Hurricane Katrina: The Making of a New New Orleans - Term Paper Example

Hurricane Katrina: The Making of a 'New' New Orleans Submitted People can be excused for becoming worn out of the headline "Hurricane Katrina, the Costliest Natural Disaster in U.S. History" (Groen & Polivka 2008, 33). Sympathy exhaustion has set in among compassionate individuals who are worried of a headline that publicizes a return to normal life. And then there are unavoidable issues regarding what the latest normal life may be, why people would inhabit an environmentally perilous location in the first place, and what madness would make them desire to reconstruct or rebuild in the same place. The objective of this essay is to provide a commentary on the tragic event that transpired in New Orleans Metropolitan Area, to explore the reason such a calamity was hardly unforeseen, and to contemplate on a number of geographical potentialities of a post-Katrina New Orleans. This commentary is by principle groundwork and unfinished, founded on early accounts from correspondents and researchers and on the experiences of the victims. I. The Katrina Tragedy In August 26, Friday morning, Hurricane Katrina was approaching the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico, with a forecasted strike on the Florida Panhandle. During the day, the predicted path of the storm changed to the west, hence that by the evening of Friday the mark location was heading towards New Orleans. This was beyond from the earliest time that New Orleans had been placed in the target zone, yet earlier hurricanes had swerved away from the area at the last minute or later on discovered to be merely a nuisance. However, this time was unusual (Brinkley 2006). Provided the classification 5 ranking of the hurricane, which implies that winds of higher than 155 miles per hour and a hurricane gush normally of at least 18 feet could be predicted, and the pushing currents directing it, an increasing sense of alarm befell on New Orleans that this hurricane Katrina could be the 'Big One' (Brinkley 2006, 17). New Orleans has all the reasons to dread the Big One. Majority of the city rests below sea level and is enclosed by hurricane-shield flood banks. The only vicinities above sea level within the city are positioned on the natural flood banks adjacent to the Mississippi River, on aged river distributaries, and on the coast of Lake Pontchartrain, a great deal of which is man-made land. In majority of these areas 'high ground' is described as anything situated above sea level. The rest of the city was constructed by sapping wetlands, burning forests and clearing land for further development, which result into massive soil erosion. Thunderstorms are a regular threat; "rainwater is removed from below-sea-level areas using 180 miles of canals, 22 pumping stations, and a water-removal capability of 30 billion gallons a day" (Travis 2005, 1657). It has traditionally been dreaded that the Big One would not merely go beyond pumping capacities but as well immobilize the pumps in general (Travis 2005). Indeed, the hurricane Katrina was the Big One. In the morning of August 29, hurricane gushes drove the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet up with such power and force that the mud flood banks of New Orleans overflowed and the solid walls adjacent to the Industrial Canal were infringed. Water surged into the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the sections of the eastern New Orleans, flooding numerous nearby vicinities with at least 10 feet of water. Later on of the same day, a storm surge coming from Lake Pontchartrain flip sided into drainage canals, discharging water that curved below-sea-level nearby vicinities into massive lakes. Any pumps that remained functional were devastated by the sheer size of the disaster. Roughly 80 percent of the urban area of New Orleans was inundated (Brinkley 2006, 20). In New Orleans the predicament of those individuals who have not evacuated turned out to be severe. Numerous of their houses were partly immersed. In a number of instances water went up to roof levels, forcing hopeless individuals who had ran away to their attics to hack passageways in roofs to escape. All over the storm-destructed region, the Coast Guard rescued more than 12,000 people by air and more than 11,000 people by boat, as a portion of the air fleet of the Coast Guard was positioned in the Gulf Coast. Places of safety of last resort were the University of New Orleans, the New Orleans Convention Center, and the Louisiana Superdome. From these refuges and other sites, people were later on transferred to evacuation centers in other states. Possibly 10,000 among the 455,000 residents of New Orleans stayed in the city subsequent to evacuation, including a number of reactionaries who declined to abandon their homes under any conditions (Brinkley 2006, 20-21). As of the middle of September some occupants of swamped vicinities were permitted to come back to their homes, though for no other justification than to check the damage. A great deal of the 'dewatering' of the city was already carried out, and the flood bank's breaks had been remedied. The spectacle that welcomed returnees was unreal: streets, pavements, trees, home turfs, cars, and houses were thickly covered with a pale brown-gray coating of dried mud, forming monochromatic scenery suggestive of the inhospitable surroundings which are remnants of the storm; a ghostly silence was present, intensified by the sounds of rebuilding machineries and the strange generator; water-stain markings on houses spotted the height of the flood and predicted what to anticipate on the inside; and roofs were mashed by felled trees. Once in the interior of flood-devastated houses, occupants were welcomed by properties and belongings that, in some instances, had been floating in water for several days. Mold can be found everywhere, on walls and ceilings exceeding the waterline (Groen & Polivka 2008). II. Hurricane Katrina: An Anticipated Disaster' People of New Orleans have been traditionally troubled with their environmental conditions, but not that much. In the metropolis which 'let the good times roll' and that 'care forgot' is an informal maxim, it is trouble-free to fall into a condition of complacency regarding environmental threats (Lewis 2003, 162). Possibly a component of fatalism is as well existent. Flood banks and pumping stations have been rebuilt to cater to these components. The city has been able to regain the natural forces thus far; being flooded at times but never sank. Why would the near future be dissimilar' In reality, the city, as the old saying goes, has been fortunate as much as it has been better. Prior to Katrina, several years had gone by from the time when a major hurricane visited New Orleans, and majority of the technology of the city had never confronted the crucial challenge. A student of New Orleans, Peirce Lewis, claimed what would turn out to be a prophetic warning: "A good many residents take a relaxed attitude toward environment hazards in general, assuming they have always been under control and, therefore, that they will remain under control. Such insouciance may be justified when it comes to threats of river flooding. It is emphatically not justified when it comes to the matte of hurricanes, and the murderous tidal surges that accompany them (Lewis 2003, 163). Even though warnings propagated about the serious environmental conditions of New Orleans, other assertions were immediate to specify that natural calamities are not entirely natural. Katrina was not an exceptional case. A particular amount of engineering pride dominated in New Orleans, encouraging complacency. Moreover, insufficient public policies from land utilization regulations to evacuation methods were ordained to convert a hurricane like Katrina into spilling chains of tragedies. As if to substantiate the irregularity of the Katrina calamity, and in an unusual quirk of fate, the U.S. Army Cops of Engineers made public on June 1, 2006 that the flood banks it had built were indeed substandard and tool liability for their shortcoming; June 1 was the beginning on the hurricane season of 2006. On the other hand, most professionals consent that undamaged flood banks would not have averted all of the flooding caused by Katrina (Groen & Polivka 2008, 34). III. The Geographical Trail of the 'New' New Orleans After the worst natural calamity in the history of New Orleans, it barely demands a leap of faith to suggest that the 'new' New Orleans will leave a geographical trail dissimilar from that of the previous New Orleans. Even though it is too premature to foresee with any extent if definitiveness the magnitude, shape and substance of this trail, several geographical concerns are particularly worth taking into account. The future trail of New Orleans lies on a large extent on who comes back from the exceptional New Orleans Diaspora. The evacuation populations are remarkable. Countless of other people migrated elsewhere. Almost one year following the storm, several of these people had yet to come back to New Orleans (Brinkley 2006). Most observers have the same opinion that New Orleans has people gone astray that may never come back. The Claritas Corporation, a company for marketing information resources, approximated in January 2006 a population for New Orleans and the City of New Orleans. Both approximations point to a loss of two-thirds from the population before the Katrina calamity. The information on the street indicates that the permanent population of the city may not surpass 250,000 people (French et al. 2008, 69). Numerous of the people include in the Diaspora and evidently affected by the tragedy were impoverished and minorities. They were among the countless originally abandoned, and then transported to out-of-town refuges. After Katrina a mass of media reports and scholarly journals were released on how the hurricane exposed the environmentally related economic and racial inequalities within New Orleans, inequalities with a long history (Brinkley 2006). New Orleans provides productive foundation for the investigation of social susceptibility issues related to threats and environmental discrimination. Even though much of the hurricane's face was indigent and African American, in the concluding analysis Katrina was no admirer of social class and race. Lakeview, one of the most devastated areas in New Orleans, is primarily occupied by Caucasians and belongs to the middle-to-high income group. New Orleans East, which a number of analysts claim should never be reconstructed, is a neighborhood populated by an increasing middle class African American. Meghan Stromberg remarked that Katrina's evident disrespect to regions of wealth and opportunity may work favorably for the rebuilding of the city (Groen & Polivka 2008, 33). Of primary issue is whether individuals with the technological and entrepreneurial talents required by a recovering city will come back. Unluckily, these talents are frequently in high demand in other place, thus people may be encouraged to remain in their adopted homes. The head of Greater New Orleans Inc, which is a public-private collaboration whose task is to organize the economic development programs in New Orleans, Mark Drennen, remarked that this opportunity is a massive concern. The longer business organizations postpone coming back to New Orleans, the more probable it is that they and their workers or employees will not return. On the more positive note, there is at all times the 'red-beans-and-rice effect' which is the heart and way of life of New Orleans that keeps the indigenous people returning, even in the reality of greener pasture somewhere else. Some analysts as well assume that they may be an incursion of risk takers who scout prospects in the reconstruction of New Orleans, providing the city a new push of people with industrial talents (Groen & Polivka 2008, 34). The lack of workers of all kinds is by now being felt. Approximations that the Gulf Coast at present lacks more than a hundred thousand construction and maintenance personnel have provoked the Business Roundtable, which is a Washington-based alliance of big-company CEOs, to formulate a preparation to recruit and train 20,000 newly hired construction workers for the area. Going with the exit of the city's impoverished people was its pool of minimum-wage employees. Fast-food and other convenience stores are particularly desperate for staff, to the point that one big hamburger outlet is offering an incentive of $500 a month to new hires; other outlets are promoting entry wage rates for surplus sales and hours. Technically skilled people such as electricians and plumbers are in excessively short supply, in part because numerous to them never came back after evacuating and in part as an outcome of the massive torrent in demand (French et al. 2008, 68). The most usual signage at business shops nowadays is 'Now Hiring.' In effect, prospective demography is fateful for New Orleans, not merely with respect to racial and cultural constitutions but as well as will respect to economic development. Its cultural make up will be formed by those who will decide to return and of those who will decide not to and by as yet unpredicted new occupants of the city. IV. Conclusions Hardly any analysts will reject that hurricane Katrina was a calamity of almost biblical proportions, generating a damaged landscape to which even the most daring headlines fell short to do justice. Thousands of people lost a great deal of the material things they possess and abandoned the city, producing a situation of mass homelessness seldom witnessed in the history of America. Businesses and schools declared closure, a number of them permanently. A large part of the city was covered by a coating of mud and its buddy irritant, mold. In the midst of the tragedy it is hard to envision that the 'new' New Orleans will look like, and even harder to consider a revival or rebirth. There is little uncertainty, nevertheless, that the 'new' New Orleans will inhabit an exceptional geographical trail, it already does. If contemporary situations present any sign of what the future has for the region, the communities on the southern part of Lake Pontchartrain will either experience a loss in population or remain in their current location, whereas the parishes in the northern part of the Lake Pontchartrain will grow more rapidly that was previously the case. From August 2005 onwards St. Tammy Parish has witnessed a level of progress that parish authorities were anticipating to take place over a decade. Part of this progress is because of the housing problem south of the lake, yet this growth may as well be a response to a developing inclination among occupants for high ground rather than high flood banks to shelter them from floods. It is too premature to forecast how the economic constitution of the urban area may be influenced, yet it is safe to predict that at least a number of the business organization will follow the people (Groen & Polivka 2008, 35). This new trail will not surface devoid of pressure and stress. By now, north-shore occupants are dealing with spatial disorientations in housing, social services, communication and transportation that make everyday living difficult. The enormity of the calamity and the lengthy rebuilding process will provide productive research prospects for geographers. The new trail of the New Orleans urban area will present controversial fields of investigation for planners and also for economic, metropolitan, social and cultural geographers. Following the same directions, demographists will desire to monitor the status of the massive New Orleans Diaspora. Of substantial concern to researchers will be the geography of wreckage and the environmental effect of vast cubic yards of rubble. Hurricane Katrina exposed the environmental hazards of New Orleans, social problems and policy inadequacy. Simultaneously, the city that everyone knew prior to the tragedy was not devastated and is gradually returning. A new normal life is surfacing, unluckily in a number of cases unmusically evocative of the previous normal life. One can hope that the next generation of brilliant minds will not be distressed once again on how people are able to endure in such a perverted and unusual metropolitan area. References Brinkley, Douglas. The Great Deluge: Hurrican Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Lousiana: William Morrow, 2006. French, P. Edward et al. "Two Years Later: Hurricane Katrina Still Poses Significant Human Resource Problems for Local Governments." Public Personnel Management (2008): 67+. Groen, Jeffrey A. & Polivka, Anne E. "Hurrican Katrina Evacuees: Who They Are, Where they Are and How they are Faring." Monthly Labor (2008): 32+. Lewis, P.F. New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. Santa Fe, N.Mex: Center for American Places, 2003. Luettich, R.A. & Westerlink, J.J. "The Creeping Storm." Civil Engineering Magazine (2005). Travis, John. "Scientists' Fears Come True as Hurricane Floods New Orleans." Science Mag 309 (2005): 1656-1659. Read More