Three days after Hurricane Katrina plowed into New Orleans, swamping 80 percent of the city, a group of 200 evacuees, most of them African-American, fled the wretched conditions of the Superdome and Convention Center and set out to find food and shelter in Gretna, a nearby white working-class suburb. When the evacuees arrived at the Crescent City Connection, a highway bridge that offered one of the few escape routes out of the flood, they were greeted by a line of white Gretna police officers who fired their shotguns into the air. Gretna, the police told the crowd, was “closed.” This ... Read More
No Port After the Storm
August 31, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Madeline Luster's family has lived in the 7th Ward of New Orleans for generations. Her home is a five-minute walk from Tremé, the neighborhood featured on HBO's program of the same name. Having turned 90 in July, Luster still lives in the home she inherited from her mother, but faces bulging, waterlogged cracks in the walls and ceiling created by Hurricane Katrina. "I need new gutter cans," she said; her precarious gutters haven't been fixed since the storm. Luster’s shotgun-style house has an empty lot next to it, and a tree that fell across her back door was all that prevented looters ... Read More
Recreating the Creative Industry in New Orleans
August 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
After Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, there seemed to be hundreds, if not thousands, of proposed solutions to the "problem" of New Orleans. Some argued that the city should be relocated to higher ground; others said it should be rebuilt from the ground up as America's model green city; still others advocated that the city allow nature to determine its shape. These blueprints had one thing in common: They sought to re-establish The Big Easy as one of America's great cities (even though some of the city's detractors argued that it should be abandoned altogether). While many of the proposals ... Read More
Fumbling FEMA Wants Back in the Game
October 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security gobbled up the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the 30-year-old bureaucracy that coordinates responses to natural disasters. The change left FEMA gutted and impotent, and when Hurricane Katrina struck two years later, the results were devastating. What's troubling, though, is that post-Katrina congressional reforms haven't fully addressed the agency's woes, argues North Carolina State University political science professor Thomas Birkland in a recent paper. Birkland, author of books such as Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after ... Read More
How Could They Have Stayed Behind?
August 28, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In the weeks and months following Hurricane Katrina, many commentators and politicians expressed considerable frustration and puzzlement as to why so many people ignored the warnings and decided to stay in New Orleans. One — then-Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. — even suggested that, "There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving." But how much of a decision was it really? According to new study by a group of psychologists, to think of it as an active decision betrays a particular model of human ... Read More
Mass Evacuation Worked in Rehearsal, But …
September 16, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
When the nation weighed the success of New Orleans’ evacuation for Hurricane Katrina, few looked to the more than 1 million citizens who drove vehicles or booked flights to flee the threat through their own means. The overwhelmingly negative reviews, rather, rested with local and state governments’ inability to assist tens of thousands of residents who either didn’t have transportation to get out or couldn’t afford the gas and lodging they would need on a multiday evacuation. An image of yellow school buses parked in neat rows while submerged in Katrina’s floodwaters epitomized ... Read More
Mississippi Forgotten
March 12, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
In the wake of Katrina in August 2005, the world watched as New Orleans filled with water and hundreds of thousands of evacuees tried to find water, shelter and food. The media focused its coverage to New Orleans but relatively little was said about the Mississippi Gulf Coast until the next day. Katrina destroyed over 90,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Great Britain. The epicenter and devastating northeast quadrant of the hurricane made landfall east of New Orleans in Waveland, Miss. The documentary Mississippi Forgotten (watch it below, length: 15 min.) gives Katrina ... Read More
