New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Memorial at Charity Hospital Cemetery. Photograph by Infrogmation

NEW ORLEANS - A Wreath Laying Ceremony commemorating the 17th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and its victims will take place on Monday, August 29, 2022. The ceremony will be held at 8:29 a.m. at the Katrina Memorial located at the foot of Canal Street, 5056 Canal Street.

The event is being hosted by the Crescent City Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association, The Orleans Embalmers and Associates, the Louisiana Morticians and Funeral Directors Association, and the Embalmers and Funeral Directors from across Louisiana. The Katrina Memorial Foundation and the City of New Orleans are co-sponsors of the annual event.

New Orleans Mayor, the Honorable LaToya Cantrell, the City Council, elected officials, and various community leaders are expected to lay a wreath at the memorial site where almost 100 unclaimed or unidentified victims of Hurricane Katrina are interred. African master drummer and Congo Square Preservation Society member, Luther Gray will perform at the ceremony.

On August 29, 2008, the bodies of unidentified and unclaimed victims of the storm were buried at the site in a ceremony that included over 35 funeral homes from across Louisiana. A procession of more than 30 hearses, donated by funeral homes, lined the street carrying the bodies of the victims as a jazz band played ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’. Volunteers and the brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., acted as pallbearers for the final burial which took 4 and one half hours.

Public and private funding totaling more than $1.2 million was used to build the memorial and burial grounds on the site of the old Charity Hospital Cemetery which was donated by the State of Louisiana for this purpose. The memorial itself was planned as bucolic and shaped like the eye of a hurricane surrounded by 8 mausoleums, each the final resting place of 12 Katrina victims. Six mausoleums were actually constructed.

When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, hundreds of thousands of families were separated for days and weeks on end. Almost 1,400 people perished in the heat, winds and the flood water of that storm; making it the worst natural disaster in this nation’s history. Many flood victims remained unclaimed for months. Some were never claimed. Then New Orleans’ Coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard was faced with a daunting dilemma - how to identify and autopsy, the bodies of over 1,000 people; and how to bury those unclaimed. With the assistance of the Crescent City Funeral Directors Association, under the leadership of its, then president, Sandra Rhodes-Duncan, Frank Minyard decided in late 2006, that, as previously suggested, a mass burial plot was totally unacceptable. Both agreed that each person should be buried with care and dignity; and thus the Katrina Memorial Foundation and Board of Directors was founded to raise funds and make the memorial a reality.

Established in 1847, the Charity Hospital Cemetery was a mass grave for the poor of New Orleans, as well as thousands of patients without money or relatives to bury them. Burials took place in unmarked graves for almost 150 years. Until Katrina no one had been buried there for over 100 years.

According to D. Joan Rhodes "On this, the 17th Anniversary of Katrina, we as a community continue to come together to celebrate and pay homage to the unidentified and unclaimed victims of Katrina. They will forever be remembered. "

The Katrina Memorial will be open all day on Monday, August 29th so that residents may pay their respects and honor the victims of Hurricane Katrina.