You don’t need an anniversary to remind Jennifer Raney about Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s something you can’t forget,” the Tulane University student said. “You always see something that reminds you.”

The Lawrence native on Friday headed back to school in New Orleans, a city still struggling to recover from the hurricane that struck last Aug. 29.

With the one-year anniversary nearing, the city still is untangling itself from the problems brought on by the storm.

“There’s no movement,” Raney said of the lack of progress she’s seen. “It’s like no one has even touched some things.”

The storm

A year ago, Raney was a green high school graduate eager to start school in a city that captivated her imagination.

On the same day that she moved into her dorm room at Tulane, she was forced to flee the city. She watched on television from her home in Lawrence as the storm hit.

Raney was one of about 30 students displaced by Katrina who attended Kansas University last year. According to KU, only one student is left. That student could not be reached Friday.

Tulane University sophomore Jennifer Raney packs her belongings Friday morning in the basement of her Lawrence home in preparation for her trip back to New Orleans later in the afternoon. Raney spent the fall semester of last year at Kansas University while Tulane and the city of New Orleans began the recovery process from Hurricane Katrina.

In the storm’s aftermath, about 75 displaced people sought help from the Douglas County Chapter of the American Red Cross.

Jane Blocher, the chapter’s executive director, said Friday she thought nearly all of those people had since returned to the Gulf Coast.

Slow progress

Raney returned to Tulane in the spring. She also took classes during the summer.

She described baby steps of progress: Some areas have been revived, but many haven’t.

Raney has toured the hard-hit areas.

She’s seen houses filled with sand. Dig a bit in the sand, she said, and you’ll find pictures and dolls and remnants of the families that once called the area home.

Raney has walked down littered streets and seen countless abandoned houses standing like skeletons.

“I had to take pictures because I couldn’t describe it to people, and even the pictures don’t do it justice,” she said.

Raney can’t help but notice how the storm changed Tulane.

She once shared a dorm with students on the swim team. When the team was cut post-Katrina, the students transferred. For a time, she stayed in the quiet, lonely dorm. But she later moved to another one.

High hopes

Many students have left. Some transferred when their programs were cut. Some didn’t return because their parents refused to let them. Some simply couldn’t take seeing the city so crippled.

But Raney stayed.

“I don’t know where else I would go,” she said. “After you go through something like that, why would you leave?”

Instead, she’s lent a hand to the effort, volunteering to pick up trash.

“There’s so much work to be done,” she said. “It’s making progress, but so slow. : I feel like everything that is being done seems to be a local project more than a national effort.”

In the aftermath of Katrina, Douglas County residents contributed about $500,000 to the Red Cross – the largest pool of contributions in the local agency’s history and about five times what the chapter raised after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Donations came from businesses, churches, even children who raised money with lemonade stands, Blocher said. The Red Cross is still using what it raised to aid Gulf Coast residents.

Raney said it’s hard not to think about the storm. The storm touched everyone there. When she looks at passers-by on the streets of New Orleans, she wonders what stories they have.

“What did they go through?” she wonders. “What did they do?”

She has high hopes for the city.

“I don’t know that it’ll ever be quite the same that it was,” she said. “What we are putting our efforts into doing is creating something even stronger and more grandiose.”