NEW ORLEANS — It is hurricane anniversary season in New Orleans, and the beleaguered city is threatened with a new inundation: a tidal wave of reports, assessments, stock-takings, prognostications and tongue-lashings.

On Wednesday, New Orleans will have endured exactly two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, and the moment will be marked by ceremonies solemn and silly, in keeping with the city's twin masks. President Bush, an object of lingering if unfocused resentment here, is expected to drop in. In the meantime, nothing in the city's halting march back is too small, or too large, to be examined in earnest prose and PowerPoint presentations raining down from Washington and points north, sometimes accompanied by overnight politicians or think-tankers vowing to bravely fight on.

The condition of the swamps, the progress of the poor, arsenic in the schoolyards, awful conditions at the jail, great conditions at the hotels, the generosity of corporate donors, the parsimony (or beneficence) of the government, the wisdom of the bond-rating agencies, the in-migration of the young, the out-migration of the old, the hopeful (or hopeless) schools: all of it is grist for the report-making, assessment-mongering frenzy in a slow August news season.

The bewildering range of outlooks adds up to a giant question mark, a collective split personality. Is the city recovering, standing still or sinking back?

What the reports seem to suggest, taken together, is that there is no useful yardstick, and no clear indicator of whether the arrow points down or up. Signs of progress and hope in latter-day New Orleans are always accompanied by their opposites.

Downtown blocks are moribund while Magazine Street, in the Uptown section, is humming. The Lower Ninth Ward remains a wasteland, and the Gentilly neighborhood is reawakening. Crime is up, but so is tourism. The medical district in central New Orleans remains empty today, but in an announcement this week, the Department of Veterans Affairs appeared committed to re-establishing a hospital there.

An anniversary-assessment briefing here Friday by the state agency that has helped organize the halting reconstruction, the Louisiana Recovery Authority, was typical of this Jekyll-and-Hyde picture. Grim and hopeful news, reams of figures promising and discouraging, were dispensed in equal and bewildering bursts.

All of it was accompanied by the muffled sounds of drilling and hammering in a building housing the state university's dental school, which sustained severe flooding in the hurricane and is preparing to reopen this week. Many of the construction workers were Hispanic, the immigrants legal or otherwise who have played a critical role in this city's reconstruction.

Upstairs, officials in suits celebrated their perseverance and presented a mixed picture of progress. On one hand, grants in the state's vilified homeowner-aid program, the Road Home, have shot up, to over 43,000 today from barely 5,000 at the end of March. On the other hand, the New Orleans area is still down more than 100,000 jobs from its pre-hurricane days (though that figure has improved slightly since the beginning of the year).

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In New Orleans, $3.39 billion in federal rebuilding money has been spent, and in Louisiana as a whole, $6.7 billion. But the state suffered some $100 billion in private property and infrastructure damage as a result of the hurricane, and remains $34 billion short in financing — the difference between the loss and the $66 billion federal and insurance company payout.

Residents here routinely quiz one another about how much progress appears to have been made, as if nobody were quite sure of the answer, but it would have to be unsatisfactory. Similarly, officials are on the defensive when they try a summing-up.

"People say, 'Why has it been so slow?'" Recovery Authority Chairman Norman C. Francis said at the briefing. "My answer is, 'Compared to what?' We do not give ourselves credit if we don't talk about why we have continued to work."

"Things are going to be different," Francis said. "They are still recovering in New York, which probably is a message for us that this is a long haul."

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