Geographical Effects of Hurricane Katrina - Thesis Example

The Effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Physical and Human Geography of New Orleans Introduction Hurricane Katrina is by far the most catastrophic natural disaster in the history of the United States. It has been estimated that it may take more than a decade for the Gulf Coast to recover (Fischetti 2001). Within that period, a massive sum of money and innumerable hours will be required reconstructing the destroyed infrastructures and buildings and severely affected institutions. Although several studies after Hurricane Katrina have showed early recovery inconsistencies motivated by gender and class, hardly any systems or measures are able to capture recovery patterns all over the whole affected territory and over extended time span (Curtis, Duval-Diop & Novak 2010). A catastrophe of this level provides an opportunity to examine how long-range recovery is evident within an impacted area to determine the motivators of recovery as they change spatially and temporally, and in this case, geographically. The objective of this essay is to examine and discuss several geographical risks and opportunities of the devastated New Orleans. After the disastrous hurricane Katrina, it barely needs too much thinking to suggest that New Orleans is destined to have a ‘new’ geographical makeup. Even though it is quite premature to envision with any level of confidence the content, form, and dimension of this makeup, several geographical issues are mainly worth taking into account. Even though the devastation of New Orleans seemed large-scale in news coverage, the geography of destruction in the city was indeed fairly inconsistent. Besides eastern and central New Orleans, Jefferson Parish’s low-lying parts were flooded (Colten 2005). South Slidell was almost devastated by a mixture of storm surge and great winds and the bridge joining the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans was shoved off its anchors (Colten 2005). On the contrary, a large part of Jefferson Parish had experienced little flooding. The elevated territories of New Orleans stayed dry (Johnson 2006). A good deal of Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore experienced damages from rain and wind but no flooding (Johnson 2006).The troubles of those people in New Orleans who had not been relocated became severe. A lot of their houses were partly inundated. In several instances the water reached houses’ roofs, compelling distressed individuals who had moved to their home’s upper floor to hack openings in roofs to get out (Ward 2008). All over the storm-devastated region, the Coast Guard ‘rescued 12,533 people by air and 11,584 by boat, as one-third of the Coast Guard’s air fleet was deployed to the Gulf Coast’ (Johnson 2006, 139). The University of New Orleans, the New Orleans Convention Center, and the Louisiana Superdome became emergency shelters (Johnson 2006). From these and other sites, the population was finally relocated to refuges in Louisiana and other areas. Possibly 10,000 of the 455,000 dwellers of New Orleans stayed in the metropolitan area after mass departure (p. 139), together with several people who stubbornly declined to abandon their homes. By September New Orleans was a completed vacated, the same as St. Bernard Parish and portions of neighboring Slidell and Metairie (Rydin 2006). Much of the city’s infrastructure, especially telecommunications, shut down not including text messaging, which became a salvation for a large number of people. Numerous businesses closed, discharging thousands of employees. Regular transportation was closed down. Police consent was needed for access into most of the metropolitan area (Eckstein 2006). More disastrously, a significant portion of New Orleans’s population died. By September several inhabitants of flooded neighborhoods were permitted to go back to their homes (Curtis, Mills, Kennedy, Fotheringham & McCarthy 2007). The levee breaches had been remedied and the ‘dewatering’ of the area was in progress (p. 210). The view that welcomed residents was dreamlike (Johnson 2006): Streets, trees, lawns, cars, and houses were coated in a pale brown-gray layer of dried mud, creating a monochromatic landscape indicative of the wasteland left behind by the storm; an eerie quiet was present, punctuated by the sounds of construction equipment and the odd generator; water-stain lines on houses marked how high the flood had risen and foretold what to expect on the inside; and roofs were crush by downed trees (p. 139) (see Appendix A for image). When inside ruined houses, locals were welcomed by properties that, in several instances, had been floating or submerged in water for a time. The most severe damage had been patched, repaired, or eradicated by May 2006 (Curtis et al. 2010). The entire city had been reopened to locals. Many of the areas had cable television, water, and electricity. For a large number of inhabitants, their ‘normal’ lives had returned. In contrast, numerous flood-ravaged areas, particularly in St. Bernard and eastern and central New Orleans, seemed to go into a coma (Castree, Demeritt, Liverman & Rhoads 2009) while administrations deliberated when and how reconstruction should take place. The Effect of the Hurricane Katrina on Physical and Human Geography of New Orleans The study of temporal and spatial ‘building permit clustering’ (Curtis et al. 2010, 45) gives an accurate image of the effects of hurricane Katrina on physical geography. It also provides proofs of differential reconstruction all over the coastal Mississippi. Further evidence or data from building permits may offer a more detailed understanding of active procedures or mechanisms along the Gulf Coast of the Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina (Curtis et al. 2010). This section will focus on the features of the built environment of the landscape and their impact on the course of rebuilding. Apparently, recovery differs temporally and spatially. Even though there has been an enhanced interest in learning the processes of continuous recovery after Hurricane Katrina, it remains under-researched and the factors motivating recovery as a mechanism are not adequately known. Although these findings are to a certain extent perceptive, a primary contribution of these studies is the use of a method, specifically a spatial scan statistic, and the use of information on building permit to technically evaluate locally rooted developments in disaster recovery (Curtis et al. 2010). The use of this method shows that space-time groups of reconstruction during the recovery period after Hurricane Katrina can be determined and assessed employing accessible software and information. These studies also fill a major disparity in the existing literature by giving a more accurate temporal resolution (Curtis et al. 2010) for the course of recovery. Researchers like Curtis and colleagues (2007) have created instruments to assess different features of recovery, decide about distribution of aid, and determine the agents of recovery. Combined, such effort can identify the main effects of Hurricane Katrina on the physical geography of New Orleans that can be used for vicinities which have not attained the planned recovery level. Besides improving the knowledge on how continuous recovery and reconstruction take place in space and time, the instruments and methods to assess the extent of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans’s physical geography are obtainable. This technique can assist long-term recovery directors and planners in identifying zones where reconstruction has been focused on and assist them in better understanding how to concentrate and allocate their resources. On the other hand, the future human geography of New Orleans rests largely on who goes back from the vast Diaspora of New Orleans (Dyer 2006). The evacuation data are remarkable. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (Johnson 2006): As of 23 September Houston had received 84,749 Katrina evacuees; Dallas-Fort Worth, 37,113; Atlanta, 29,252; Chicago, 4,773; and even faraway Los Angeles, 4,435 (p. 139). A vast number of people evacuated elsewhere. Several months after Hurricane Katrina, many had yet to go back to New Orleans. Numerous scholars and researchers have the same opinion that New Orleans has locals that will not return anymore. A Gallup/CNN/USA Today survey carried out immediately after Hurricane Katrina declared that ’39 percent of evacuees either would not, or probably would not, return home’ (Johnson 2006, 140). The information on the street show that the new permanent residents of the city may not go above 250,000 individuals (p. 140). Undoubtedly a large number of these people desire to go back to New Orleans. The ties of inhabitants of New Orleans to their ‘remarkable’ city are renowned (Colten 2005). For several of them it is impossible to inhabit a place where in rice and red beans, combined with pickled meat, are not a weekday staple (Johnson 2006); where in youngsters go to school during Mardi gras; and where in a stop light is viewed more than an opinion statement (p. 140). For elderly evacuees, the family and social connections built over generations are of major consequence (Colten 2005). Approximately eighty-eight percent of Black New Orleans’s locals were born in Louisiana (Dyer 2006). The main dilemma is housing. Roughly ‘288,000 people in Louisiana’ (Johnson 2006, 139) lost their homes. Approximately 100,000 houses in Orleans Parish sustained major or extreme damage (p. 139). Remaining rental belongings and housing have dramatically increased in cost and became hard to insure. For numerous property holders, the only alternative is the travel trailers or mobile homes acquired by FEMA (Curtis et al. 2010). A large number of the members of the Diaspora and most clearly affected by Hurricane Katrina were marginalized people, or those belonging to minority groups, as for instance in the heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward (Ward 2008). After the storm a barrage of media reports and scholarly commentaries surfaced on how Hurricane Katrina exposed the environmentally (Castree et al. 2009) associated racial and economic inequalities within New Orleans. Several authorities in prominent positions were suspected of ‘good-riddance’ (Johnson 2006, 140) inconsiderateness toward the transfer of the region’s poverty and associated social problems. On a more favorable aspect, numerous researchers and planners have required the creation of processes that can provide for the affected poor inhabitants, who should be persuaded to go back (Karlin et al. 2009). Hurricane Katrina may have shaped an opportunity to deal with the problem of land use and poverty in a manner that is much more efficient than earlier techniques. A primary issue shaping the New Orleans’s future racial and cultural geography is how much of the population of African Americans will go back to the metropolis (Dyer 2006). Roughly two-thirds of the population of Orleans Parish was made up of African Americans prior to the hurricane (Rydin 2006, 5); at present the percentage is largely estimated to be a lot lower (p. 5), even though no one actually knows the actual percentage. Mayor Ray Nagin was obviously anxious about the risk of a permanent loss of the population of African Americans when he persistently declared that affected African Americans would go back to a reconstructed or renewed metropolis and that New Orleans would be “chocolate at the end of the day… This city will be a majority African American city. It’s the way God wants it to be… You can’t have it no other way. It wouldn’t be New Orleans” (Ward 2008, 76). According to Johnson (2006), portion of the anxiety of the mayor stem from the possibility that a large-scale migration of Hispanic employees to assist in the reconstruction of the metropolis, and the likelihood that a large number in-migrants may remain eternally, would possibly change the political and cultural power balance in New Orleans. Even though the storm’s features were largely African American and poor, ultimately, Hurricane Katrina was no sympathizer of race and social class. Lakeview, one of the severely damaged areas in New Orleans, is mostly middle-to-high income and Caucasian (Eckstein 2006). New Orleans East, which several scholars think should never be reconstructed, is a neighborhood inhabited by increasing African American middle earners (Colten 2005). South Slidell and Venetian Isles accommodate several of the most sought-after waterfront features in the city, a large number of which were ornamented with beached sailboats following Hurricane Katrina (Johnson 2006). Meghan Stromberg remarked that the apparent disrespect of Katrina for vicinities of power and wealth may work in support of the recovery of the metropolis (Johnson 2006): “Homeowners there have greater resources to rebuild sooner” (p. 140). Basically, upcoming demography is fate for New Orleans, not just in relation to cultural and racial geography but also with regard to economic strength. The city’s cultural geography will be influenced by those who return and do not and by so far unidentified new residents of the city. Assessing the Actual Change in the Physical and Human Geography of New Orleans The biggest flood wreckage took place in a ‘swath extending from the 17th Street Canal to New Orleans East and southward to St. Bernard Parish’ (Johnson 20046, 140), a region of compacted commercial and residential trend. Whether and how this flood devastated area will be reconstructed will affect considerably the future geography of the city and its economic status. Several scholars view this damage as permanent, resulting in a metropolis ‘hollowed out of its population core’ (Castree et al. 2009, 55) and as a result its economic health. For several people, this is not something unfavorable. For instance, a number of metropolitan heads in Baton Rouge argued that the conditions confronting the region less resemble those of earthquake-devastated San Francisco than hurricane-damaged Galveston (Johnson 2006). According to Dyer (2006), in 1900 “Galveston was poised to blossom into one of the nation’s major cities, but the extensive death and destruction caused by the hurricane shifted development efforts to nearby Houston, and the rest was history” (p. 28). These managers trust that Baton Rouge will surface as the population and economic driving force of the state and, therefore, will emerge as the ‘new’ New Orleans (Colten 2005). Even though it is reasonable to think that people who are most confident of this result live within the walls of Baton Rouge and that an extent of overstatement may be included, a definite ‘hollowing out of New Orleans’ (p. 83) might be unavoidable. According to Curtis and colleagues (2007), the degree to which this really takes place will rely on residential rebuilding regulations, land-use resolutions, and the kinds of buildings and infrastructures that are permitted in flood-prone zones. Majority of the more progressive solutions result in lower population concentrations in the city’s flood-prone residential center (Colten 2005). A number of planners think that this is suitable, and they envision prospects for launching form-oriented principles and new urbanism ideals, establishing the Gulf Coast metropolises and New Orleans exemplars of futuristic planning (Curtis et al. 2010). Several planners are anxious that ambitious goals will create quick-fix measures of local economic progress and politically traditional policymaking or decision making process (Rydin 2006) that will expose the metropolis to a damaging recurrence of incidents. A ‘hollowing out of population’ (Karlin, Dunford & Mussenden 2009, 56) does not essentially imply economic failure for New Orleans. The more confident and hopeful people view a ‘renewed’ New Orleans that is an international metropolis with a restored light-rail systems linking people of suburban areas, global ‘trade parks’, and a European model of flood control (Karlin et al. 2009). New Orleans has consistently had a profit-oriented motive to exist, ironically, due to its closeness to the same water that it has constantly dreaded (Johnson 2006), which has assumed main precedence over the evident environmental threats of the area. Contrary to the hollowing out that could take place in New Orleans, operations within the Interstate 12 access strip north of Lake Pontchartrain will build up (Karlin et al. 2009). In some measure this was already taking place prior to Hurricane Katrina. For instance, St. Tammany Parish had a population of roughly 214,000 prior to the storm (p. 57). Following Hurricane Katrina the population increased to an approximated 280,000, a lot of whom originated from wrecked St. Bernard Parish (Karlin et al. 2009, 57). Metropolitan areas like Mandeville, Covington, and Slidell increased in population at one to build the forms of city gridlock that inhabitants aimed to break away from by transferring to these suburban areas (Curtis et al. 2010). The degree to which this growth surpasses residential operations, building traditional mini-cities, suburban business districts, and possibly a technologically advanced structure concentrating on the Stennis Space Center, located across the neighboring Mississippi frontier, will rely mainly on what occurs in New Orleans and how effective the area is in sustaining connections with the New Orleans core downtown (Castree et al. 2009). A light rail structure has been recommended to sustain the strength of these connections. A large number of researchers and scholars argue that the continuous geographical well-being of the suburban zones will remain dependent of, to a certain extent, on connections with New Orleans’s business district (Eckstein 2006). The residents of the inner city and suburban areas will persist to adopt the same technique, casualness, and ironic wit that typified the immediate period of recovery. The ‘New’ New Orleans Several scholars will disagree that Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophe of virtually biblical proportions, creating a wrecked physical and human geography to which even the loudest media report failed to capture (Johnson 2006). A vast number of people became homeless and relocated, building geography of mass homelessness seldom witnessed in the history of America. Businesses and schools shut down, a number of them permanently. A large portion of the metropolis was coated with a stratum of mud and its attendant nuisance, mold (Johnson 2006). In the midst of the wreckage it is hard to envision the geography of the ‘new’ New Orleans. No one can know for sure how many people will come back to region, and what the ethnic and racial composition of the metropolis will be. A large part of the population that left New Orleans was white and African American, while a considerable percentage of the population that has seemed to reconstruct the area has been Hispanic (Ward 2008). It is logical to think that not every evacuee will come back and not every Hispanic laborer will evacuate, producing a largely Latin metropolis than before (Ward 2008). Ever more it is evident that New Orleans will be smaller (Johnson 2006): The metropolitan area of 1.3 million people before the storm may struggle to return to 1 million; New Orleans itself may linger for some time at around 200,000 people, far smaller than before and eclipsed by the suburban parishes of Jefferson and St. Tammany (p. 140). Obviously, the dilemma is housing, specifically its affordability and accessibility. A lot of evacuees remain homeless, and offered housing has skyrocketed in price (Dyer 2006). Moreover, the levee fractures revealed old failings in public policies concerning land use and the contribution of technology in safeguarding the people, showing that the catastrophe was not entirely ‘natural’ (Colten 2005). There is great demand from the planning and associated decision-making institutions to depend less on technology, particularly levees, and more dependence on green areas in zones prone to flooding, hoisted housing, and more responsible policymaking on land use (Colten 2005). Concurrently, there is an increasing anxiety among property owners and a growing sentiment that the administration should stop intervening (Johnson 2006) and allow inhabitants re-build the communities they once had. Nonetheless, it is unquestionable that the ‘new’ New Orleans will have a dramatically different geographical makeup. If present circumstances give any cues of what the future holds, the local communities located in south of Lake Pontchartrain will stay where they are or lose population, while the communities located in north of Lake Pontchartrain will increase much rapidly than was previously the case (Dyer 2006). St. Tammany Parish, since August 2005, has witnessed a growth level that parish authorities were anticipating to take place over a decade (Johnson 2006). Portion of this growth is brought about by the housing problem south of Lake Pontchartrain, but this development may also be a reaction to an increasing partiality among inhabitants towards high places instead of high levees to safeguard them from flood (Curtis et al. 2010). It is quite premature to envision how the economic geography of New Orleans may be influenced (Dyer 2006), but it is reasonable to believe that at least several of the downtowns will pursue the population. This new geography will not surface easily. By now, north-shore inhabitants are dealing with spatial imbalance in transportation, services, and housing that render ordinary life challenging (Castree et al. 2009). Morale issues have undoubtedly been affected by the increasing understanding that whatever positive emanate from Hurricane Katrina will require considerable time to realize (Ward 2008). Certainly, one perspective proposes that complete recovery may require an astonishing twelve years (Johnson 2006). Other approximations range from a minimum of three years to a maximum of fifteen years (p. 140). Taking into account the time it required to clean up and repair after Katrina and the successive interruptions that occurred in the transportation of FEMA trailers to locals, and in the completed projects of Army Corps of Engineers (Curtis et al. 2007), the longer approximations are perhaps more reasonable. Conclusions The enormity of the catastrophe and the long-term reconstruction procedure will provide a wide array of prospects for scholars and researchers of geography. The new geography of New Orleans will offer interesting topics for planners and cultural, urban, and economic geographers. Similarly, scholars of population geography will aim to monitor the position and condition of the New Orleans Diaspora. A particular interest to scholars is the environmental effect of a vast space of waste and the geography of wreckage. Bio-geographers will develop an interest in the disturbance of the animal environment and ecosystems; and obviously environmental and physical geographers will develop a restored thrust to keep on examining the environmental threats related to corroding coast areas. Hurricane Katrina exposed the environmental weaknesses, public policy and social problems of New Orleans. Concurrently, the metropolitan area that everyone is familiar of prior to Katrina was not wrecked and is steadily returning. By now vacationers have came back to the French Quarter (Johnson 2006), with its hoarse gleeful promises; and the traditional domain is recovering its strength. Slowly but surely, confidence is being renewed in a renovated levee mechanism. An emerging concept and reality of ‘normal’ has taken place, sadly in several instances harshly suggestive of the ‘traditional’ normal. It remains to be seen if the emerging New Orleans has gained positive realization from Hurricane Katrina, or if over-romanticizing of the ‘earlier’ New Orleans will equip or strengthen the metropolitan area for another catastrophe. It can only be hoped that researchers and scholars will not be alarmed again about how individuals survive in this kind of ‘surreal’ and ‘abnormal’ metropolis. References Castree, N., D. Demeritt, D. Liverman & B. Rhoads. A Companion to Environmental Geography. UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Colten, C.E. An Unnatural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans from Nature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Curtis, A., D. Duval-Diop & J. Novak. “Identifying Spatial Patterns of Recovery and Abandonment in the Post-Katrina Holy Cross Neighborhood of New Orleans.” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 37.1 (2010): 45+ Curtis, A., J. Mills, B. Kennedy, S. Fotheringham, & T. McCarthy. “Understanding the geography of post-traumatic stress: An academic justification for using a spatial video acquisition system in the response to Hurricane Katrina.” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 15.4 (2007): 208-19. Dyer, S. “Overflow City: What Do You Do When a Natural Disaster Increases Your City’s Population by 50 Percent Almost Overnight?” Planning 72.4 (2006): 28-31. Eckstein, B. Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City. New York: Routledge, 2006. Fischetti, M. “Drowning New Orleans.” Scientific American 285.4 (2001): 76-85. Karlin, A., L. Dunford & S. Mussenden. Lonely Planet New Orleans. New York: Lonely Planet, 2009. Johnson, M.L. “Geographical Reflections on the ‘New’ New Orleans in the Post-Hurricane Katrina Era.” The Geographical Review 96.1 (2006): 139+ Rydin, Y. “Justice and the Geography of Hurricane Katrina.” Geoforum 37.1 (2006): 4-6. Ward, J.W. The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery. New York: Uno Press, 2008. Appendix A Pictures of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina *images taken from Google pictures Appendix B *image taken from Google picture Read More