Bush marks Katrina anniversary in scarred New Orleans [+ pictures]

A combination picture shows Canal Street in New Orleans on September 6, 2005 (left) when it was flooded after Hurricane Katrina struck, and a view of the same place on August 26, 2006. Pictures / Reuters

NEW ORLEANS - It was the storm that laid waste to an area along the US Gulf Coast about the size of England, in the process wreaking terrible damage to one of America's legendary cities.

It also changed the perception of a presidency, perhaps forever.

Today George Bush returns to New Orleans, exactly a year after Hurricane Katrina, on his 13th visit since the storm, for an anniversary that has been designated a national day of remembrance.

Katrina was not only the most expensive national disaster in US history, leaving an insurance bill for the devastation in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama of some US$60bn ($94bn).

The total cost - human and emotional as well as economic - has been far higher still.

Some 1,600 deaths are now attributed to the storm. Some Gulf Coast communities were virtually wiped of the map. Thousands of historic buildings in cities like Biloxi in Mississippi were lost.

In New Orleans itself, half of the 500,000 inhabitants pre-Katrina have yet to return, and many of them surely never will.

Ray Nagin, the mayor, says population recovery will take five years, but that may be optimistic.

The bulk of those who have gone are black and poor, with little financial stake in what, long before Katrina, was one of the worst-run cities in the country.

In their absence, New Orleans' character, both ethnic and political, cannot but change.

A year after the category-three hurricane - and the storm surge which breached the city's levees and left 80 per cent of it under water - a third of the debris has yet to be removed.

Vast tracts of the all-but-obliterated Ninth Ward to the east of Downtown and the French Quarter look exactly as they did when the floods finally receded last October.

They have not been rebuilt - and probably never will be.

The same may go for the standing of the President, as he vows today again to see through the rebuilding of the city, promising to his country that "never again" will it be unprepared for such a catastrophe.

But nothing even Mr Bush's talented speech writers come up with will make good the damage done.

"Compassionate conservativism" was the slogan on which he was elected six years ago.

But the image of him surveying the disaster from aloft amid the comfort of Air Force One as it made a detour from California to Washington definitively banished any such notions.

Meanwhile the botched federal response, encapsulated for ever in the eight words, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," - addressed to the discredited federal emergency chief Michael Brown - destroyed his reputation for strong leadership, indeed for basic competence.

In those dreadful days after the storm, the authorities seemed not to grasp the scale of the disaster, despite the apocalyptic television pictures and the undisguised on-screen exasperation of reporters.

Within days, Mr Brown, director of the federal disaster agency, FEMA, had been sacked, as the shambolic response became apparent.

Simultaneously, Mr Bush's own approval rating tumbled to below 40 per cent, where it has been stuck ever since.

The mess in Iraq of course had heavily contributed to his troubles. But Katrina delivered a coup de grace. Since then things have improved - but only slowly.

Congress has allocated US$110bn ($172bn) for relief and reconstruction. But precisely how much has been spent is debatable.

Housing plans have been developed, and Congress has passed an act setting up a Gulf Opportunity Zone.

But the focus has been on privately owned property, not the public housing where New Orleans' poorest used to live.

And other promises outlined by the President when he made his celebrated prime-time speech in an artfully lit Jackson Square on 15 September have not been fulfilled.

The levees meanwhile have been repaired - but not to withstand the maximum category-five hurricane that Katrina briefly was before it made land early on 29 August 2005.

In other words, the flooding of New Orleans, for decades top of every expert's list of likely natural disasters in the US, could happen again - especially if the direst warnings of global warming and its consequences are borne out.

For all this, Mr Bush, fairly or unfairly, is blamed.

According to one poll this month, only 37 per cent of Americans approve of his handling of Katrina, compared with 42 per cent immediately after the storm.

The consequences may become apparent at this November's mid-term elections, at which the Republicans' control of both Senate and House of Representatives is at risk.

Senior Democrats have been swarming over New Orleans in the run-up to the anniversary, with a single message.

The crisis had proved that their opponents were not fit to run the country.

"The storm was a tragedy," Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, declared as he toured stricken areas of the city last week.

"But a bigger tragedy is how the federal government responded."

What was needed, according to Mr Reid, was public works projects: "For as much money as we spend in one week in Iraq, we could create 150,000 jobs."

Nature, however, deals in reality, not the dubious statistics of political point-scoring.

As New Orleans remembered Katrina, another hurricane called Ernesto - potentially the first of the 2006 season to strike the US - was bearing down on Florida.

In this case, however, another Bush will be in charge: Governor Jeb of Florida, whose competence in matters of hurricanes even Democrats acknowledge.

- INDEPENDENT