St. Bernard Parish

St. Bernard is located between the Mississippi River and Lake Borgne, south and east of New Orleans. It has a distinct Islenos (Spanish Canary Islander) heritage, productive fishing villages, industrial centers for sugar and oil refining and a major port. Residents recognize the natural ridges, marshes and swamps as part of the flood protection system. Because of their close ties to these coastal elements, they have placed their highest recovery priority on coastal restoration and levee improvements. The community is looking forward to re-building in a stronger and safer manner than before.

During the storm, many community leaders took shelter in the St. Bernard Port building. While the surge slowly receded Parish Leaders started the process of mapping out their recovery. In November the Parish Council established a Citizens Recovery Committee (CRC) this ad-hoc committee was charged with working with the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) and the FEMA Long Term Community Recovery planning team (LTCR) to develop a Long Term Community Recovery plan and to communicate that plan to the Parish Council. This “tiered” approach to recovery allowed the elected officials to resolve the day-to-day recovery issues; while the CRC worked on long term recovery plans. The Long Term Community Recovery team facilitated a series of meetings with the CRC, community residents, and businesses to identify disaster needs, establish a vision for the future, set goals, and identify recovery projects.

This website provides a summary of these activities and provides a listing of long term recovery projects. Recovery projects are different from projects found in a comprehensive plan or capital improvement program. Projects on this website have a “value” placed on them. This value provides an indicator that the characteristics of these projects will have either a high, moderate, or low impact in terms of benefiting community recovery. The value placed on these projects is not an evaluation of the overall importance of a project - it relates the project to the process of recovering from the disaster.

Additional information about St. Bernard Parish can be found on the following websites:

St. Bernard Parish Government - http://www.sbpg.net/

St. Bernard Port - http://www.stbernardport.com/index.html

St. Bernard Schools - http://www.stbernard.k12.la.us/

St. Bernard Chamber of Commerce - http://www.stbernardchamber.org/

St. Bernard Los Islenos Community - http://www.losislenos.org/

St. Bernard Parish Net - http://stbernardparish.net/