How To Prevent Hurricane Katrina

It was around 5 pm on a Tuesday evening when the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida, issued a warning to its citizens that a tropical storm would soon become a hurricane. Being only 350 miles from the populated city, Floridians didn’t have much to fear. At age four, I was one of them. But we and the residents of New Orleans, Louisiana and Mississippi didn’t know just how wrong we would be. Hurricane Katrina was the third deadliest hurricane in the United States history, claiming over a total of up to 2,000 lives. Not only did it claim lives, but it claimed minds, skyrocketing the amount of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), anxiety disorders, depression and frequency of heart attacks in the areas affected by the hurricane.
Katrina wreaked havoc on the earth, costing over $1 billion to only repair bridges. The hurricane scattered debris throughout the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The forceful winds uprooted the oldest of trees, sending them crashing into electricity lines, leaving the majority of those in the area without a sufficient use of electricity.
In the sunshine state, South Florida was flooded with rain and “certain areas reported nearly 12 inches of rainfall.” The ocean waves were at a high of fifteen feet, with almost 100 miles per hour wind speed, leaving Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale Beach deserted.
It flooded homes in the Miami-Dade and Broward County, while leaving over 1 million people without power. It ended up costing South Florida about $63 million to repair damages done to electricity units and flooding. Some still remain homeless from the fury of Katrina. Though there was a significant amount of earthly damage to Florida, the number of deaths did not even relatively compare to Louisiana’s
971.
When Katrina made its arrival to New Orleans, the strongest winds slammed to the coastal areas and according to Sandy Rosenthal, “...[The storm] exposed engineering mistakes in the levees and floodwalls...causing extensive flooding throughout the New Orleans region.”
Because of the mistakes in the engineering, 80% of New Orleans and surrounding areas were completely flooded for weeks. Not only were the floodwaters bad, but this water was contaminated with raw sewage, oil, bacteria, pesticides, and other toxic chemicals. This resulted in over 1 million people relocating to surrounded areas, leaving New Orleans empty and adding to the population of other cities. Ten years after Katrina, the population has still not fully recovered, still 134,000 people less than it was before the hurricane made its shattering blow. While the tourist areas are upkept and back to normal, there are neighborhoods not too far from the birthplace of jazz that no longer exist.
The amount of damage done by the deadly hurricane broke all records in 2006, leaving 118 million cubic yards of debris, and “if all stacked onto the space of a football field, would reach over ten and a half miles high.” With its forceful winds and heavy rains, Katrina completely demolished an estimated 300,000 homes, making them uninhabitable to hundreds of thousands of people. The overall damage cost $96 billion dollars.
To sum up, Katrina has been one of the most damaging disasters in US history, costing billions of dollars, and many lives of innocent people. The physical damage was an enormous load to clean, taking over weeks to start to get things back to normal. But the mental effects caused by the hurricane still live on in many people today, who are now suffering with mental illnesses. I still remember walking outside after the storm had passed over our apartment complex, and while the sun shone, trees were fallen everywhere, making it almost impossible to get anywhere. It took a while for everything to get back to the way things were before, but it definitely made all of us stronger and more aware of potential danger these storms can cause.