New Orleans - From Katrina to Corona
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is facing another lethal storm. The city on Louisiana’s coast has become one of the worst-hit areas in the US. Some have blamed the high death toll on the decision to allow the annual Mardi Gras parade to go ahead. But musician and actor Harry Shearer, famous, among other things for voicing characters in The Simpsons, says don’t victim blame and don't reproach the revellers.
South Africa's president has extended the lockdown until the end of the month as the country braces for a surge in infections. But enforcing social distancing in the poorest, most crowded South African townships remains a struggle says Andrew Harding.
This weekend the World Health Organization is set to officially declare the end of the Ebola epidemic that has killed thousands in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Peter Yeung was one of the few journalists to visit health workers in the epidemic’s former epicentre of Beni amidst the global lockdown. But with the coronavirus on the way, there is no cause for celebration.
In Jerusalem, Yolande Knell has been talking to local religious leaders about how to mark Easter, Passover and Ramadan when prayers at holy sites are forbidden.
Every ten years the small Bavarian village of Oberammergau puts on a passion play – a huge pageant about the life and death of Christ. The tradition dates back to the seventeenth century when people believed that the plays would protect them from the plague. But this year’s performance has been postponed and it’s a huge blow to tourists and locals alike says Jenny Hill.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:04.6 | Good morning. Today our man in Southern Africa can usually file stories on wars and |
| 0:10.2 | disasters and then leave, but he can't escape coronavirus by jumping on a plane. |
| 0:16.4 | You deal with one virus and then another comes along, spare a thought for Democratic |
| 0:21.3 | Republic of Congo just emerging from Ebola. The season of Passover, |
| 0:27.0 | Easter and Ramadan approaching and its lockdown in the Holy Land. More tradition thwarted in Bavaria. A young man is bitterly |
| 0:36.0 | disappointed having waited a decade to play Jesus. This year there'll be no show in |
| 0:41.8 | Oberamagow. |
| 0:44.0 | First to New Orleans on the southern tip of Louisiana, a city devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 due to lack of protection from flooding. |
| 0:55.7 | And now as the pandemic sweeps across the US, it's one of the worst hit areas. |
| 1:01.3 | The Finger of Blame has been pointed that the decision to hold the Mardi Gras parade. |
| 1:06.7 | But there are voices which say otherwise, and you may know one of those voices from the |
| 1:10.8 | characters in The Simpsons, Mr Burns, Smithers and over a dozen others. |
| 1:16.7 | It belongs to actor Harry Shearer who has a house in New Orleans. |
| 1:22.3 | Carnival in New Orleans begins in earnest with Orleans. one of them, wearing a rigorously embroidered bathrobe on a carriage that, unlike the one |
| 1:35.3 | I rode as the parade's first king a decade ago, actually completed the entire route. |
| 1:41.8 | It was early February, mild weather. The streets were full of people |
| 1:45.6 | celebrating their first real chance this year to celebrate. A month later the |
| 1:50.8 | city's mayor declared a state of emergency. |
| 1:53.6 | The novel coronavirus had come to town. |
| 1:57.0 | The Lécé le Bon-Té-Téloulet culture of New Orleans is built on three centuries of disasters big and small. A recent article by the |
| 2:05.0 | prestigious cultural geographer Richard Campanella reminds us of the |
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