Hurricane Katrina

The discipline of disaster studies has been hesitant to critically interrogate dual discourses of vulnerability and ‘building resilience’ in a meaningful way as it continues to dominate research and practice. This is despite deep engagement within different disciplines to offer radical reconsiderations of these discourses. I use multi-year long autoethnographic immersion into the problematic of resilience. I integrate personal experience as a White, female scholar who studies disasters, with an almost decade-long project focused on the pre-and-post Katrina context of New Orleans bounce rap. I task what it means ‘to be resilient’ and who decides when groups have reached this state. I situate an empirical challenge to metanarratives of resilience and the colonialism they suggest, and also task resilience as constructed by elites and imposed on those decided as vulnerable. This work suggests a dramatic shift away from the building resilience discourse into meaningful engagement with the institutional neglect of the colonial present that fosters disaster in the first place.

This article argues that Hurricane Katrina was not a 'natural' disaster. Human error caused the catastrophic flooding, and its impacts were magnified by the lack of resilience in large parts of the New Orleans population. Managing human vulnerability and coping capacity is key to disaster prevention.

Information extraction from high spatial resolution imagery is sometimes hampered by the limited number of spectral channels available from these systems. Standard supervised classification algorithms found in commercial software packages may misclassify different features with similar spectral characteristics; leading to a high occurrence of false positives. An additional step in the information extraction process was developed incorporating the concept of object geometry. Objects are defined as a contiguous group of pixels identified as belonging to a single class in the spectral classification. Using results from the spectral classification, a supervised approach was developed using genetic programming to select and mathematically combine feature-specific shape descriptors from a larger set of shape descriptors, to form a new classifier. This investigation focused on extraction of residential housing from QuickBird and IKONOS imagery of the Mississippi Gulf Coast before and immediately after hurricane Katrina. Use of genetic programming significantly reduced false positives caused by asphalt pavement and isolated roofing material scattered throughout the image.

Hurricanes are the costliest natural disasters in the United States. Understanding both hurricane frequencies and intensities is a topic of great interest to meteorologists, decision makers and the general public alike. Previous research has suggested that damage has been dramatically increasing within the last two decades, in part due to rapid increase of population and wealth in coastal regions (Blake et al., 2005; Emanuel, 2005;

This is an unpublished essay that I circulated privately in September 2005, several weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck the City of New Orleans.  Having lived in the Big Easy while in college and having made it and its culture and its people an important part of my life, I was aghast at calls by people unfamiliar with the city to allow for its demise.  This was before it became known to the country that the reason that the city was devastated was the failure of its levees to hold and protect the city and not because of many other factors.

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005, driving hundreds of thousands of residents out of the city and causing upwards of $55 billion in damage. Between August 2005 and New Year's Day 2006, New Orleans lost over half its population because Katrina forced people out of their homes and businesses were relocated temporarily, if not permanently. This natural event played a crucial role in the development of the insurance industry with regards to how it reacted to these "black swan" events. Journalists and reporters were quick to criticize the response time of government organizations such as FEMA, but insurance companies were also to blame for the disastrous aftermath. The mathematical models used at the time failed to properly prepare companies for the payouts needed after the storm subsided, meaning hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents were left unsubsidized for the damage done and were forced to move out of the city altogether. This paper analyzes how models were used by the insurance industry prior to Hurricane Katrina, followed by an analysis on how those models changed to accommodate for future events that may cause similar damage. I also discuss the role of government in natural catastrophes and the regulation of insurance before vs. after Hurricane Katrina.

I moved to New Orleans in the overwhelming heat and humidity of early July for one reason: K10. Branded as such on banners, billboards, and a deluge of press kits, the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall (2015) promised to be a media circus rivaling that of the 1984 World’s Fair. For six weeks leading up to the anniversary, The Times-Picayune ran regular Katrina stories, eliciting hundreds of comments. During the same period, WWOZ, the local public radio station, aired a weekly hour-long show, “The Debris,” which focused on how the storm affected New Orleans communities. Residents used these forums to debate the merit of recuperating stories from a decade ago, at once questioning each others’ taste, tact and yearning for spaces to shed lingering pain and heartbreak.

https://themigrationist.net/2018/03/02/i-have-a-right-not-to-be-resilient-new-orleanians-of-color-remember-hurricane-katrina/

The aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between natural forces and the
unstoppable might they posses, and the actions of man, both as part of nature himself, and
as a social agent, focused on his progress, development and continuity. In this
relationship, the Mississippi river plays a central role, just as the American nation plays
an equally important part – the river initially represented a barrier for the West, while the
Americans were drawn, in times of their settlement, towards West. The two entities were,
as such, bound to eventually meet and struggle, smaller or larger groups of settlers trying
to understand and control the river, rather than just surviving it. In its own right, the
Mississippi follows its own course to the Gulf of Mexico, peacefully or destructively,
never allowing society to ignore its might. I will discuss these struggles focusing on
several main ideas: transformation in human nature at the encounter with the River, the
perpetual change (technical, social, spiritual), and also more focused issues such as
technical failures in the attempt to contain the floods on Mississippi or the deep racial
issues at the core of social relations in the Mississippi Delta.

On August 29th 2005 Hurricane Katrina triggered a catastrophic disaster in the city of New Orleans, followed by a dysfunctional response and a flawed recovery. The flood evacuation and resulting nationwide diaspora led to a dramatic decline in the number of residents. Recently the city reached 90 percent of its pre-Katrina population count, some neighborhoods even report population growth. Yet the share of African Americans is lower, and the departure of poor and black residents after Katrina has changed the face of the city. Some of the lessons learned after Katrina include the realization that disasters aren’t “natural”, but rather the conjunction of at-risk settlement patterns, flawed planning, and vulnerability. This recognition also contributed to developing new strategies aimed at strengthening resilience.

New Orleans is unique – which is precisely why there are many Crescent Cities all over the world: for almost 150 years, writers, artists, cultural brokers, and entrepreneurs have drawn on and simultaneously contributed to New Orleans’s fame and popularity by recreating the city in popular media from literature, photographs, and plays to movies, television shows, and theme parks. Addressing students and fans of the city and of popular culture, Popular New Orleans examines three pivotal moments in the history of New Orleans in popular media: the creation of the popular image of the Crescent City during the late nineteenth century in the local-color writings published in Scribner’s Monthly/Century Magazine; the translation of this image into three-dimensional immersive spaces during the twentieth century in Disney’s theme parks and resorts in California, Florida, and Japan; and the radical transformation of this image following Hurricane Katrina in public performances such as Mardi Gras parades and operas. Covering visions of the Crescent City from George W. Cable’s Old Creole Days stories (1873-1876) to Disneyland’s "New Orleans Square" (1966) to Rosalyn Story’s opera Wading Home (2015), Popular New Orleans traces how popular images of New Orleans have changed from exceptional to exemplary.

Storm surge and wind associated with Hurricane Katrina caused many deaths and the destruction of property and public infrastructure along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The devastation was predicted, and absent massive and immediate action, the next major storm will inevitably produce additional disastrous outcomes. Somewhat less predictable are the many social changes associated with the hurricane and public sector response to the event. We characterize some of the more salient human consequences across multiple sectors of the economy—including energy, finance, construction, housing, gaming, and commercial fisheries. We examine how preexisting social trends were amplified, otherwise-latent social and cultural distinctions were exacerbated, and national resources and funds intended for broad-scale “recovery” were converted into instruments of capital formation and further concentration of wealth. We conclude with a discussion exploring public policy and other implications of the disaster in a context of ever-increasing global, environmental, and social challenges.

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans. The (near-) complete evacuation of the city led to the nation-wide dislocation of vulnerable citizens. Today, its reconstruction and recovery seems to be 'uneven'. The author views urban disaster recovery as an interaction of particular spatial, institutional, and social aspects. Uneven recovery is conceptualized as disconnect between planning for urban disaster recovery, impacted populations, and the places in the city they inhabit. As process, it encompasses heterogeneous cases of 'strong' or 'weak' recovery within the city. Based on a socio-spatial approach, an integrated multidimensional theoretical and methodological framework is formulated for empirical case study research in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. Quantitative and qualitative mixed methods served to collect empirical data in 2007 and 2009. The author's intention is to better understand planning for urban disaster recovery in an American city and formulate resulting planning recommendations. This dissertation contributes to future sustainable and just recovery paradigms in the context of recurring urban disaster events.

Under mandatory evacuations, I sent Brenda and Ellie, the last child left at home, to Texas for both Hurricanes Ivan (2004) and Katrina (2005).

Ivan scored a direct hit, the eye passed right over Sibley. Katrina devastated the Mississippi coast and caused the levee breach that flooded New Orleans, but located in the northeast quadrant of Katrina, Mobile Bay and the Gulf Coast to Pensacola also suffered severe damage.

I weathered both storms on Bella until they moved into Cat 2 levels. Eventually, flooding over the docks made staying aboard needlessly risky. Skill setting lines can get a sailor though a Cat 1 or Cat 2 storm, but once a storm reaches Cat 3, survival increasingly depends more on luck than skill. A skipper can do everything right and lose the boat.(download to read more)

This Applied Research Project is an explanatory study that evaluates the impact of Hurricane Katrina on crime rates in New Orleans. By analyzing existing data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Census, this research measures crime trends in New Orleans from January 2002 through December 2007. The findings of this research suggest that some types of crime increased after this disaster, while others decreased. In New Orleans, most crime rates increased significantly beginning in January 2006. Additionally, most crime rates appeared to be returning to pre-storm levels by December 2007. Since the reconstruction of New Orleans is projected to last for between 8 and 11 years, this research evaluates crime trends early in the reconstruction of the city