Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was a precursor to many similar events to come, and has become a yardstick by which to measure other storms impacting the U.S. since then. Katrina was and still is the deadliest and costliest storm to make landfall in the United States in 100 years. Hurricanes Harvey and Maria follow closely behind in costs and loss of life. Katrina impacted coastal communities in five Gulf Coast states - Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The greatest impacts were felt in Louisiana and Mississippi, while the greatest media attention focused on New Orleans. Katrina’s death toll was approximately 1,500 in Louisiana alone. The economic impacts were complex and enormous. If measured by insurance claims alone, the disaster generated more than 1.7 million claims across six states, to a total of more than $40 billion. Estimates of the overall economic impact of the storm in the Gulf states put the damage at approximately $200 billion!
The New Orleans economy is based on three main sectors: tourism, port operations, and educational services (Monthly Labor Review, 2007). All these sectors were essentially shut down after the storm for several months, and up to years in some cases. Many operations did not fully recover until a full year after the storm. The University of New Orleans and all other schools were closed except for online learning for the fall semester or longer. The Port of New Orleans is essential to the nation, as the Port of South Louisiana (of which New Orleans port is a component) handles the most bulk tonnage of any port in the world. About 5,000 ships from nearly 60 countries dock at the Port of New Orleans each year (Monthly Labor Review, 2007). The tourism service industry, for which New Orleans is best known, is the major employer in the city and, of course, that was also shut down for many months after Katrina. So, as well as being displaced, many New Orleans residents lost their source of income until the city could recover sufficiently, which took years.
These examples do not tell the whole story of a complex natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina. Some have described it as a man-made disaster because of the failure of the flood control system surrounding the city of New Orleans, much of which sits at below sea level elevations. Meanwhile, a short distance away, unprotected coastal communities on the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts were also devastated. Some areas were never rebuilt, but most have been rebuilt, and this rebuilding has been a complex process driven by economic resources. Insurance payments; federally funded programs such as the Road Home Program, as well as people, organizations, and companies willing to invest in rebuilding the city all contributed to the patchwork of means by which the region recovered, house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood.
View the following image: a summary of the changes in population in the Greater New Orleans area in the eight years following Hurricane Katrina from The Times-Picayune.
The response to Katrina was inadequate and in retrospect revealed a need for improvements to all levels of emergency planning – from evacuation to caring for the vulnerable, to providing for equitable recovery – and more. Today we look back on Katrina as an example of poor disaster planning and New Orleans as a city with very low adaptive capacity at the time. Why was the response so poor, and how have things changed since then? Is the Gulf Coast and New Orleans in particular, better prepared for a major storm, and has it increased its adaptive capacity? In other words, have each component of the emergency management cycle – mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery been addressed to ensure another "Katrina experience" does not happen?
Immediately after Katrina broke the flood defenses of the city, with 80% of the city underwater and a crippled infrastructure, New Orleans had to be completely evacuated. Those who could not or did not evacuate ahead of the storm were temporarily trapped in a hellish scenario for days before an organized response could evacuate everyone. People were gathered at the New Orleans Superdome, Convention Center, and New Orleans International Airport where conditions were deplorable. Triage and evacuation centers were set up in locations that were above water in the flooded city and those rescued from the flood were processed and transported out. It was a chaotic and sometimes violent situation. The temperatures were in the 90’s Fahrenheit and there was no power at all. There was a deep level of suffering and trauma as families were separated and individuals sent far away from home to places where they had no family or friends. Many older people who were in poor health succumbed to the heat, lack of food and water, and extremely poor sanitation. Many did not know the fate of their family members and communication was almost impossible with all cell towers having been toppled. It was obvious to even a casual observer that the majority of the stranded citizens were disadvantaged by poverty and most were African American.
The introductory video in Module 11 showed some of the immediate aftermath of Katrina.
Even though the flood itself affected 80% of the city in a way that crossed socio-economic boundaries and did not discriminate, some of the lowest-lying areas were also the areas where there was more poverty so that the disadvantaged residents of the city were significantly more likely to be displaced by the flooding than those with greater wealth.
A great deal of attention was given by the press to the poor, predominantly African American neighborhood of New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward. This area was flooded by a break in the floodwall of the Inner Harbor (Industrial) Canal, a shipping canal that cuts through the heart of the city and at that time (incredibly) was directly connected to the Gulf of Mexico via the Intracoastal Waterway and The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and Lake Borgne. The flood wall was broken by the force of the water, and a loose barge pushed its way through. Water poured through the break, washing houses off their foundations, and drowning many residents. To this day, fifteen years after Katrina, many blocks of this neighborhood still sit vacant after houses had to be demolished and families were unable to return and rebuild. This is even with organizations such as Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation pouring money into rebuilding and trying to “make it right” for the local residents. This can be considered a forced relocation by a natural disaster.
It was the aftermath of the flood and the recovery process that really shone a spotlight on the disparity of fortune. The suffering did not end when the floodwaters were finally pumped out of the saucer-shaped city, against the force of gravity - this “dewatering” took most of the month after the flood. Nobody could return until the infrastructure – power, water, sewage, etc. was functioning well enough to make it minimally livable, and as the city slowly reopened, people who could return found their houses completely wrecked and their neighborhoods almost unrecognizable. Those lacking financial resources, could not get back to the city for months or even more than a year. Families had to find ways of making a living wherever they had landed after the flood. People with stronger financial resources were able to return and take care of the myriad tasks of recovery much more easily than those in poverty. This and other factors and financial obstacles meant that it was the wealthier neighborhoods that were rebuilt more quickly than the poorer neighborhoods.
Please watch this 9.54 minute CBS Sunday Morning video: “New Orleans After Katrina: A Tale of Two Cities” that examines the inequity of the rebuilding process in which it is mentioned that black homeowners were more than 3 times more likely than white homeowners to have lost their home in the flooding and that the Road Home Program, the state’s policy for funding rebuilding through grants to homeowners, was found to be discriminatory. The flaw in the policy was that it used the home’s value before the storm to determine the amount the homeowner received. So, the homes of much lower value in poorer, predominantly black neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward, were eligible for significantly less funding for rebuilding, failing to meet rebuilding costs.
Geographer Richard Campanella, in his book Geographies of New Orleans, addresses the question, were poor, black neighborhoods impacted by flooding more than more affluent white neighborhoods, due to the fact that the poor tend to occupy the lower, less desirable land areas? His analysis showed, through mapping the demographics and the levels of flooding together, that the answer is more complex than you may expect. He looked at the distribution of ethnic groups, distribution of flooded land, and the length of time an area remained flooded after Katrina. If only the city of New Orleans itself is considered (and not the suburbs), his data shows that the pre-Katrina population consisted of 67% African American and 28% white, while 76% of persistently flooded properties were of African American families, 20% were of white families. So African American neighborhoods did suffer greater persistent flooding. The maps below illustrate the complex nature of the distribution of social vulnerability in relation to the more intense flooding. The neighborhoods of Gentilly, New Orleans East, the Lower 9th ward, Chalmette, and Lakeview experienced the deepest floodwaters. The distribution of wealth and poverty in these communities is complex, with New Orleans East, the Lower 9th Ward, and Gentilly being predominantly black neighborhoods, while Lakeview is an affluent, mostly white part of the city. Chalmette is a mostly white suburb of mixed-income.
So, in summary, Hurricane Katrina negatively affected the poorer citizens of the city, who were represented heavily by the African American community, more than the affluent members of the community. The poor are the most vulnerable citizens due to their sensitivity. They are also the least resilient, having lower levels of adaptive capacity, due almost entirely to a lack of financial resources. Without the incredible generosity of non-profit and non-governmental organizations, faith-based groups, and volunteers, many people would never have been able to return home. In addition, insurance payments, various federally funded programs such as the Road Home Program, and the migration to the area of people and companies willing to invest in rebuilding all contributed to the recovery of New Orleans house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Would New Orleans fare better if another “Katrina” hit the city? Many improvements have been made. Preparedness and response, including evacuation plans with transportation for those without a vehicle, and response plans are all greatly improved. The city’s overall adaptive capacity and resilience have made strides and the economy of the city has stabilized, but poverty is still a major problem for the city. The system of engineering structures, designed to protect the city from a surge from - up to category 3 level “100-year" (1% chance in a given year) storm, has been rebuilt and greatly improved. But projections indicate that this system will deteriorate over time and it is very expensive to maintain. New Orleans may be in a good position at this time if a category 3 hurricane were to hit the city. But there are too many variables to say for sure what the outcomes would be in terms of long-term recovery in the future or for a larger storm. For example, an event with precipitation of the magnitude of Hurricane Harvey would quite likely prove to be equally devastating to New Orleans as Katrina.
The process of recovery from a major disaster such as the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is long and complex. Today, the city functions normally again, bearing scars in the form of hundreds of large empty lots, a smaller population, and many examples of increased resilience. Lessons can and should be learned and applied to other disasters, such as Houston's flooding in 2017 by Hurricane Harvey.
The article, Building Back the Big Easy: Lessons from New Orleans’ Recovery from Hurricane Katrina [3], provides an overview of the changes that have taken place in the city of New Orleans through the eyes of an outside observer with a background in urban resilience and disaster risk management. Artessa Saldivar-Sali is a Resilience Engineering Specialist, World Bank. The article outlines several aspects of the recovery process, including the rebuilding of neighborhoods worst hit by the flooding, and repairs to the vital infrastructure that drives the economy. It also points to the changes in disaster management and the improvements in the flood defenses surrounding the city, including a surge barrier that is the largest of its kind in the world, and raising of the 133 miles of levees that surround the entire city.
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, there was much debate about the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans and the vision of what New Orleans would look like ten or twenty years later was elusive. The article, New Orleans, Louisiana Population 2020 [4], from the World Population Review website, examines the demographic changes in the decade following Katrina. It outlines the steady growth in population since Hurricane Katrina literally emptied the city of every single resident and killed 1,500 in southern Louisiana. In 2006, the population was only 223,000, down from the 2000 census level of 484,000. In the decade following, the population steadily grew back to a level of 343,800 in 2010 and 391,495 in 2016.
When Hurricane Isaac approached New Orleans in 2012, the city’s residents were advised not to evacuate as the repairs to the hurricane protection system were complete. This was sound advice at that time and for that particular storm, which flooded communities on the outside of the levees. For those who know New Orleans now, with its rebuilt levees, rising housing prices, and seeming amnesia – reminders about the struggle to rebuild are important. It may also be helpful to keep an awareness of the continued vulnerability of the lowest-lying city in the U.S. and most of the world.
Links
[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/1525
[2] https://www.floodauthority.org/the-system/lake-borgne-surge-barrier/
[3] http://blogs.worldbank.org/sustainablecities/building-back-big-easy-lessons-new-orleans-recovery-hurricane-katrina
[4] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/new-orleans-la-population