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Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005 . The next day, some of the levees protecting New Orleans failed, and the city was flooded. The storm damage can be classified as both a natural disaster (a category five hurricane, meaning winds above 175 miles per hour) and a human-made disaster. (According to one scientist who studied hurricanes, We've had plenty of knowledge to know this was a disaster waiting to happen.) Katrina flooded New Orleans both because it was a monster hurricane and because the levees failed; this should not have been surprising. Computer models of hurricanes had predicted this. With this knowledge in hand, an adequate public health plan could have been in place before the storm: evacuation plans; the designation of shelters provided with adequate food, clean water, medications, and vaccinations; plans to get all the people to those shelters; and plans to clean up and rebuild the city. Apparently, adequate plans were not in place. More than a year after the hurricane, 99,000 people were still living in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers. Ten years after Katrina, New Orleans' population was 29 percent smaller than it was in 2000 (343,829 in 2010, down from 484,674 in 2000). The percentage of the city that is white has grown by 30 percent, although the number of whites has shrunk by 24,000 people. Black residency is down by 118,000 people. New Orleans was once two-thirds black; it is now less than 60 percent black. The number of children has dropped by more than 40 percent. Rebuilding of housing, particularly rentals, has been slow.
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