Hurricane Katrina and Its Impact on The Community of New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina has changed the lives of many, especially in the community of New Orleans, Louisiana. The migration of the residents of New Orleans has changed the city in multiple ways that have affected the community for the better and for the worse. The story of this event starts in 2005.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005 on the gulf coast of the United States where it went from a category 3 to a category 5 storm in just under 9 hours. Little did the residents of Louisiana know that this storm would change their lives for the worse. Over $100 billion dollars of damage were made from the storm leaving hundreds of thousands homeless and killing 1,800 people. During and after the storm, many residents were not able to evacuate the area and many had to go the New Orleans superdome. Later the superdome would succumb to terrible conditions as a result of the lack of preparedness of the city. Even years after the storm the effects of it are still visible.

Some of the effects of the storm were more mental and physiological than physical. Many children were forced to move away to new homes with higher ground such as Houston and San Antonio which left them with a feeling of homesickness and no real moral grounding. Therapist and social scientists believe that these rapid changes for children can stress them out and overwhelm them and have negative effects later in the future. These children had to witness horrific things that can stick with them for a long time and affect them in the future as they are adults. It is even proven that there are patterns in people who suffer from these kind of tragedies, some good patterns and some bad. Usually children who had something to hold onto usually thrived afterwards and children that had nothing and lost what they had usually suffered the most. Sometimes these kind of events can have a good effect on people. Some were better at dealing with stressful situations than others because they had that kind of background.

Using a migrational map, we can see where people went after the storm. In the map, we can see the path of Katrina and obviously see the way it affected the gulf coast of America in where people live. We can clearly see that a large amount of people migrated towards Texas, more specifically in the Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston area. Houston had the most migrants come from hurricane Katrina as more than 22,500 households settles in the Houston area shortly after hurricane Katrina. Texas wasn’t the only place people migrated to, hundreds of people also went to California and New York if they had family there.

A lot of experts believe that most of the damage caused by hurricane Katrina could've been avoided if the right measures were taken. One aspect of this would be the confusion between the federal officials in charge of natural disaster response as a lot of agencies were unsure of their role in the operation and were not sufficiently trained for such a big disaster as hurricane Katrina was. Another aspect of this would be the failure to supply the public with the necessary goods before, during and after the storm. During the storm, many citizens evacuated to the superdome in New Orleans and took several days for FEMA to be able to supply medical supplies to the people who need it. Another supply failure would be the failure to supply mobile homes for people who no longer had homes but went unused due to FEMA’s own regulations preventing them from using the mobile homes on flood plains where the homes were destroyed. One final aspect of this is the fact that FEMA denied doctors who were willingly volunteering to help individuals who had been hurt because their names were not in the government database.