Washington, DC – Twenty years ago, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall, almost 1,500 people died from the floodwalls protecting the city of New Orleans.
On August 29, 2005, scenes of desperation were broadcast worldwide, particularly in the heavily populated and predominantly Black Ninth Ward of the city’s southern United States city.
The storm, which targeted the Gulf states and claimed the lives of more than 1,800 people overall, was the third-tragic hurricane to hit the US mainland since 1900. It quickly surpassed the Great Plains exodus from the Dust Bowl in 1930 as a mass displacement event.
In its wake, Katrina’s generational destruction exposed the pervasive racial and economic inequality, prompting a passionate, if incomplete, debate over local laws and national obligations to the most vulnerable communities both before and after extreme weather events.
Many experts in the field of emergency disasters are still haunted by the storm two decades later, a spectre that has grown larger as more people worry that US President Donald Trump’s administration may be making the same mistakes as it weighs down federal resources.
Katriana, according to director Alessandra Jerolleman of Loyola University of New Orleans, disproved the notion that Americans would always be protected in times of crisis, exposing the fragility of the systems intended to protect them.
According to Jerolleman, “Katrina exposed the idea that people could be stuck in American cities, people could be stranded without basic resources, and the federal government could be too slow and largely unable to get people out,” Jerolleman said.
When the hurricane struck, the Center on Environment, Land, and Law’s head of research said the revelation was “very shocking” for many at the time.
She said that “many things that went wrong really increased the misery that people felt.”
Source: Aljazeera
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