Related Papers
Disaster, Displacement and Casework: uncertainty and assistance after Hurricane Katrina
Susan Sterett
Humanitarian assistance after disaster offers sympathy for those hurt. However, the disaster assistance must be administered, and it is administered through bureaucratic rules that my require accountability as much as offer sympathy. Only tracing the process of giving assistance will reveal the mixture of sympathy and accountability. After Hurricane Katrina, displaced people received an unprecedented level of housing assistance payments. People also received casework from nonprofits paid via a grant from international donations to the United States. Based in interviews and analysis of documents, this paper argues that accountability led to uncertainty for those in greatest need.
American Ethnologist
Chronic disaster syndrome: Displacement, disaster capitalism, and the eviction of the poor from New Orleans
2009 •
Taslim van Hattum
DEMS 3706 Assignment 2 – Examining Hurricane Katrina from the Three Perspectives.docx
Chris Cook
Ethnic and Racial Studies Markets of sorrow, labors of faith: New Orleans in the wake of Katrina
Kyle Kusz
Walda Katz-Fishman
This essay, written in the months immediately after the human-made disasters of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, contextualizes the destruction of human life, community, and environment in history, economy, power, and peoples' struggles. The horrific destruction reflects the intentional abandonment and criminalization of the poor, working class, communities of color - African American, Indigenous, immigrant - especially women, children, elders, and environmental crisis over centuries. It teaches us two critical lessons. One, that the economic and political system of global capitalism, including the U.S. government at all levels, is broken and cannot be fixed. Two, that only a powerful bottom-up movement led by those most adversely affected can reconstruct New Orleans and the Gulf Coast around a transformative vision rooted in twenty-first century economic, political, and social realities that addresses their needs and hopes. The U.S. Social Forum, as part of a global movement building process, held in Atlanta, June 27 to July 1, 2007 was an important moment in building movement and lifting up the voices, visions, and struggles of the people in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
An Unnatural Disaster: The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
An Unnatural Disaster: The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
2005 •
Carmen Gonzalez
In the weeks since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, much attention has been paid to the manifest failure of government rescue efforts. But a broader view is in order, one focused less on the apparent incompetence and unpreparedness of the government officials charged with managing such emergencies, and more on the failures of policy-making and resource allocation leading up to the disaster. An examination of those failures leads to a simple conclusion: the hurricane could not have been prevented, and some flooding may have been inevitable, but at least some, and perhaps much, of the damage visited upon New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina could have been prevented by wiser public policy choices. The choices that failed New Orleans are the subject of this report. It examines the environmental decisions that robbed the area around New Orleans of the natural environmental features that might have absorbed floodwaters before they toppled levees. It looks at the policy choices not merely the incompetence that resulted in the governments feeble emergency response. It identifies the serious environmental challenges now facing the New Orleans area resulting from environmental policy-making that allowed toxic chemicals to be produced, handled, and stored in such a manner that flooding would loose them on residents. It discusses the effect of energy policy choices on Katrina, as well as the implications of Katrina for future choices. It explores the environmental justice lessons to be learned from the Katrina disaster how environmental policy disfavors poor and minority Americans. It concludes with a series of challenging questions to be examined by investigators and policymakers as they reshape government policy to prevent Katrina-style environmental and policy disasters from compounding natural disasters in the future.
The political, economic, and social aspects of Katrina
2007 •
Peter Boettke
In this paper, we examine the resiliency of community recovery after a natural disaster. We argue that a resilient recovery requires robust economic/financial institutions, political/legal institutions, and social/cultural institutions. We explore how politically and privately created disaster preconditions and responses have contributed to or undermined institutional robustness in the context of the Gulf Coast's recovery after Hurricane Katrina.
What Went Wrong in New Orleans? An Examination of the Welfare Dependency Explanation
Social Problems
The impact of Hurricane Katrina was especially dramatic in New Orleans, where catastrophic flooding threatened the lives of thousands of residents who did not or could not evacuate before the storm. To explain the large number of residents who did not evacuate in time, some commentators blame a lack of government aid and assistance for the poor while others fault an excessive dependence of the poor on government. Welfare dependency theorists, in particular, contend that a dependency-induced " mentality of helplessness " was prevalent among New Orleans' poor and helps to account for the incomplete evacuation. To gauge the plausibility of this argument , I use data from a unique survey to examine the characteristics of New Orleanians who were trapped in the flooded city. The findings indicate that, contrary to the expectations of welfare dependency theorists, more than half of the New Orleanians in question were employed full time before the storm and most displayed initiative after the disaster. Furthermore, in multivariate analyses, characteristics highlighted by dependency theorists did not predict the odds of pre-storm evacuation. Other explanations for the incomplete evacuation are explored. The devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina focused the nation's attention on a long list of political and social ills and, perhaps most of all, exposed the vulnerability of the urban poor to natural disasters. The impact of the hurricane was especially dramatic in New Orleans, where catastrophic flooding threatened the lives of thousands of residents who did not or could not evacuate before the storm (Brinkley 2006). The event now serves as a catalyst for institutional and organizational reform and provides an opportunity to better understand the relationships between poverty, race, and vulnerability. The lessons to be taken from the New Orleans disaster are not yet clear, however, especially with respect to the incomplete pre-storm evacuation. As David Alexander (2005) observes: " one striking aspect of the intellectual response to Hurricane Katrina " is that commentators have drawn " diametrically opposite " conclusions from the very same event. To explain the large number of residents who did not evacuate before the storm, some commentators blame a lack of government aid and assistance for the poor (e.
"New Orleans: Do You Know What It Means?" (Reflections on Disaster)
John Clark
Administrative Theory & Praxis
Forum: Humanistic Perspectives on the Policy and Praxis of Disaster Management
2010 •
Branda Nowell
