1 year after Hurricane Katrina stormed ashore, Gulf Coast residents mourn, celebrate life

(AP) Bells tolled in this shattered city Tuesday morning, marking the moment one year earlier when New Orleans' levees buckled and unleashed a torrent of water that ripped homes from their foundations and sent tens of thousands of residents into an uncertain exile.

As the bells pealed, survivors of the storm gathered outside City Hall, commemorating the moment at 9:38 a.m. when New Orleans began its spiral into a watery hell.

"I felt like I needed to be here. It's like a funeral," said Gayla Dunn, 33, of New Orleans.

Mayor Ray Nagin told the city at a midday interfaith service it was time to take responsibility for rebuilding.

"If government can't get you your check on time, it says you need to do something," Nagin said. "It says your neighbors need to come together and all you need to do is cook a pot of red beans and they'll bring over the hammers and the nails."

Hurricane Katrina made landfall 65 miles south of the city in the tiny fishing village of Buras. Within hours, New Orleans' protective levees collapsed, causing one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history that killed more than 1,800 people.

One year later, the Gulf Coast commemorated the storm that brought the region to its breaking point.

In pockmarked neighborhoods choked with weeds, in church pews and in gutted community centers, residents held public and private vigils. At each of the city's broken levees, they tossed wreaths of flowers, sending them bobbing into the calm, black water, marking the geography of the crescendoing flood.

At a somber prayer service in the 285-year-old St. Louis Cathedral, President Bush made an impassioned plea for displaced residents to return to New Orleans.

"I know you love New Orleans, and New Orleans needs you," Bush said. "She needs people coming home. She needs people _ she needs those saints to come marching back."

Later, at the city's convention center, where thousands of haggard refugees had waited in the sweltering sun for rescue after the storm, the mayor joined residents in dedicating a memorial to Katrina's dead. One by one, they laid a white carnation at the monument, saying the name of a loved one.

For Joyce Brulee of New Orleans, it was her father, 99-year-old Benjamin Francois, who died in an eastern New Orleans nursing home. "He was so looking forward to his 100th birthday," Brulee said.

Under a calm, gray sky in Gulfport, Miss., the community remembered 14 residents lost to the storm.

"I'm hoping this is a step forward," said Carolyn Bozzetti, 60, whose 83-year-old father died in the storm. "I've been crying for a year. I'm tired of crying."

In St. Bernard Parish, where just about every building was flooded after the levees buckled, 400 people gathered for mass at Our Lady of Prompt Succor, a church named for the saint to whom Catholics in Louisiana traditionally pray for protection from hurricanes. The water had risen just high enough to graze the feet of a golden statue of Our Lady Of Prompt Succor beside the altar.

The working class community adjacent to New Orleans' Ninth Ward lost 129 people to the flooding.

Hundreds gathered there Tuesday to dedicate a monument with those 129 names. The monument and a massive metal cross are set against the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the channel that allowed the mammoth storm surge to push up the length of the parish.

"It's a hard day," said Wendy Stone, 40, who brought a bouquet of pink daisies for her friend who drowned.

Back in New Orleans, a stream of people danced, sang and openly wept at the new concrete levee wall that replaced one that had split open on the Industrial Canal. The wall of water demolished the hardscrabble Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, and the once-bustling landscape now resembles a littered pasture.

"This is also a way for us to mourn," Lavonda Hicks, 34, said as she marched past debris-strewn streets on her way from the Lower Ninth to Congo Square, said to be the birthplace of jazz.

Traditional spirituals spilled into the street around her and drums beat out rhythms.

Cedrick Johnson, 25, wiped away sweat and tears as he talked about the death of his grandmother, a longtime resident of the neighborhood.

"Look around. Look at all these empty lots. Why us?" he said. His shirt bore a photographic image of his grandmother and the words: "Why Geraldine. Why?"

Later, in one of the Crescent City's age-old traditions, a jazz funeral will wind through downtown streets, beginning with a somber dirge and ending with a song of joy.

Others marked the anniversary privately.

"I'm going to pray to the good Lord that he put his arms around the levees. I'm praying that he hug the levees tight so they don't break again, that he keep us safe," said 58-year-old Doretha Kitchens, whose home in the Lower Ninth Ward was submerged under a 10-foot wave.

Katrina grazed Florida before making landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, in Buras, a fishing village south of New Orleans on one of the fingers of land jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico. Entire blocks of houses, bars and shops vanished, whipped into the Gulf by a wall of water 21 feet high.

In New Orleans, the sun came out after the hurricane's violent winds subsided, but the worst was yet to come: The industrial canal began to leak, and when two sections of the wall fell, a muddy torrent was released that yanked homes off their foundations.

Throughout the city, other parts of the levee system began to fail. With each breach came a gush of water, until 80 percent of the city was submerged.

Nearly 1,600 people died in Louisiana and 231 in Mississippi while the nation watched in horror as survivors begged to be rescued from rooftops and freeway overpasses. A year later, 49 bodies remain unidentified in a Louisiana morgue.

The reminders of the destruction _ and how far the city still has to go _ are everywhere.

White trailers still line driveways in neighborhoods where piles of debris and unchecked weeds have overtaken abandoned houses. Only half the population has returned. Emergency medical care is doled out in an abandoned department store, while six of New Orleans' nine hospitals remain closed. Only 54 of 128 public schools are expected to open this fall.

The one-year mark is also a reminder of how far each survivor has come, Gulfport Mayor Brent Warr noted as he spoke near calm waters of the Mississippi sound.

"We're not well. We're not finished, but I will say this: We've made it," Warr said. "Let's move on, let's move forward, and let's do that together."

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Associated Press writer Stacey Plaisance and Becky Bohrer in New Orleans, Mary Foster in Buras, La., Michelle Roberts in Chalmette, La. and Michael Kunzelman in Gulfport, Miss. contributed to this report.