Hurricane Kartina - Essay Example

ooding following the levee breaks, pre-storm positioning of rescue equipment from the Coast Guard and other entities proved to be insufficient to handle the degree of damage and flooding presented. The rescue operations and the response to the hurricane’s aftermath showed that it was a total failure. This failure is not just about failures in emergency response at the local, state and federal levels or failures in the overall emergency management system, rather it is also about failures of the social support systems.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters to ever strike American soil. However, it might not have been such a costly storm if certain measures had been taken prior to the storm’s landfall and if others had been better organized following its departure. Most disasters do not occur because of a single event. It takes the failure of multiple systems or stages, and for a number of incidents to happen in a precise, systematic order. This was the case with the New Orleans disaster as location, lack of proper advance planning and lack of appropriate infrastructure contributed significantly to the disaster.

New Orleans is a city that lays on average 12 feet below sea level and is also located along a coast. In fact, the entire city is nearly surrounded by water. To the south, of course, is the Gulf of Mexico, but the city is also bordered on the west by the Mississippi River and to the east by Lake Pontchartrain. This bowl-shaped valley in which the city resides is a natural spill-over point if and when any of these bodies of water experience a significant increase in the water levels. To protect it, the city relies on a complicated yet antiquated levy system that rises in some places as much as 50 feet above the city.

Yet studies conducted prior to the storm had indicated these levees would not be enough to protect the city from a significant storm surge such as that brought in by Katrina. Tax dollars raised to fortify the