Narratives that came out of Katrina portrayed the Superdome, where 30, people were stranded after the storm, as lawless, depraved, and chaotic — with reports of murders, rapes, and even sniper attacks on the crowds crammed into the sports stadium. For example, New Orleans's mayor at the time, Ray Nagin, told Oprah Winfrey horror stories of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people," while Eddie Compass, then the city's police chief, told of "little babies getting raped," the Los Angeles Times's Susannah Rosenblatt and James Rainey reported a month after the storm.
While the scene in the Superdome was far from a paradise, it was not the murderous hellhole that media reports and government officials made it out to be. In fact, just six people died in the Superdome — four of natural causes, one of suicide, and one of a drug overdose. Some of the blame for the sensationalist stories falls on journalists who breathlessly reported some of the outrageous claims about the situation in the Superdome.
But a lot of the blame also falls on local, state, and federal officials who, already facing a lot of chaos and panic due to the impact of Katrina, echoed wild claims about the Superdome that helped foster even more chaos and panic. And this additional panic came with a real cost: In the aftermath, officials focused resources on supposedly restoring order in the Superdome — leaving fewer resources for some of the rescue and reconstruction work that was left to be done.
So officials helped create unnecessary panic, and then they dedicated resources to address that panic. US Census Bureau. A decade after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans metro area still hasn't recovered from the storm.
Although the area has grown since , it holds , fewer residents, more than 39, fewer housing units, and nearly 2, fewer business establishments since Katrina hit. Again, much of this damage was likely unavoidable in the face of a storm as strong as Katrina — but the harms could have been at least mitigated by better government preparation and a stronger response, based on the many reports that have reviewed the situation since Katrina.
Despite the massive damage left behind by Katrina, another storm like it could still decimate the region again. A report from the Lens, a local news outlet in New Orleans, and Politifact found that the anti-flooding system built after Katrina couldn't handle another storm like it.
The system could endure a year storm — a storm with a 1 percent chance of happening on any given year — but Katrina was considered a much stronger year storm. Still, the new system is certainly much stronger than what existed before it, so it could diminish a lot of the damage that Katrina caused. Another report by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council concluded that levees and flood walls can never be large or sturdy enough to fully protect New Orleans from another disaster similar in scope to Katrina.
In fact, this is perhaps the most lasting, dangerous public policy failure after Katrina: The report noted that the new structures built around the city give a false sense of security, leading the public to believe that they will be protected if another storm like Katrina comes.
But the reality is the nature of New Orleans — mainly, its status as a city largely below sea level — will always leave it exposed to these kinds of storms and floods.
Ultimately, the report concluded that voluntarily relocating people from areas exposed to floods should be considered as a viable public policy option — otherwise, the same problems may repeat themselves in the future.
The region sits in a natural basin, and some of the city is below sea level so is particularly prone to flooding. Low-income communities tend to be in the lowest-lying areas. Just south of the city, the powerful Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico. During intense hurricanes, oncoming storms can push seawater onto land, creating what is known as a storm surge. Those forces typically cause the most hurricane-related fatalities. As Hurricane Katrina hit, New Orleans and surrounding parishes saw record storm surges as high as 19 feet.
Levees can be natural or manufactured. They are essentially walls that prevent waterways from overflowing and flooding nearby areas.
New Orleans has been protected by levees since the French began inhabiting the region in the 17th century, but modern levees were authorized for construction in after Hurricane Betsy flooded much of the city. The U. Army Corps of Engineers then built a complex system of miles of levees. Yet a report by the. Corps released in concluded that insufficient funding, information, and poor construction had left the flood system vulnerable to failure.
Even before Katrina made landfall off the Gulf, the incoming storm surge had started to overwhelm the levees, spilling into residential areas.
More than 50 levees would eventually fail before the storm subsided. While the winds of the storm itself caused major damage in the city of New Orleans, such as downed trees and buildings, studies conducted in the years since concluded that failed levees accounted for the worst impacts and most deaths.
An assessment from the state of Louisiana confirmed that just under half of the 1, deaths resulted from chronic disease exacerbated by the storm, and a third of the deaths were from drowning. Hurricane death tolls are debated, and for Katrina, counts can vary by as much as Collected bodies must be examined for cause of death, and some argue that indirect hurricane deaths, like being unable to access medical care, should be counted in official numbers.
Hurricane Katrina was the costliest in U. Oil and gas industry operations were crippled after the storm and coastal communities that rely on tourism suffered from both loss of infrastructure and business and coastal erosion. An estimated , people were permanently displaced by the storm. Demographic shifts followed in the wake of the hurricane. The lowest-income residents often found it more difficult to return.
Some neighborhoods now have fewer residents under 18 as some families chose to permanently resettle in cities like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta.
If the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone National Park ever had another massive eruption, it could spew ash for thousands of miles across the United States, damaging buildings, smothering crops, and shutting down power plants.
If within the vicinity of the blast or ground zero , your chances of survival are virtually nonexistent unless you are in a shelter that provides a very VERY good blast protection. A combination of civic boosterism and excessive faith in engineered water-control systems led New Orleans to keep reclaiming swampland for housing, building canal systems for commercial ship traffic, and dredging spillways that were supposed to draw floodwater away from the city when the need arose.
These systems all failed during Katrina. The storm caused massive, sustained flooding. Two hundred and sixty thousand people had to leave their homes. An ambitious long-term hurricane-protection plan passed by Congress and signed into law by Johnson was never completed.
Katrina flooded out many white people as well as Black people, and, within Black New Orleans, many working-class and middle-class people as well as poor people. But the dynamic of recovery was all about race. New Orleans is a Black-majority city. Nagin was later convicted of taking bribes from city contractors. The committee soon unveiled a plan that entailed not rebuilding some of the Black neighborhoods that had flooded.
Many residents were outraged; on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead, the idea was that every homeowner should get prompt and generous help in order to return and rebuild. New Orleans has a large racial gap in resources—the Black poverty rate is triple the white poverty rate—so whites were able to move back more quickly and with less hardship. For a decade after Katrina, New Orleans was a whiter city than it had been before. That fed into a venerable tradition, in Black New Orleans, of suspicion of what white New Orleans might be up to.
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