One year after Katrina, the $100 billion federal relief effort for Gulf Coast hurricane victims has turned into another national scandal.

"This city is in intensive care," Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, said yesterday.

Quigley was one of the last hurricane survivors to be evacuated from flooded New Orleans Memorial Hospital a year ago. He'd gone there before the storm to volunteer beside his wife, Debbie, a nurse at the hospital.

While hospital staff waited days for rescuers to arrive, 45 patients died.

Yesterday, Quigley and his wife joined hundreds of angry former residents of the lower Ninth Ward in a protest march that pleaded for the nation not to forget New Orleans again.

All around them were destroyed, abandoned and rotting homes. Only about a thousand of the lower Ninth Ward's 20,000 original residents have been able to return.

"It's been a year and so little has been done," Quigley told me by phone. "Not a single dollar of federal housing money has made it to Louisiana. No one sees the despair and fury that people here have."

In another part of the city yesterday, George W. Bush was pretending to see.

The previous day the President had joked in nearby Biloxi, Miss., that "the check is in the mail."

His words reminded you of his now-infamous line from last year: "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."

Well, Michael Brown, the former FEMA chief and poster child for disaster incompetence, is long gone, yet the federal government's $100 billion postKatrina recovery project is still a catastrophe.

Half the money that Congress allotted still hasn't been spent. And too much that has been allocated vanished through waste, no-bid contracts to Republican political cronies or outright fraud.

In June, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general revealed that 1,395 cases of Katrina-relief-related criminal activity are under investigation.

Meanwhile, the city's poor - those who were already stranded once - keep asking where all the federal money went.

Without sufficient federal help, the city's health care and court systems are near collapse. There have been more than 80 murders in New Orleans the past year but only one murder trial. There's a backlog of 6,000 criminal cases.

Last month, Orleans Parish judge Arthur Hunter said he was so fed up with the "pathetic and shameful state of affairs" that he threatened to start releasing inmates who have not had their cases heard.

Public transportation has been cut back, thousands of New Orleans schoolteachers have been fired and the public school system has been virtually dismantled - much of it turned over to out-of-state private companies running charter schools.

Tracie Washington, a lifelong New Orleans resident and head of the NAACP's Gulf Coast advocacy division, had to sue the state earlier this year on behalf of 10 black autistic children when the handful of state-run public schools left in the city refused to admit them. The state quickly backed down.

When she talked to me yesterday, Washington was on her way to the Six Flags park in New Orleans, where hundreds of empty FEMA trailers are still being stored.

One of her clients, Carmela Howard, has been waiting since November for FEMA to provide her a trailer for temporary housing while she rebuilds her destroyed home.

"FEMA keeps telling her they can't bring the trailer because there's no water supply on her site," Washington said. "But of course there's water. Mrs. Howard has been paying her sewage and water for the past two months and has the proof, still FEMA won't act."

"Things are so absurd you almost have to laugh," Washington said.

Laugh to stop from crying, because after last year's massive failure by our leaders, this wasn't supposed to happen again.

Juan Gonzalez is a Daily News columnist. Email: jgonzalez@edit.nydailynews.com

© Copyright 2006 Daily News, L.P.

###