This weekend marks five years since Hurricane Katrina swept through and ravaged New Orleans. Earlier in the week, we spoke about recovery efforts with the mayor of Biloxi, Mississippi, and Grammy award winning Jazz musician Terence Blanchard explained how the rich musical community in New Orleans has evolved since. Many Katrina victims are still very much in the recovery process. Five years after Hurricane Katrina there are 12,000 homeless people New Orleans. That’s double what it was before the storm.

It's been five years since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast, ripping the footing out from under the residents of New Orleans. Many of those residents were musicians, who not only had to rebuild their homes but find their creative spirit after the devastation of the storm. Terence Blanchard, Grammy-winning jazz musician, says he's learned how to set his ego aside when composing music in the aftermath of the hurricane. 

The New Orleans Police Department is in trouble with the law. The department is under at least eight federal criminal investigations, including several cases in which police killed civilians. The details revealed in the investigations are horrific. n the Danziger Bridge case, a mentally handicapped man was shot in the back of the head, and police stomped on his body. In the Glover case, a man was killed and his body was torched inside his car.

Six current and former New Orleans Police Department officers were indicted yesterday in connection with the Danziger Bridge shooting five years ago, amidst the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The indictment charges that NOPD officers shot at unarmed civilians as they crossed the bridge on September 4, 2005, leaving four people wounded and two dead: 17-year-old James Brissette and Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally disabled man who was shot in the back and, allegedly, kicked and stomped while dying, laid out on the ground.

If a picture paints a thousand words, what story is told by photographs of dilapidated buildings and abandoned factories? Photos of city ruins have been around for centuries, but they have not always been referred to as "ruin porn."  That's a phrase some criticsuse to describe recent photo journalism in Detroit. But does the term apply to art, as well as journalism?

Satirist, voice actor and radio host Harry Shearer spends much of his time in New Orleans. As the BP oil well continues to spew into the Gulf, he looks at the effect of the disaster on the culture of the city. In a region where the sea food industry co-exists with oil, he says it's becoming impossible to trust either the government or the private sector.

Yesterday, a rare piece of positive news came from the BP camp when they announced that engineers were successful in their attempt to siphon off some of the millions of gallons of crude oil still leaking from the Deepwater Horizon well site in the Gulf of Mexico. But, even as they admit that the procedure of threading a four inch diameter tube through the broken pipe is successfully pulling out some of the oil, this isn’t a complete solution to the region's environmental catastrophe

At least ten state and federal wildlife refuges are in the path of the river of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf Coast is one of the world's richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life and commercial fishermen are bracing for the worst.

Fans of David Simon's "The Wire" are eagerly awaiting the premiere of his latest HBO Series, "Treme." "Treme" is another city-biopic that chronicles a group of people struggling for survival in a scarred neighborhood. But post-Katrina New Orleans is very different from the Baltimore projects fans of "The Wire" came to know intimately. Treme is a poor neighborhood in New Orleans and we get introduced to it three months after the flood waters have receded.

It's Fat Tuesday, the day of excess before Lent begins, and the day would not be complete without the sound of horns, drums and jubilant voices singing throughout the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Last night's Super Bowl victory for the Saints was also a victory for the City of New Orleans.  We talk about how the big win will impact the city. 

The New Orleans Saints are this year's Super Bowl champions and their home city is celebrating.  This is a bright time for a city that has suffered much since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. 

President Obama visited New Orleans yesterday for the first time since he was elected, fulfilling a campaign promise he'd made as a candidate to see the city's recovery firsthand. Some locals were frustrated, however, that the president stayed for only four hours. We spoke yesterday with Bill Barrow, staff reporter for the Times Picayune, and invited him back this morning to discuss what the president managed to do in those four hours. We also speak with with Anne Milling, founder of Women of the Storm, a nonpartisan advocacy group focused on Katrina recovery, and Nolan Rollins, president & CEO of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans.

• Washington Takeout: Washington Examiner White House correspondent Julie Mason says President Obama will face a tough crowd when he visits New Orleans tomorrow. Many city residents are upset that it's his first visit to the city and are unimpressed with his short, four-hour visit.
• Sports Takeout: The Takeaway's sports contributor, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, previews Game 1 of baseball's National League Championship Series taking place in Los Angeles tonight. Will the LA Dodgers or the Philadelphia Phillies take the lead as the teams vie for a slot in the World Series?
• Business Takeout: New York Times finance reporter Louise Story takes a look at why Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has surrounded himself with policy advisors from Wall Street firms. 

President Obama heads to New Orleans tomorrow — his first trip to the Big Easy since becoming president. His plans include a visit  to a charter school and holding a town hall meeting while he’s there. But some residents think the four hours he’s spending in their city is too short a time to hear the problems facing the city. Today we ask some New Orleans locals what they want the president to address. We hear from Clarence White, a social worker with Unity Welcome Home, a homelessness outreach organization; Diana Pinckley, with Woman of the Storm, a coastal rebuilding group; Eric Jensen, director of youth engagement for the Afterschool Partnership; and Bill Barrow, staff reporter for The Times-Picayune.

In post-Katrina New Orleans, the education landscape has been rebuilt almost as dramatically as the city itself. There are 88 public schools currently open in the city, but most of the city's 35,000 students attend charter schools; the Big Easy has become the first city in the nation to have more charter schools than traditional schools. The change seems to be doing well by the students, as test scores are rising. On Thursday, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will travel to New Orleans to visit one of the new schools. To find out more about the charter school revolution, we speak to Benjamin Marcovit, the principal of the one-year-old charter school Sci Academy, and Luis Miron, dean of the College of Social Sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans.

When Hurricane Katrina roared through Lousiana, the flood waters rose in New Orleans, costing lives and livelihoods. Lost in the devastation were some of the city's biggest tourist attractions and beloved restaurants. Four years after Katrina, we check in with a few of the city's institutions: famed fried chicken purveyor Willie Mae's Scotch House and classic New Orleans restaurant Commander's Palace. Both were closed for months after the hurricane, but with hard work and perseverance their doors have re-opened. We talk to Kerry Seaton, granddaughter of Willie Mae, who now runs the Scotch House, and Tory McPhail, the chef at Commander's Palace, about their experiences in rebuilding. We also have Tom Fitzmorris, a lifelong New Orleans resident and food critic who has made a new hobby of counting the restaurants in the Crescent City.

The resurrection of Willie Mae's Scotch House was a work of love for those involved and it was captured in a documentary produced by the Southern Foodways Alliance called Above the Line: Saving Willie Mae's Scotch House. Watch it below:

Saving Willie Mae's Scotch House from Joe York on Vimeo.

Actor and New Orleans native Wendell Pierce is probably best known for his role as the cigar-smoking, hard-drinking detective William "Bunk" Moreland on HBO's critically acclaimed drama "The Wire." Since the end of that series, though, Pierce has been keeping busy: in between stage performances in New York City and his work on "Treme," a new HBO drama by David Simon, Pierce has been building affordable, eco-friendly, sustainable homes for a New Orleans neighborhood whose residents were displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, sending an enormous storm surge into the Mississippi river delta. By the time the winds died down, hundreds of thousands of residents of New Orleans were displaced and whole neighborhoods were destroyed. This week, we’ll be looking at New Orleans four years later. It’s now the fastest growing large city in America, and today we talk to three residents who are making new beginnings in the city.  

Clarence White was forced out of his Gentilly home during Hurrican Katrina. He was evacuated to Michigan, lived in a FEMA trailer for a time, and this month is finally planning to move back into his old house.
 
Allen Darnell is the COO of iSeatz, a software development company based in New Orleans. The company had to move to New York after the storm, but has now returned to New Orleans. 

Duke Bradley took over a failing public elementary school in the Ninth Ward and started Mays Prep Academy, a charter elementary school. This is the school’s first year, and he’s the principal.

A new report by the U.S. Census Bureau says that the population of New Orleans grew faster than any other city in America. Who is behind the Big Easy's growth spurt? The Takeaway talks with Jaime Peters and Marcie Dickson. They both moved to New Orleans within the past year and they'll tell us why. We’re also joined by Lolis Eric Elie, a reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune.