Hurricane Katrina Case Study

time of crisis by R. David Paulison, who unlike Brown, has had a career focused on disaster

“There are natural hazards, but disasters are the result of human actions that put people and property in harm’s way” (Cigler 2007: 64). Throughout history New Orleans has been continuously altered by the presence of humans through the creation of levees and canals, the introduction of artificial irrigation systems, and through human induced processes that have ultimately accelerated the process of land degradation and erosion. While a natural hazard struck New Orleans in 2005, the disaster portion resulting from Hurricane Katrina was a result of human induced interactions throughout the history of New Orleans.

It sets the beginning scene of the story containing a crowd of people in front of a heavy wooden oak door. The building is a prison and outside the wall is a rosebush that represents a symbol of nature's kindness to the condemned, or relief in unrelenting sorrow and gloom.

In the late summer of 2005, a terrible tragedy occurred that changed the lives of many in the south-east region of the United States. A Category 3, named storm, named Hurricane Katrina, hit the Gulf Coast on the 29th of August and led to the death of 1,836 and millions of dollars’ worth of damage (Waple 2005). The majority of the damage occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana. Waple writes in her article that winds “gusted over 100 mph in New Orleans, just west of the eye” (Waple 2005). Not only was the majority of the damage due to the direct catastrophes of the storm but also city’s levees could no longer hold thus breaking and releasing great masses of water. Approximately, 80% of the city was submerged at sea level. Despite the vast amount

The failure to adequately prepare for the storm led to increased and more widespread devastation, which in many cases harmed those living in the affected areas. An independent analysis of the reason for such massive chaos was performed and determined that “Most of the damage was due to the failure of the levee system that surrounds the city to protect it from flooding” (Ubilla). Had these levees been properly built, and had there been more of them protecting the city of New Orleans, major flooding could have potentially been lessened. A simple feature of the levee structure which engineers neglected to include is the concrete

Katrina hit New Orleans, Louisiana on August 29th, 2005, but the failure of the local government started before this day “by allowing building and growing in areas in low flood lands.” The local government did not regulate these land areas that have always

Packing 145-mile-an-hour winds as it made landfall, the category 3 storm left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from its center. The hurricane’s storm surge — a 29-foot wall of water pushed ashore when the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast — was the highest ever measured in the United States. Levees failed in New Orleans, resulting in political and social upheavals that continued a half decade later. (Laforet, New York Times)

The New York Times article, “Left to Louisiana’s Tides, a Village Fights For Time,” discusses the plight of Jean Lafitte, a town of seven thousand people located two miles below the levee protecting New Orleans. A fourth of Louisiana’s wetlands have been lost, much of which is due to intense hurricanes from 2005 to 2008. It is estimated that a football field worth of wetland disappears every 100 minutes and that in 200 years the wetlands will be completely gone. This degradation is due to climate change and human intervention in the area in pursuit of oil and farmland and in the creation of levees. Oliver A. Houck, a Tulane professor quoted in the article, claims, “It is the largest ecological catastrophe in North America since the Dust Bowl.” The loss of the wetlands puts coastal, working-class communities, many of which have lived in the area since the 1800s, in danger of washing away. Local governments

In December of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, tearing through the levee systems, and resulting in massive flooding that eventually covered 80% of New Orleans (1), leading to the most significant number of deaths by the storm. As images of Hurricane Katrina were displayed on front pages and television sets across the counry, Katrina became a strategic research site for sociological theory and research of how identity shapes a natural disaster (1). In this essay, I want to explore the fate of New Orleans. How will climate change affect human populations and which human populations will it affect? To do this, I will need to review both scientific and socially scientific papers to understand what the future of New Orleans and southern Louisiana will look like. Though this concept is technically broad for the limitations of this paper, I will review several pieces of literature to begin to gain an understanding of the social and ecological situations at play.

Hurricane Katrina struck the city of New Orleans, Louisiana on August 29th, 2005. The events that followed would leave the whole nation in shock until this day. One of the major topics of discussion after this disaster was whether or not the government's slow reaction time had anything to do with the fact that New Orleans is sixty-seven percent African American. As helicopters circled a wasteland that was once a major tourist attraction, the racism of the Deep South, thought to be extinct, proved it was only dormant. The same racism against African Americans that could be seen on Bourbon Street in the months prior to the hurricane reared its ugly head once more in Gretna, LA and was pointed out on live television by rapper Kanye West.

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.

Numerous different aspects were altered due to the ruckus of Hurricane Katrina. The first major aspect was housing and location. Katrina nearly demolished 300,000 homes. The ascending sea level along the coast resulting from onshore winds is a storm surge. With a twenty-two foot storm surge in New Orleans and a twenty-seven foot storm surge in Mississippi, Hurricane Katrina averaged a shocking twelve foot storm surge. As a storm surge’s footage increases, the surge will continue to move inland farther and farther. Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge is documented as moving inland a total of twelve miles into the state of Mississippi (FAQS, 2013). Hurricane Katrina impacted a total of seven states. Five of these states were Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Kentucky and Ohio were two more states affected but in a different way. Because of the tremendous amount of water, Kentucky and Ohio were victims of the Mississippi River flooding. Some states experienced more extreme destruction than others. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana experienced Hurricane Katrina’s wrath firsthand. These three southern states were affected the worst by the massive storm (FAQS, 2013). Mississippi’s forest industry experienced a great amount of destruction losing 1.3 million acres of valuable forest land. The main cause of destruction in New Orleans was blamed on the failure of the levee system to stand its ground

Growing up in Edmonds, Washington exposed me to a largely white, liberal, gender-binary, heterosexual, Christian worldview. My idea of American society is that in general, women fulfill the role of caretaker in the household and may or may not work outside the home. Men, on the other hand, are perceived to provide and lead.

The Legalist philosophy asserted that society can only be maintained through strict laws and punishments in order to suppress the inherent evil in humanity. In addition to differing greatly from other notable Chinese philosophies such as Confucianism and Taoism in its regard for human nature and its ideals for enforcement of the law, Legalism itself has several tenets that its followers believe are essential to the maintenance of an empire. The philosopher Han Fei explores these aspects in his writings on Legalism. His writings rose to significance towards the demise of the Han Dynasty and as a result, Legalism prevailed as the leading philosophy of the Qin Dynasty that followed. If we assume the innate selfishness of human nature, as Han

Before we discuss disaster management, it is important to briefly sum up the events of the events that began on August 25, 2005 to fully understand the brevity of the situation. Meteorologists began warning inhabitants of the regions that were hit by Katrina on August 23, 2005. By the 28th, evacuations were under way, that day, the National Weather Service predicted that after the storm hit, “most of the [Gulf Coast] area will be uninhabitable for weeks…perhaps longer.” (Spowart, 2015) New Orleans was particularly vulnerable. More than half of the city was built below sea level, and the levees protecting it were built on porous sand. The poorest parts of the city were completely unprepared for a storm surge. Many of these citizens lacked transportation and could not evacuate, and were left to wait out Katrina in their