Hurricane Katrina (& Rita)
Most recently updated: May 13, 2006
Bold red italic = Things in the "Yes, we should have known better" category (that is, information written BEFORE Katrina and Rita hit).
Please do email me other good links that you find! --Gwyn Jones (gwjones@bcc.ctc.edu)
When the Levee Breaks (.pdf) - James Denning, in January 1994 issue of Civil Engineering - "The floods that devastated the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys in 1993 have created two questions: Is our approach to flood control correct? And where do we go from here?"
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5 - National Geographic - Thanks, Emily!
"Last year, National Geographic did a story on what would be likely to happen if a powerful hurricane hit New Orleans. Its conclusions were eerily accurate. Equally scary, it paints a frightening picture of changes in the waters near New Orleans. Given its conclusions, it appears to have been only a matter of time before disaster struck."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/national/nationalspecial/22storm.html - "Rita, with winds of 165 m.p.h., forced the evacuation of as many as a million people from Corpus Christi to New Orleans."
Segments I heard on the radio during Autumn 2005 (you can listen to them online) - http://www.kuow.org:
* http://www.radioopensource.org - Open Source segment Tuesday September 6, 2005 "The Lessons of Katrina"
"It's been about a week since the waters of Lake Pontchartrain inundated the city. The levees have been patched up and the draining of New Orleans has begun. The refugees - now called evacuees - have been taken to twenty different states, with about a quarter million people in Texas alone. Baton Rouge has doubled and Cape Cod is geting ready for a few thousand of its own. Erstwhile Red Sox pitching ace Curt Schilling has stepped in: he's paying for a family of nine to live in Boston for the next year. It's time for us to step back and think about the long-term reverberations of Katrina's aftermath. There is no shortage of questions for our guests - who have yet to be determined - and for you: What is the role of government in the context of a disaster on the scale of Katrina? What about private citizens and groups? Or faith-based initiatives? Are we on the cusp of a sea-change in terms of our civic expectations? Will "big government" become more of a wish than an epithet? And then there are the indelible - and shameful - images that played around the clock on U.S. televisions and throughout the world - images that have immediately brought to the fore the beginning of a new dialogue about race and poverty. By that I mean that, if nothing else, the words "race" and "poverty" have acutally been mentioned recently in the news. So the largest question, and the one that perhaps would demand a sooth-sayer as much as a truth-teller: If Katrina has changed the way you view race, or poverty, or the role of government in America, what - if anything - will change as a result of it?"
* http://www.radioopensource.org/the-end-of-new-orleans - Open Source, 8/31/05
* http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2005/Sep/hour1_090205.html - Science Friday, 9/2/05, Hour 1
* http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2005/Sep/hour2_090205.html - Science Friday, 9/2/05, Hour 2
* Additional segments will probably be posted at http://www.radioopensource.org/2005 and http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2005/Sep
* http://www.npr.org/templates/topics/topic.php?topicId=1092 - NPR coverage of Katrina
http://www.pbs.org - PBS
* http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/video/3204/q02.html - NOVA Science Now, January 25, 2005 (Robert Krulwich) - Fascinating to see now, "in retrospect"
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/dispatches/050901.html - Follow-up 9/1/05
* http://www.pbs.org/now - NOW (Bill Moyers, David Brancaccio)
http://www.pbs.org/now/science/neworleans.html
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_neworleans.html
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_delta.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/dispatches/050901.html - Follow-up 9/1/05
* http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/july-dec05/katrina/index.html - NewsHour (Jim Lehrer)
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/july-dec05/katrina/index.html#pbs - Additional links
http://www.colorado.edu/hazards - U of Colorado's Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center (NHC)
* http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/o/nov04/nov04c.html - "What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans?" (November 2004)
* http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/o/maro02/maro02e.htm - "Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Disasters: Lessons from the East Coast and New Orleans" (March 2002)
* Search on the word hurricane yields many additional articles, such as http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/wp/wp94/wp94.html ("Hurricane Damage to Residential Structures: Risk and Mitigation") - And there have been many follow-up articles about these events (planning, action, ethics, clean-up, ongoing issues, etc).
http://www.nasa.gov - National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA)
* http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/hurricane_2005.html - Hurricane Resource Page (Looking at Earth)
* http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards - "Hurricane Katrina Floods the Southeastern United States" (Earth Observatory)
http://www.usgs.gov - United States Geological Survey (USGS)
* Main page has had "Hurricane Science -- Katrina, August 2005"
* http://www.usgs.gov/homepage/science_features_time.asp?Year=2005 - Science Features Archives (2005)
http://www.noaa.gov - National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
* Main page has had lots of news about Katrina
* http://www.nhc.noaa.gov - National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service
http://www.fema.gov - Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
* Main page has had lots of news about Katrina
* http://www.fema.gov/library/prepandprev.shtm - Preparation and Prevention
And:
* http://www.geotimes.org/current - Geotimes magazine's Web Extras has had information
* http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20050831/ts_usatoday/developmentnatureerodedregionsdefenses - "Development, nature eroded region's defenses"
* http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/09/01/katrina/index.html?source=daily - "Any Report in a Storm: How are journalists covering climate change in Katrina's wake?" (Grist magazine)
* http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050830_STORM_FEATURE/blocker.html - "Hurricane Katrina: The Storm's Impact" (New York Times)
* http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/visualization/collections/hurricanes.html - Hurricane Visualizations (Carleton College's Science Education Resource Center)
* http://geology.com/news - "Hurricane Katrina - New Orleans Flooding" (geology.com)
* http://www.learner.org/resources/series78.html? - Earth Revealed (short videos) - Episodes #19 & #20
* http://www.acadweb.wwu.edu/eesp/emc_certs.shtml - WWU Emergency Management Certificate (online program)
* http://www.redcross.org - American Red Cross