Expressing the trauma people go through when experiencing a natural disaster, is difficult. The rebuilding of a broken city and coping is a whole other story. These are topics in Richard Ford’s essay on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: “Elegy for My City”. Recalling his old memories from back when he lived in the city, he has a whole other view of his earlier home.
In the essay, Ford describes how a journalist calls him with a request. “Tell me what you feel, a woman in Los Angeles said to me today by telephone. […] when you think of New Orleans. There must be special things you feel the loss of. Memories. And I realised, by her voice, that she had made a firm decision already about this loss. Oh, yes, I said, though not always the memories
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But, no. It's not like anything. It's what it is. That's the hard part. He, with all of us, lacked the words.” Ford wants to explain that the disaster is without comparison. It cannot be compared to 9/11 nor Hiro-shima. Natural disasters do not happen often, and when they do, people do not have a handbook or basic knowledge on how to handle their losses. Ford does give his readers some hope to lash onto in his epilogue despite the difficult occurrence. “Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now […] many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened […] A city on firmer ground.” Ford shows his empathy for the poor and homeless people left in the city. But he also reassures the people in the city that New Orleans will become a city with a lot less chaos. He talks about a re-formed city. “I write in the place of others, today, for the ones who can't be found. […] But today is a beginning. There's no better way to think of it now. Those others surely will be writing soon.” Ford feels the presence of a new city. Ford wants his readers, the people of New Orleans and any-one connected to it, to move on knowing that the city is changed, but that it’s all right. The last sentence might be a metaphor,
The Segrave family then returned home and saw the real devastation of Hurricane Katrina, “seeing it on tv couldn’t compare to a first hand view.”
This graphic novel accurately depicts the reality that faced New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Eighty percent of the city was able to evacuate, and when the mayor issued a mandatory evacuation Sunday before the storm hit, it was too late for the police to enforce the orders. Drowned City goes into detail about the people who were left behind. Don Brown, the author, conducted interviews with rescuers and survivors to gain insight into what it was really like after Katrina hit, so the story is a compilation of all of the interviews. The devastation resulted in the levees breaking, looting, drowning, clouds of gnats and cockroaches, poisonous snakes in the high water, and even a Navy barge rolling through the streets. Brown also highlights
Eighty percent of the city’s housing stock had been flooded, and sitting under this water for multiple days. Rivlin follows former mayor, Ray Nagin to show how disastrous and difficult it was to restore the housing and businesses of New Orleans. In a few pages, you can see the incompetence of public officials and how the damage from the hurricane was extremely hard to repair due to poor decision making. While the FEMA trailers are gone and a $14.5 billion food-protection system is in place 10 years later, there are still houses and businesses that were destroyed that have been untouched. Alden McDonald, president of the city’s oldest black-owned bank, says, “…the untouched destruction creates the illusion the floodwaters poured in just yesterday. There's still so much to be
When analyzing the horror of Katrina within Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones and the actual catastrophe that was broadcasted throughout the media, readers are able understand its true impact. It seems as though Ward brought to light the realness and severity of Katrina rather than just restate the obvious. Ward’s writing is a perfect storytelling of the event— filled
In this paper I read the Essay that Abe Louise Young wrote about “The Voice of Katrina Part One”. In this Essay at its core is about Hurricane Katrina, which was a massive hurricane that hit in 2005. It caused massive damage and destruction along the Gulf coast from Florida to Texas. Hurricane Katrina will always be remembered for hitting New Orleans, Louisiana, when the levee system failed leaving 80% of the city flooded and destroyed. Hitting the worst parts of New Orleans such as the 9th ward, already being one of the poorest areas in Mississippi. Much of the Essay talks about the people of New Orleans, Abe being a new graduate started Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History and Memory Project, her goal she state’s is to
Hurricane Katrina was one of the most and extraordinary disasters which rocked the part of New Orleans in the United States of America. The disaster left dozens of people dead, rendering thousands of them homeless. The public were shocked after the extreme hurricane because millions of dollars were recorded all as losses given that there was not enough money that for repairing all the damages. Hurricane Katrina had a great negative impact on the public health causing psychological trauma that resulted in a sizeable burden of different diseases. The data collected showed that several people were attacked with a cute stress disorder (ASD) among sheltered evacuees (Zimmermann, 2012). The paper will analyze the sources and impact of power and influence in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina including the impact of power and influence on public administration and public policy. In every government states, there must be set of measures that are taken to achieve the set objectives and public policies are renowned to be the government-driven course of actions. Every stakeholder get satisfied if only there are policies which are made that can integrate their input. The citizens are therefore important when involved in the policy making process and administration to shun conflicts. Failure to do so, the outcome often results to huge conflicts and misunderstandings because they may feel left out from the issues that affect them.
It is pretty poignant, yet honest to say that the hurricane Katrina has long derived an almost obsessional attention from Natasha writer. In “Beyond Katrina: A meditation of the Mississippi Gulf Coast”, Tretheway has purposely pictured the devastation scenario from witnesses’ narratives; hence her story could speak for many stories of people who are less visible, whom we cannot see struggling against the aftermath - the stories we may not know about how tenacious the return of Gulf Coast communities was from those tremendous sufferings they miserably faced up to.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast at daybreak, “pummeling a region that included the fabled city of New Orleans and heaping damage on neighboring Mississippi. In all, more than 1,700 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of others displaced.” (Laforet, New York Times)
This case summarizes events preceding the Hurricane Katrina, which was one of the worst natural catastrophes in the modern history of the USA. It raises questions about the lack of reasonable prevention and preparation actions due to flimsy structure and management of the responsible organizations and persons, invalidity and inconsistence of their actions and incapability of making the decisions in a timely manner. As a result of the unstructured and incoherent activities, we could observe several ineffective and costly attempts to mitigate floods and hurricanes. In the beginning the local officials, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and “White Houses past and present always seem penny-wise and pound-foolish” because of the chain of the wrong
Hurricane Katrina was a devastating disaster that has affected many people in New Orleans. The communication broke down hours after Katrina because of the unexpected fast winds and floods that broke down “3 million phone lines and 1,000 cellular towers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.”( Joch ). Because of the millions of phone lines that were broken down, contacting the government for help was difficult hours after hurricane Katrina. Not only that, the people of New Orleans underestimated the power of Hurricane Katrina causing many to be “ stranded with no food or water” (Narrator, “The Storm”,PBS).
The Washington Times opens with a statement describing the path of Hurricane Katrina and also shares the known death toll. This article gives the audience more of a general overview of the first known effects of the hurricane, without having too many newly revealed facts. The article has quotes from the governors of Mississippi, which gives the reader a feeling that
Hurricane Katrina resulted in massive loss of life and billions of dollars in property damage. There are many lessons worth learning from this event. Finger pointing started before the event was over. Most of the focus on Hurricane Katrina was on its impact on New Orleans; however, the storm ravaged a much wider area than that. This paper will briefly summarize the event, the impact on the city of New Orleans and the lessons learned to ensure preparedness today.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in late August of 2005, it not only destroyed the city, but unraveled the ties that held the society together. Tens of thousands of people were forced out of their homes, bound to find a means of survival on their own. Relationships they had previously formed, social constants they had grown accustomed to were thrown out of the window, and laws became irrelevant. Within a matter of days, everything they had known was destroyed, and it became the survival of the fittest and the wealthiest. While this broken society brought out the inner hero in some people, it brought out the chaos and lawlessness in others. Some embraced selflessness and saved hundreds of people, while others turned to looting, shooting,
The city is dead. Without a single person out in the street, and without the bright summer sunshine that wakes people up for another Monday morning. The city was completely gone; the city that used to burst with people and streets that were filled with energy is now empty but filled with filthy water. It was August 29, 2005, when the hurricane entered the warm water of the Gulf and grew to be a monstrous storm. So monstrous, that it destroyed anything in its path. The hurricane that we now call Katrina had swept away the entire city of New Orleans. Many people lost family members and the storm caused an abundance of property damage. It was reported that the hurricane killed about 1,800. The number of damages totaled $108 billion dollars. Just imagine seeing your neighbor, your family members, your loved one and even yourself suffering to survive in the water that swipes away so many of your memories and what you valued. What would you have done the day before the hurricane knowing that it will hit the city? This also questions the characters in the story “A.D: New Orleans After the Deluge”, by Josh Neufeld, a comic book that depicts the moments before, during and after the big disaster. Illustrating different characters within the different status of ranking going through the event differently. Demonstrating how very contrasting the “high up” and “low down” society face the consumer society even in the hurricane. Just as how Bauman describe that there are
In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina vigorously tore apart the U.S. Gulf Coast Region killing at least 1500 people, ranking at the third deadliest hurricane in United States history. Author of Survival and Death in New Orleans, Patrick Sharkey (2007), looked specifically at data on New Orleans residents that perished during Katrina in an attempt to look at the communities that were most affected by this unfortunate disaster. The storm took the largest toll on the elderly population and by African Americans, who he argued were overrepresented in comparison to whites. The toll was not only physical but mentally damaging as well, due to the overwhelming amount of loss to their homes, family members, pets, and childhood neighborhoods in which