How many people have returned to New Orleans?
There are roughly 140,000 people in the city. The population was over 600,000 before Katrina. The projections are that it will approach 250,000 by September 2008 — less than half the people by 2008. It’s a city that’s going to be much smaller than it used to be. Will the conference focus on the entire Gulf Coast region? Anything that we do will have to be larger in scope, at least from a systems perspective. Biloxi was just really destroyed, but Biloxi is a different issue. Biloxi was hit like a normal hurricane would hit. It wasn’t an infrastructural failure. It was an example of what a strong storm surge can do. It gives people in that area an understanding of what can happen again. This was an amazing storm with amazing consequences on the economy of the United States. It has displaced 1.2 million people, which is second only to the Dust Bowl. The damage is very difficult to assess in terms of economic effect. Has New Orleans as we knew it disappeared? It’s never going to be the sam
