Increasing National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters The Perspective from the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi: Summary of a Workshop (2011) / Chapter Skim
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2 New Orleans Before and After Katrina
2 New Orleans Before and After Katrina
Pages 11-26
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From page 11... ...
Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University, compared the experiences of New Orleans during Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to track the evolution of resilience in the city over the past half century. Allison Plyer, co-deputy director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, provided a statistical analysis of the New Orleans Metropolitan Area since Katrina to highlight both the accomplishments and the challenges of the post-Katrina period.
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From page 12... ...
But human communities have the ability to learn, adapt, and adjust to subsequent disruptive events, so long as they retain lessons learned in previous events and use those lessons to adapt to future events. Given this definition, the term resilience implies a community that anticipates problems, reduces vulnerabilities, responds effectively to an emergency, and recovers rapidly to a safer and fairer functional state.
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From page 13... ...
After a devastating hurricane in 1915 drove storm surge beyond the lakefront and into the sprawl ing city, the city turned to structural protection. It built a 9.5-foot seawall on the lakefront, which was completed in 1934, to keep water out of the city's "back door." With that barrier in place, the city expanded toward the lakefront during the economic boom of the 1920s, facilitated by public works programs that drained low-lying areas and provided water and sewer lines.
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From page 14... ...
SOURCE: Kates et al., bitmap 2006. Following Hurricane Betsy, the city and state appealed for enhanced structural protection to what was then a modest system.
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From page 15... ...
. On the eve of Hurricane Betsy, warnings were sent out to people living in lower coastal parishes, and city residents were urged by radio, television, and newspapers to relocate to shelters.
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From page 16... ...
But the failure of the levees disrupted response procedures and interfered with communications. While the Coast Guard and the fire department were among the few organizations that received praise, the storm became a major social calamity, Colten indicated.
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From page 17... ...
The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center publishes the New Orleans Index with the Brookings Institution, which began publishing the index after Hurricane Katrina. For the fifth anniversary edition of the index, the Community Data Center and the Brookings Institution examined trends in the New Orleans Metropolitan Area across the past 30 years to look more deeply at issues of resilience.
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From page 18... ...
As a broad rule of thumb, every export industry job supports about two local serving jobs. For example, one job in the oil and gas industry might support the equivalent of two dry-cleaning jobs, with export industry jobs typically paying higher wages than local serving jobs, Plyer said.
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From page 19... ...
. Wages in the New Orleans Metropolitan Area have grown by nearly 14 percent in the last 5 years -- to about $45,000 in 2008 inflation-adjusted dol lars -- approaching the national average for the first time since the mid-1980s
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From page 20... ...
The median household income also grew by 4 percent from 1999 to 2008 while national median household incomes declined. These changes are due to some extent to the loss of lowerpaying jobs among people who could not afford to return to the New Orleans area after the storm.
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From page 21... ...
"Citizens and civic leaders have also advocated for and won critical governance reforms, such as the consolidation of the levee boards, the merger of the city's seven property assessors into one office, [and] the creation of the Office of the Inspector General.
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From page 22... ...
Black and Hispanic household incomes are 45 and 25 percent lower than for whites, respectively. The New Orleans African Ameri can population has even lower household incomes than the national average for African Americans.
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From page 23... ...
Despite the growth in average wages and median household incomes in the metropolitan area, "renters in the city and suburbs still pay too much of their earnings toward housing" (Liu and Plyer, 2010)
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From page 24... ...
She responded that New Orleans has tremendous potential to lead in such areas as renewable energies, for example, by redeploying scientists and engineers involved in the oil and gas industries. Sectors of the U.S.
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From page 25... ...
But that level of protection will not be adequate in the future. Many people in the city have become interested in the flood protection measures being built in the Netherlands, where protection against an 11,000-year storm is the goal.
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