Laurie Vignaud faces a double dilemma: If she rebuilds her wrecked ranch house at 1249 Granada Drive in the great suburban expanse south of Lake Pontchartrain, will her neighbors do the same? And even if they do, will that guarantee their Gentilly neighborhood does not end up an isolated pocket in a diminished, post-Katrina New Orleans?

Nothing in Vignaud’s 46 years, not even her job as affordable housing vice president with Hibernia Bank, the region’s biggest financial institution, prepared her for this problem. From her relocated offices in Houston, she recently confessed, “It’s scary.” “I don’t know when I’ll ever...

After hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, many questions were raised about the decisions that were made, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, to develop a system of levees and flood walls to protect the city from hurricanes. These structures were designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane with wind strengths of 111 to 130 mph and a flood surge of 14 m (see U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 1984). Hurricane Katrina was a category 4 hurricane at landfall with higher wind speeds of up to 140 mph and a higher flood surge of about 20 m, which eventually...

The landfall of Katrina against the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama on August 29,2005 resulted in an unprecedented human catastrophe. Hurricane Katrina itself was not unprecedented, either in magnitude or trajectory. However, the catastrophe was immense because that stretch of the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, including the city of New Orleans, was both unprepared for Katrina and rendered acutely vulnerable to storm damage by 200 years of well intentioned but ultimately counterproductive efforts to manage the Mississippi River and its delta. We believe that the city will ultimately be doomed by the progressive deterioration of the complex...

The ability of ecosystems to reduce the risks and scales of natural disasters, for example, by attenuating floodwaters and storm surges, has largely been neglected in natural disaster planning and policymaking. Both the 1993 flood on the Mississippi and Hurricane Katrina point to a loss of such “ecosystem services” in the Mississippi watershed, from the northern states down to the Gulf. The actions that cause the loss of these services are often remote from the impacts—whether in time, space, or due to the probabilistic nature of natural disasters. We employ the acronym JAR—Jeopardize Assets that are Remote—to...

Managing risks is a human enterprise. Its success depends on risk managers’ ability (a) to anticipate behavior before, during, and after potentially disastrous circumstances; (b) to assemble and integrate the expert knowledge relevant to that understanding; and (c) to provide that knowledge to those who must act on it, in a relevant, comprehensible way. These processes have been studied extensively by social scientists. However, their research receives little attention in most risk analyses. In its place, one finds risk managers’ folk wisdom, with occasional allusions to research summaries in secondary sources. Ignoring relevant research has both direct costs—misleading those...

The world, over the course even of its relatively recent history, has known many natural disasters, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and pandemics. The 1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic killed more than 20 million people (some estimates run as high as 50 million). The current AIDS pandemic has already killed more than 20 million people (most in sub-Saharan Africa), and there are serious concerns that a new avian flu pandemic could kill hundreds of millions of people around the world. The recent earthquake in Pakistan is estimated to have killed over 70,000 people. The tsunami in the...

Social science research on disasters began in the early twentieth century with the publication of Samuel Henry Prince’s sociology doctoral dissertation on the 1917 Halifax explosion (Prince 1920). However, disaster research did not begin to coalesce as a field until pioneering research was carried out by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Opinion Research Center in the early 1950s, as research teams were sent into the field to collect data on individual, group, and organizational responses to disasters (see Fritz and Marks 1954). The Disaster Research Center, established in 1963 at the Ohio State University and now located...

A standard claim in the natural hazards literature is that natural hazards policy should be sensitive to equity concerns (Mileti 1999; Berke et al. 1993; Cochrane 1975; Heinz Center 2000; Kunreuther and Rose 2004). But is equity really a normative consideration that is distinct from efficiency or overall well-being? Assuming it is, what does equity mean? Is equity group-based or individualistic? If the latter, what is equity’s “currency?” Does equity concern the distribution of income, of fatality risk, of well-being generally, or perhaps of some other item? Further, is individualistic equity comparative or noncomparative? Is the idea to equalize the...

Upon many witnessing the immense destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, feelings of sympathy were coupled with those of puzzlement: how could so much carnage be caused by a hazard that was so predictable? In 2004 the region had the benefit of a full dress rehearsal for Katrina when Hurricane Ivan—another category 5 storm while in the Gulf—triggered full-scale evacuations of the same areas, revealing many of the same weaknesses of preparedness procedures that were observed during Katrina. In addition, just weeks before the storm planners in New Orleans engaged in a training exercise that simulated...

Hurricane Katrina has raised a number of questions regarding the role that insurance can or should play in providing protection against natural disasters. Preliminary estimates suggest that it will be the most costly disaster in the history of the insurance industry with total claims ranging between $40 and $55 billion (Towers Perrin 2005). The previous year’s Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne that hit Florida in the fall of 2004 produced a combined total loss of $24 billion. Each of these disasters was among the top 10 most costly insurance losses in the world from 1970–2004 (Wharton Risk Center...

The approach of Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing devastation in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast riveted the nation’s attention. Estimates of privately insured losses from Hurricane Katrina and subsequent storms Rita and Wilma approach $60–$70 billion (Mallion 2005). Losses insured under federal flood insurance are expected to be near $25 billion, compared to $15 billion over the program’s entire prior history (Schroeder 2005). The total cost of federal disaster assistance could approach $100 billion; some estimates suggest a much higher figure. These events punctuate an increase in the frequency and severity of losses from natural catastrophes in the...

As the nation faces up to the challenges of rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it also needs to face up to something it has long avoided: the need to help homeowners and business people construct buildings and retrofit existing structures in ways that will help resist future severe storms and other natural calamities.

Katrina heavily damaged New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama when it roared ashore August 29, 2005. Congress has already approved more than $62 billion for disaster relief, and White House officials have said total federal disaster relief costs could reach $200...

While originally connected, public health and clinical medicine have evolved as different fields, with clinicians focusing on the needs of the individual, and public health professionals focusing on the needs of the community. Their education has even drifted into different schools (schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, and veterinary medicine, vs. schools of public health), with different accreditations, and different professional organizations. Indeed, the degree of difference between clinical medicine and public health is sometimes sufficiently broad that the gap has been referred to as a schism (White 1991). In recent decades, there have been attempts to heal that schism (White...

Since Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, there has been extensive public discussion about the reasons for the disastrous emergency planning and response. Many people and organizations have been blamed for the disaster, ranging from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to Mayor Nagin of New Orleans.

Of course, all analyses of Hurricane Katrina at this point are necessarily preliminary, especially in light of the voluminous records that were recently released (CNN December 3, 2005; Associated Press 2005), and scholars will undoubtedly be poring over what went wrong before and after Katrina for many years to come. However, given the complexity...

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, only one thing disintegrated as fast as the earthen levees that were supposed to protect the city, and that was the intergovernmental relationship that is supposed to connect local, state and federal officials before, during and after such a catastrophe.

In sifting through the debris of the disaster response, the first question is why intergovernmental cooperation broke down so completely. While it’s hard even at this point to get an official accounting of exactly what happened, clearly there were significant communication and coordination problems at all levels of government. At the moment, much time...