NEW ORLEANS — The wind still howls down on the bayou.

Residents of New Orleans and indeed all south Louisiana remain traumatized seven months after Hurricane Katrina tore through here, leaving more than 1,000 dead and more than 200,000 homeless.

With Gov. Kathleen Blanco in the Governor's Mansion, with my friend C.B. Forgotston at his cinder-block getaway in the country, with my friend Jed Horne at his 19th century French Quarter home, with a commercial fisherman deep in bayou country — no conversation lasted a few minutes before the talk inevitably turned to what Chris Rose, the prize-winning columnist of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, calls The Thing. It hit here on Aug 29.

Blanco described the pain of visiting with people in the immediate aftermath of the storm. They had lost everything and didn't know the whereabouts of sons and daughters.

C.B. recalled that he and his wife evacuated to their place in rural Tangipahoa Parish, 90 minutes north of New Orleans, only to spend the day in fear that one of the falling trees would crush their supposed safe place.

Jed relayed his concern that another killer hurricane might be in the offing and forever ruin New Orleans.

The commercial fisherman noted how Katrina had further ravaged the wetlands that provide a natural protection against the force of a hurricane.

I attended a potluck dinner in New Orleans' Garden District with 50 journalists and other professionals who are deeply attached to the city and hate the thought that they might be forced to leave some day. They were shaken by a slide show given by Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane expert at Louisiana State University.

Van Heerden began by showing slides that demonstrated New Orleans flooded because of levee breaches from shoddy work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

His slides also showed that the corps is rushing to rebuild the levees by June 1, when hurricane season resumes, with the same substandard methods that caused the levees to break during Katrina.

You could almost feel the air being sucked out of the room as everyone contemplated that.

This coming season, van Heerden said, New Orleans can survive nothing more than a slow-moving Category 2 hurricane.

A writer named Tom Piazza has penned a post-Katrina book called "Why New Orleans Matters."

More eloquently than I could, he explains why New Orleans is the most interesting city in the United States, with its funky neighborhoods, picturesque avenues and antebellum homes. It is the birthplace of jazz and the home of Creole and Cajun restaurants that have left generations of locals and visitors alike in wonder that food can taste so good.

It is a place that celebrates life with Mardi Gras and death with jazz funerals. Ellis Marsalis, patriarch of New Orleans' most renowned jazz family, once said, "In other places, culture comes from on high. In New Orleans, it bubbles up from the street."

Today, you can still hear Dixieland jazz and blues in the French Quarter and at neighborhood juke joints, and the food continues to be achingly good.

But New Orleans and its suburbs are hurting. In block after block in New Orleans' Ninth Ward and in St. Bernard Parish, you see boarded-up homes with broken windows and no front doors. Throughout the area, stoplights sometimes work, and sometimes they don't. Familiar establishments — McDonald's, Popeye's fried chicken, CVS Pharmacy — remain shuttered, along with dozens of local places.

As I drove around and looked out the car window, I felt astonished that I could be in the United States of America.

Now the region's future depends on the willingness of Congress to provide billions of dollars to rebuild homes and businesses destroyed by the Army Corps of Engineers' bungling and to provide billions more to replicate the pioneering work by the Netherlands to protect their vulnerable coast.

Rep. Charlie Melancon represents the battered coastal communities of south Louisiana. In a speech, he noted that the future of the region depends on the willingness of God-fearing conservatives in Congress to show their true Christian values by helping those hurting in New Orleans.

Will they do their part to make New Orleans whole again? If not, are they anything but hypocrites?

Tyler Bridges, a New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter from 1989-96, is the Miami Herald's bureau chief in Lima, Peru.