Hurricane 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 city’s police force had simply walked off the job. The 20,000 people who made their way to the Superdome, the city’s 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 weren’t 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