Two full years after Katrina, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city’s long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn’t President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government’s participation in the rebuilding?

And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?

Unfortunately, one of the biggest misperceptions the American public harbors is that Katrina was a week-long catastrophe. In truth, it’s better to view it as an era. Remember, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted eight or nine years. We’re still in the middle of the Katrina saga.

[Read](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/24/AR2007082401209.html “Read the Story”) (Washington Post)

With government money for New Orleans trickling through the pipeline, private foundations, wealthy individuals, and philanthropies are playing a larger role than expected.

Billions of federal dollars have been allotted or spent in New Orleans since hurricane Katrina, so it may come as a surprise that the first public works project in the city’s long-term recovery – the Rosa Keller Library in the middle-class Broadmoor neighborhood – was not paid for by American taxpayers but by the Carnegie Foundation in New York.

[Read](http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0627/p01s06-usec.html “Read the Story”) (Christian Science Monitor)

Four men in New Orleans were killed on Monday, marking the deadliest day in the city. All four victims were shot in the head from point-blank range, but the murders did not appear to be connected. At least 55 people have been killed in New Orleans so far this year.

Alexandra Cohen reports, followed by a discussion between former University of New Orleans criminologist Peter Scharf and Noah Adams.

Listen (NPR)

In the latest twist to the demographic transformation of New Orleans since it was swamped by Hurricane Katrina last year, hundreds of babies are being born to Latino immigrant workers, both legal and illegal, who flocked to the city to toil on its reconstruction.

The throng of babies gurgling in the handful of operational maternity wards here has come as a big surprise — and a financial strain — to this historically black and white city, which before the hurricane had only a small Latino community and virtually no experience of illegal immigration.

[Read](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/us/nationalspecial/11babies.html?ex=1323493200&en=68c902d882214ed1&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss “Read the Story”) (New York Times)

Some critics are starting to praise the Army Corps of Engineers’ work in rebuilding the levees around New Orleans.

Coming from Professor Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been one of the most persistent critics of the Army Corps of Engineers’ work on the levees, it was an important turnabout. His praise of the levee work gives an important endorsement to the corps’s desperate struggle to improve flood control around New Orleans and its suburbs before the hurricane season begins on June 1.

Just two months ago, Professor Bea, who is investigating the levee failures around New Orleans with his colleague Raymond B. Seed, had a very different assessment of the corps’s work. The researchers, who receive financing from the National Science Foundation, said the corps and its contractors in St. Bernard were rebuilding parts of these levees with sandy soil that was likely to wash away under the next assault of a storm. Professor Seed referred to the material going into some parts of the levees as “sugar sands.”

[Read](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/12/us/nationalspecial/12levee.html?ex=1302494400&en=623f5e8b72af87a4&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) (New York Times)

Critics say the New Orleans levee system is likely to fail again, because not enough clay is being imported to strengthen it.

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More than 3,200 people are still unaccounted for nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina, and the Louisiana medical examiner wants the search to resume for those missing from the most devastated neighborhoods.

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A Louisiana congressman says e-mails written by the government’s emergency response chief as Hurricane Katrina raged show a lack of concern for the unfolding tragedy and a failure in leadership.

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For some reason, we are still paying Brownie a salary – $148,000 a year. I wish someone would pay me that much money for doing an extremely poor job.

Investigators yesterday added a possible new explanation for some of the flooding that devastated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: contractors who may have skimped on construction materials in building the city’s floodwalls and levees. Experts probing the cause of the flooding have received at least a dozen allegations of major cheating by builders and possibly others involved in levee construction. The list of alleged misdeeds includes the use of weak, poorly compacted soils in levee construction and deliberate skimping on steel pilings used to anchor floodwalls to the ground.

Read (Washington Post)