How Hurricane Katrina Affected the People of New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina was the storm that wiped New Orleans off the map in 2005. hurricane Katrina starts off as a tropical depression on Tuesday, August 23rd. katrina made two landfalls the first one was on the southeast Florida coast on August 25th as a Category 1 hurricane with 80mph winds and soon after the storm passes over Florida it moved into the Gulf of Mexico where it became a category five. the second landfall was Monday, August 29, 2005, at 6:10 AM CDT. The aftermath of this hurricane was a disaster for the city's residents. The storm had been a major turning point in the history of New Orleans and the surrounding area because from this day we would have to rebuild everything.

The hurricane killed 1,836 in Southeast Louisiana and Mississippi (mostly in New Orleans) and South Florida. This death toll was caused because of the failed plans to evacuate the city. The state of had to move nearly 1.5 million people before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. for example for the people that couldn't get out the city, there was a plan to bring them to Texas via buses but the buses were left on the ground level and flooded. A significant part of the city, most of which sits below sea level, was drowned. Damages reached the US $ 81.5 billion, making Katrina the costliest tropical cyclone ever recorded in the U.S. Rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina was one of the most and extraordinary tragedies which shook apart of New Orleans in the United States of America.

The catastrophe left dozens of people dead, rendering thousands of them homeless. The public was weakened after the extreme hurricane because billions of dollars were recorded entirely as losses made that there was not enough money for fixing all those damages. Hurricane Katrina had a significant impact on public health causing elderly people to death because they lost their medicines and people getting sick from unsanitary conditions. Now 13 years after the horrible disaster New Orleans is just now getting back to normal. More than half of the city's neighborhoods and some small businesses are returning and reaching their pre-storm population levels. One of the most important places that have not returned to the city is jazz land or six flags, it was known as the place to go on the weekends. The place that needs the most help would have to be the infamous Lower Ninth Ward. In the years following Katrina, only about 37 percent of households have returned home to the Ninth.

Black residents who wanted to rebuild simply couldn't afford to as federal aid was allocated based on home values rather than the cost of construction. This is why the major of the houses in the ninth are abandon because their owners either never returned or couldn't afford to rebuild so they moved. Till this day the Ninth Ward has not recovered from the hurricane. Hurricane Katrina was one of the biggest natural disasters ever recorded. With fierce winds and high water levels, Katrina struck the city of New Orleans with great force on Monday, Aug 29th, 2005. The water rose so high that it left about 80% of New Orleans underwater. The unfortunate part of this whole situation is how ill-prepared New Orleans was for this disaster.

Work cited

Medlin, Jeffrey, et al. Hurricane Katrina - August 2005. Edited by Morgan Barry et al., National Weather Service, NOAA's National Weather Service, 29 Nov. 2016, www.weather.gov/mob/katrina.

Institute of Medicine (US) Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine. Hurricane Katrina: Challenges for the Community. Environmental Public Health Impacts of Disasters: Hurricane Katrina: Workshop Summary., U.S. National Library of Medicine, 1 Jan. 1970, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK54237/.

ROSENBERG, JOYCE M. After a Katrina or Harvey, Businesses Suffer Long after Water Recedes - Many Never Recover. The Advocate, The New Orleans Advocate, 6 Sept. 2017, 2:22 pm, www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/business/article_a8a1286a-9338-11e7-bb27-03254e58e552.html.

The University of Rhode Island. Katrina Impacts. Hurricanes: Science and Society: Home, The National Science Foundation, 2010, www.hurricanescience.org/history/studies/katrinacase/impacts/.

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