Hurricane Katrina In The Bahamas

In the last century in the United States there have been approximately sixty-five-hundred deaths incurred from hurricanes when taking into consideration only the top twenty deadliest. The numbers are incredibly difficult to verify when trying to account for a cumulative total and become especially staggering if taking into consideration the more than sixteen-hundred lives lost just last year in Hurricane Katrina, which was the second deadliest hurricane known to the United States. (source 5) While death tolls are obviously the worst figures to think about in conjunction with nature's fury, devastating totals of economic hardship are sad reality and sad when thought is focused on it, between money required for repairing damages and providing
While the hope is that no one person could or would debate the utmost importance in taking no shortcuts in allocating proper funds and means for the relief and support of said survivors, there is a great deal of debate on the other large aspect of a disaster's aftermath. The debate would be on what is truly appropriate funding for rebuilding and restoring damages incurred. Rather than addressing a broad spectrum, as done in the preceding, it will be easy to focus on such debates in regard to the recent Hurricane Katrina. Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005, and crossed southern Florida as a moderate Category 1 hurricane before strengthening rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico and becoming one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Gulf. The storm weakened considerably before making its second landfall as a Category 3 storm on the morning of August 29th in southeast Louisiana. (source
The basic necessities in reparation were inclusive of the drinking water infrastructure, the sewer infrastructure, the sewage treatment plants; a myriad of sources for electric, health care facilities, schools, and the list is obviously very quantitative. There were large amounts of hazardous materials and industrial discharges to the sewers that had been released along with oil and gas from gasoline stations and waste oils. You had a host of household hazardous materials, pesticides, volatile chemicals; the health risks possible were overwhelming. Not inclusive of what could primarily be categorized as cosmetic restructuring, the estimates of cost for public building and service recovery was 80 to 100 billion dollars and there has already been over 65 billion dollars spent and Congress has actually committed just shy of one-hundred billion dollars . (source