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Hurricane Katrina Case Study

Hurricane Katrina is tied with Hurricane Harvey (2017) as the costliest hurricane on record. Although not the strongest in recorded history, the hurricane caused an estimated $125 billion worth of damage. The category five hurricane is the joint eight strongest ever recorded, with sustained winds of 175 mph (280 km/h).

The hurricane began as a very low-pressure system over the Atlantic Ocean. The system strengthened, forming a hurricane that moved west, approaching the Florida coast on the evening of the 25th August 2005.

A satellite image of Hurricane Katrina.

Hurricane Katrina was an extremely destructive and deadly Category 5 hurricane. It made landfall on Florida and Louisiana, particularly the city of New Orleans and surrounding areas, in August 2005, causing catastrophic damage from central Florida to eastern Texas. Fatal flaws in flood engineering protection led to a significant loss of life in New Orleans. The levees, designed to cope with category three storm surges, failed to lead to catastrophic flooding and loss of life.

What were the impacts of Hurricane Katrina?

Hurricane Katrina was a category five tropical storm. The hurricane caused storm surges over six metres in height. The city of New Orleans was one of the worst affected areas. This is because it lies below sea level and is protected by levees. The levees protect the city from the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain. However, these were unable to cope with the storm surge, and water flooded the city.

$105 billion was sought by The Bush Administration for repairs and reconstruction in the region. This funding did not include potential interruption of the oil supply, destruction of the Gulf Coast’s highway infrastructure, and exports of commodities such as grain.

Although the state made an evacuation order, many of the poorest people remained in New Orleans because they either wanted to protect their property or could not afford to leave.

The Superdome stadium was set up as a centre for people who could not escape the storm. There was a shortage of food, and the conditions were unhygienic.

Looting occurred throughout the city, and tensions were high as people felt unsafe. 1,200 people drowned in the floods, and 1 million people were made homeless. Oil facilities were damaged, and as a result, the price of petrol rose in the UK and USA.

80% of the city of New Orleans and large neighbouring parishes became flooded, and the floodwaters remained for weeks. Most of the transportation and communication networks servicing New Orleans were damaged or disabled by the flooding, and tens of thousands of people who had not evacuated the city before landfall became stranded with little access to food, shelter or basic necessities.

The storm surge caused substantial beach erosion , in some cases completely devastating coastal areas.

Katrina also produced massive tree loss along the Gulf Coast, particularly in Louisiana’s Pearl River Basin and among bottomland hardwood forests.

The storm caused oil spills from 44 facilities throughout southeastern Louisiana. This resulted in over 7 million US gallons (26,000 m 3 ) of oil being leaked. Some spills were only a few hundred gallons, and most were contained on-site, though some oil entered the ecosystem and residential areas.

Some New Orleans residents are no longer able to get home insurance to cover them from the impact of hurricanes.

What was the response to Hurricane Katrina?

The US Government was heavily criticised for its handling of the disaster. Despite many people being evacuated, it was a very slow process. The poorest and most vulnerable were left behind.

The government provided $50 billion in aid.

During the early stages of the recovery process, the UK government sent food aid.

The National Guard was mobilised to restore law and order in New Orleans.

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Tropical Storms Case Study: Katrina

The effects of hurricane katrina.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the US states of Mississippi and Louisiana. It was the 3rd deadliest hurricane in American history. New Orleans' flood defenses (levees) broke because they were badly designed, flooding the city.

Primary effects

• 1,836 people are thought to have died.
• 154,522 houses were destroyed between 2005 and 2006.
• The electricity supplies for over 3 million people were cut off. Many people sheltered at the Superdome stadium in New Orleans.
• 80% of New Orleans was flooded with some parts 4.5 metres underwater.
• Coastal habitats were damaged and bridges & infrastructure collapsed.

Secondary effects

• The population of New Orleans fell from 1.386 million to 1.04 million between 2005 and 2006. In 2014, the population was 1.25 million.
• 2,400 businesses in New Orleans closed down or went bankrupt between 2005 and 2006.
• Hundreds of thousands became homeless and sewers overflowed and entered water supplies.
• The estimated total amount of damage was around $125 billion.

The Responses to Hurricane Katrina

The severe effects of Hurricane Katrina were met with both immediate and long-term responses.

Immediate responses

• 1.7 million people were evacuated from the states of Mississippi and Louisiana before the storm struck.
• 20-30% of inhabitants were forced to stay in New Orleans and most of these people were the poorest who could not afford to evacuate.
• Louisiana's National Guard asked for more than 700 buses to evacuate people, however, only 100 buses were sent. States of emergency were declared in Mississippi and Louisiana.
• More than 35,000 people were rescued by the coastguard in New Orleans.
• Charities provided food, water, and aid to those affected.

Long-term responses

• The waters that flooded New Orleans were pumped into Lake Pontchartrain. This took over a month.
• The US Congress (government) allocated $62bn to be spent in aid helping feed and re-house the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
• The US federal and state governments have spent $20 billion rebuilding New Orleans' flood defence systems, with levees, gates, pumps and floodwalls.

1 The Challenge of Natural Hazards

1.1 Natural Hazards

1.1.1 Types of Natural Hazards

1.1.2 Hazard Risk

1.1.3 Consequences of Natural Hazards

1.1.4 End of Topic Test - Natural Hazards

1.1.5 Exam-Style Questions - Natural Hazards

1.2 Tectonic Hazards

1.2.1 Tectonic Plates

1.2.2 Tectonic Plates & Convection Currents

1.2.3 Plate Margins

1.2.4 Volcanoes

1.2.5 Effects of Volcanoes

1.2.6 Responses to Volcanic Eruptions

1.2.7 Earthquakes

1.2.8 Earthquakes 2

1.2.9 Responses to Earthquakes

1.2.10 Case Studies: The L'Aquila & Kashmir Earthquakes

1.2.11 Earthquake Case Study: Chile 2010

1.2.12 Earthquake Case Study: Nepal 2015

1.2.13 Living with Tectonic Hazards 1

1.2.14 Living with Tectonic Hazards 2

1.2.15 End of Topic Test - Tectonic Hazards

1.2.16 Exam-Style Questions - Tectonic Hazards

1.2.17 Tectonic Hazards - Statistical Skills

1.3 Weather Hazards

1.3.1 Global Atmospheric Circulation

1.3.2 Surface Winds

1.3.3 UK Weather Hazards

1.3.4 Tropical Storms

1.3.5 Features of Tropical Storms

1.3.6 Impact of Tropical Storms 1

1.3.7 Impact of Tropical Storms 2

1.3.8 Tropical Storms Case Study: Katrina

1.3.9 Tropical Storms Case Study: Haiyan

1.3.10 UK Weather Hazards Case Study: Somerset 2014

1.3.11 End of Topic Test - Weather Hazards

1.3.12 Exam-Style Questions - Weather Hazards

1.3.13 Weather Hazards - Statistical Skills

1.4 Climate Change

1.4.1 Evidence for Climate Change

1.4.2 Causes of Climate Change

1.4.3 Effects of Climate Change

1.4.4 Managing Climate Change

1.4.5 End of Topic Test - Climate Change

1.4.6 Exam-Style Questions - Climate Change

1.4.7 Climate Change - Statistical Skills

2 The Living World

2.1 Ecosystems

2.1.1 Ecosystems

2.1.2 Ecosystem Cascades & Global Ecosystems

2.1.3 Ecosystem Case Study: Freshwater Ponds

2.2 Tropical Rainforests

2.2.1 Tropical Rainforests - Intro & Interdependence

2.2.2 Adaptations

2.2.3 Biodiversity of Tropical Rainforests

2.2.4 Deforestation

2.2.5 Case Study: Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest

2.2.6 Sustainable Management of Rainforests

2.2.7 Case Study: Malaysian Rainforest

2.2.8 End of Topic Test - Tropical Rainforests

2.2.9 Exam-Style Questions - Tropical Rainforests

2.2.10 Deforestation - Statistical Skills

2.3 Hot Deserts

2.3.1 Overview of Hot Deserts

2.3.2 Biodiversity & Adaptation to Hot Deserts

2.3.3 Case Study: Sahara Desert

2.3.4 Desertification

2.3.5 Case Study: Thar Desert

2.3.6 End of Topic Test - Hot Deserts

2.3.7 Exam-Style Questions - Hot Deserts

2.4 Tundra & Polar Environments

2.4.1 Overview of Cold Environments

2.4.2 Adaptations in Cold Environments

2.4.3 Biodiversity in Cold Environments

2.4.4 Case Study: Alaska

2.4.5 Sustainable Management

2.4.6 Case Study: Svalbard

2.4.7 End of Topic Test - Tundra & Polar Environments

2.4.8 Exam-Style Questions - Cold Environments

3 Physical Landscapes in the UK

3.1 The UK Physical Landscape

3.1.1 The UK Physical Landscape

3.2 Coastal Landscapes in the UK

3.2.1 Types of Wave

3.2.2 Weathering & Mass Movement

3.2.3 Processes of Erosion & Wave-Cut Platforms

3.2.4 Headlands, Bays, Caves, Arches & Stacks

3.2.5 Transportation

3.2.6 Deposition

3.2.7 Spits, Bars & Sand Dunes

3.2.8 Case Study: Landforms on the Dorset Coast

3.2.9 Types of Coastal Management 1

3.2.10 Types of Coastal Management 2

3.2.11 Coastal Management Case Study - Holderness

3.2.12 Coastal Management Case Study: Swanage

3.2.13 Coastal Management Case Study - Lyme Regis

3.2.14 End of Topic Test - Coastal Landscapes in the UK

3.2.15 Exam-Style Questions - Coasts

3.3 River Landscapes in the UK

3.3.1 The River Valley

3.3.2 River Valley Case Study - River Tees

3.3.3 Erosion

3.3.4 Transportation & Deposition

3.3.5 Waterfalls, Gorges & Interlocking Spurs

3.3.6 Meanders & Oxbow Lakes

3.3.7 Floodplains & Levees

3.3.8 Estuaries

3.3.9 Case Study: The River Clyde

3.3.10 River Management

3.3.11 Hard & Soft Flood Defences

3.3.12 River Management Case Study - Boscastle

3.3.13 River Management Case Study - Banbury

3.3.14 End of Topic Test - River Landscapes in the UK

3.3.15 Exam-Style Questions - Rivers

3.4 Glacial Landscapes in the UK

3.4.1 Erosion

3.4.2 Landforms Caused by Erosion

3.4.3 Landforms Caused by Transportation & Deposition

3.4.4 Snowdonia

3.4.5 Land Use in Glaciated Areas

3.4.6 Tourism in Glacial Landscapes

3.4.7 Case Study - Lake District

3.4.8 End of Topic Test - Glacial Landscapes in the UK

3.4.9 Exam-Style Questions - Glacial Landscapes

4 Urban Issues & Challenges

4.1 Urban Issues & Challenges

4.1.1 Urbanisation

4.1.2 Urbanisation Case Study: Lagos

4.1.3 Urbanisation Case Study: Rio de Janeiro

4.1.4 UK Cities

4.1.5 Case Study: Urban Regen Projects - Manchester

4.1.6 Case Study: Urban Change in Liverpool

4.1.7 Case Study: Urban Change in Bristol

4.1.8 Sustainable Urban Life

4.1.9 End of Topic Test - Urban Issues & Challenges

4.1.10 Exam-Style Questions - Urban Issues & Challenges

4.1.11 Urban Issues -Statistical Skills

5 The Changing Economic World

5.1 The Changing Economic World

5.1.1 Measuring Development

5.1.2 Classifying Countries Based on Wealth

5.1.3 The Demographic Transition Model

5.1.4 Physical & Historical Causes of Uneven Development

5.1.5 Economic Causes of Uneven Development

5.1.6 How Can We Reduce the Global Development Gap?

5.1.7 Case Study: Tourism in Kenya

5.1.8 Case Study: Tourism in Jamaica

5.1.9 Case Study: Economic Development in India

5.1.10 Case Study: Aid & Development in India

5.1.11 Case Study: Economic Development in Nigeria

5.1.12 Case Study: Aid & Development in Nigeria

5.1.13 Economic Development in the UK

5.1.14 Economic Development UK: Industry & Rural

5.1.15 Economic Development UK: Transport & North-South

5.1.16 Economic Development UK: Regional & Global

5.1.17 End of Topic Test - The Changing Economic World

5.1.18 Exam-Style Questions - The Changing Economic World

5.1.19 Changing Economic World - Statistical Skills

6 The Challenge of Resource Management

6.1 Resource Management

6.1.1 Global Distribution of Resources

6.1.2 Food in the UK

6.1.3 Water in the UK 1

6.1.4 Water in the UK 2

6.1.5 Energy in the UK

6.1.6 Resource Management - Statistical Skills

6.2.1 Areas of Food Surplus & Food Deficit

6.2.2 Food Supply & Food Insecurity

6.2.3 Increasing Food Supply

6.2.4 Case Study: Thanet Earth

6.2.5 Creating a Sustainable Food Supply

6.2.6 Case Study: Agroforestry in Mali

6.2.7 End of Topic Test - Food

6.2.8 Exam-Style Questions - Food

6.2.9 Food - Statistical Skills

6.3.1 The Global Demand for Water

6.3.2 What Affects the Availability of Water?

6.3.3 Increasing Water Supplies

6.3.4 Case Study: Water Transfer in China

6.3.5 Sustainable Water Supply

6.3.6 Case Study: Kenya's Sand Dams

6.3.7 Case Study: Lesotho Highland Water Project

6.3.8 Case Study: Wakel River Basin Project

6.3.9 Exam-Style Questions - Water

6.3.10 Water - Statistical Skills

6.4.1 Global Demand for Energy

6.4.2 Factors Affecting Energy Supply

6.4.3 Increasing Energy Supply: Renewables

6.4.4 Increasing Energy Supply: Non-Renewables

6.4.5 Carbon Footprints & Energy Conservation

6.4.6 Case Study: Rice Husks in Bihar

6.4.7 Exam-Style Questions - Energy

6.4.8 Energy - Statistical Skills

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Impact of Tropical Storms 2

Tropical Storms Case Study: Haiyan

Case Study – Hurricane Katrina

At least 1,500 people were killed and around $300 billion worth of damage was caused when Hurricane Katrina hit the south-eastern part of the USA. Arriving in late August 2005 with winds of up to 127 mph, the storm caused widespread flooding. 

Physical impacts of Hurricane Katrina

Flooding Hurricanes can cause the sea level around them to rise, this effect is called a storm surge. This is often the most dangerous characteristic of a hurricane, and causes the most hurricane-related deaths. It is especially dangerous in low-lying areas close to the coast.

There is more about hurricanes in the weather section of the Met Office website https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/weather/tropical-cyclones/facts

Hurricane Katrina tracked over the Gulf of Mexico and hit New Orleans, a coastal city with huge areas below sea-level which were protected by defence walls, called levees. The hurricane’s storm surge, combined with huge waves generated by the wind, pushed up water levels around the city.

The levees were overwhelmed by the extra water, with many collapsing completely. This allowed water to flood into New Orleans, and up to 80% of the city was flooded to depths of up to six metres.

Hurricane Katrina also produced a lot of rainfall, which also contributed to the flooding.

In pictures

Strong winds The strongest winds during 25-30 August were over the coastal areas of Louisiana and Florida. A map of the maximum wind speeds which were recorded during the Hurricane Katrina episode is shown. Although the winds did not directly kill many people, it did produce a storm surge over the ocean which led to flooding in coastal areas and was responsible for many deaths.

Satellite Image

Illustration

Tornadoes Hurricanes can create tornadoes. Thirty-three tornadoes were produced by Hurricane Katrina over a five-day period, although only one person died due to a tornado which affected Georgia.

Impact on humans

• 1,500 deaths in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida.
• Costs of about $300 billion.
• Thousands of homes and businesses destroyed.
• Criminal gangs roamed the streets, looting homes and businesses and committing other crimes.
• Thousands of jobs lost and millions of dollars in lost tax incomes.
• Agricultural production was damaged by tornadoes and flooding. Cotton and sugar-cane crops were flattened.
• Three million people were left without electricity for over a week.
• Tourism centres were badly affected.
• A significant part of the USA oil refining capacity was disrupted after the storm due to flooded refineries and broken pipelines, and several oil rigs in the Gulf were damaged.
• Major highways were disrupted and some major road bridges were destroyed.
• Many people have moved to live in other parts of the USA and many may never return to their original homes.

The broken levees were repaired by engineers and the flood water in the streets of New Orleans took several months to drain away. The broken levees and consequent flooding were largely responsible for most of the deaths in New Orleans. One of the first challenges in the aftermath of the flooding was to repair the broken levees. Vast quantities of materials, such as sandbags, were airlifted in by the army and air force and the levees were eventually repaired and strengthened.

Although the USA is one of the wealthiest developed countries in the world, it highlighted that when a disaster is large enough, even very developed countries struggle to cope.

Weather Map

Web page reproduced with the kind permission of  the Met Office

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Adding to the destruction following Hurricane Katrina, fires burn in parts of New Orleans in an apocalyptic scene from early on September 3, 2005. The storm struck the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Aug. 29, 2005, pummeling a region that included New Orleans and neighboring Mississippi.

• ENVIRONMENT

Hurricane Katrina, explained

Hurricane Katrina was the costliest storm in U.S. history, and its effects are still felt today in New Orleans and coastal Louisiana.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall off the coast of Louisiana on August 29, 2005. It hit land as a Category 3 storm with winds reaching speeds as high as 120 miles per hour . Because of the ensuing destruction and loss of life, the storm is often considered one of the worst in U.S. history. An estimated 1,200 people died as a direct result of the storm, which also cost an estimated $108 billion in property damage , making it the costliest storm on record.

The devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed a series of deep-rooted problems, including controversies over the federal government's response , difficulties in search-and-rescue efforts, and lack of preparedness for the storm, particularly with regard to the city's aging series of levees—50 of which failed during the storm, significantly flooding the low-lying city and causing much of the damage. Katrina's victims tended to be low income and African American in disproportionate numbers , and many of those who lost their homes faced years of hardship.

Ten years after the disaster, then-President Barack Obama said of Katrina , "What started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster—a failure of government to look out for its own citizens."

( What are hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons ?)

The city of New Orleans and other coastal communities in Katrina's path remain significantly altered more than a decade after the storm, both physically and culturally. The damage was so extensive that some pundits had argued, controversially, that New Orleans should be permanently abandoned , even as the city vowed to rebuild.

The population of New Orleans fell by more than half in the year after Katrina, according to Data Center Research . As of this writing, the population had grown back to nearly 80 percent of where it was before the hurricane.

For Hungry Minds

Timeline of a storm.

Katrina first formed as a tropical depression in Caribbean waters near the Bahamas on August 23, 2005. It officially reached hurricane status two days later, when it passed over southeastern Miami as a Category 1 storm. The tempest blew through Miami at 80 miles per hour, where it uprooted trees and killed two people. Katrina then weakened to a tropical storm, since hurricanes require warm ocean water to sustain speed and strength and begin to weaken over land. However, the storm then crossed back into the Gulf of Mexico, where it quickly regained strength and hurricane status. ( Read a detailed timeline of how the storm developed .)

On August 27, the storm grew to a Category 3 hurricane. At its largest, Katrina was so wide its diameter stretched across the Gulf of Mexico.

Before the storm hit land, a mandatory evacuation was issued for the city of New Orleans, which had a population of more than 480,000 at the time. Tens of thousands of residents fled. But many stayed, particularly among the city's poorest residents and those who were elderly or lacked access to transportation. Many sheltered in their homes or made their way to the Superdome, the city's large sports arena, where conditions would soon deteriorate into hardship and chaos .

Katrina passed over the Gulf Coast early on the morning of August 29. Officials initially believed New Orleans was spared as most of the storm's worst initial impacts battered the coast toward the east, near Biloxi, Mississippi, where winds were the strongest and damage was extensive. But later that morning, a levee broke in New Orleans, and a surge of floodwater began pouring into the low-lying city. The waters would soon overwhelm additional levees.

The following day, Katrina weakened to a tropical storm, but severe flooding inhibited relief efforts in much of New Orleans. An estimated 80 percent of the city was soon underwater. By September 2, four days later, the city and surrounding areas were in full-on crisis mode, with many people and companion animals still stranded, and infrastructure and services collapsing. Congress issued $10 billion for disaster relief aid while much of the world began criticizing the U.S. government's response .

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Geography of new orleans.

The city of New Orleans was at a disadvantage even before Hurricane Katrina hit, something experts had warned about for years , but it had limited success in changing policy. The region sits in a natural basin, and some of the city is below sea level so is particularly prone to flooding. Low-income communities tend to be in the lowest-lying areas.

Just south of the city, the powerful Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico. During intense hurricanes, oncoming storms can push seawater onto land, creating what is known as a storm surge . Those forces typically cause the most hurricane-related fatalities. As Hurricane Katrina hit, New Orleans and surrounding parishes saw record storm surges as high as 19 feet.

Katrina, Then and Now

Levees can be natural or manufactured. They are essentially walls that prevent waterways from overflowing and flooding nearby areas. New Orleans has been protected by levees since the French began inhabiting the region in the 17th century, but modern levees were authorized for construction in 1965 after Hurricane Betsy flooded much of the city . The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers then built a complex system of 350 miles of levees. Yet a report by the

Corps released in 2006 concluded that insufficient funding, information, and poor construction had left the flood system vulnerable to failure.

Even before Katrina made landfall off the Gulf, the incoming storm surge had started to overwhelm the levees, spilling into residential areas. More than 50 levees would eventually fail before the storm subsided. While the winds of the storm itself caused major damage in the city of New Orleans, such as downed trees and buildings, studies conducted in the years since concluded that failed levees accounted for the worst impacts and most deaths.

The aftermath

An assessment from the state of Louisiana confirmed that just under half of the 1,200 deaths resulted from chronic disease exacerbated by the storm, and a third of the deaths were from drowning. Hurricane death tolls are debated, and for Katrina, counts can vary by as much as 600. Collected bodies must be examined for cause of death, and some argue that indirect hurricane deaths, like being unable to access medical care, should be counted in official numbers.

Hurricane Katrina was the costliest in U.S. history and left widespread economic impacts. Oil and gas industry operations were crippled after the storm and coastal communities that rely on tourism suffered from both loss of infrastructure and business and coastal erosion.

An estimated 400,000 people were permanently displaced by the storm. Demographic shifts followed in the wake of the hurricane. The lowest-income residents often found it more difficult to return. Some neighborhoods now have fewer residents under 18 as some families chose to permanently resettle in cities like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta. The city is also now more racially diverse, with higher numbers of Latino and Asian residents, while a disproportionate number of African-Americans found it too difficult to return.

Rebuilding part of New Orleans's hurricane defenses cost $14.6 billion and was completed in 2018. More flood systems are pending construction, meaning the city is still at risk from another large storm. A series of flood walls, levees, and flood gates buttress the coast and banks of the Mississippi River.

Simulations modeled in the years after Katrina suggest that the storm may have been made worse by rising sea levels and warming temperatures . Scientists are concerned that hurricanes the size of Katrina will become more likely as the climate warms. Studies are increasingly showing that climate change makes hurricanes capable of carrying more moisture . At the same time, hurricanes are moving more slowly, spending more time deluging areas unprepared for major flooding.

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Hurricane Katrina

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 28, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Early in the morning on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States. When the storm made landfall, it had a Category 3 rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale–it brought sustained winds of 100–140 miles per hour–and stretched some 400 miles across. 

While the storm itself did a great deal of damage, its aftermath was catastrophic. Levee breaches led to massive flooding, and many people charged that the federal government was slow to meet the needs of the people affected by the storm. Hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama were displaced from their homes, and experts estimate that Katrina caused more than $100 billion in damage.

Hurricane Katrina: Before the Storm

The tropical depression that became Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005, and meteorologists were soon able to warn people in the Gulf Coast states that a major storm was on its way. By August 28, evacuations were underway across the region. That day, the National Weather Service predicted that after the storm hit, “most of the [Gulf Coast] area will be uninhabitable for weeks…perhaps longer.”

Did you know? During the past century, hurricanes have flooded New Orleans six times: in 1915, 1940, 1947, 1965, 1969 and 2005.

New Orleans was at particular risk. Though about half the city actually lies above sea level, its average elevation is about six feet below sea level–and it is completely surrounded by water. Over the course of the 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers had built a system of levees and seawalls to keep the city from flooding. The levees along the Mississippi River were strong and sturdy, but the ones built to hold back Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne and the waterlogged swamps and marshes to the city’s east and west were much less reliable. 

Levee Failures

Before the storm, officials worried that surge could overtop some levees and cause short-term flooding, but no one predicted levees might collapse below their designed height. Neighborhoods that sat below sea level, many of which housed the city’s poorest and most vulnerable people, were at great risk of flooding.

The day before Katrina hit, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation order. He also declared that the Superdome, a stadium located on relatively high ground near downtown, would serve as a “shelter of last resort” for people who could not leave the city. (For example, some 112,000 of New Orleans’ nearly 500,000 people did not have access to a car.) By nightfall, almost 80 percent of the city’s population had evacuated. Some 10,000 had sought shelter in the Superdome, while tens of thousands of others chose to wait out the storm at home.

By the time Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans early in the morning on Monday, August 29, it had already been raining heavily for hours. When the storm surge (as high as 9 meters in some places) arrived, it overwhelmed many of the city’s unstable levees and drainage canals. Water seeped through the soil underneath some levees and swept others away altogether. 

By 9 a.m., low-lying places like St. Bernard Parish and the Ninth Ward were under so much water that people had to scramble to attics and rooftops for safety. Eventually, nearly 80 percent of the city was under some quantity of water.

Hurricane Katrina: The Aftermath

Many people acted heroically in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Coast Guard rescued some 34,000 people in New Orleans alone, and many ordinary citizens commandeered boats, offered food and shelter, and did whatever else they could to help their neighbors. Yet the government–particularly the federal government–seemed unprepared for the disaster. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took days to establish operations in New Orleans, and even then did not seem to have a sound plan of action.

Officials, even including President George W. Bush , seemed unaware of just how bad things were in New Orleans and elsewhere: how many people were stranded or missing; how many homes and businesses had been damaged; how much food, water and aid was needed. Katrina had left in her wake what one reporter called a “total disaster zone” where people were “getting absolutely desperate.”

Failures in Government Response

For one thing, many had nowhere to go. At the Superdome in New Orleans, where supplies had been limited to begin with, officials accepted 15,000 more refugees from the storm on Monday before locking the doors. City leaders had no real plan for anyone else. Tens of thousands of people desperate for food, water and shelter broke into the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center complex, but they found nothing there but chaos. 

Meanwhile, it was nearly impossible to leave New Orleans: Poor people especially, without cars or anyplace else to go, were stuck. For instance, some people tried to walk over the Crescent City Connection bridge to the nearby suburb of Gretna, but police officers with shotguns forced them to turn back.

Katrina pummeled huge parts of Louisiana , Mississippi and Alabama , but the desperation was most concentrated in New Orleans. Before the storm, the city’s population was mostly black (about 67 percent); moreover, nearly 30 percent of its people lived in poverty. Katrina exacerbated these conditions and left many of New Orleans’s poorest citizens even more vulnerable than they had been before the storm.

In all, Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 2,000 people and affected some 90,000 square miles of the United States. Hundreds of thousands of evacuees scattered far and wide. According to The Data Center , an independent research organization in New Orleans, the storm ultimately displaced more than 1 million people in the Gulf Coast region. 

Political Fallout From Hurricane Katrina

In the wake of the storm's devastating effects, local, state and federal governments were criticized for their slow, inadequate response, as well as for the levee failures around New Orleans. And officials from different branches of government were quick to direct the blame at each other.

"We wanted soldiers, helicopters, food and water," Denise Bottcher, press secretary for then-Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana told the New York Times . "They wanted to negotiate an organizational chart."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin argued that there was no clear designation of who was in charge, telling reporters, “The state and federal government are doing a two-step dance."

President George W. Bush had originally praised his director of FEMA, Michael D. Brown, but as criticism mounted, Brown was forced to resign, as was the New Orleans Police Department Superintendent. Louisiana Governor Blanco declined to seek re-election in 2007 and Mayor Nagin left office in 2010. In 2014 Nagin was convicted of bribery, fraud and money laundering while in office.

The U.S. Congress launched an investigation into government response to the storm and issued a highly critical report in February 2006 entitled, " A Failure of Initiative ."

Changes Since Katrina

The failures in response during Katrina spurred a series of reforms initiated by Congress. Chief among them was a requirement that all levels of government train to execute coordinated plans of disaster response. In the decade following Katrina, FEMA paid out billions in grants to ensure better preparedness.

Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers built a $14 billion network of levees and floodwalls around New Orleans. The agency said the work ensured the city's safety from flooding for the time. But an April 2019 report from the Army Corps stated that, in the face of rising sea levels and the loss of protective barrier islands, the system will need updating and improvements by as early as 2023. 

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Original research article, impact of hurricane katrina on the coastal systems of southern louisiana.

• 1 Western Program, Miami University, Oxford, OH, United States
• 2 United States Environmental Protection Agency, Cincinnati, OH, United States
• 3 United States Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, Durham, NC, United States
• 4 Utrecht Centre for Water, Oceans and Sustainability Law, Utrecht University School of Law, Utrecht, Netherlands
• 5 Department of Agronomy & Horticulture, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, United States

Natural disasters, such as hurricanes and forest fires, could trigger collapse and reorganization of social-ecological systems. In the face of external perturbations, a resilient system would have capacity to absorb impacts, adapt to change, learn, and if needed, reorganize within the same regime. Within this context, we asked how human and natural systems in Louisiana responded to Hurricane Katrina, and how the natural disaster altered the status of these systems. This paper discusses community resilience to natural hazards and addresses the limitations for assessing disaster resilience. Furthermore, we assessed social and environmental change in New Orleans and southern Louisiana through both a spatial and temporal lens (i.e., pre- and post-Katrina). By analyzing changes in system condition using social, economic and environmental factors, we identified some of the characteristics of the system's reorganization trajectories. Our results suggest that although the ongoing population recovery may be a sign of revitalization, the city and metropolitan area continue to face socioeconomic inequalities and environmental vulnerability to natural disasters. Further, the spatial distribution of social-ecological condition over time reveals certain levels of change and reorganization after Katrina, but the reorganization did not translate into greater equity. This effort presents an enhanced approach to assessing social-ecological change pre and post disturbance and provides a way forward for characterizing pertinent aspects of disaster resilience.

Introduction

Over the past several decades, the increase in intensity and frequency of natural hazards, such as hurricanes ( Goldenberg et al., 2001 ; Webster et al., 2005 ), prolonged drought and heat waves ( Meehl and Tebaldi, 2004 ) has brought significant impacts on social-ecological systems. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina impacted an estimated 2,331 square kilometers, flooded over 80% of the city of New Orleans, and displaced 400,000 people causing significant outmigration ( Lewis et al., 2017 ). The scale and degree of devastation and population relocation from this natural hazard exceeded the impacts from previous events such as the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1927 Mississippi Flood ( Elliott and Pais, 2006 ). It is well-documented that Hurricane Katrina's devastation was widespread, however, there has been less discussion and exploration on the equity of the impacts and recovery using a social-ecological resilience lens.

Hazard research has grown significantly in the past decades across various fields of study, with research questions primarily associated with vulnerability, recovery and resilience ( Opdyke et al., 2017 ). Vulnerability is defined as the characteristics of an individual or a group that influence their capacity to anticipate, respond to, cope with, resist, and recover from an external disturbance (e.g., natural hazard) and the subsequent impact on their livelihood and well-being ( Kelly and Adger, 2000 ; Wisner, 2004 ). It can also be defined as “the degree to which a system or system component is likely to experience harm due to exposure to a hazard, perturbation or stress” ( Turner II et al., 2003 ). The assessment of vulnerability to natural hazards typically uses surrogate variables, representing sensitivity and adaptive capacities of an exposed entity, to construct a quantitative and comparable index among spatial units. The assessment can serve as a baseline or context for decision and action that facilitates and informs prevention, planning, mitigation, adaptation, and recovery from the impact of natural hazards ( Kelly and Adger, 2000 ; Cutter and Finch, 2008 ). An example is the social vulnerability index (SoVI) to natural hazards developed by Cutter et al. (2003) . The index aggregates demographic, housing, and neighborhood variables from the U.S. Census Bureau to examine the social vulnerability of U.S. counties to environmental hazards.

In recent years, the discourse on natural hazards in both research and policy domains, is shifting from vulnerability to resilience among U.S. federal agencies ( Cutter et al., 2008 , 2014 ; US Department of Housing Urban Development, 2014 ) and on the international stage ( Fekete, 2009 ; World Bank, 2013 ). Part of the reason for this shift is that resilience is more proactive and dynamic ( Cutter et al., 2008 ). A challenge of assessing disaster resilience emerges when there is neither a single definition for disaster resilience nor a widely accepted way to measure it. Though there have been attempts to assess some dimensions of community resilience to natural disasters, there is still a lack of consistent and standard metrics or surrogate variables to evaluate disaster resilience in communities. The concept of resilience (from ecology) is described as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationship between populations or state variables” ( Holling, 1973 ). Ecological resilience focuses on the ability of a system to withstand change and retain its processes and structures without shifting to a new regime, or an alternative state. Thus, resilience can be measured by the magnitude of disturbance the system can tolerate and still persist ( Carpenter et al., 2001 ). Ecological resilience was introduced to the social sciences in the context of vulnerability to climate effects ( Timmerman, 1981 ; Cutter et al., 2003 ). Cutter et al. (2008) later presented a disaster resilience framework at the community level. Heavily influenced by the work of social vulnerability to environmental hazards, the research attempts to assess disaster resilience by applying an inductive method to explain susceptibility through select variables intended to characterize the exposed entity. Cutter et al. (2008) argued that the conceptual frameworks of disaster resilience and vulnerability to natural hazards are both dynamic; however, the assessment presented was still static (i.e., evaluated only one snapshot at a time), which is very different from the quantitative approaches for assessing ecological resilience ( Angeler et al., 2016 ). In the context of natural hazards, resilience is sometimes defined from an engineering perspective. An example is the National Ocean Service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA, 2018 ) defining coastal resilience as “building the ability of a community to bounce back after hazardous events such as hurricanes, coastal storms, and flooding, rather than simply reacting to impacts.” Within this context, many natural hazard studies focus on engineered and human systems, including loss prevention and post-disaster actions and planning to minimize disaster impacts ( Bruneau et al., 2003 ; Cutter et al., 2008 ). An overemphasis upon engineering resilience (which assumes a single-state landscape) limits the understanding of a system's emergent capacities to withstand disruptions that are unforeseeable ( Sikula et al., 2015 ) or the possibility that recovery to a previous state is impossible; hence, new regimes, processes and structures emerge ( Chuang et al., 2018 ).

Vulnerability and resilience share some commonalities. For instance, the level of vulnerability can affect the degree of resilience in a coupled human and natural system ( Turner II et al., 2003 ). There have been attempts to distinguish the two terms from various (and some contested) definitions ( Turner II et al., 2003 ; Gallopín, 2006 ; Cutter et al., 2008 ). With the lens of sociology, Gotham and Campanella (2011) argue that resilience studies attempt to find “how and under what conditions ecological and human communities adapt and adjust, or transform and innovate in response to a shock or traumatic event,” and vulnerability studies investigate the root of hazards within coupled systems (e.g., Eakin et al., 2009 ), examine their varying capacities to respond to these hazards, and explore the “co-existence of adaptive and maladaptive couplings in vulnerable systems” ( Gotham and Campanella, 2011 ). In the context of hazards and disasters, Cutter et al. (2008) differentiated the two concepts by the temporal period of the assessment. They described vulnerability as the “ pre-event , inherent characteristics or qualities of social systems that create the potential for harm ( Cutter et al., 2008 ),” while defining resilience as “the ability of a social system to respond and recover from disasters. Accordingly, the Cutter et al. (2008) definition of resilience includes those inherent conditions that allow the system to absorb impacts and cope with an event , as well as, post-event adaptive processes that facilitate the ability of the social system to re-organize, change, learn and respond to a threat.”

Disaster resilience studies often address a set of capacities and strategies for disaster readiness ( Norris et al., 2008 ) which relates the ability of a community to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and adapt to adverse events in a timely and efficient manner. Opdyke et al. (2017) documented the hazard studies from 1990 to 2015. Among the methods used for quantifying resilience to natural hazards, the top three approaches are (1) modeling or simulation (31% out of 241 studies), (2) literature review or theoretical framework (24%), and (3) GIS analysis (15%). Specifically, the majority of the first type of research focuses on economic aspects of resilience (i.e., economic modeling). The second type of research is largely narrative-based, conceptually developing a framework and indices to measure resilience to natural hazards or climate events. For example, Summers et al. (2017) presented a conceptual model that characterizes resilience to climate events from the natural environment, society, the built environment and risk domains. Such approaches use indicators (metrics) to establish a quantifiable baseline condition for comparing the degree of resilience to monitor progress. However, many of these disaster indicator studies are designed with generic goals, like community resilience, implying or attempting to characterize an entire community's resilience to all hazards without specifying a particular threat, disturbance or unique characteristics of the exposed system. Such a generalized assessment could limit the application and utility of the approaches for exploring particular cases. This is in contrast to the Carpenter et al. (2001) argument that the most important step is to identify resilience “of what to what” because different disturbances could impact a system in many ways and with different magnitudes and, building the capacity for resilience in one area may create vulnerabilities in other areas. Further, when evaluating resilience, one must be aware of the existence of multiple regimes and understand that returning to a particular regime (set of conditions) may be impossible ( Carpenter et al., 2001 ).

There is extensive research on natural hazards but little has focused on the process of reconstruction ( Kates et al., 2006 ), change and reorganization of social-ecological systems before and after a natural hazard. Although disturbances, such as natural hazards, often wreak havoc on human and natural systems, in the aftermath (reorganization phase), there is the potential opportunity for innovation, development and transformation ( Folke, 2006 , 2016 ). Panarchy describes the changing stages of complex adaptive systems as they continually organize and structure within and across scales of space and time, and is characterized by a set of interconnected adaptive cycles ( Gunderson and Holling, 2002 ). The four phases of adaptive cycles are release (or collapse), reorganization, exploitation, and conservation ( Gunderson and Holling, 2002 ). The release/collapse phase is triggered by a disturbance that is large enough to change the state of a system. Reorganization describes the period after a disturbance where the system goes into an unstable period and has relatively low resistance to new innovations. Exploitation refers to a rapid growth ( van der Leeuw, 2013 ) and exploitation of resources by system components ( Gunderson and Holling, 2002 ). Lastly, conservation is the phase where system components gradually become more established and connected ( van der Leeuw, 2013 ). In this state, the system becomes rigid and increasingly sensitive to disturbances ( Allen et al., 2014 ). Disturbances have the potential to create opportunities for innovation, development ( Folke, 2006 ), improvement, and beneficial transformation.

The City of New Orleans has rebuilt after previous natural disasters with the hope of emerging in a safer and more equitable way ( Kates et al., 2006 ). This research aims to examine if this goal was reached by studying how social and ecological condition changed over time, while viewing Hurricane Katrina as a perturbation of the system. The effort focuses on the process of change and reorganization after a natural hazard and applies the concept of ecological resilience in the analyses. It takes an integrated approach that includes assessments from socio-demographic, economic, and environmental dimensions, to understand the changes in this coastal city, before and after Hurricane Katrina. Specifically, we asked the following questions: What are the impacts on human and natural systems in New Orleans, several years after Hurricane Katrina? Further, Hurricane Katrina offered a window of opportunity to transform the system. How has the system changed over time? Extending the traditional approaches, we used indicators to characterize the condition of the system. Also, rather than a snapshot, we introduce a dynamic component by assessing the status of New Orleans and southern Louisiana pre- and post-disaster using multiple time steps. We also incorporated ecological components by assessing land cover changes over time and incorporated breeding bird survey data as a proxy for evaluating ecosystem variation. Further, we evaluated these social-ecological changes using principal component analysis (PCA) and rather than simply quantifying and comparing indicator variables, we used GIS to capture spatial patterns and observed the quality of change by examining specific traits of the system. Finally, we discussed the limitations of our work and offer guidance on improving disaster resilience research in the future.

New Orleans is an archetype for coastal ecosystems under immediate threat by natural hazards and environmental change, specifically due to sea level rise and hurricanes ( Gotham et al., 2014 ). The City is about 169 kilometers north of the Gulf of Mexico, located between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. A large part of the city is below sea level (lowest topography reaches 3–5 meters below sea level) ( Dixon et al., 2006 ) and flooding of levees and floodwalls is expected when a storm reaches Category 3 or above ( Carter, 2005 ). Prior to Katrina, the city's population declined from a peak at 627,000 in 1960 to about 484,000 people in 2000 ( US Census Bureau, 2017 ). In 2005, Hurricane Katrina resulted in more than 1500 deaths and 76.8% of the population suffered from flooding. Right after Hurricane Katrina, the population size of the city sharply decreased to 208,000 people in 2006, resulting in more than a 57% reduction in population in the city when compared with the population of the city in 2000. In the post-Katrina era, the city has revived and is experiencing increased wages and higher median household income, population growth (391,000 in 2016) and growing entrepreneurship ( Liu and Plyer, 2010 ). Along with economic and population growth, there are also spikes in housing costs and crime rates, resulting in neighborhood instability and social conflicts ( Gotham and Campanella, 2011 ). Our aim is to study the changes in this social-ecological system over time.

Methods and Data Analysis

To better understand a system's capacity to withstand and adapt to natural hazards, the evaluation should examine the degree of pre-disturbance vulnerability or risk to the system, and level of post-disturbance renewal, reorganization, and innovation ( Gotham and Campanella, 2011 ). Thus, we assessed and compared the conditions before and after Hurricane Katrina through an integrated approach to interpret our findings in a disaster resilience context. Our assessment comprises the three core dimensions of coupled human and natural systems: (1) economic; (2) social; and (3) environmental. We examined the characteristics of the system temporally and spatially using representative variables from economic and social-demographic dimensions. In the environmental dimension, we examined the restoration and alteration of the natural system by evaluating land-cover change and bird diversity over time.

Since continuous data were not available for all the social and economic variables, the assessment of before and after conditions comprises three-time steps, year 2000 (pre-Katrina), 2009 (post-Katrina), and 2014 (post-reorganization). We selected these years based on the availability of Census data. The 2009 Census data were from the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimate, based on the data collected between 2005 and 2009. The ACS 2014 is the estimation based on the survey between 2010 and 2014. ACS uses the same measurement as the decennial Census but takes the average over a longer period. Thus, the ACS data is more reliable than the single-year survey due to its larger sample size and temporal coverage.

Bird data were acquired from the USGS North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS), a long-term and large-scale avian monitoring program. In this paper, we used the total number of species and the total bird population to calculate a Shannon Index of Diversity (Equation 1) for each BBS route from 2000 to 2015. Since there is no BBS route in the City of New Orleans, we selected the closest routes which are 33–136 km from the city center.

p i = proportion of the population made up of species i

s = number of species in sample

The land cover and land cover change data were gathered from the Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) of NOAA's Office of Coastal Management. The C-CAP regional land cover and change products are nationally standardized, raster-based inventories of land cover for the coastal areas, from the analysis of multiple dates of remote-sensing imagery with 30 meters/pixel resolution. The thematic land-cover land-change raster files were input and processed using ArcGIS 10.3 to calculate area of change for the land type of interest given C-CAP's 24 land-cover classes. We specifically examined the following data: (1) developed area which is covered by concrete, asphalt, and other constructed materials; (2) vegetation that includes forest, scrub land, and grassland; and (3) wetlands ( NOAA, 2017 ). Table 1 shows the data, their sources, and temporal coverage available for this study. We used land-cover change over time at the city scale and beyond (southern Louisiana) as a surrogate of environmental degradation at different spatial scales. Zonal statistics were applied in ArcGIS to measure land-cover change and calculate percentage of change outside of the political boundary including open water.

Table 1 . Variables and data sources.

Level of heterogeneity or diversity is a critical indicator of resilience. It reflects the options and a system's capacity to respond to change and disturbance in various ways ( Walker and Salt, 2006 ). Inequality among income and ethnic/racial groups has been an issue in New Orleans. In general, the lower-income population lives in the areas with higher risk to flooding ( Kates et al., 2006 ). We used spatial autocorrelation to quantify the pattern of change and test the following hypotheses:

H1: The spatial distribution of some social and economic variables became less clustered (exhibited more heterogeneity) than pre-Katrina condition.

H2: Disproportional risk to flooding decreased over time.

To test the first hypothesis, we used a spatial autocorrelation index, Moran's I (Equation 2), to measure the correlation of targeted variables and determine its spatial pattern (cluster, random, or discrete). Moran's I values range between −1 and 1, indicating that attribute values at adjacent geographic sites are more dissimilar (−1) or more similar (1).

For an observation Z at location i ( Z i = X i - X ¯ , where X ¯ is the mean of variable X): W ij is the element of the spatial weights matrix, S 0 = ∑ i ∑ j W ij is the sum of all the weights, and n is the number of observations. All the spatial autocorrelation analyses were performed in the Geoda 1.8.16.4 spatial data analysis software.

For the second hypothesis, we mapped the area flooded during Hurricane Katrina in ArcGIS and superimposed temporal Census data on the GIS map to calculate the population of each ethnicity in the area over time. The flood-damaged information comes from a report ( Logan, 2006 ), which used FEMA and high-resolution images from the Dartmouth Flood Observatory to estimate flood-impacted area right after Hurricane Katrina.

Lastly, we synthesized the social-ecological conditions and monitored change over time using a deductive statistical approach, principal component analysis, to characterize this coastal system, and observe how the social-environmental system of New Orleans changed and restructured over time.

Analysis and Results

Land-cover change.

An assessment of land-cover changes pre- and post-Katrina (2005–2006) showed that the primary land conversion in both southern Louisiana and New Orleans was from wetland loss. Deforestation and destruction of man-made infrastructure was also critical ( Tables 2 , 3 ). Over the longer term (2001 to 2010), southern Louisiana experienced deforestation reflected in more vegetation changing from forest and grassland to shrubs ( Table 4 ). At a finer scale, the major land change in New Orleans resulted from wetland loss and new development ( Table 5 ).

Table 2 . Land-cover change between 2005 and 2006 in Southern Louisiana.

Table 3 . Land-cover change between 2005 and 2006 in New Orleans.

Table 4 . Land-cover change between 2001 and 2010 in Southern Louisiana.

Table 5 . Land-cover change between 2001 and 2010 in New Orleans.

Bird Diversity Change

We selected five BBS routes close to New Orleans. Three routes are in northeast, south, and southwest of Louisiana, and two routes are in neighboring Mississippi with the distances ranging from 33 to 136 km away from the city center. A plot of the Shannon diversity index displays the index value for each route from 2000 to 2015 and the mean for the two LA routes (A and B) closest to New Orleans ( Figure 1 ). (Note that the discontinuities relate to missing data (2004 for route B; 2010 for route E; 2001–2004, 2016 for route C). There was a slight drop for these two routes after 2006, in 2008, but both tended to vary around the 15-year average level and by 2010, they decreased again until 2014.

Figure 1 . Bird diversity represented by Shannon Index between 2000 and 2015. LA-Louisiana; MS-Mississippi; Dot lines are 15-year average of the two sites in Louisiana.

Income Change

Income is an indicator associated with socio-economic status and may serve as a surrogate measure of a group's ability to cope with change. We calculated z-scores of incomes at Census-tract level between 2000 and 2014 to monitor changes in wealth status. The z-score is the standard deviation from the mean of all tracts for a specific time step. A positive z-score meant the income level was above the mean (of 0) and a negative z-score meant the observation was below the average. Using z-score to examine the income distribution yielded a relative indication of how each tract's income status compared to the other tracts in New Orleans over the period. The data yielded four wealth categories. For example, in Figure 2 :

1. Remained relatively low income: Neighborhoods with z-scores below 0 between 2000 and 2014.

2. Decreasing wealth: Neighborhoods with a z-score above 0 in 2000 and below 0 in 2014.

3. Remained wealthy: Neighborhoods with z-scores above 0 in both 2000 and 2014.

4. Increasing wealth: Neighborhoods with a z-score below 0 in 2000 and above 0 in 2014.

Figure 3 reveals the geographical location of these four types of neighborhoods with different time steps: (1) between 1990 and 2000; and (2) between 2000 and 2014.

Figure 2 . Z scores on distribution of income between 2000 and 2014.

Figure 3 . Spatial distribution of income change between (1) 1990 and 2000; and (2) 2000 and 2010.

Since some tract boundaries were modified by the US Census Bureau over time, we made the census data comparable by aligning historical census information to year 2010 Census boundaries, using the Longitudinal Tract Data Base program developed by Brown University. The program applies proportional area weighting to assign census variable values to the consistent spatial unit ( Logan et al., 2016 ). Figure 3 maps the neighborhoods that remained wealthy, relatively low income, and those with increasing or decreasing wealth in two-time segments: 1990–2000 and 2000–2014).

Spatial Autocorrelation of Income, Unemployment, Vacancy Rates, Renters and Owners

Spatial autocorrelation of income, unemployment, vacancy rates, renters, and owners. The spatial analysis reveals that while occupied housing (renter and owner) and vacancy rate dispersed (Moran's I declined), income became more clustered over time (Moran's I increased), the unemployment rate exhibited more variability: declined from pre-storm rates (2005–2009) and by 2014 spatial autocorrelation had increased ( Figure 4 ). Specifically, the spatial analysis reveals that income patterns became more clustered over time, meaning wealthy and low-income neighborhoods were spatially autocorrelated, instead of randomly distributed across the city. Moreover, while high-income clusters grew slightly between 2005 and 2009, low-income clusters contracted (relatively concentrated), but both became more aggregated, respectively, in 2014. Accordingly, the aggregation pattern measured by Moran's I suggests that income inequality enlarged spatially over time.

Figure 4 . Cluster maps and Moran's Index of income, housing characteristics, unemployment, and vacancy. Areas in dark blue are the clusters of low value, and areas in red are the clusters of high value. The values relate to high or low income, unemployment rate, etc.

The average unemployment rate at Census-tract scale in New Orleans was 10.96%, higher than the national level in 2000 (4.00%). After Hurricane Katrina, the average unemployment rate reached 13.92%, and then dropped to 12.74% in 2014. Further, there was variation in unemployment rate at a fine scale within the city. In 2014, almost 20% of neighborhoods had unemployment rates below 5%, yet nearly as many (16%) neighborhoods had unemployment rates above 20%. The degree of spatial autocorrelation decreased after Hurricane Katrina but increased again in 2014. Hot spots of high unemployment were less aggregated, but a new cluster appeared on the east side of the city in 2014.

The vacancy rate during 2005-09 was about 26.71%, more than twice the level in 2000 (12.68%). The rate decreased to 21.29% in 2014, suggesting that even 9 years after Katrina, there are still neighborhoods with limited capacity for reorganization. Meanwhile, the spatial patterns of vacant units become less aggregated over time but remained spatially autocorrelated. As Figure 4 shows, the hot spot of vacant units clustered in the urban core. Specifically, the geographical location of highly vacant areas changed and became more discrete after Katrina, yet the spatial cluster returned to a pattern similar to pre-Katrina status by 2014.

The spatial distribution of renter and owner-occupied housing units was highly clustered. Though the degree of spatial autocorrelation has decreased since 2000, the hot spot of owner-occupied and renter-occupied units remained segregated.

Principal Component Analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a multivariate statistical approach used to identify the pattern of similarity among observations ( Abdi and Williams, 2010 ). We input all variables from Table 1 , except for bird diversity data (because it only showed small variation) and performed PCA in IBM SPSS 24. Varimax rotation was applied to the dataset.

Five principal components were identified for the year 2000 with 73.14% of variance explained. Figure 5 shows the spatial distribution of the first three components. Component 1 accounts for 31.34% of the variance in the data. Results indicate a strong positive loading (values ≥ |0.50|) for median household income, median home value, median rent, non-Hispanic white, Hispanic, and Native Indian populations, and population living in a different state within the past 5 years. The component had negative loading for African Americans, unemployment rate, and population living in the same house within 5 years. Component 2 accounts for 20.46% of the variance with heavy loading on vacancy rate, unemployment rate, renter, and medium to high intensity of urbanization and negative loading on income, owner-occupied housing, and low developed areas. The third component explains 9.84% of the variance, with only two heavy and positive loadings for Asian population and wetland area. Component 4 accounts for 6.34% of the variance with strong positive loading for population living in different houses but the same city within 5 years. Lastly, Component 5 has 5.16% variance, with strong loading in income and vegetation cover ( Table 6 ).

Figure 5 . First three principal components for 2000. Classified by standard deviation.

Table 6 . Results of principal component analysis using data from year 2000.

The PCA after Hurricane Katrina reveals changes in the social-ecological system of New Orleans in 2009, with 71.64% of the variance explained through six components. Figure 6 shows the spatial distribution of the first three components. Component 1 accounts for 26.55% of the variance, with strong positive loading in income, home value, rent, non-Hispanic white population and negative loading in percentage of African American population and unemployment rate. Component 2 explains 15.10% of the variance and has heavy loading on renters, and medium to highly urbanized area along with negative loading on owner-occupied housing and low developed area. Component 3 accounts for 10.55% of the variance with heavy loading in Asian population and wetland area. Component 4 explains 7.56% of the variance and reflects strong positive loading in population living in the same house 1 year before and negative loading in population living in a different house in the same city 1 year before. Component 5 accounts for 5.99% of the variance with strong positive loading in Hispanic population and vacancy rate. Lastly, Component 6 accounts for 5.89%, and has heavy negative loading in newcomers and strong positive loading in population living in the same house 1 year before ( Table 7 ).

Figure 6 . First three principal components for 2005–2009. Classified by standard deviation.

Table 7 . Results of principal component analysis using data from year 2009.

In 2014, five components explained 74.05% of the variance. The spatial distribution of the first three components were mapped in Figure 7 . Component 1 accounted for 29.6% of the variance, and a heavy positive loading in income, home value, rent, non-Hispanic white population, and strong negative loading in African American population, unemployment rate, and new comers. Component 2 accounts for 20.93% of the variance with strong positive loading in renter, population living in different house but the same city within 1 year and negative loading in owner-occupied housing and population living in the same house 1 year before. Component 3 explains 11.52% of the variance, and has strong positive loading in vacant rate, renter, and highly urbanized area, and strong negative loading in owner-occupied housing. Component 4 accounts for 6.14% of the variance and has heavy positive loading in percentage of Asian population and wetland area. Lastly, Component 5 that accounts for 5.87% of the variance, and has strong positive loading in percentage of Native Indian population and vegetation cover ( Table 8 ).

Figure 7 . First three principal components for 2014. Classified by standard deviation.

Table 8 . Results of principal component analysis using data from year 2014.

Population Living in Flooded Areas

Figure 8 shows the demographic change in flooded areas over time. A large proportion of African Americans live in the city and consequently, reside in flooded areas. The portion of African Americans living in the flooded areas decreased slightly after Hurricane Katrina, but they remain the largest population living in the flooded areas.

Figure 8 . Demographic change in flooded areas over time.

Through investigating social, economic and environmental data temporally and spatially, we sought to better understand how the human and natural environment responded to Hurricane Katrina and how these systems reorganized and recovered from the devastating event. Hurricane Katrina decimated the City of New Orleans, and after several years of reconstruction, the city is growing with some innovations. Liu and Plyer (2010 , p. 6) claim the city “has become more resilient, with increased civic capacity and new systematic reforms, better positioning the metro area to adapt and transform its future” using certain economic indicators (e. g., increase in wage and income, growing entrepreneurship). However, there was still an outstanding question as to whether all residents benefit from this? Are the environmental concerns well-understood and managed? Accordingly, there was a need for a systematic and integrated approach to evaluate changes in the social and environmental condition of New Orleans.

Income status was more stagnant between 1990 and 2000 than between 2000 and 2014. During the initial period, most of the census tracts (96 out of 173 tracts; 55.50%) were below the city's average, 64 tracts were relatively stable and wealthy and little change was evident given that only 8 neighborhoods were considered declining and 5 tracts were growing in income. Between 2000 and 2014 (encompassing the effects of Hurricane Katrina) income status became more dynamic. There were 18 neighborhoods that experienced decreasing income, 20 tracts with growing income, 48.5% (84 tracts) were below the city's average and the remaining 51 tracts were in stable wealthy status. From a paired sample t -test, the income status was significantly different after Hurricane Katrina than before ( p <0.05). The increase in average income can be viewed as a sign of growth. However, when looking at the spatial distribution of neighborhoods that remained below the city's average, inner city residents were not better off after the system reorganized.

Carpenter and Brock (2008) use the term “poverty trap” as a metaphor to describe a social-ecological system's adaptive capacity. In a social-ecological poverty trap, the system has low or loose connectedness and resilience. The potential for change is not realized because the system lacks resources to reorganize and move forward ( Gunderson and Holling, 2002 ; Westley, 2006 ; Carpenter and Brock, 2008 ). The situation in New Orleans before 2000 and before Hurricane Katrina could be described as in a “poverty trap,” such that while more than half of the neighborhoods were in a relatively low-income situation and only five Census tracts had increased income between 1990 and 2000. In the aftermath of Katrina, the dynamics of income status changed. From 2000 to 2010, there were 20 neighborhoods experiencing increased income as the average income increased in the post-Katrina era.

While bird diversity was relatively stable, land-use patterns along with economic growth in New Orleans put pressure on natural systems and potentially damaged the area's long-term sustainability ( Gotham et al., 2014 ). After Hurricane Katrina, these environmental concerns remain and potentially undermine the social-ecological resilience of New Orleans to natural disasters. These concerns include the continuous loss of wetlands at both the city and southern Louisiana scale, high intensity of urbanization inside the city without addressing storm water and flooding issues, and loss of forests in southern Louisiana.

Principal Component Analysis Pre- and Post-katrina

Pre-katrina conditions (2000).

In 2000, social-ecological conditions were diverse ( Figure 5 ). Wealthy populations co-existed with non-rich urban dwellers in the center of the city. Component 1 which accounts for 31.34% of variance of the data revealed that the groups/areas with high-income were non-Hispanic whites with high-property and rental value and contained a high percentage of newcomers (population who moved from other states at least 1 year prior to the survey). The areas with very high component 1 scores (> 2.5 standard deviation) were Central Business District, Lower Garden District, French Quarter, Marigny, Audubon, and New Aurora. Some of these neighborhoods (e.g., French Quarter), also contained pockets of low-income renters, living in the highly urbanized places that are positively associated with unemployment and vacancy rates. Regarding ecological characteristics, we found that income-level was positively associated with high vegetation cover. This relationship is consistent with social stratification theory, which presumes high socioeconomic status population is very likely to have more (or better access to) environmental amenities including green spaces ( Grove et al., 2006 ; Roy Chowdhury et al., 2011 ).

Post-Katrina Conditions (2005–2009)

After Hurricane Katrina, the first principal that explained the most variance across the city was primarily linked to wealthy Caucasians. Newcomers were no longer associated with Component 1 and the geography and variability in Component 1 changed ( Figure 6 ). Central Business District, Lower Garden District, and French Quarter no longer received the highest scores (but their scores were still relatively high, compared with the rest of the city). We did not observe the highest scores in the city center but instead, the neighborhoods with the highest Component 1 scores were found in Audubon, followed by Lakeshore, Lake View, Terrace & Oaks, and New Aurora. Component 2 accounts for 15% of the variance and is characterized by renters with relatively low income in highly developed areas and in the aftermath of Katrina, high vacancy and unemployment rates were no longer key characteristics under Component 2. With regard to the spatial distribution of Component 2, the neighborhoods with highest scores were still found in the city center, suggesting that low-income and lack of ownership of housing in highly urbanized areas remains an inner-city problem. In the post-Katrina era, vacancy rate became positively associated with Hispanic population (Component 5).

More Recent Conditions (2010–2014)

After several years of recovery, the characteristics of Component 1 (wealthy Non-Hispanic White population, high percentage of newcomers, high home values and rent) became similar to pre-disaster conditions. The high scores of Component 1 were observed in Lakewood, Lakeshore, Audubon, Central Business District, and French Quarter ( Figure 7 ). Relatively low-income renters were divided into two components—one group (Component 2) with a positive relationship with the population who did not live in the same house in the city 1 year prior to the survey, and the other (Component 3) holds positive relationships with vacancy rate and percentage of highly developed area. Interestingly, vegetation cover was no longer associated with income and instead was linked with native Indian population in 2014. Studies have shown that land abandonment or unmanaged vacant lots are the driver of emergent vegetation in New Orleans ( Lewis et al., 2017 ) and in a shrinking city context ( Schwarz et al., 2018 ).

Green infrastructure (natural and human made) is considered an important ecosystem service as well as an environmental amenity in many environmental studies ( Green et al., 2016 ). Typically, quantitatively assessing the level of greenness and identifying the spatial unevenness of vegetation cover are the major approaches to evaluating provision of ecosystem services and equality. In the city of New Orleans, the amount of vegetation cover was once positively associated with household income. However, after the system reorganized, maintaining vegetation in good condition turned into a challenge in minority, low-income neighborhoods which have abandoned land. Within this context, evaluating the amount of vegetation does not provide enough information to characterize ecosystem service provision and the impact on environmental justice ( Lewis et al., 2017 ). Moreover, the assessment of equity, which is determined by the quality of outcomes, will be more critical to better understand ecosystem services in the post-disaster era.

Natural hazards can trigger collapse but also create opportunities for systems to learn, restructure, and reorganize to manage disaster resilience. Our study examines the social and ecological condition of New Orleans (and surrounding areas) before and after Hurricane Katrina. By analyzing the change in system condition using social, economic and environmental factors, we identified some of the characteristics of the system's regrowth and reorganization trajectories. Although the ongoing population recovery may be a sign of revitalization, the city and metropolitan area continue to face socioeconomic inequalities and vulnerability to natural disasters. Our findings suggest that high poverty rates in some areas, and environmental concerns such as loss of bird diversity and wetlands, create challenges to the sustainability of the city. The spatial distribution of social-ecological conditions over time reveals certain levels of change and reorganization after Katrina, but the reorganization did not translate into greater equity.

Resilience is not static. Assessing disaster resilience requires the measurement of changing conditions and the reorganization process. Our analyses comprised three-time steps, including before and after the system was disturbed, and demonstrate an advanced approach for assessing disaster resilience. In addition to temporal aspects, we examined spatial dimensions of disaster resilience to include capturing patterns in social, economic and environmental conditions. We suggest that as high-resolution time-series data becomes available, future research should include monitoring long-term spatial heterogeneity of other environmental variables (e.g., terrestrial biodiversity, land use zoning, green space, vacant lots, and flood depth).

Disaster resilience cannot be fully understood by collecting only one-time-step data or using data that insufficiently capture the area and period of study. Accordingly, in addition to larger and finer temporal coverage, the spatial resolution is important. For instance, to address the inter-scalar interactions, it is critical to have data at both local and regional scales. In our analysis, Breeding Bird Survey data has excellent temporal resolution, however, its spatial resolution is limited. For assessment of disaster resilience, it would be useful to have ecological variables from a very fine scale (such as high-resolution Lidar data) with continuous temporal coverage. Regarding the social and economic variables, before 2009, the Census data was only available every 10 years, which reduces a researcher's ability to measure dynamics of socio-economic change. More recently, the American Community Survey began offering continuous data collections with finer temporal resolution and multiple spatial scales; hence, we were able to incorporate this data. Although the lack of available data limited our ability to perform a more complete ecosystem assessment, this work provides key advances in research for disaster resilience. In particular, introducing the dynamic, time-step analysis, employing a social-ecological resilience lens and incorporating ecological variables (where available) were significant improvements for research in disaster resilience. Lastly, we highlight the need to not only examine system conditions quantitatively, but also qualitatively (e.g., governance, or quality of the green space/green infrastructure) to link with management options.

While, this research mainly focuses on Hurricane Katrina's impact on New Orleans, our assessment of human and natural systems is not limited to the municipal scale and provides a modular framework for assessing impacts at multiple geographic scales (i.e., other variables may be added and it is possible to expand the scale and scope). Human and natural activities may occur at a particular location but impacts are not constrained by municipal boundaries; hence, understanding the cross-scale implications of social-ecological change is critically important for disaster resilience ( Green et al., 2015 ).

Author Contributions

W-CC conceived the original idea, designed the research, and performed the analyses. W-CC, TE, CR, and AG developed the manuscript. CR gathered and processed the Breeding Bird Survey Data from USGS.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The findings and conclusions in this manuscript have not been formally disseminated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and should not be construed to represent any agency determination or policy. We thank the two reviewers for their constructive feedback that helped improve this manuscript.

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Keywords: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, disaster resilience, natural hazards, social-ecological systems

Citation: Chuang W-C, Eason T, Garmestani A and Roberts C (2019) Impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Coastal Systems of Southern Louisiana. Front. Environ. Sci. 7:68. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2019.00068

Received: 25 October 2018; Accepted: 06 May 2019; Published: 12 June 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Chuang, Eason, Garmestani and Roberts. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Ahjond Garmestani, garmestani.ahjond@epa.gov

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The Health Effects of Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricanes are natural disasters that have unfortunately been on the rise as the years have gone on. With any natural disaster, comes concerns for human health. Hurricane Katrina brought with it flood waters, the loss of power, little livable space left, and a breeding ground for mosquitoes. This in turn caused molds to grow, endotoxin levels to rise, little clean drinking water, spoiled food, West Nile virus concerns, and many other causes for a person to be sick. New Orleans, Louisiana was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Close to 90 percent of the city was flooded, some parts of the city under 20 feet of water. Many structures were completely destroyed and those that weren't destroyed by the hurricane, most likely had to be destroyed because of how long the flood waters were there. The pumps used to rid the city of the water, were not working and because they couldn't be replaced, had to be repaired. This led to the integrity of the buildings to be compromised, leaving people homeless and worries to arise about the places refugees were going to stay when the water was all pumped out of the city.

Katrina's Path

Katrina began about 200 miles southeast of Nassau in the Bahamas. It then moved northwest, becoming Tropical Storm Katrina. It continued through the northwestern Bahamas (August 24-25) and then went westward towards southern Florida. Tropical Storm Katrina became Hurricane Katrina just before it made landfall near the Miami-Dade/Broward county line (August 25). It then moved southwest across southern Florida and into the eastern Gulf of Mexico (August 26). The center made landfall near Buras, Louisiana (August 29) and continued north. It was still a hurricane near Laurel, Mississippi, but became a tropical depression over the Tennessee Valley (August 30). It continued up to the Great Lakes, weakening until it became a frontal zone (August 31).

Health Effects of Hurricane Katrina

The main health effects of Hurricane Katrina had to deal with the amount of water left behind in New Orleans. Outbreaks of West Nile, mold, and endotoxin levels rising were the biggest concerns. With the flooding came all new types of bacteria from the open water, leaving New Orleans with little to defend itself. The medical centers were either destroyed or in utter disarray and power was lost for quite awhile. The concern that people were going to get sick because of contaminated food or water also weighed heavily on people's minds. All of the health concerns for New Orleans came from the amount of flood water because there was so much of it, that it was an optimal breeding ground for mosquitoes and the water covered everything making nothing truly safe.

Here is a link to the NOAA (National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration) site on Hurricane Katrina and a few impacts Katrina had in the south United States. Hurricane Katrina .

The clean up for Hurricane Katrina is still on going. A lot of water flooded the city and some areas that were flooded near New Orleans are still under water. Those areas may just become lakes because the water may never drain out. New Orleans had to fix their water pumps in order to drain their city. This took a few days because they couldn't replace them since the pumps they did have, weren't manufactured anymore. The extra time it took to repair the pumps meant that the city stayed in the dirty water that much longer. This meant that most homes that were flooded had to be completely destroyed. The foundations were weakened and more and more mold was growing. The city was going to be uninhabitatable longer and longer. The levees also had to be repaired to keep the water out of the city. When the water was finally pumped out, the homes had to be taken care of. The people of the city were put in temporary trailers while their homes were destroyed and then reconstructed. Every home that was flooded, had to be destroyed because it sat too long, too much mold and putrid water sat within them. Once the homes were cleared and power was restored, the concerns for human health went down considerably. Clean water and food were brought in while the plants that filtered the water were being repaired and power was restored.

Effects Hurricane Katrina Had on the Rest of the U.S.

Katrina hit New Orleans the hardest, mainly because it is below sea level and easily flooded, but it also did damage in other states. It caused flooding in Southern Florida and damage and extensive power outages in Miami. From the Gulf coast to the Ohio Valley, flood watches and warnings were issued. Parts of Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi were under water. Some rain bands from Katrina also produced tornadoes creating more damage. Some areas effected by the tornadoes were in Georgia. Most of the death toll though, was in Mississippi and Louisiana, but a few deaths were also reported in Florida. The entire U.S. was also affected when the oil rigs in the Gulf were found to have suffered major damages, making gas prices go up.

In order to prevent more disasterous floods in New Orleans, better levees have been built and a better disaster plan has been made. Unfortunately, because New Orleans is below sea level completely preventing a disaster like this is not possible. New Orleans will continue to sink and flooding will always be a problem. Better, faster clean up is the only way that the city can prevent a disaster as great as Hurricane Katrina. Routine maintenance of the pumps and levees can help keep the water at bay, but one day it will return. Fast action, awareness, and knowledge of a disaster plan are the only things that people can do to protect themselves. Those and flood insurance, will help to make sure people stay safe. Also, when a city is evacuated for a hurricane make sure to secure your home and then evacuate yourself.

Recommended Readings

"Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans." Angelfire . N.p., 2005. Web. Sept. 2012. https://www.angelfire.com/la3/judyb/katrina.html

This website covers what was done in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. It also talks about the different problems that arose and how they were taken care of. This is a reliable, objective source that discusses the events of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. It was very useful in discussing the specific effects Hurricane Katrina had on New Orleans and how the hurricane was handled there.

Used sites:

National oceanic and atmospheric administration (last accessed 12/10/12):.

This website gives an account of what happen before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.

• http://www.vos.noaa.gov/MWL/apr_06/katrina.shtml

This website tells of the path Hurricane Katrina took and the effects Katrina had on certain areas.

• http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/outreach/history/#katrina

This website is an overview of the weather side of Hurricane Katrina and how that effected the areas Katrina passed over.

• http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/special-reports/katrina.html

National Center of Biotechnology Information (last accessed 12/10/12):

This website about the procedure people took to check their homes for mold and check the endotoxin levels to make sure they're home was safe.

• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17185280

Environmental Protection Agency (last accessed 12/10/12):

The website tells about the health problems facing New Orleans and how to deal with them.

• http://www.epa.gov/katrina/healthissues.html#d

Effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans (last accessed 12/10/12):

This website tells about the predictions given for Katrina and then what actually happened and how everything was taken care of.

• https://www.angelfire.com/la3/judyb/katrina.html

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (last accessed 12/10/12):

This website gives an overview of what happened and what was done to deal with the effects.

• http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/archives/2005/h2005_katrina.html

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