Abstract
This chapter provides an overview and assessment of the progress made in mitigating, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters during the period since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Louisiana on August 29th, 2005. While the focus of the chapter will be Louisiana, many of the changes that are examined extend far beyond the state and will therefore be included in this chapter. Indeed, a disaster of this magnitude engendered a re-examination of the nation’s readiness that extended far beyond the region. Using the 5-year period before Katrina as a baseline, the chapter assesses the progress made in four major areas: social, technical, and political systems. These areas have been generally accepted as important yardsticks for community resilience and sustainable development, and it is often where two or more of these systems interact that major vulnerabilities in a community’s ability to deal effectively with a disaster will occur.
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Notes
- 1.
Some communities have been successful at pursuing development while making sound mitigation decisions. These communities illustrate the fact that development is not inherently risky or unwise, it simply unwise to undertake development which does not fully take the natural environment into account.
- 2.
The manual, one of the first of its kind, can be found online at http://www.chart.uno.edu/docs/RiskLiteracyManual.pdf.
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Kiefer, J., Jerolleman, A. (2014). What Has Been Done? Louisiana After Katrina. In: Kapucu, N., Liou, K. (eds) Disaster and Development. Environmental Hazards. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04468-2_6
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