Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for New Orleans, Louisiana. Hitting New Orleans on August 29, 2005, the storm devastated the city, causing over $75 billion in damages to the New Orleans area and the coast of Mississippi alone (1). The damage in human life was even costlier, with 1200 reported deaths total (2). 

When talking about Katrina, it is impossible not to acknowledge the effects that race and class had on the reaction to it. With the response to the storm, there was a large disparity between the different people and places that received aid. Areas like St. Bernard’s Parish for example, months after Katrina, still had no power, and contaminated and undrinkable water (3). However, in the immediate aftermath of the storm, the civilians that were the most affected by Katrina were poor African Americans. An article in a local newspaper in the days following the storm stated that, “The majority of the evacuees left behind until day five were African Americans without food, water and medicine,” and that buses simply passed them by, heading instead for the richer areas of New Orleans to evacuate the upper class, mainly white, populations (4). 

The effect Katrina had on these African American residents cannot be overstated. Darnell M. Hunt, a sociologist and the head of the African American Studies department at UCLA, said about Hurricane Katrina that, “You’d have to go back to slavery, or the burning of black towns, to find a comparable event that has affected black people this way” (5). The reaction from the Bush administration was delayed, FEMA wouldn’t enter New Orleans for fear of violence, and predominantly poor, African American areas like the Lower Ninth Ward were not given the appropriate level of help and coverage. Life-long residents like Vanessa Gueringer would even call her representatives and television stations and beg for footage to be taken of the area in order to bring attention to its damage, and the lack of aid it was receiving (6).

The issue of the lack of a proper response to the disaster, as stated by Robert Collins, a professor at Dillard University in New Orleans, is “not an engineering issue, it’s not a planning issue; it’s a political issue” (7). That is where the majority of the backlash to the response to the storm lies: the government, and its lack of attention to poorer and mainly black areas. It is imperative to learn about this disaster — and the response to it — in order to understand New Orleans as a whole because it allows for an insight into the racial and class-based inequalities that exist within the city, as well as in the American South (and the entire United States) as a whole. 

Written by Logan Jones

Citations:

1. “Hurricane Katrina.” Hurricanes in History, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/outreach/history/#katrina.
2. “Hurricane Katrina.” Hurricanes in History, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/outreach/history/#katrina.
3. Interview with Lee Boe by Elizabeth Shelborne, June 2 2006, U-0224, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
4. “THE PUBLIC SPEAKS Evacuation showed government’s racism.” American Press (Lake Charles, LA), sec. Editorial, 10 Sept. 2005, p. 4. NewsBank: America’s News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNEWS&docref=news/119E557E090FCF18. 
5. Press, Jesse. “Unprecedented outpouring of aid from black America.” American Press (Lake Charles, LA), sec. Metro-State, 9 Sept. 2005, p. 25. NewsBank: America’s News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNEWS&docref=news/119E55761A492BF8. 
6. Interview with Vanessa Gueringer by Pam Hamilton, June 9, 2006, U-0237, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
7. Interview with Robert Collins by Joshua Guild, June 2, 2006, U-0229, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill