Lessons from Katrina – What Went Wrong, What Was Learned, Who’s Most Vulnerable

Abstract

If humans did not occupy the planet, disasters would never occur. Massive climatic events, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis would be regular occurrences, of course, and the earth would look like a dynamic cauldron of natural activity, changing the look and the balance of nature and natural events continuously and randomly. What morphs these natural phenomenon into catastrophic events we call “disasters” is simply the presence of human beings who by choice, chance, or necessity find themselves in harm’s way. The “human factors” may be straightforward and benign. For instance, people making their livelihood from the sea are at risk from coastal storms and tsunamis. Similarly, people are found living in areas at considerable risk for mudslides and volcanoes. It could even be said that living in New Orleans, a coastal city actually below sea level, is a gamble, as was so dramatically emphasized by the storms and subsequent flooding of August and September 2005. On a more complex level, there is growing evidence to suggest that people may have a significant impact on seemingly natural events. To the extent that human behaviors, particularly massive consumption of fossil fuels and overloading the atmosphere with higher and higher levels of CO2, accelerates the phenomenon known as global warming. This may actually be responsible for the growing frequency and severity of coastal storms. The point is that there is good reason to worry about more Katrina’s in the future.