and contamination (9 million gallons, by some accounts) as the 10.8 million gallon Exxon Valdez oil spill. What will be the legacy of this floating swamp of pollution? The after-effects of something this large and wide won’t be measurable for decades or generations as we monitor cancer and other death rates from the survivors, their decedents, and the people brave enough to move back.

The financial impact is still being measured. The National Flood Insurance Program, already on shaky ground before Katrina, is now $20 billion in the hole and showing no signs of getting on the level in the immediate future. Musicians, once one of the beautiful and amazing pillars New Orleans was built on, are leaving in droves. A city in one of the poorest regions in the country, desperate for capital, is only at 60% of the population it recorded in 2005 and isn’t forecasting a pre-Katrina tax base available before 2009.

Have we forgotten about Katrina? Perhaps a little. There’s a tendency for people to not hold things close to the heart that do not affect them directly — this is why you don’t read or hear as much in the U.S. about the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake/Tsunami that killed hundreds of times more people than Katrina did. The further away from us something like this happens, in both time and distance, the more disconnected we feel of it.

I do question throwing more money at a system that was so diluted in waste, fraud, and downright mismanagement that it’s hard to imagine how we were able to spend $100 billion and have so little to show for it. I applaud the *idea* behind Podcamp New Orleans — I just hope the people who chose to attend that event realize that it’s more that just “making a presence” and putting their credit cards down on the desk of national hotel chains that aren’t hurting that much. If that’s all that’s involved, I’d rather give my money to a more worthy and direct cause.

It may cost another $40 billion or more and another decade to bring New Orleans back to its former glory. What we really don’t need, but unfortunately are always left with, are politicians using this mess as an opportunity to push agendas and photo opportunities. That, more than anything, proves to me we’ve learned absolutely nothing from this mess and are destined to see the same tragedies repeated when, not if, another natural disaster strikes.

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