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American Morning

Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Recovery Examined; The Challenges Ahead; Iran's Nuclear Timeline; Convention Center: Then and Now; Miners Message to Their Families; New Orleans Lesson Learned; Trauma After Katrina

Aired August 27, 2010 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Thanks so much for being with us on this Friday, the 27th of August. A special edition of AMERICAN MORNING. I'm John Roberts, live in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans this morning. Hi, carol.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Hi, John. I'm Carol Costello in for Kiran Chetry today. John, I just can't believe it's been five years. The city has rebounded but in some parts of course it has not. But it's been a fascinating morning so far.

ROBERTS: It has. And it just shows you how quickly time goes by. It was five years ago on Sunday that Hurricane Katrina came ashore with sustained winds of 125 miles an hour. It was a Category 3 storm, thankfully not the category five that it was just offshore.

In all, 1,800 people were killed, one-and-a-half million people displaced. As you can see by these pictures going back five years, it submerged vast areas of the city under more than ten feet of water.

At the time we were thinking, how could this city ever come back from a devastating blow like this? It's taken a monumental effort over the past five years. Much of the city is back and the downtown area in some ways better than ever. Other places, though, like the lower ninth ward though, it's like the hurricane happened just last week. There's been a lot of progress, but still problems linger.

And charges that it was a lot of inequality in the recovery in this area. We'll get to all of that this morning as we mark the fifth anniversary of hurricane Katrina.

And we're covering it like no one else can this morning, using the massive reach of CNN's resources to cover this fifth anniversary. Soledad O'Brien is with us, Anderson Cooper, Jeanne Meserve, Tom Foreman all joining us over the course of the morning. We'll also speak with Mayor Mitch Landrieu, General Russell Honore, who was the John Wayne figure in the wake of the hurricane, will be with us in morning.

And we'll talk with the new police chief of New Orleans about the task that he has in trying to reform the New Orleans police department. That in and of itself is a monumental task. First, though, let's go back to carol in New York.

COSTELLO: All right, John. Thanks.

Here's a quick look at what else is new this morning. New video from deep below the earth in Chile is giving us a real look at the survival shelter where 33 miners are trapped, possibly for months. You can clearly see it is dark down there, cramped, hot. I think it is 85 degrees, and it is quite dirty.

But the men are smiling and showing the few possessions they have right now. The 25-minute message was taken for the miners' families.

Former president Jimmy Carter is on his way back to the states this morning and in tow, an American who's been in a North Korean prison since January. He was granted amnesty after he was sentenced to eight years of hard labor for illegally crossing into the country. The State Department welcomed his release.

And NASA scientists say they discovered two unique planets slightly similar to Saturn with the Kevlar space telescope. NASA says this is the first discovery of multiple planets orbiting the same. The star they've been orbiting has been named Kevlar Nine and is in the constellation Lira. At the speed of light it would take 2,000 years to get there, that's approximate 11.76 quadrillion miles away, in case you wondered.

Two major storms brewing in the Atlantic. Let's head to Atlanta, and Reynolds Wolf, one of those storms is getting pretty serious out there.

REYNOLDS WOLF, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Absolutely. We're talking about a major hurricane. This one is a category four storm at this time, winds are just roaring at 135 miles per hour sustained.

Let's go right to the satellite imagery, and you see both systems out there, Danielle on one side, Earl on the other, both of them again as we mentioned just really getting strong. Danielle is expected to remain fairly strong.

Then the latest path we have from the National Hurricane Center shows it will pass to the east of Bermuda. That's good news. Earl right now is a tropical storm. Earl expected also to intensify to a category one possibly upwards to a category three, major hurricane passing perhaps south of Bermuda as we get into Tuesday of next week.

Again right now neither storm poses a threat to the U.S. mainland. But these storms can be very fickle, so we'll watch them for you very carefully. Back to you in New York.

COSTELLO: Thank you very much, Reynolds.

Let's head back to New Orleans. John has sort of a ray of sunshine for you from the city because many parts of the is he is better than it was before the waters came in.

ROBERTS: Yes. As Julia Reed told us last hour, people in New Orleans have become experts and finding the silver lining. It's been a long road, but in many ways the city of New Orleans is coming back -- the culture, the jazz, the vibe. There are actually more restaurants in the city now than there were before the storm. And what was a wasteland in September of '05 is now for many people a land of new opportunity.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERT VITRANO, ENTREPRENEUR: After Katrina, it was kind of that, if not now, when question that everyone asked.

ROBERTS: For Rob Vitrano and Randy Crochet, the answer was creating a new type of pizza, even though neither had ever worked in the food industry.

RANDY CROCHET, ENTREPRENEUR: We wanted to find pizza which is notoriously the worse thing for you and flip it on its head and make it a part of a healthy lifestyle.

ROBERTS: Six months after the storm they opened Naked Pizza in a New Orleans neighborhood that had been flooded. And their business took off. This weekend, the fifth anniversary of Katrina, the first franchise will open. They're planning 300 worldwide. But they weren't alone in finding opportunity in New Orleans after the storm.

TIM WILLIAMSON, CO-FOUNDER, THE IDEA VILLAGE: When New Orleans became a start-up city after Katrina, everyone became an entrepreneur.

ROBERTS: Tim Williamson is the cofounder of the idea village, a non-profit organization that supports this new wave of entrepreneurs.

WILLIAMSON: There was a fear that New Orleans might never come back again. And I think everyone here at the end of the day believed in New Orleans and believed we wanted to bring the city back.

ROBERTS: The idea village's mantra -- trust your crazy ideas. Some of those include bayou brew iced tea, fell-good flip-flops, and Nola Couture.

CECILE HARDY, ENTREPRENEUR: The community is so supportive with people coming here from all over.

ROBERTS (on camera): Where many of these business renegades are coming to is in this building in the warehouse district, which has come known as "the intellectual property." For years it was a law firm, now a hub for new entrepreneurs.

ROBERTS (voice-over): Chris Schultz's company, launch-pad, leases work space to these start-ups, and 60 percent are from New Orleans while the other 40 percent are out of town.

ROBERTS (on camera): There is more than just giving them office space and bringing folks together, isn't it?

CHRIS SCHULTZ, LAUNCH PAD: Absolutely. This is a work opportunity, so one of the biggest challenges an entrepreneur faces when you are getting a business off the ground is having a sense of community and going through with other people. JAMES LOGAN, ENTREPRENEUR: You'll talk to most of the people in this building and you'll see they're actually embracing more of New Orleans culture than their own. It just becomes part of you.

ROBERTS (voice-over): The environment for young entrepreneurs is completely different than before Katrina. Prior to the storm, New Orleans wasn't exactly a friendly place for start-ups.

SCHULTZ: Katrina shook it up for everybody. I'm not a New Orleans native but I was here pre-Katrina and I knew what the business environment was before Katrina and it is a very different place now.

ROBERTS: But is it enough to keep these newcomers in New Orleans? 504ward, a company that connects entrepreneurs with the local culture is doing just that.

JESSICA WHITE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, 504WARD: We quickly earned that everyone else had talent attraction policies, which is more or less than advertising campaign -- we're clean and pretty, move here. No one was tackling talent retention. Once they're here, how do you get them to stick?

ROBERTS: 504ward connects new owners with community leaders. Some turn into mentor relationships, even job opportunities. Jessica White is hopeful that her generation will stick around.

WHITE: We are a very entrepreneurial demographic. We're hard- working. We want to create new things, which is perfect for the New Orleans environment. We've got creative spirit.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERTS: It is really pretty amazing. It is kind of like San Francisco and Silicon Valley was ten years ago or how Austin, Texas is now. How vibrant is the entrepreneurial environment here? Well, New Orleans is now surpassing the national rate of starting up new businesses.

It's kind of an irony of Hurricane Katrina that the hurricane leveled so much of the city but at the same time paved the way for its re-growth in a way that might never have happened if not for the storm.

Still ahead on the special edition of "AMERICAN MORNING," our coverage of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina continues. Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans joins us coming right up. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ROBERTS: Coming up now on 12 minutes after the hour. We're back with a special edition of "AMERICAN MORNING" coming to you live from New Orleans five years since Hurricane Katrina.

No one knows more about the challenges that still face this city better than its mayor, Mitch Landrieu. I had the chance to talk with him earlier, and I asked Landrieu about the huge disparity between certain areas of the city like the French quarter where tourists are visiting and businesses are thriving, and places like here in the lower ninth ward, where people are still struggling.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MAYOR MITCH LANDRIEU, (D) NEW ORLEANS: The tourist areas never got damaged that much by the storm. The Super dome and Convention center, most of them did not, which is one of the reasons the tourism industry was able to stand back up.

When you look at most of the neighborhoods though, in 80 percent of the neighborhoods, more than half are back up so you see that happening in Genteelly, in lake view and on the West Bank. The Ninth ward is always going to struggle, but that's where a lot of new investments have to go.

You see people that got hurt the most having the hardest time standing back up, a continuing challenge for us. But we have to move forward.

ROBERTS: How do you direct more of that investment to the lower ninth, because only 4,000 of the 18,000 people who lived there have come back? And it is difficult if you're a business person trying to get your feet on the ground to reestablish business if you don't have the customer base.

LANDRIEU: There's no question about it. A couple of weeks ago I announced 100 new projects. One reason we were able to do that is because we were finally able to work out with FEMA how to get the full reimbursements for some projects.

There were a lot of projects were half funded, you couldn't get designed. I think we're turning the corner. We're building firehouses and police stations. It's one of the difficulties we've had arguing with the federal government about whether or not we had the capacity to respond to catastrophic events.

A lot of us have been saying for a long time what we've realized from the BO oil spill, from Katrina and Rita that the governments, federal, state, and local are not really organized to respond to catastrophic events and it takes a long time to move money from where it is to the ground.

You're seeing that in New Orleans. It is absolutely moving in the right direction. It's taking much longer than it should have though.

ROBERTS: Another part of what makes New Orleans New Orleans is its racial character. We all remember Mayor Ray Nagin in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina saying this is a chocolate city, it's got to stay a chocolate city.

RAY NAGIN, (D) FORMER NEW ORLEANS MAYOR: This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way.

ROBERTS: How has the racial character of this city changed?

LANDRIEU: It's interesting, because that framework or that discussion is not something that's really knowable to the people in the city of New Orleans. Most of us, black and white, don't see New Orleans as a black city or white city. What's unique to New Orleans is how multicultural it is.

ROBERTS: Obviously things have changed, because two, three years ago a white mayor probably stood no chance of being elected in this city.

LANDRIEU: Well, a white man lost the election. I did. But I don't see myself as a white man. That's not the way I see myself. I don't think the people of New Orleans see me that way nor do I think they see themselves as part of a white city or black city.

ROBERTS: So what changed to allow Mitch Landrieu to become elected mayor?

LANDRIEU: Well, I think people got to the point of wanting to get something done and they didn't really care who was the mayor of the city as long as we can move the city together.

I think also the city and the people of the city found common ground. They finally said, look, we need safe streets. That's what we need. We need schools that work. We need to get rid of the blight.

We need to start really focusing on health care. It really is amazing because I've just finished going around the entire city having public meetings. No matter what community I go the issues are exactly the same and the city has found a really special place for itself. That tension does not exist.

ROBERTS: Obviously, you're going to put the best face on this next question because you're the mayor of New Orleans. But really, realistically speaking, pragmatically speaking is the lower ninth ward ever going to come back the way it was pre-Katrina?

LANDRIEU: I really strongly believe that every part of the city can be rebuilt. We think it's fallacy for people around this country --

ROBERTS: But can and will are two different things.

LANDRIEU: No, I think it will, but I think things take time. It is always going to be longer and harder for some people than others and that's (INAUDIBLE). That's true everywhere.

ROBERTS: But can you get the people back?

LANDRIEU: I think eventually they will. But again, this is not something that you can snap your fingers and have happen overnight. When you are talking about building something back, it takes time to put a nail in a piece of wood. If you just replicate that over and over again by house and think about what it means in terms of family structure and kind of people's community, it takes a long time.

ROBERTS: But no question, it's going to take years, decades?

LANDRIEU: It is hard to know exactly how long it will take. People just thought we could snap back. This storm was more than a wound to this country. There's no question about it and I think what people are happy about this is that we're still standing. We're alive.

Now think about what has happened to us. We had Katrina. We had Rita. We had Ike. We had Gustav. We had the recession and we had the BP oil spill. You know, that's a lot of stuff and so well, we're proud of ourselves that we still think of people counting us out.

And I think message of the week is not only are they not down or out, they're coming back now. Nobody is foolish enough to think that this is going to just be the Garden of Eden in the next two or three years.

We have a lot of problems that have as much to do with how the country sees it self-as it does about New Orleans, but I have no doubt that all of the city is going to be back over a period of time.

ROBERTS: Well, you got a lot of work ahead of you. We wish you luck. Mitch, thanks.

LANDRIEU: Thank you very much.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERTS: Landrieu also told the "Wall Street Journal" that it is time to make some tough choices about people who are not coming back.

There are about 55,000 abandoned structures here in the city of New Orleans. Landrieu told the "Wall Street Journal" he hopes to remove about one-third of those by the end of his first term in 2014.

Well, it could be one of the most significant questions facing this country's military. Is Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons? Just ahead, Barbara Starr sits down with the top commander for the U.S. for a straightforward and honest look at Iran's nuclear capability. Don't go away. It's 18 minutes now after the hour.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to the Most News in the Morning. Today, we have an exclusive interview with America's top military commander about the looming fears of a nuclear capable Iran.

Our Barbara Starr sat down with Admiral Mike Mullen in Detroit.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sat down with CNN for an exclusive and blunt interview about one of his biggest worries -- a nuclear Iran.

(on camera): You said that them, Iran having a nuclear weapons capability is unacceptable, but that striking Iran is unacceptable. So in reality, what do you do about it? Because you yourself say the space between those two things is very small.

ADMIRAL MIKE MULLEN, JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN: Well, I've been very -- I've talked about this for a long period of time. Certainly again, the position that the United States has taken is Iran with a nuclear weapons is unacceptable.

STARR (voice-over): Mullen thinks financial and economic sanctions against Iran still could work. As President Obama's top military advisor, Mullen sees highly classified intelligence on how soon Iran could go nuclear.

MULLEN: They've been about one to three years is what I've used for some time and that continues to be what the potential is.

STARR (on camera): Let me just be very clear. When you say one to three years, what are you specifically referring to in terms of their capability, a deliverable weapon?

MULLEN: A one to three years to develop a nuclear weapon.

STARR: Something that could be used.

MULLEN: Something that could be used.

STARR: So if you're the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and you are looking at a horizon that starts 12 months from now, it's not really a hypothetical. You have to think about what your military capabilities and options are should you be asked.

MULLEN: As is I think widely known and understood, we look at contingency possibilities all the time. Certainly we've done that with respect to Iran and will continue to do that.

STARR (voice-over): An administration official tells CNN, the White House hasn't yet asked for a military attack plan.

MULLEN: Should we get to that point, certainly I'll be able to have a very comprehensive discussion with the national leadership, including the president, about what options might be.

STARR: But are the options already ready to go?

(on camera): I come back to the notion, 12 months is a very short period of time, which suggests to me that the U.S. military today, as we sit here, must be ready to do whatever it might be ordered to do against Iran because 12 months is a very short period of time.

MULLEN: Well, again, I won't go into any of the specifics of it.

STARR (voice-over): Mullen says a major reason he opposes a strike, he doesn't know what Iran might do in retaliation.

Barbara Starr, CNN, Detroit.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERTS: And back now in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, one of the enduring scenes of the post-Hurricane Katrina time was that terrible, terrible scene at the convention center.

All of those people who were inside and the sweltering, stifling air, dead bodies out in the streets. Soledad O'Brien is coming up to take a look at the convention center then and now next on the Most News in the Morning. It's 23 minutes after the hour.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ROBERTS: Scenes of downtown New Orleans then in a photograph and now as well and what a contrast. Soledad O'Brien has got stark contrast for us this morning.

She went back to the scene of the most unthinkable suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the convention center downtown. We all remember what it was like back then and it is amazing how different it is today.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It really is. I remember I was angry when we first saw pictures of people going en masse to the convention center.

It was really shocking to see how hot it was, people literally desperate for water and food. When we finally got on the ground here, we went into the convention center to see how it looked. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: This is what it is like inside and the stench is overpowering. The first thing you notice -- the smell. Smells like -- smells like dead bodies. Smells like urine. Smells like people who have waded through sewage to make their way out of their houses and that, of course, is people who lived through that came here.

It is just a mess and still bodies out here. Even on Saturday, late Saturday afternoon, under this comforter someone has covered up, it is a dead body. At some point, they'll figure it out and move it out.

Five years later, this is what the inside of the convention center looks like. You can see, it has been vastly improved in almost every single way from that day that I walk through five years ago.

As we head here into the meeting rooms, you'll see the improvements, $93 million projected will have been spent on renovations by the end of this year, 2010. Back in the summer of 2006, the American Library Association was the first group in to hold their convention here.

After that, there's been Microsoft, Starbucks, Essence had its music festival. Then just a couple weeks ago, members of the Delta sorority came here to hold their convention here. We see this massive room and how much it has been cleaned up.

We're told that roughly 100 conventions are held here every single year and that is roughly on par with the number of conventions that were held here before Katrina hit. So at the convention center, massive improvement, lots of money spent and it really shows.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: What's interesting, I started going back to the convention center to go to events or meetings or whatever and it really took me several times before I got used to the fact that the convention center was back and beautiful.

It was very unnerving to walk through places where you had been and seeing really awful stuff and finally realize that they've been able to fix it.

ROBERTS: You can remember the sea of humanity that was inside that building, which led to the stench and horrible conditions, dead bodies outside and that kind of sits in your mine as an enduring image. To go past it now and see it as just a normal convention center that you'd see in any downtown area --

O'BRIEN: I never thought they're going to fix it. I really did. When I first walked through I thought that's it, I didn't think they'd fix it.

ROBERTS: Tear the place down.

O'BRIEN: Right, I really did that.

ROBERTS: And remember the rumors too that there were 11 dead bodies stacked up in the back and --

O'BRIEN: Freezers and all of those things. Well, that was, you know, it was a time when rumors were running rampant and people were desperate.

ROBERTS: All the rumors in the super dome as well. Separating fact from fiction -

O'BRIEN: It is just crazy to look at those pictures from five years ago to today, wow. In some ways great indication of amazing progress with $90 million will do.

ROBERTS: Yes.

O'BRIEN: And then you look around here and you think, OK, well some of that money or some money, period, needs to come here to figure out what the plan is going to be for this, you know part of Ninth Ward.

ROBERTS: Just to give you a little bit of the lay of the land in the Ninth Ward here, the houses that are sort of within our eyesight. We've got one house here, one house here that have still yet to come back. Our high camera is taking a look at that. One right in front of us yet to come back. There's a church which was being used as a nursery, which is still in the same condition it was five years ago. So here in the Ninth Ward, still so much work to do.

Let's send it back up to New York right now. Here's Carol.

COSTELLO: Thanks, John.

It's 30 minutes past the hour. Time for a check of this morning's top stories. The final kill of the gulf oil well on hold. BP says crews will have to fish out pieces of drill pipe from the well's blow-out preventer before they can move on with a permanent shutdown. Oil has not flowed from the well site since July 15th.

On their way home. Former President Jimmy Carter frees an American who has been in a North Korean prison since January. Aijalon Mahli Gomes was granted amnesty after he was sentenced to eight years of hard labor for illegally crossing into the country. The State Department is welcoming his release.

And brand-new videos giving us an amazing look at the horrible conditions 33 Chilean miners are enduring deep below ground. Let's listen to what they're doing down there in part. They were singing. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: They're singing the Chilean national anthem. It is a 25-minute video. We also see them sleeping, playing cards, brushing their teeth. The men each sent a message to their families. They also give a tour of the cramped, dark and dirty shelter that they'll be trapped in possibly for months. They might be down there until December.

And in the video of these miners, of course, they appear to be in good spirits but there is still only a few weeks into what could end up being months underground. So what needs to be done to make sure they stay sane? Joining me on the phone, Mark Radomsky, the director of the Penn State Miner Training Program. Good morning.

MARK RADOMSKY, DIRECTOR, PENN STATE MINER TRAINING PROGRAM (on the phone): Good morning, Carol. COSTELLO: Thank you for joining us. You train miners to go through these sorts of things. As you look at that video, what goes through your mind?

RADOMSKY: Well, it's a relatively positive video. Just that they're able to do that. In other words, get video out to the families and communicate. The miners look in pretty good shape right now.

COSTELLO: They look very thin. I just want to play a bit more of this video. Because it is just so astounding that we're able to see this. I mean, these guys are miles underground and they put a camera - it is just amazing. Let's listen once again. I mean, you can see some of them giving the victory sign. It's amazing. I'm just going to pause for just a second so you can listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

COSTELLO: So they were sending message to their family. They were playing cards. They're brushing their teeth. If you're looking at these miners, how would you judge their state of mind?

RADOMSKY: Well, right now based on the video it seems to be pretty positive and they seem to be doing the right thing, sticking together.

COSTELLO: What do you mean by "pretty positive"? I mean, are these the things you want to see as someone who trains for this kind of thing?

RADOMSKY: Well, definitely. Yes. This is an unusual situation, but, you know, they are, according to the reports, doing their chores and working and helping each other out and passing the time. They have to keep busy.

COSTELLO: You know, there is this social dynamic developing down there. A shift leader has fallen into sort of a leadership role. There is a man with nursing experience. There's another man who's emerged as a kind of spiritual leader. Are these the kinds of things that you teach miners to do if they get themselves into this situation?

RADOMSKY: Well, certainly as far as the leadership role goes. I mean, we know that that's a natural - that's going to be a natural occurrence. Somebody's going to step up, or several people are going to step up, and people are going to play a role based on their experience and education, training and so forth. That's certainly a good thing.

COSTELLO: Those above ground are trying to keep these guys occupied so they can keep their sanity. They're thinking of things like, you know, if we show them certain movies, that might not be good. For example, if we show them "Avatar," should you be showing them that kind of movie where you show the environment and you see people running? I mean, what kinds of things should they be sending down to these men so they can keep their sanity?

RADOMSKY: Well, I don't know about the movies. I think you probably ask a psychologist and get their advice on that. A lot of these shelters will have games, will have reading material, will have diversions and different things like that. So, yes, they have to remain optimistic and positive and hopefully they're helping each other out in that regard. If they see somebody who's kind of depressed or withdrawn, that they'll support that person. It's a support network down below, as well as on the surface. It is going to be important.

COSTELLO: It's absolutely amazing. Of course, you know, the world is praying for these men. It is just amazing.

Mark Radomsky, thanks for joining us this morning. We sure appreciate it.

RADOMSKY: You're welcome.

COSTELLO: Now, let's get back to New Orleans and John.

ROBERTS: Carol, thanks so much.

He was as close as we had to the cavalry in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. General Russel Honore joining us next to talk about how far we've come in the past five years and how far we have yet to go. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ROBERTS: In the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, our next guest was famously dubbed a John Wayne dude by then-mayor Ray Nagin. Here is he in action post-Katrina.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LT. GEN. RUSSEL HONORE (RET.), COMMANDED MILITARY RESPONSE TO HURRICANE KATRINA: I'm not going to tell you! Get those (INAUDIBLE) weapons down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERTS: Lieutenant General Russel Honore is now a CNN contributor and author of the book "Survival." When you look at those scenes, and I remember that all too well when you came riding into town. Does it seem like it was five years ago?

HONORE: Time has passed fast. If you're not one of these people trying to rebuild their homes. As you come back, we come back here annually. It has passed fast and a lot of progress had been reached, John, but much left to be done.

ROBERTS: When you look at the recovery in total, general, do you see good? Do you see bad? Do you see a mix?

HONORE: I think you see a little bit of all of that. I mean, just in our background here you see one home that's been rebuilt, people are in it. You see a church next door that could be a threat for fire. That's the blight the mayor has been talking about that we got to learn how to deal with. Or to go ahead and recover these homes that are in places like the - this part of the Ninth Ward that wasn't destroyed by the water, it only got wet.

ROBERTS: Right.

HONORE: So these families were able to come back. But at the same time, the reason many of them did come back is an unbalanced approach to the road home program where people did not get a fair amount of help from the federal government, based on using a standard of pre-home value pre-Katrina.

ROBERTS: Right. Because they were only allowed the amount of money that their home was worth pre-Katrina. Building costs have gone so much that some homes that were valued at $140,000 cost a quarter of a million dollars to rebuild now.

HONORE: That's correct.

ROBERTS: Were those programs because a judge has found elements of the road-home program were discriminatory. Were those programs geared more to helping affluent New Orleanians than they were poor Orleanians? Because that chart has been leveled as well.

HONORE: That's going to play as we go to court. But as the people I talked to it had a bigger effect on the poor people whether you're black or white. You struggled. If you were poor before the storm, living in the neighborhood that was struggling where property value was lower, such as here in the Ninth Ward, St. Bernard Parish, poor people did not get the same shaking as the people in uptown New Orleans.

ROBERTS: Big issue, general and this falls right under your purview because the Army Corp of Engineers is working on it, that's rebuilding the levee system. Flood walls being erected. Our Tom Foreman took a look at the big one across the (INAUDIBLE) the other day. $15 billion being spent. 350 miles of levees and flood walls being constructed but here in New Orleans, you talk to most people, they don't trust because they know that the levees were not built to the proper standards before.

What's your sense of this? Did the Army Corp of Engineers in this redesign or redevelopment which will be completed next year do it right this time?

HONORE: Well, the Army Corps has taken a different approach than pre-Katrina. They've put the gates in, the flood gates, the reinforced walls, they've done it, using some of the best advice they've gotten from good science and engineering. The challenge remains, John, that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane can overmatch any of these levees.

You know, the eye of Katrina went through Biloxi. It pushed a 17-foot rise in the surge through the (INAUDIBLE) and then came through 17th street canal and the canals. That storm coming in this a different position could put a 20-foot wall of water so you had to constantly battle what's the height of the levee and the strength of the levee based on what projection, category 4 or 5 or a category 3 storm?

ROBERTS: Well, let me ask you this question. Because you're not a man known to be "stuck on stupid" here. You're very pragmatic and you understand the way that the world works. Would you bet your life and your livelihood on those rebuilt levees?

HONORE: Let me say this about the levees. As strong as we can build them, any one of them can be overmatched by high water and surge. So when you are threatened and the levees are threatened and it is time to evacuate, you evacuate. A levee gives you time to evacuate and help protect your property. You should not stay behind a levee if it is threatened by higher water. You need to move.

ROBERTS: Right. But do you think the way those levees are being rebuilt what we saw in 2005 would not happen again? When you take those levees, improved levees together with the improved pumping system, might you have some incursion of water but not to the 15 feet it was here in the Ninth Ward?

HONORE: It could happen again.

ROBERTS: It could happen again.

HONORE: The Gustav we had over tipped the levee in the Ninth Ward. The water was splashing up and splashing over the wall. So it could happen again. The tidal surge we have to be pay more respect to and the impact of the tidal surge this far inland. It could happen again. So when it's time to evacuate, people need to evacuate.

ROBERTS: All right. General, as I said, you've got an incredible reserve of horse sense. Thanks for joining us this morning. I really appreciate it.

HONORE: Thank you.

ROBERTS: All right. Carol?

COSTELLO: Thank you, John.

The troops come alive. Plus, a gorgeous start to the weekend. High and dry in the Northeast. Reynolds Wolf coming your way, next.

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DAVID LETTERMAN, TV HOST: Are you like me? Are you getting a little wistful about summer? It is just about gone, isn't it? I mean, it really is just about gone. I mean, summer went by quicker than a Brett Favre retirement.

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LETTERMAN: Really!

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COSTELLO: I was just saying that the other day. Summer is already over. Brett Favre is playing his first preseason game.

WOLF: It's hard to believe. I know it is amazing until the next retirement and the one thereafter and the one after that.

But, you know, it's absolutely right. It's going to feel very fall-like in parts of the Northeast. For Boston and New York, temperatures are going to be in the 70s today. High pressure overhead is going to give you very little in terms of cloud cover.

But when you make your way into parts of the Southeast, you see this dividing line. That's your stationary front, and with that, you have a chance of scattered showers, perhaps even some thunderstorms. In that area, in Atlanta, where you may have delays up to an hour due to the thunderstorm.

Go farther to the south in Miami, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale could have a half-hour wait, maybe less due to the storms. In Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, thunderstorms also possible. And Los Angeles got some haze for you.

Now, in terms of temperatures out to the west, fairly cool in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles a bit warmer with 82; 87 in Minneapolis; 92 in Denver; 94 in Dallas; 95 in Houston. New York and Boston, as I mentioned, at the 70s.

Eighty in Atlanta -- but we have some showers developing in parts of Atlanta and rain-cooled air is going to make all the difference and it's going to feel much better by late afternoon; 91 in Miami; 87 in Tampa.

That's a quick snapshot of your forecast. Let's kick it back you in New York. Sunny and 79. Not bad at all.

COSTELLO: Not bad. I'll take it. Thank you, Reynolds.

WOLF: You bet.

COSTELLO: Much more ahead from New Orleans in the next hour, including living next to the levees. The federal government has spent $15 billion trying to fix what went wrong during Katrina. So, do people feel any safer today?

Also, the scene of so much unthinkable suffering, now the home of champions. Tom Foreman shows us the Superdome then and now.

And the naked pizza success story. The big ideas and big money being made on ideas people would never dream of before the storm now becoming reality in the Big Easy.

It's 49 minutes past the hour.

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ROBERTS: Welcome back to Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

After Katrina, there was no real home for children here. They were living in limbo. More than 160,000 of them had been displaced from their homes.

Remember the sea of cots in the Superdome and after that, kids forced into emergency housing, trailers, stacked row upon row with no comforts?

The trauma of Hurricane Katrina had a long lasting effect. A new study shows many of these kids are still dealing with anxiety and depression. More than half had been diagnosed with serious emotional and behavioral issues.

Joining me now is the co-author of that study, Dr. Irwin Redlener. He is director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, and the co-founder of the Children's Health Fund.

Dr. Redlener, good to see you this morning.

It's amazing to think that five years after Hurricane Katrina, the scars of that storm is still very much apparent in so many children here.

DR. IRWIN REDLENER, NATIONAL CENTER FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS: And they are pretty active scars, John. You know, a lot of people are falling all over themselves to say the recovery is over, we're done.

But our data is showing there's still a tremendous amount of work to be done, especially around the needs of children. And this has been a really big problem because at least 20,000, 30,000 kids just between Louisiana and Mississippi who are having serious problems that need help.

ROBERTS: You know, when we look at those numbers -- and let's take a look at them. More than 50 percent of children in this area are suffering serious emotional issues, 38 percent suffer from anxiety and depression. One in three children who lived in temporary emergency housing have since been diagnosed with mental health problems. That's a huge number of kids.

REDLENER: Well, it's an enormous number. And to make matters worse, more than half the parents are reporting that they can't get the support service they need. They can't get the diagnosis. They can't get the treatment that the children need. They need themselves, by the way.

A lot of those families are feeling extraordinarily uncertain. They're living still in unstable housing. They don't know what's going to happen next year. And they can't afford to go into rental properties.

So, it's a combination of uncertainty and instability for them, plus all this psychological stress. It's really tough.

ROBERTS: Well, Doctor, how is it with all of the focus that's been put on this area, post-Katrina, all of the millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, that have gone into rebuilding and trying to look out for folks, that people can't get the care they really need?

REDLENER: Because, well, here's a big lesson that we've never learned from previous disasters. In fact, we haven't learned from Katrina, that recovery is more than just rebuilding houses and fixing the electrical grid. We really have to include -- when we talk about recovery -- meeting the needs of people, of families, of restoring communities, services, economic stability and all of that. Because if we don't do that, we'll end up with maybe some of the buildings doing fine, getting rebuilt, but a lot of families and a lot of lives still very much not rebuilt and that is a disconnect that we need to deal with head-on.

In other words, when we start talking about planning for the next major disaster and its recovery, we need to make sure that we've included exactly those things you just mentioned, in the agenda for when needs to happen.

ROBERTS: Is this a lingering failure of Hurricane Katrina?

REDLENER: This to me means that Hurricane Katrina and the recovery from it far from over. And so, there's no snapshots of a city that you can take that will help us understand or deal with the fact that so many children still need care.

ROBERTS: There had been charges of inequity in terms of the recovery and how people are looked after. That these problems you have outlined in the study, do they break down along racial lines?

REDLENER: They mostly break down along economic lines. And this is another --

ROBERTS: And to a large -- to a large degree, though, economic lines or racial lines?

REDLENER: There's no question about that. So, people who were marginalized before Katrina, or struggling in very difficult neighborhoods, are much more effective than children from more appropriate higher levels of affluence. So, there's something we call poverty penalty, unfortunately.

So, if you -- if there's a major trauma or disaster in an area, those that are generally speaking affected the worst and the longest will be those who are poor and those who have been marginalized prior to the disaster.

ROBERTS: Look, as opposed to -- you know, in addition to lessons learned and what do about the next disaster, what do you do about New Orleans now and all of those kids that are in such need?

REDLENER: Well, right now, we have to -- we have to organize a significant infusion of money and people and health -- mental health professionals, in particularly, to come in and work with these families that are still out there.

Part of the problem is that the governmental agencies -- this was just absolutely crazy, never did anything to allow us to track where those families were. When they went out of the FEMA trailer parks and renaissance village, we begged them, please, make sure that the appropriate agencies can track and find these families because it's not going to be well for them. Not going to be good for them. That never happened.

So, even finding the families to provide the services is difficult. But I think we still have to do it. And a lot of these kids, by the way, are falling behind in school which is the other tragedy.

ROBERTS: Yes, more than a year.

REDLENER: Oh, yes. There's twice as many as we'd expect kids who are too old for their grade in middle school and high school. Another academic travesty added on to the emotional problems.

ROBERTS: While some disturbing statistics you have identified in this. But, you know, maybe a lesson for the future. Be more inclined to --

REDLENER: You know, my center at Columbia University, the national center, is going to actually continue to follow these kids. And see what happens.

But we're also pushing hard with appropriate agencies and government to make sure the money actually appears where it's needed.

ROBERTS: (INAUDIBLE). Good work you're doing. Dr. Irwin Redlener --

REDLENER: Thank you. Thanks, John.

ROBERTS: -- good to see you this morning. Thanks so much.

Top stories are coming your way right after the break. Don't go away.

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