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Sanxton 2Hurricane Katrina
According to (Brunner, 2007), Hurricane Katrina slammed into the
U.S. Gulf Coast
on Aug. 29, 2005, destroying beachfront towns in Mississippi and
Louisiana, displacing a
million people, and killing almost 1,800. When levees in New
Orleans were breached, eighty
percent of the city was submerged by the flooding. About twenty
percent of its 500,000 citizens
were trapped in the city without power, food, or drinking water.
Rescue efforts were so delayed
and haphazard that many were stranded for days on rooftops and
in attics before help arrived.
The city became a toxic pool of sewage, chemicals, and corpses,
and in the ensuing chaos,
mayhem and looting became rampant; about fifteen percent of the
citys police force had simply
walked off the job. The 20,000 people who made their way to the
Superdome, the citys
emergency shelter, found themselves crammed into sweltering and
fetid conditions. At a second
shelter, the convention center, evacuees were terrorized by
roaming gangs and random gunfire.
Relief workers, medical help, security forces, and essential
supplies remained profoundly
inadequate during the first critical days of the disaster.
New Orleans was in the path of that particular storm. I remember
it like it was
yesterday. My family and I received minor damage from this
hurricane that year. We were left in
the dark for over a week when this storm occurred. The city was
mostly deserted during this
storm. It was mostly the poor and immobile who were left behind
as the storm hit (Getis et. al,
2011). I do not think that Hurricane Katrina would have been
such a tragedy if there werent
many people left behind. It may seem impossible, but there could
have been other ways to get
those people out of there before the storm actually hit. The
main thing that actually was a tragedy
in New Orleans was the fact that the levees failed, which caused
a majority of the flooding and
drowning of its victims. I had a lot of family members that came
to stay with us to escape the
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/hurricanekatrinatimeline.htmlhttp://www.infoplease.com/spot/hurricanekatrinatimeline.html
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Sanxton 3storm that was brewing in the Gulf. Days before the
storm you could feel the winds that were
coming from the storm. It was very sad to sit and watch a lot of
people that were pleading for
their lives on television. There were many different websites
that develop after Hurricane Katrina
to help ith relief efforts.
Many people do not realize the threat of hurricanes as each one
is different. Over the
past several years, U.S. hurricane warning systems have provided
adequate time for people on
barrier islands and the immediate coastline to move inland when
hurricanes threaten. However,
due to rapid population growth, it is becoming more difficult to
evacuate people from the barrier
islands and other coastal areas because roads have not kept pace
with the expansion. The
problem is further compounded by the fact that 80 to 90 percent
of the population now living in
hurricane-prone areas has never experienced the core of a major
hurricane. Many of these
people have been through weaker storms. The result is a false
impression of a hurricanes
damage potential. This often leads to complacency and delayed
actions, which could result in the
loss of many lives (1999).
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Sanxton 4References
Brunner, Borgna. (2007) Hurricane Katrina: A disaster and its
catastrophic aftermath.Information Please Database, Pearson
Education, Inc.
Getis, Arthur, Judith Getis, Mark Bjelland and Jerome D.
Fellmann (2011). Introduction to
Geography, 13th ed. McGraw Hill.
Talking About Disaster: Guide for Standard Messages.Produced by
the National DisasterEducation Coalition, Washington, D.C.,
1999.
