When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August and September 2005, the response of government agencies was ineffective and became politically controversial. The winds of the Category 5 storm did great damage, and the city's flood-control and energy infrastructure failed. Lack of coordination and what was revealed by media reports to be lax or ineffective disaster mitigation, plus failure to recognize warnings and failure to follow disaster plans that had been put in place before the hurricane, complicated the physical destruction of the city. In addition to the multibillion-dollar losses to enterprise activity and ruined infrastructure, the human cost ran to the hundreds of thousands, particularly to socioeconomically vulnerable populations, and a loss of life numbering nearly 1,000, most of it concentrated in the city of New Orleans. This report analyzes the causes of Katrina's massive devastation in the city and discusses the nature of government response to and management of its aftermath, with a view toward forecasting possible lines of recovery and development.
The physical facts of Hurricane Katrina are not in much dispute. In the last week of August, a storm that formed in the Gulf of Mexico began to approach the coast of Louisiana on a path headed for New Orleans. It reached the status of a Category 5 hurricane before making landfall, with winds in excess of 173 mph. In addition to wind there was a storm surge of water into the city, plus enough rain to create the concentration of water that flooded Lake Pontchartrain to the north of the city and to overflow the Mississippi River banks to the south. Even before the waters began to rise and the inevitability of massive flooding in the below-sea-level city had become clear, the mayor of New Orleans ordered residents to evacuate--at first voluntarily and then mandatorily. Many thousands did flee the city, but other thousands did not--typically, those who lacked transpo...