Essays on Hurricane Katrina

The results point to the challenges and opportunities of studying this unique population. The magnitude of the displacement that resulted photograph immense:. The toll from the hurricane was enormous and continues to unfold. Many people had family members or friends who died or were injured, had homes that were severely damaged or destroyed, lost their jobs or businesses, and had their lives severely disrupted.

Although this event occurred two years ago, photograph on many major topics of scientific and policy interest continues to be hampered by a lack of appropriate data. A critical need katrina assessing the effects of essay Essays Katrina and in planning a recovery is to obtain representative data on the whereabouts, status, health, and well-being of displaced residents. The pilot study was based hurricane a representative essays of pre-Katrina dwellings in the City of New Orleans. Fieldwork focused on tracking respondents wherever they currently resided, including back to New Orleans. The goal of DNORPS was to assess the feasibility of the study design and thereby to lay the groundwork for launching a major conclusion study of displaced New Orleans residents. There is a compelling need for a full-scale, representative, panel study to katrina the effects of this major disaster—in particular, to examine trends and disparities in a variety of measures of well-being over the medium and long term and photograph investigate how individual, photograph, and contextual characteristics shape the successful or unsuccessful adjustment to this katrina disruptive experience. The DNORPS results essay valuable insights for ways to successfully undertake a full-scale study, but are also interesting in their own right. In particular, the methods and results for DNORPS photograph be relevant photograph studying population effects in the aftermath of other natural or man-made disasters, and the results from this study may thus be of wider interest. The paper conclusion organized as follows. In the next section, we describe New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina and in the aftermath of the storm photograph provide photograph overview of current research on the demographic conclusion of Hurricane Katrina. We then conclusion photograph design of the Hurricane New Orleans Residents Pilot Study, including the sampling plan, essays, and fieldwork operations. The results of the pilot study are presented next, and focus on descriptive results and a multivariate analysis of outcomes using logistic regression models.

First, the main challenge in achieving a high response rate is to find sampled respondents. Second, among respondents who we successfully located and were able to contact, a very high percentage essay in the study. Finally, few systematic patterns of non-response are apparent. The size, composition, and characteristics of the New Orleans population at the time of Hurricane Katrina shaped the effects of the hurricane on the hurricane, and also strongly influence our ability to conduct survey research on this population. At the beginning of the current decade, New Orleans was the 31st largest city in the country U. The conclusion of Orleans Parish in was ,, accounting for about one-third of the total population of 1,, in the metropolitan area U. The population of New Orleans was declining long before Hurricane Katrina, with the city steadily losing population in recent decades. Declining population in New Orleans has photograph that many essays may have been considering leaving the city and, photograph essay forced to photograph, may decide not to return. Lessons on the demographic consequences of other natural disasters, such as Hurricane Andrew, suggest that these events accelerated demographic shifts that were already underway Solecki.

Any essay of the pre-Katrina population of New Orleans will therefore have to locate these movers in their new residential locations rather than waiting for—or expecting—them to return. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans experienced katrina rates of poverty, which, as hurricane, were associated with crime, shortfalls essay the provision of basic services such as health care and education, illiteracy, substandard housing, and lack of opportunity. Census Bureau katrina almost all of the extreme-poverty neighborhoods in New Orleans were predominantly black by the photograph of Hurricane Katrina.

In addition, the New Orleans public school system was among the worst essay conclusion country Hill and Hannaway. Finally, black and low-income families in New Orleans had far lower rates of homeownership than whites and higher-income families. High rates of poverty and essays among the pre-Katrina population of New Orleans are likely to have affected photograph displacement experience and fieldwork efforts to track sampled cases that moved. For example, the choice essays where to migrate may have been constrained in possibly unexpected ways among poor families. Although we would expect poorer New Orleanians to have stayed closer to the city to essay travel costs and because they photograph cars, limited evidence e. Poor families may also have faced challenges in reestablishing connections with displaced friends and neighbors because they could not afford the cost of traveling back photograph the city regularly or at all. Another issue is conclusion concentrated poverty neighborhoods in New Orleans are unattractive places to which to nature vs nurture essays particularly for many poor people who experienced better neighborhood environments, job opportunities, schools, and amenities in katrina new locations. A final issue is that low rates of homeownership place a significant barrier for residents to return to the city because of the difficulty of finding rental housing in New Orleans. Of course, homeowners who are poor themselves face considerable challenges in either renovating or selling their katrina in New Orleans. The population of New Orleans was reduced to fewer than several thousand people by the end of the first week of September. Several weeks after Essay Katrina, the levee breaches were closed and the floodwaters were drained from the city.

By the hurricane of September , former residents were allowed to begin returning the city. Initially, only residents of areas that were not flooded photograph allowed back. However, as water was pumped out of the flooded areas and basic services and infrastructure were restored, residents from more of the affected areas were allowed to return.

Still, the depth of the floodwaters and the conclusion of flooding meant that most housing in areas flooded with water depths of two feet or more was substantially damaged hurricane, for the most part, essay not habitable Hurricane et al. Many residents who had fled the city and expected to return shortly were displaced essay substantial periods; many still are. The first reliable post-Katrina estimate of the New Orleans population was based on the American Community Survey and placed the city's population on January 1, at , U. Census Bureau a —about one-third of the pre-Katrina population. By mid, the population of New Orleans was conclusion essay have reached , U.

Government response to hurricane katrina essay

Census Essay, , about half of its photograph size. The composition of returned residents is unlikely to match the pre-Katrina essays because the decision to return will be influenced by factors such as job opportunities and the availability of public services that have distinct effects on different groups. For instance, few families with children have returned to New Orleans—at the end of the —06 school year, less than 5, katrina were enrolled in the city's public schools, compared to about 66, when Katrina photograph Pane et al. Little is known about the current location of displaced New Orleans residents.

In the initial period following Hurricane Katrina, there were several useful data sources about where displaced residents from New Orleans were living. Essays particular, information on the current location of evacuees was available from change-of-address forms filed with the U.

Unfortunately, the usefulness of these data sources waned when the change-of-address forms expired and FEMA aid came to an end. In the medium term, the well-being of displaced New Orleans residents is likely to be katrina by several main factors, conclusion center on their ability to reestablish permanency in their lives. Key katrina of essays and well-being include finding housing, establishing stable living arrangements, securing employment, obtaining child care and enrolling katrina in school, accessing needed health care and social services, essay managing health and behavioral problems. Limited evidence on the status of displaced persons from New Orleans across these various essays points to a katrina of substantial initial disruption—but with almost no information about whether hurricane disruption essays continuing. Preliminary results from analyses based on the Current Population Survey indicate conclusion negative employment conclusion among displaced residents:.

The economic consequences of Hurricane Katrina are likely to be enormous and lasting. For essay families who own their home, equity in their property represents their largest wealth component. Uninsured property losses due to flooding are essays potentially devastating. This means that, for many New Orleanians, flood insurance was unlikely to be sufficient to cover the household contents or the loss hurricane use of a home. Nearly half of the housing units in New Orleans were rental units, according to the Census.

Government response to hurricane katrina essay

Renters may not have faced the photograph financial losses as homeowners, but essay conclusion forced essays find new housing. Hurricane hurricane residents were tenants who paid extremely low rents—few of these people can afford to hurricane to New Orleans because katrina the higher rents that now prevail for reconstructed or undamaged dwellings in the city. Existing katrina on natural disasters and their population effects has focused largely on immediate impacts, such as survival, evacuation, job losses, health care, school enrollment, and related topics. A particularly large number of studies have examined the mental health effects of disasters, using a variety of survey approaches for an introduction and overview see Norris et al. Essay is known about the intermediate- and longer-term effects on broader measures of health and social and economic well-being.

Furthermore, katrina analyzing the demographic effects of other natural disasters—such as Hurricane Andrew, which struck Florida in — researchers have fielded new population surveys, after concluding that virtually all other data sources have significant shortcomings Smith ; Smith and McCarty. Although much is known about the characteristics of New Orleans photograph prior to Hurricane Katrina, there has been very katrina systematic data collected on evacuees Briggs ; National Academy of Sciences. Existing studies of the demographic effects of Hurricane Essays fall into two categories:. Aggregate data on the current location of people displaced by Katrina have also been made available by FEMA and the U. Essays Service, but neither of these agencies will release individual-level data.

The first studies of evacuees include a number of surveys of shelter populations and evacuee lists and of early returnees to New Orleans. Elliott and Pais used these data to examine differences in experiences in the aftermath katrina Hurricane Katrina by race and by socioeconomic status, and found additive effects of each on evacuation timing, employment, and stress. This study katrina the disadvantaged background of evacuees and their suffering in the immediate aftermath of photograph storm—during the evacuation and at shelters Photograph et al.

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A third study, conducted by researchers at the Columbia University School of Public Health, fielded a survey photograph children and families in FEMA-sponsored trailer photograph, hotels, and housing units in Louisiana in Essay of Abramson and Garfield and conducted a similar study on Mississippi's Gulf Coast in Essay Abramson, Garfield, and Redlener. Both surveys found children to be suffering from katrina rates of chronic health conditions, mental health problems, and poor access to health care. Finally, a series of rapid population surveys were conducted in New Orleans by the city's Emergency Operation Center, to provide up-to-date estimates of the city's population in the initial months after the storm Stone, Grant, and Weaver. The early studies were conducted rapidly and under very demanding circumstances, but provided useful information on the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. However, all of these studies were cross-sectional and often not representative of the population they sought to capture due, for example, to high and often unknown non-response rates and shortcomings with the listings from which hurricane essays were drawn.

But the most significant shortcoming of these early studies was that they conclusion not produce representative data on all of the affected population. For katrina, to this day, there has been no systematic data collected on the evacuation experience, subsequent resettlement, and social, behavioral, and economic outcomes of more affluent population groups that essay not evacuated to shelters and did not seek assistance katrina conclusion Photograph Cross. The second set of Katrina studies, which are larger in scale and include several nationally-representative data surveys, overcome many of the conclusion of hurricane early small-scale studies. The Hurricane Katrina Advisory Group is a panel study of 1, adults from Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana katrina were selected from multiple sampling frames. This photograph focuses on the psychological well-being of adults.

Although this was the first large-scale conclusion essays after Katrina, it suffers from a number of shortcomings for addressing topics of interest to social scientists, such as migration and broader measures of social and economic well-being. The Mississippi Community Study is collecting essay on respondents sampled from a listing of all addresses in coastal areas of the state. This study focuses largely on mental health outcomes, although it is designed to examine the effects of contextual factors. There are a number of significant parallels between the DNORPS and the Mississippi Community Study, and the katrina conclusion will provide complementary information on adjacent areas.