Five years later, Katrina legacy lingers

ALMOST EVERY week, I get a letter from Dot McLeod. And every time, my heart breaks.

Dot is 80. For 75 of those years, she lived in New Orleans. Then Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home and her life.

Her back was permanently injured when the helicopter basket carrying her away from the flood waters struck the side of a building. After a stay in a military hospital, she moved to a Fort Worth, Texas, retirement community, waiting for her chance to go home to Louisiana.

Instead, she's been in Texas ever since. Her letters are always the same: "No one cares anymore. No one remembers."

For those who lived through it, whose lives were altered by it, Katrina is unforgettable.

Who could forget seeing the bodies in the streets, ignored for days, bloating in the sun? Who could erase the voices pleading for food and water, the cries of scared and homeless children? Amid mile after mile of destroyed and flooded homes, who could imagine anyone living there again?

It's been five years since the storm, and many outside the Gulf Coast may want to forget it. It's important for them to remember.

For people like Dot, Katrina is still a part of everyday life. Aug. 29 is the day their world changed and, in many ways, that upheaval still dominates all.

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I was in New Orleans before Katrina hit, thinking that the imminent storm would leave the city largely unfazed as so many other allegedly catastrophic storms had done before it.

I was wrong.

I spent almost two weeks in the flooded city, writing about the devastation. I waded through water up to my chest, notebook and cell phone held above my head, to cover the story. I watched as survivors were plucked from rooftops, scarred from having seen loved ones drown next to them. I was helpless as looters picked apart a Walmart, a savage feeding frenzy like I'd never seen.

When I finally left New Orleans, a city I love and used to call home, I felt helpless. I wondered if it would ever be whole again. I felt that it would take at least a generation for the city to recover.

Five years later, an update on the city is a mixed bag of progress and decline:

The city's school system, which had been troubled before the storm, has taken steps in the right direction: For example, a greater share of students in grades 4 and 8 are proficient in math and English, according to figures from the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

Tourism, essential to the city's survival, is on the upswing. About 7 million people visited the city in 2009, and it was among the top U.S. destinations in the first five months of 2010, according to the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. That's still below the 2004 figure of 10 million, but tourism officials say that the recession has affected travel across the board.

A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that two out of three people - 67 percent - have said that their own lives have returned to normal.

But it's not all good news. New Orleans has always had a reputation for lawlessness. So far this year, it has the nation's highest murder rate, according to FBI statistics.

Residents are still displaced: The population now hovers around 350,000, about 70 percent of its pre-storm population, according to 2009 Census estimates. In 2000, the last full Census count before the storm, the city had about 484,000.

Those who are home still see the city itself as struggling: According to Kaiser, 60 percent of them feel that the city hasn't fully recovered from Katrina.

And most New Orleanians wonder if people still care: Seventy percent of those asked by Kaiser say that the rest of the nation has forgotten the challenges they continue to face.

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Dot cries a lot. She still mourns the loss of her house and neighborhood. She still weeps for her beloved cat - "my boy," she calls him - who died in the days after the storm.

I comfort her as well as I can but the truth is, she'll never go home again. She will die in a state she doesn't know, surrounded by people who she feels do not care.

When I spoke to Dot this week, she asked me if I wanted to know what she wanted written on her tombstone. Although she's now alone, she's led a rich life, playing piano with Liberace's band, traveling the world, working as a photographer, dabbling in painting and drawing.

But none of that matters to her now. She's come to define herself differently. The words she wants, right under her name, are: "Katrina survivor."

She just as easily could have written: "Katrina victim."