Rebuilding After Hurracane Katrina Essay - 927 Words

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina brought a death toll in the thousands and millions of dollars in damage. It was a severe storm â€Å"with winds in excess of 150 miles per hour [that] caused 20-foot-high waves to pound the coastlines of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi† (Dass-Brailsford 24). Other than the rescue missions, the city was also concerned with clean up efforts and restoring basic service to residents, which was a huge challenge to the city government. On the other hand, different voices from residents are also caused city government moving slow in decision-making and implementation of the recovery plans. Some progress on recovery plan has been made, but the city is struggling with the slow planning process, the lack†¦show more content†¦The low number of skilled workers is also an important factor that New Orleans is struggling with. The city was also continuously losing population after Hurricane Katrina, and it did not have enough human resources to support the public services over such a huge territory to maintain an equivalent level as other cities in the United States. As the down trend of residents, the skilled workers was also getting lower that some of the jobs were taken by unskilled Latino Americans and African Americans; therefore, the service quality was not improved along with the rising price of everything. However, â€Å"[a]bout 37 percent of pre-Katrina New Orleanians had annual [incomes] below twenty thousand dollars† (Lukensmeyer 5). However, â€Å"displaced evacuees who had not returned to New Orleans had poorer labor market outcomes than those who returned to the city and appeared to be worse-off compared to their situation before the hurricane† (Fussell et al. 24). The number of skilled workers is decreasing. Finally, because many residents do not return, the city is not able to rebuild many of its neighborhoods. One of the main reasons was because of the serious destruction after the storm. As the majority of the city was sitting below sea level, 80 percent of the land area was drowned by the disastrous floodwaters because of numerous of the levee failures. In New Orleans, â€Å"more than 70 percent of