United Saints Recovery Project is a 501(c)(3) non-profit located in the Central City neighbourhood of New Orleans which developed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. [1] It is a second-tier disaster response and community development organisation that exclusively harnesses the power of national and international volunteers to rebuild and preserve the city of New Orleans. The United Saints organisation was founded by Daryl Kiesow in 2007 after HandsOn organisation transitioned out of the neighbourhood. [2] The United Saints main focus is to help communities affected by disasters and to revitalise economically distressed neighbourhoods. The United Saints Recovery Project operates out of First Street United Methodist Church on Dryades Street, New Orleans. [3]
From the United Saints Recovery Project website:
In 2005, First Street Wesley United Methodist Church opened its doors to volunteers for their recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina. The church, which was established in 1833 and long served as the center of the neighbourhood, was itself severely damaged from the storm, but nevertheless became the only relief center for Central City, New Orleans after the hurricane. In December, 2005, 'Mission Minnesota' arrived with a tractor-trailer full of supplies and more hands to help, including roofer Daryl Kiesow. After volunteering for a few weeks and fixing the church roof, Kiesow went back to Minnesota. He returned to New Orleans in 2007 and founded the United Saints Recovery Project after discovering that the volunteers that had formerly occupied the church had moved on to a different location and work in Central City had come to a halt.
The volunteers began to come once again. Approximately 55 homes were gutted and rebuilt that first year. Additionally, an abandoned church property at the corner of First Street and Dryades was rebuilt, supplied with bunk bed and opened up as housing for volunteers.
The United Saints Recovery project was officially chartered in 2008 to assist the disadvantaged home owners and distressed neighbourhoods of New Orleans.
Waveland is a city located in Hancock County, Mississippi, United States, on the Gulf of Mexico. It is part of the Gulfport–Biloxi, Mississippi Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city of Waveland was incorporated in 1972. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 6,435. Waveland was nearly destroyed by Hurricane Camille on August 17, 1969, and by Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005.
Clarence Raymond Joseph Nagin Jr. is an American former politician who was the 60th Mayor of New Orleans, Louisiana, from 2002 to 2010. A Democrat, Nagin became internationally known in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate is an American newspaper published in New Orleans, Louisiana, since January 25, 1837. The current publication is the result of the 2019 acquisition of The Times-Picayune, which was the result of the 1914 union of The Picayune with the Times-Democrat, by the New Orleans edition of The Advocate in Baton Rouge.
Hurricane Katrina was a devastating Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that resulted in 1,836 fatalities and caused damage estimated between $97.4 billion to $145.5 billion in late August 2005, particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding areas. At the time, it was the costliest tropical cyclone on record, tied now with Hurricane Harvey of 2017. Katrina was the twelfth tropical cyclone, the fifth hurricane, and the third major hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was also the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane on record that made landfall in the contiguous United States by barometric pressure.
As the center of Hurricane Katrina passed southeast of New Orleans on August 29, 2005, winds downtown were in the Category 1 range with frequent intense gusts. The storm surge caused approximately 23 breaches in the drainage canal and navigational canal levees and flood walls. As mandated in the Flood Control Act of 1965, responsibility for the design and construction of the city's levees belongs to the United States Army Corps of Engineers and responsibility for their maintenance belongs to the Orleans Levee Board. The failures of levees and flood walls during Katrina are considered by experts to be the worst engineering disaster in the history of the United States. By August 31, 2005, 80% of New Orleans was flooded, with some parts under 15 feet (4.6 m) of water. The famous French Quarter and Garden District escaped flooding because those areas are above sea level. The major breaches included the 17th Street Canal levee, the Industrial Canal levee, and the London Avenue Canal flood wall. These breaches caused the majority of the flooding, according to a June 2007 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The flood disaster halted oil production and refining which increased oil prices worldwide.
The disaster recovery response to Hurricane Katrina in late 2005 included U.S. federal government agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the United States Coast Guard (USCG), state and local-level agencies, federal and National Guard soldiers, non-governmental organizations, charities, and private individuals. Tens of thousands of volunteers and troops responded or were deployed to the disaster; most in the affected area but also throughout the U.S. at shelters set up in at least 19 states.
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The Lower Ninth Ward is a neighborhood in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. As the name implies, it is part of the 9th Ward of New Orleans. The Lower Ninth Ward is often thought of as the entire area within New Orleans downriver of the Industrial Canal; however, the City Planning Commission divides this area into the Lower Ninth Ward and Holy Cross neighborhoods.
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Lakeview is a neighborhood of the city of New Orleans. A subdistrict of the Lakeview District Area, its boundaries as defined by the City Planning Commission are: Allen Toussaint Boulevard to the north, Orleans Avenue to the east, Florida Boulevard, Canal Boulevard and I-610 to the south and Pontchartrain Boulevard to the west. Lakeview is sometimes used to describe the entire area bounded by Lake Pontchartrain to the north, the Orleans Avenue Canal to the east, City Park Avenue to the south and the 17th Street Canal to the west. This larger definition includes the West End, Lakewood and Navarre neighborhoods, as well as the Lakefront neighborhoods of Lakeshore and Lake Vista.
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Internally displaced persons in the United States are people from the Gulf States region in the southern United States, most notably New Orleans, Louisiana, who were forced to leave their homes because of the devastation brought on by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and were unable to return because of a multitude of factors, and are collectively known as the Gulf Coast diaspora and by standard definition considered IDPs. At their peak, hurricane evacuee shelters housed 273,000 people and, later, FEMA trailers housed at least 114,000 households. Even a decade after Hurricane Katrina, many victims who were forced to relocate were still unable to return home.
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Edward James Blakely, for most his career, was a professor of Urban Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1994, he retired as a leading scholar in the field with award-winning books. He is known primarily for having been executive director of Recovery Management for the City of New Orleans.
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