Happy Katrinaversary
By Marcus Gilmer in Miscellaneous on Aug 29, 2008 6:10PM
As the residents of the Gulf Coast keep an eye on Gustav, today marks the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall along the Louisiana and Mississippi coast. And while, on the surface, it seems most memorials would be confined to that region, there's no underscoring the amazing contribution Chicago made to the relief effort. The city of Chicago opened its arms to evacuees and learned from the experience for its own emergency plan. Chicagoans donated not just money but much-needed water. The Red Cross estimated that roughly 7,000 Katrina evacuees wound up in Chicago while other estimates were as high as 9,000 (one of the highest totals outside the Southeast). The rift between Illinois's politicians seen in Katrina's wake reflected what was happening across the country: while Dennis Hastert questioned the decision to rebuild (reasoning that's not nearly as outlandish as it originally sounded when read in context), Mayor Daley expressed outrage at FEMA's refusal for assistance. And, of course, who could forget Chicagoan Kanye West's dramatic declaration during the nationally broadcast telethon?
My Katrina experience coincidentally included a stop at O'Hare; I had been away for a week in Wisconsin for a wedding and my flight back home to New Orleans was canceled due to the approaching Katrina. All I could do was sit in an O'Hare terminal watching CNN's coverage of the evacuation, call my friends to see where everyone was headed, waiting for the next flight to Alabama where I would set up shop at my parents' house. It wasn't my first brush with Chicago, and I had no idea I'd eventually wind up here on a permanent basis, but looking back at not only the kindness I personally received from my Chicago-based friends and the O'Hare workers who knew my situation and did all they could to help but the reaction of Chicago as a whole, it's no surprise that when I left New Orleans a year after Katrina, I relocated here.
The examples listed above don't even begin to scratch the surface of the way Chicago reached out to what, in many ways, is a sister city (that Bears-Saints playoff game aside). It doesn't include the stories of the numerous Chicago-area families who donated their time, money, and effort to the relief cause and opened their own homes to evacuees or the teachers that welcomed relocated students to their already painfully overcrowded classrooms.
Flooding is a concern Midwest residents are fully aware of, especially with more recent events. And the faulty levees that gave way and flooded New Orleans aren't just a localized problem; it's a national issue. It's estimated that there are faulty levees in 28 states and Levees.org has supported a bipartisan effort called the 8/29 Investigation to look into what went wrong in New Orleans and how that can be applied to levees nationwide.