What was new orleans like before hurricane katrina

People lived in putrid, crowded conditions for days until they were relocated to temporary housing outside the city. Several people, mostly elderly, died while waiting to be relocated, but reports of sexual assaults inside the arena were largely unsubstantiated.

TV news crews captured the squalid conditions at the Superdome and the sports arena became an iconic symbol of the city's suffering during the crisis. If another Katrina-type hurricane hit New Orleans, would it be as devastating as it was 10 years ago? A: Quite possibly. Katrina was a year storm when it made landfall on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. A direct hit from a similar storm could overwhelm the system and send floodwaters again rushing into low-lying neighborhoods.

Experts agree only a massive buildup of the surrounding coastal wetlands would truly protect the city from future storms. Besides New Orleans, where else was hit? What was the cost of cleanup for the Gulf Coast region? It remains the costliest natural disaster in U. A: The Lower Ninth Ward is still struggling to rebuild. A: Today, New Orleans is alive with a spirit of continual rebuilding.

New residents have moved in, opening businesses and bringing fresh ideas to the city. In contrast, jobs in knowledge-based industries, such as higher education, legal services serving clients outside the region, and insurance, have increased in number. In , for example, jobs in higher education became the fourth largest economic driver in the metropolitan area, exceeding shipbuilding, heavy construction, and engineering Liu and Plyer, Figure This increase in wages started before Katrina as knowledge-based industries grew, and accelerated after the storm.

The median household income also grew by 4 percent from to while national median household incomes declined. These changes are due to some extent to the loss of lower-paying jobs among people who could not afford to return to the New Orleans area after the storm. However, tracking where people have moved and what has happened to them after Katrina has been difficult, so the effects of demographic changes on average incomes are very difficult to determine. The rate at which New Orleanians are creating new businesses is higher than the national average, after lagging behind the national average before Katrina.

A greater share of students attend schools that meet state standards of quality—59 percent compared with 30 percent in —which is also a trend. Furthermore, these gains have occurred across all of the parishes Liu and Plyer, Plyer analyzed five factors that help determine resilience: 1 a strong and diverse regional economy, 2 large shares of skilled and educated workers, 3 wealth that can be deployed in strategic ways to adapt when a shock hits, 4 strong social capital, and 5 community competence.

Of these five, New Orleans has exhibited particular strength in the last three since Katrina, she said. For example, it has experienced a significant increase in community participation. More New Orleanians are involved in shaping public policies. The recovery has seen the rise of sophisticated resident and community groups. These groups are pursuing holistic strategies to revive entire neighborhoods and are engaging in effective policy advocacy to pursue economically integrated housing and neighborhoods, Plyer indicated.

The plan provides for predictable development and formalizes the community participation process. In the area of education, the majority of the schools in the New Orleans school district were converted to charter schools after Katrina. Many school facilities have been upgraded, and new teachers have been recruited. A higher percentage of eighth and fourth graders are proficient in mathematics and English today than before the storm Liu and Plyer, In the criminal justice area, programs have begun to offer alternatives to incarceration.

With respect to the coastal wetlands, acknowledged as important for flood protection, the state created the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

A plan for coastal restoration has also been passed by the state, and the need for better land-use and land-use management plans has been recognized, including the adoption of a statewide building code Liu and Plyer, Despite this progress, several indicators point to continuing difficulties as New Orleans seeks to recover from Katrina. First, money remains a serious constraint. Furthermore, major industries, including oil and gas, and shipping, have all declined since To some extent, a rise in tourism made up for the loss of jobs in oil and gas, but the number of tourism jobs is now lower than in The Deepwater Horizon disaster reinforced how vulnerable many industries in the region are to water-related disasters, though the oil spill provides an opportunity to use some of the funds from BP British Petroleum to clean up and restore the wetlands that protect the city.

Also, New Orleans may have lost educated workers after the storm. In the share of college-educated workers in New Orleans remained unchanged from at about 23 percent, but this number grew nationally Liu and Plyer, Black and Hispanic household incomes are 45 and 25 percent lower than for whites, respectively.

The New Orleans African American population has even lower household incomes than the national average for African Americans. The suburban parishes now house the majority of the metro-. This trend started before Katrina and is consistent with the national trend of the suburbanization of poverty. In Orleans Parish, 58 percent of renters, and 45 percent of renters in the metropolitan area, pay more than 35 percent of their pretax household income toward housing, compared with 41 percent of renters nationally.

Homeowners in New Orleans also bear a higher cost burden than is the average nationwide Liu and Plyer, The rates for both types of crimes in Orleans Parish are about double the national rates, Plyer said. Meanwhile, coastal wetlands have continued to erode. More than 23 percent of the land around the New Orleans Metropolitan Area has been lost since measurements began in ; the impact of the oil disaster on the wetlands has not yet been measured Liu and Plyer, Much of the recovery since Katrina has been aimed at bringing the city back to where it was before the disaster.

But that is not enough, Plyer said. The goal must be transformation, not just preserving the status quo. In this regard, she identified three key principles for continuing the recovery.

The first is to sustain and build on post-Katrina reforms. Specific ideas suggested in Liu and Plyer include. The second principle is to embrace new opportunities presented by the recession and oil spill. Liu and Plyer suggest. In this area, Liu and Plyer suggest that New Orleans should. Becoming resilient is a marathon and not a sprint, Plyer concluded. During the discussion period, Plyer was asked about her vision for New Orleans in She responded that New Orleans has tremendous potential to lead in such areas as renewable energies, for example, by redeploying scientists and engineers involved in the oil and gas industries.

Sectors of the U. New Orleans culture has not emphasized innovation in the past, but the numbers of entrepreneurs in the city have grown since Katrina.

New Orleans also has the unique advantage of the Mississippi River, which it could use to increase its role in an export economy. The United States has many products that could be sold abroad, and the country needs to reverse its trade imbalances. Building on that culture could create a new future for the city. In response to a question about the privatization of governmental services, Plyer responded that more evidence is needed to make generalizations that apply across sectors.

In some cases the privatization of services in New Orleans after Katrina has had benefits, but in other cases the privatization of services has been tremendously inefficient. Plyer also said that people in every neighborhood in the city tend to express the opinion that other neighborhoods are receiving more money than is their neighborhood. However, tracking the exact expenditures of recovery funds is very difficult. What we encourage folks to do is really to continue to build their capacity to advocate for what they need in their neighborhood.

Finally, in response to a question about climate change, Plyer observed that the U. Army Corps of Engineers has been commissioned to build levees that will protect the city against a year storm. But that level of protection will not be adequate in the future. Many people in the city have become interested in the flood protection measures being built in the Netherlands, where protection against an 11,year storm is the goal.

Pursuing such a goal for New Orleans would require a tremendous effort. Natural disasters are having an increasing effect on the lives of people in the United States and throughout the world. Every decade, property damage caused by natural disasters and hazards doubles or triples in the United States. More than half of the U. The increasing impact of natural disasters and hazards points to increasing importance of resilience, the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events, at the individual , local, state, national, and global levels.

Assessing National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters reviews the effects of Hurricane Katrina and other natural and human-induced disasters on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi and to learn more about the resilience of those areas to future disasters.

Topics explored in the workshop range from insurance, building codes, and critical infrastructure to private-sector issues, public health, nongovernmental organizations and governance. This workshop summary provides a rich foundation of information to help increase the nation's resilience through actionable recommendations and guidance on the best approaches to reduce adverse impacts from hazards and disasters.

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Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book. But many stayed, particularly among the city's poorest residents and those who were elderly or lacked access to transportation. Many sheltered in their homes or made their way to the Superdome, the city's large sports arena, where conditions would soon deteriorate into hardship and chaos. Katrina passed over the Gulf Coast early on the morning of August Officials initially believed New Orleans was spared as most of the storm's worst initial impacts battered the coast toward the east, near Biloxi, Mississippi, where winds were the strongest and damage was extensive.

But later that morning, a levee broke in New Orleans, and a surge of floodwater began pouring into the low-lying city. The waters would soon overwhelm additional levees. The following day, Katrina weakened to a tropical storm, but severe flooding inhibited relief efforts in much of New Orleans. An estimated 80 percent of the city was soon underwater. By September 2, four days later, the city and surrounding areas were in full-on crisis mode, with many people and companion animals still stranded, and infrastructure and services collapsing.

The city of New Orleans was at a disadvantage even before Hurricane Katrina hit, something experts had warned about for years , but it had limited success in changing policy. 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.