Katrina Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Katrina - Research Paper Example Then, in the early morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina came ashore at the mouth of the Mississippi near Orleans with 140 mph sustained winds and storm surges two stories tall. To make matters worse, many of the 500,000 residents of New Orleans live below sea level and are surrounded by the Mississippi River, Pontchartrain, and several bays. It was obvious that this was going to be a huge storm; consequently hundreds of thousands of Gulf residents evacuated on Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday night Mayor Holloway of Biloxi said that most of the residents in the lowest-lying sections of his city of 55,000 had evacuated. (Drye, 2005). Wherever possible, evacuees from low-lying areas went to higher ground to stay with relatives and/or friends. Some competed to rent limited accommodations; however, soon these were no longer available. By Sunday night shelters were filling up, even as far away as South KATRINA 3 Texas and all over Lousiana, according to Steve Rinard, meteorologist in charge of the national weather service office in Lake Charles, Louisiana (ibid.). Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category Four Storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale which ranks hurricanes from one to five according to wind speeds and destructive potential† (ibid.). ... rina herself was responsible for injecting the initial surprise and resulting confusion by making an unexpected jog southward as it crossed the Florida peninsula and then rapidly strengthening in the Gulf of Mexico. Residents in the Florida Keys were caught off guard by Katrina’s intensification. Katrina kept on getting stronger as it took a ragged S-shaped path across the very warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. By Friday afternoon meteorologists feared the worst They felt that the storm would further intensify as it approached large Gulf Coast cities such as Alabama, Mobile, and New Orleans, which it did (ibid.) One has to wonder why by this point, coordinated preparations were not being made for a huge impending disaster. Emergency management officials had been concerned for sometime about a powerful storm such as Katrina hitting vulnerable areas such as New Orleans and the Florida Keys. They saw the greatest vulnerability being the coastal population growth that had occurre d during the past three decades, as well as the fact that 55,000 citizens were living below sea level. Knowing this, one wonders why coordinated plans were not in place for rapid evacuation and shelter for all these people should a Hurricane such as Katrina come to visit. They must have known that KATRINA 4 evacuation would not be easy, not only because of all of the people involved, but because there were a lot of people in the area without transportation and money to evacuate. Certainly there was a lack of preparedness for such a major storm, but, perhaps, even more to the point was a lack of communication, trust, and cooperation. Although President Bush declared a state of emergency for Louisiana and authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide aid, in response to