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White travel trailers still sit parked in front of homes, many homes, in the New Orleans parishes ravaged by Hurricane Katrina back in August of 2005. Black holes hacked into the rooftops of houses attest to the stalwart ability of some to survive - even getting trapped inside their own homes.

Fronts of homes, many homes, are indelibly marked with large painted "X's," along with a variety of numbers and letters-signs to rescuers that the home had been searched and, possibly, bodies discovered. But while the victims of Katrina struggled to survive the high winds, and huge tidal surges, they had no idea of the struggle for survival that still lay ahead of them. Even 2-1/2 years after the worst natural disaster in American history.

It was a sobering bus trip. Tourists gazed through the Gray Lines bus window as our driver, Sylvester, recounted the horror of Katrina, as she first bypassed New Orleans, and then in a grim act of a female's right to change her mind, Katrina changed course, and in a fury, swept back through the Louisiana port city. Many lost their lives; some lost family members - temporarily, as thousands were randomly loaded to evacuation buses; some lost pets; many lost possessions; but many lost - everything.

"Look," our driver says, as he points to the ragged hole in the roof of a small house in the St. Bernard parish. "That's where people took an ax and cut their way out of their attic." He pauses and adds, "But 200 people died in their attics, because they forgot to take their ax with them."

It's a staggering thought; people died in the very homes designed to protect them? And what of those homes today? Many sit in the same condition they were in following the breaking of the canal walls, and resulting flood waters - waters that reached as high as 12-feet in some areas. The flood waters are gone, but the damage remains, like the damage in the Lakeview neighborhood. House after house still bear the scars of the wind-ripping power of Katrina.

Our Gray Line driver takes us through a more affluent area. "Look, you can't even tell these homes were flooded, too. These people had the money to fix their homes." And he was right; unlike the "shotgun" houses, the high density apartment buildings, and the more modest homes in the lower middle-class neighborhoods, these homes look untouched. But for the poorer neighborhoods, the situation is grave.

"Many of these areas never experienced flooding-ever, in the history of New Orleans," our driver tells us. "So,

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