Although Houston residents have raised complaints about Memorial’s flooding problem in the past, the city has failed to respond in meaningful ways. Instead, they have let contractors carry on with construction programs that have weakened drainage infrastructure. Plans to fix the damage have continuously been put on the backburner in favor of more construction plans (Foster, Robin). Memorial residents have been offered platitudes and empty promises for years, but now the time has come to stand firm and say: Stop the flooding. Stop letting our homes and businesses be ravaged by the rains. It is time for City Council to step up and address the issue. It is time to focus on fixing this crucial problem facing Memorial. It is time city council to
Carson uses logos to appeal to the Houstonians of how to make flood not a big issue. He gives ideas such as green infrastructure which includes rain gardens, green roofs and rain barrels in which the water gets absorbed rather than flowing out to the streets. They are affordable at very low expenses, and it is even available through incentives and grants.
People all around have paid notice; Marcus Hiles has had any sort of impact for the city of Houston by building a few private units in a rate of the best regions around the city. A large number of inhabitants can now occupy peace knowing there is an unrivaled decision accessible that offers more regard at a much lower
When a huge storm caused the Missouri River to overflow in 1993, its water swept through Hardin. Water swept through Hardin,destroying homes and other buildings. Then something terrible happened that the town would never be the same: the dead rose up from the cemetery. It destroyed homes and buildings, and unearthing nearly 600 coffins from the local cemetery. As storm after storm pummeled the Midwestern United States, rivers began to overflow their banks. Throughout the summer, floodwater destroyed homes and businesses, and roads and bridges were washed away. The flooding didn’t and unit fall, and by then, more 20 million acres of land. Fifty people had died, and 55,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.
According to Houston Chronicle, Turner reduced flooding by asking City Council to grant $10 million towards quick drainage fixes. Mayor Turner’s staff put together 60 quick-fix projects which fulfilled to reduce flooding in neighborhoods. Although Turner was aware that the fix will not eliminate flooding, he plans to improve drainage in time.
Graphic novels have the ability to portray multiple perspectives and can cleverly represent as many groups an author believes is needed. What becomes the decision of the author is which perspective deems more important or more fascinating. Depending on which the author decides to portray, there tends to be different effects on the readers. Neufeld uses Scott’s Mccloud’s ideas from Understanding Comics, such as adding detail to a character to differentiate them from the reader in order to induce certain emotions. The perspective taken from the primary source may receive more empathy or distaste depending on who the author chooses to represent. Through detailing certain character, this focus is made clear to be on the victims. However, graphic novels are sometimes subject to biases and misinterpretations, which can belittle the authenticity of the accounts being given. Different accounts of the events hold different biases. They could either represent those who have undergone the specific event or that of someone who has speculated from the outside. In A.D. New Orleans after the Deluge, Josh Neufeld represents a perspective not commonly exemplified, as he assigns different perspectives to his character and juxtaposes them using the dialogue from their interactions. A different view of the story is told, and reasons to the questionable, or unethical actions of the victims are brought into focus and analyzed through a perspective that sides with the victims.
New Orleans was built on a risky location. According to Lalwani, Khagram, Evans, Jackson, and Lindenber (2007, p1), New Orleans was built on “a natural levee adjacent to the massive Mississippi river that was not embayed and therefore not protected from flooding.” When French colonizer, Jean Baptiste La Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded New Orleans in 1718, it was considered a strategically significant port of trade between North America and the rest of the world due to the Mississippi River and its’ vast network of tributaries (Lalwani, et al., 2007, p1). On the other hand, the city’s first chief engineer, Del la Tour, and geologists Kolb and Van Loplin found the site unsuitable for a city because the threat of flooding (Lalwani, et al.,
New Orleans was built on a marsh. The city was inundated by water during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, causing a tremendous loss of human lives and costing the economy billions of dollars in damage. Since the storm, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has built a system of lift stations and levees to control the flow of water around the city. This has created what is best described as a bathtub surrounded by water. To further elaborate, New Orleans is the bath tub, while Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River surround the city. Over the years keeping water from entering the city has become more difficult because the city continues to sink lower below sea level. Subsidence of marshy soils lowers the ground elevation in and around the City of New Orleans. The gradual caving in or sinking of land is known as subsidence.
Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest storms to strike the United States of America, had the greatest impact on New Orleans, Louisiana. Due to it's low elevation, as well as the faulty levee and floodwall failures, the city was inundated with water, displacing most of the population, and leaving people stranded without power, fresh water, and other infrastructure resources for days. In the midst of all of the chaos was the Memorial Medical Center. The events that took place at that hospital, and the decisions made by those in charge, are still debated today.
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
“Johnstown flood” is a short story written by David McCullough. This story talks about the miraculous survival of a little girl named Gertrude. Gertrude’s sheer luck got her up the hill safely. Of course, with the help of several people she met along the way. I think that this is an extraordinary act of how worked together and some people put his/her life at risk to save a small child that they didn’t even knew. I fell that this is a great example of how human beings come together in times of need and extreme danger and in the way that we try to protect ourselves from disaster.
Prior to the disaster of 2010, there was some work done to prevent flooding. One can see a wall protecting the area of downtown from the river, but it was not large enough to protect from the flood of 2010. After the 2010 flooding, and into the year
We will begin sending out survey pamphlets to the residence of the city with paid return envelopes. In those surveys, we will ask questions about their experience with FEMA and have them be specific of when they needed to use FEMA’s services because not everyone in the city experience Hurricane Katrina. This will make it easier to count those surveys out by asking if they were residing in the city during that time. In addition, we will follow that question with asking the people how fast FEMA reacted to their request for help. We all know Hurricane Katrina caused severe damage to the people and it would take a minute for all of it get cleaned up. The government was extremely slow in bringing help to those in the middle of the damage. One more way we want to learn about the people in the city is by holding multiple town hall meetings around the city with different times and dates. In these town halls meetings we will be discussing the same information that have been sent out in the surveys along with giving people the freedom of speech and tell FEMA what exactly they feel needs to be worked on.
Hurricane Katrina is infamous: the storm that buried the vibrant city of New Orleans under up to sixteen feet of water. Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster, but the crimes committed against the storm’s survivors in the months prior, setting them up for devastation, were the true tragedies. Not only were the citizens of the Big Easy neglected pre-Katrina, but they remained on the back burner of the federal government for days after the storm hit. Citizens of New Orleans - who had just been put through one of the worst natural disasters the United States had ever seen - were treated like animals, or foreign refugees seeking sovereignty in the US. They were not treated with the common decency an American citizen deserves, but why did this happen? The answer is simple, because the politicians on all levels, before, during, and after the storm, neglected the citizens that trusted them. City, State, and Federal government officials incorrectly used funds that had been allocated for disaster relief, and to the repair of the levees for many years leading up to the disaster. Because of this corrupt behavior, the people of New Orleans were caught in a very unnatural disaster to accompany the storm. The low class citizens of New Orleans were hit with unparalleled injustices. The atrocities committed against these innocent people was no less than a war waged against them, but the
The city of New Orleans lies below sea level in a bowl bordered by levees which prevent the high waters of the Mississippi River from flooding the city. These levees were put to the test on August 29, 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit, causing severe destruction along the Gulf coast. Three concrete floodwalls protecting the city of New Orleans fractured and burst under the weight of surging waters from the hurricane, killing hundreds and resulting in an estimated $100 to $150 billion worth of damage (Luegenbiehl, 2007). In the aftermath of the storm, society placed part of the blame on design flaws that compromised the safety of the levees and endangered the public. Under the Flood Control Act of 1965, Congress had mandated the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to protect the city from a Category 3 storm, yet the floodwalls were unable to withstand the force of Hurricane Katrina, which was eventually classified as Category 3 (Grunwalk & Warrick, 2005). The Corps pointed towards a massive surge that exceeded the height of the floodwalls, but investigations by civil engineers and other experts pointed towards the inadequate design and construction by the Corps of Engineers as the cause of the failure (Englehardt et al., 2013). The Corps acted in a manner contradicting ethical engineering behavior by being less than forthcoming about deficiencies that were accumulating in the overall system. In order to prevent future disasters involving human life, the government should require
For the upcoming earthquake we will not repeat the lack of communication and disorganization our government made when Hurricane Katrina struck the southeast because our nation will learn from the past. One of the problem was the government and public administrators lack of communication and response to the natural disaster. According to Eikenberry et. al, after the hurricane struck, Louisiana’s largest community foundation, Baton Rouge Area Foundation, spent 24 hopeless hours trying to contact state federals for