A day to mourn losses and celebrate rebirth

NEW ORLEANS - As the church bells rang marking the decade since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the 80-year-old woman wept softly into a tissue as she leaned against her rusting Oldsmobile.

"I feel guilty," said Eloise Allen, whose house was damaged but inhabitable after the storm. "I didn't go through what all the other people did."

Saturday was a day to remember what "all the other people" went through. Those who were lifted from rooftops by helicopters, those who came home to find only concrete steps as evidence of where their house used to be, those whose bodies were never claimed after the storm.

But the mourning Saturday was balanced by a celebration of how far the region has come since Hurricane Katrina.

The storm killed more than 1,800 people and caused $151 billion in damage, in one of the country's deadliest and most costly natural disasters. The dead were not far from anyone's thoughts Saturday, from Mississippi where church bells rang out to mark when the storm made landfall to a commemoration at the New Orleans memorial containing bodies of people never claimed or identified.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu spoke of the dark days after the monstrous storm and how the city's residents leaned on each other for support.

"We saved each other," the mayor said. "New Orleans will be unbowed and unbroken."

In Biloxi, Miss., clergy and community leaders gathered at a newly built Minor League Baseball park for a memorial to Katrina's victims.

During a prayer service at a seaside park in Gulfport, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour praised volunteers who worked on the Katrina recovery. He said more than 954,000 volunteers came from around the country to Mississippi in the first five years after the storm, and many were motivated by faith.

"They thought it was God's command to try to help people in need," Barbour said.

Katrina's force caused a massive storm surge that scoured the Mississippi coast, pushed boats far inland and wiped houses off the map.

Glitzy casinos and condominium towers have been rebuilt. But overgrown lots and empty slabs speak to the slow recovery in some communities.

In New Orleans, wide-scale failures of the levee system on Aug. 29, 2005, left 80 percent of the city under water.

New Orleans has framed the 10th anniversary as a showcase designed to demonstrate to the world how far a city that some questioned rebuilding has come. In the week leading up to the actual anniversary, the city has held lectures, given tours of the levee improvements and released a resiliency plan.

Many parts of the iconic city have rebounded phenomenally while many residents - particularly in the black community - still struggle.

Neighborhoods held events to commemorate the storm, and thousands of volunteers spread out across the city in a day of community activism.