Bibliography > Featured > Hurricane Katrina

While commentators across the political spectrum, celebrities, and other observers expressed outrage that the US government would let this happen to Americans-even "those Americans"-millions outside of New Orleans live without adequate health insurance; clean air and water; decent education, housing, nutrition, health care, and work; and freedom from police brutality and state repression. And thousands are deported, displaced, and dying in prisons and illegal wars from coast to coast, gulf to gulf.

Short and accessible, this anthology, featuring such voices as Vandana Shiva, Glen Ford, Jordan Flaherty, and Robert Bullard, takes readers beyond the Superdome. It explores the complexity of this turning point in US history as representative of the nation's direction and priorities.

The events of Hurricane Katrina have been seared into our collective consciousness, revealing a glaring discrepancy between the experiences of privileged whites and those of low-income blacks. The latter faced a scale of physical danger and mental trauma that the former largely escaped. While residents with resources evacuated in cars, poor residents were left to fend for themselves -- without food, water, medicine, shelter, or safety. Many poor African Americans died; many more lost loved ones and all of their material belongings. Natural Disasters and Public Health analyzes the public health effects of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma on minorities in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast.

The contributors assess the overall health policy and public health implications of these three natural disasters. While most of the current literature on disaster relief focuses on FEMA, race, urban planning, and the environment, Natural Disasters and Public Health takes a broader perspective, advocating the inclusion of comprehensive public health policy in future disaster relief programs.

Unflinching photographs -- many from the Astrodome in Houston after the evacuation of New Orleans and including the triage clinic set up there by the Baylor School of Medicine -- illustrate the poor conditions under which health care professionals and aid workers ministered to the sick and injured. Reports from the field by disaster relief professionals and research articles by scholars present lessons learned and offer tools and guidance for future planning.

This volume is a valuable resource for public policymakers, health care agencies, providers who plan for large-scale emergencies, academics teaching disaster relief courses, and professionals working in this field.

The events of Hurricane Katrina have been seared into our collective consciousness, revealing a glaring discrepancy between the experiences of privileged whites and those of low-income blacks. The latter faced a scale of physical danger and mental trauma that the former largely escaped. While residents with resources evacuated in cars, poor residents were left to fend for themselves -- without food, water, medicine, shelter, or safety. Many poor African Americans died; many more lost loved ones and all of their material belongings. Natural Disasters and Public Health analyzes the public health effects of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma on minorities in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast.

The contributors assess the overall health policy and public health implications of these three natural disasters. While most of the current literature on disaster relief focuses on FEMA, race, urban planning, and the environment, Natural Disasters and Public Health takes a broader perspective, advocating the inclusion of comprehensive public health policy in future disaster relief programs.

Unflinching photographs -- many from the Astrodome in Houston after the evacuation of New Orleans and including the triage clinic set up there by the Baylor School of Medicine -- illustrate the poor conditions under which health care professionals and aid workers ministered to the sick and injured. Reports from the field by disaster relief professionals and research articles by scholars present lessons learned and offer tools and guidance for future planning.

This volume is a valuable resource for public policymakers, health care agencies, providers who plan for large-scale emergencies, academics teaching disaster relief courses, and professionals working in this field.

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. Yet those wind-torn hours represented only the first stage of the relentless triple tragedy that Katrina brought to the entire Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama.

First was the hurricane, one of the three strongest ever to make landfall in the United States--150 mile per hour winds, with gusts measuring more than 180 miles per hour ripping buildings to pieces.

Second, the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half million homes, creating the largest refugee crisis since the Civil War. Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water, as debris and sewage coursed through the streets, and whole towns in southeastern Louisiana ceased to exist.

And third, the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, implemented an evacuation plan that favored the rich and healthy. Kathleen Blanco, governor of Louisiana, tended to details but dithered in the most important aspect of her job: providing leadership in a time of fear and confusion. Michael C. Brown, the FEMA director, seemed more concerned with his sartorial splendor than the specter of death and horror that was taking New Orleans into its grip.

In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans resident and professor of history at Tulane University, rips the story of Katrina apart and relates what the category 3 hurricane was like from every point of view. The book finds the true heroes--such as Coast Guard officer Jimmy Duckworth, who oversaw the quick-thinking, lifesaving rescue efforts during the crucial first days of the crisis. And Tony Zumbado, the hurricane jock, who, in his role as an NBC videographer, first broke the stories of the anarchy at the convention center and the deaths at Memorial Hospital.

Throughout the book, Brinkley lets the Katrina survivors tell their own stories, masterfully allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina. The Great Deluge investigates the failure of government at each level and breaks important new stories. Packed with interviews and original research, it traces the character flaws, inexperience, and ulterior motives that allowed the Katrina disaster to devestate the Gulf Coast.

Hurricane Katrina not only devastated a large area of the nation's Gulf coast, it also raised fundamental questions about ways the nation can, and should, deal with the inevitable problems of economic risk and social responsibility. This volume gathers leading experts to examine lessons that Hurricane Katrina teaches us about better assessing, perceiving, and managing risks from future disasters.

In the years ahead we will inevitably face more problems like those caused by Katrina, from fire, earthquake, or even a flu pandemic. America remains in the cross hairs of terrorists, while policy makers continue to grapple with important environmental and health risks. Each of these scenarios might, in itself, be relatively unlikely to occur. But it is statistically certain that we will confront such catastrophes, or perhaps one we have never imagined, and the nation and its citizenry must be prepared to act. That is the fundamental lesson of Katrina.

The 20 contributors to this volume address questions of public and private roles in assessing, managing, and dealing with risk in American society and suggest strategies for moving ahead in rebuilding the Gulf coast.

Several themes predominate here. One, of course, is the appalling performance of authorities on nearly every level, who ignored specific warnings about the levees and then professed ignorance after the fact; Lee doesn't have to go out of his way to make George W. Bush, FEMA chief Michael Brown, and other members of the Bush administration (not to mention his own mother) look bad, as they do an excellent job of that themselves. Another is the shameful ineptitude of the response; it's hard not to be disgusted when it's pointed out more than once that while we were able to provide supplies and assistance to Indonesians within two days of the 2004 tsunami, American citizens were virtually ignored for five days or more. Most of all, When the Levees Broke (which includes optional commentary by Lee for all four acts) leaves us feeling the sheer rage of the poor and dispossessed of New Orleans, where the population is 70 percent African-American. Confronted with the ignorance, arrogance, and callousness of the people whose job it was to protect them, they can point to just one cause: racism. --Sam Graham

Hurricane Katrina: The Storm that Drowned a City presents astonishing storm footage, suspenseful eyewitness testimony, and a penetrating analysis of what went wrong. Viewers relive the storm through the eyes of survivors and the stories of top engineers, hurricane experts, and emergency officials as they grappled with the arrival of the storm and its traumatic aftermath.

Now, in The Storm, van Heerden shares up-to-the-minute reporting from his investigations and connects the dots among the Army Corps of Engineers, the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the chain of events - both natural and human - that culminated in catastrophe. An epic of cutting- edge science and systemic bureaucratic failure, The Storm is the first book from a major player in the Katrina disaster and a riveting narrative that brings expertise, passion, and a human viewpoint to America’s greatest natural disaster.