The Positive And Negative Impact Of Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina
An unexpected and a devastating event that forms over tropical or subtropical waters because of the extreme heat from the water and increases the intensity of the storm is called a hurricane storm. In the last few decades, we came across several hurricanes such as Katrina, Sandy, Ike etc. whose occurrence had a large negative impacts on the life of the human beings. In this essay, I am going to discourse the reasons for the occurrence of Katrina, its impacts on the life. Also, I am going to address characteristics of Katrina, future predictions and how to prevent from such storms.

Katrina is considered as one of the most destructive hurricane that knocked the door of the southern coast of the United States in August 2005.
The question still arises that what things were responsible for getting it to happen. Some scientists believe that global warming was the only cause for the occurrence of Katrina, but it has been proved that there cannot be only one cause for this large destruction to arise. The difference in the air pressures between the surface and high altitudes, continuous evaporation, condensation cycle and strong winds were responsible for it to occur. People think that not only these climate change factors, but also the government was responsible for such destruction and the deaths of thousands of people due to mismanagement and the failure of emergency service. But with the climate change, ocean temperatures are constantly rising since last few years and it reached above the threshold point which allowed the hurricane to gain energy for making a large destruction.

The occurrence of Katrina had a large impact on the life such as loss of life, flooding, power outages, cost damage etc.
It flooded almost 4/5th part of New Orleans, which resulted in the destruction of a large number of houses which made millions of people to get homeless. Large portion of New Orleans was under 20 feet of water due to the failure of the levee. When it comes to the estimation of the total number of losses led by Katrina, it is still unknown to get the exact number. But thousands of people lost their life due to this levee failure, which makes Katrina as one of the deadliest hurricanes ever to hit any part of the world. The survey found that nearly 3/4th of the people who died were old because they failed to evacuate themselves. Hundreds of people were declared as missing. Now when considered the cost damage caused by it, finding exact numbers is difficult to estimate but it exceeds 100 billion dollars. This caused some industries and companies forced to shut down, making a large number of people unemployed. Another impact was the power outages which caused millions of people to live without power, with companies providing power saying that it will take several weeks to restore power. It had a large impact on the Oil and Gas refineries which led to the rise of gas prices making it difficult for the people to ride to their jobs and forcing them to use an alternate form of transportation. Flood water caused severe diseases to emerge which resulted in large number of deaths because of not getting a feasible and proper treatment at a proper
time.

Considering all these impacts of Katrina on human life, anyone could guess easily if it occurs again in the future. So this has created an awareness among the scientists to design some technique by which people can know in advance about such devastating storms and can take quick steps to save their lives. First technique is to rely on scientists who can predict the approximate wind speeds and intensity for sustained winds using statistics. Also storms can be predicted based on the past occurrences and current measures of factors in the climate. Thus, several agencies like the National Hurricane Center (NHC), NASA etc. is working together to notify the public with the future risks and information. Live computer models are being used by these agencies to keep track of air pressure and temperature, sea level temperatures and wind speeds; thus keeping track of all the information about the intensity of cyclones.

In conclusion, Katrina was one of the deadliest natural disasters ever to hit the United States. Large number of people lost their lives, their home, and even their family members due to devastating floods. Though some of the organizations and companies donated some money to help the victims of the hurricane, but still people shiver with fear when they hear the word “Katrina”. Several agencies are putting their efforts to give the best possible future prediction reports to the public at a regular interval of time.