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Katie Couric is on assignment. I’m Seth Doane.

It's been four years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and parts of Mississippi - killing 16 hundred people and causing more than 40 billion dollars worth of damage.

Homes and lives were washed away and the nation watched in helpless horror as faces soaked in tears and flood waters pleaded for rescue.

Still today, 62-thousand homes and buildings remain uninhabitable and vacant, and 17-hundred families are living in temporary housing. Though the waters have receded, many residents have yet to land on solid ground.

But there is some good news to share.

New Orleans, as President Obama stated this weekend, is the fastest growing city in America. Nearly three quarters of its pre-Katrina population has returned, and the unemployment rate is about 2 points below the national average.

The voyage to recovery has been long and hard for the city known as the Big Easy, but there are signs of hope on horizon.

I'm Seth Doane, CBS News.

They're cramped and some badly need repairs, but for at least 4,000 people who lost everything to Hurricanes Katrina or Rita, FEMA trailers are still home almost four years later. Just not for much longer.

The temporary housing program was supposed to end two years ago. But now the government says there will be no more deadline extensions. Anyone in these trailers must be out by the end of the month. Many are elderly or disabled and say they have nowhere else to go. Most of them were homeowners who have started to rebuild, but delays in aid money and a sour economy have stalled progress.

FEMA promises to help those being kicked out find someplace else. The agency is under pressure from local communities that want to move on, and worry trailers will keep property values from rising.

Now as for the trailers, they'll just be scrapped, or sold at a loss, and thousands of residents may once again be looking for a place to call home.

That's a page from my notebook.


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This post was written by CBS News' Hari Sreenivasan, who reported from Texas on Hurricane Ike and now looks at how recovery efforts have progressed.

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This week, almost three months after Hurricane Ike battered Texas, it was clear that the rebuilding and repair is happening far slower than the rest of the country imagines it to be. David Stall, the Shoreacres city manager we spoke with had a poignant observation in our piece when he mentioned that it seems like when the lights came back on in Houston, people just began to think that everything was all better. The facts are that for his community, and several others along the Texas coast, life is far from normal.

The human costs are chronicled in both our pieces on the Evening News as well as The Early Show through the eyes of the Brown family. Michelle Brown didn't want to speak with us about things when we met her on her driveway. After a few minutes of conversation it became apparent why. I'm certainly not a psychologist but it doesn't take one to realize that she and her family are still in states of shock, grief and trauma over what has happened - not just to their house, but their home.

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Kelly Cobiella is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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The Haitians have a saying, “beyond mountains there are mountains,” meaning after each big obstacle stands another bigger obstacle.

I saw the saying come to life in the town of Cabaret. It was my first trip to Haiti, a ninety minute plane ride from Miami. So close, yet so foreign. There was no warning the night Hurricane Ike hit Cabaret and no evacuations. The town’s two rivers swelled with such force the night Hurricane Ike hit, they swept dozens of people out to sea, and left a thick layer of mud in homes and on roads. At least 68 people were killed in flash floods in this farming town of 30,000 – 17 of them children.

When I arrived, the mud from the river was dry and a fortunate few managed to remove most of it from their homes. But there’s no way to clean the bedding, the tables, the walls. Banana farmer Jean Renaud Romelus told me he hasn’t even gotten that far yet. His home is filled with mud, his truck buried in mud, his crop flattened by mud. He has no food to sell; no food to eat.

Because Haiti’s third-largest city is still flooded, and some 250,000 people are stranded without food or water, smaller towns such as Cabaret fall much lower on the priority list. In many of these towns, non-governmental aid groups have come to the rescue. An American relief organization called Mission of Hope Haiti has been handing out food in Cabaret. But even they admit they have a hard time keeping up with demand. I spent much of my time with workers from World Vision. They’ve been trying to reach the small salt-producing town of Grande Saline for days with no luck. No one knows how many people there died, or how many are waiting for food and water ...

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America's sophisticated satellite system for tracking hurricanes desperately needs to be updated -- before we face another disaster like Katrina.

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