Vox - Hurricane Katrina: New Orleans 10 years laterhttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2015-08-28T13:10:00-04:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/89475202015-08-28T13:10:00-04:002015-08-28T13:10:00-04:00These stunning NASA images show the effect of Hurricane Katrina 10 years later
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Vj1-W8IjSs62BqoPZhkbyS4ZV28=/0x45:3000x2295/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47048320/GettyImages-53509282.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Mark Wilson/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ten years after <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/8/23/9191907/hurricane-katrina">Hurricane Katrina</a>, you can still see the scars left by the storm — not just in places like New Orleans, but also in the region's less inhabited areas.</p>
<p><a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php">NASA</a> published stunning satellite images looking at swamplands around Delacroix, a fishing town southeast of New Orleans, one week before Katrina and 10 years after — showing how the flood changed waterways in the region.</p>
<p>Here's the image for before Katrina:</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Swamp areas in Louisiana before Katrina hit." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qwNG0WRo3bSoPrFf72tT6GI_nSM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4008890/Katrina%20before.png">
<cite><p><a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php">NASA</a></p></cite>
</figure>
<p>Here's the image for 10 years after:</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Swamp areas in Louisiana 10 years after Katrina." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jiaws0BliuvYWubg1BceI5odipo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4008896/Katrina%2010%20years%20after.png">
<cite><p><a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php">NASA</a></p></cite>
</figure>
<p>NASA explained:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A team of US Geological Survey scientists has <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2112/SI63-009.1">published detailed maps</a> of land change around Delacroix. By looking at a series of Landsat and commercial satellite images of the area over time, and comparing them pixel by pixel, they have determined how much effect Hurricane Katrina had on the marshes compared to <a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=20416">Gustav</a>, another hurricane that struck in 2008.</p>
<p>Their conclusion was that Katrina’s extreme winds, long duration (20 hours), and major storm surge (up to five meters) did serious, lasting damage to Delacroix’s marshes; Gustav reinforced it in 2008. After Katrina’s flooding had subsided, 8.2 percent of the pixels in their study area had changed from land to water; Gustav changed an additional 1.4 percent of pixels.</p>
<p>Katrina did build new land in a few areas. In the 2015 image, for instance, note the expansion near Big Mar and along some of the other new ponds and channels west of Lake Lery. In total, 3.3 percent of pixels were converted from water before Katrina to land afterward.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The change is clear on the maps — there's a lot more black, representing waterways, in the images after Katrina. This impacted the region's ecosystem, but it also shows how powerful Katrina was — to still have an effect on the land 10 years later.</p>
<h3>Watch: Katrina survivors remember the day their lives changed forever</h3>
<p><iframe src="https://www.vox.com/videos/iframe?id=76844" frameborder="0" seamless="true" marginwidth="0" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true" name="76844-chorus-video-iframe"></iframe></p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/28/9220849/katrina-satellite-imagesGerman Lopez2015-08-28T12:10:00-04:002015-08-28T12:10:00-04:007 facts about Hurricane Katrina that show just how incompetent the government response was
<figure>
<img alt="Water spills over a levee toward New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/A0-OV1ok0Z4Yr1rx37a1FcUAgDQ=/0x0:2998x2249/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47011090/GettyImages-97657258.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Water spills over a levee toward New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. | <a href='http://www.gettyimages.com'>AFP via Getty Images</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>10 years after Hurricane Katrina overran New Orleans, the city is still recovering from a disaster that was as much human-caused as natural.</p>
<p>Katrina, which formed on August 23, 2005, and hit the Gulf Coast of the US on August 29, was a massive storm that was likely to wreak havoc in the region regardless of how the government reacted. But the government response was so wildly incompetent that it allowed the worst of the catastrophe to continue and sometimes created entirely new, unnecessary problems.</p>
<div data-analytics-category="article" data-analytics-action="link:related" class="chorus-snippet s-related">
<span class="s-related__title">Related</span><a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/8/20/9176225/hurricane-katrina-government" target="new">I worked for the governor of Louisiana during Katrina. Here are 5 things I learned.</a>
</div>
<p>This is the big lesson of Katrina: People will always have to deal with unavoidable natural disasters, but a poor government reaction and preparation can lead to many more deaths and untold costs — like it did in Mississippi and Louisiana, particularly New Orleans, a decade ago.</p>
<h3>1) At least 1,800 people died due to Hurricane Katrina</h3>
<p><iframe src="https://www.vox.com/videos/iframe?id=76844" frameborder="0" seamless="true" marginwidth="0" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true" name="76844-chorus-video-iframe"></iframe></p>
<p>With a death toll of <a href="http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL122005_Katrina.pdf">more than 1,800</a>, Katrina was the third-deadliest hurricane in US history after Galveston in 1900 (which killed 8,000 to 12,000 people) and Okeechobee in 1928 (which killed 2,500 to 3,000 people), according to <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/06/18/deadliest-costliest-hurricanes-in-us-history">US News and World Report</a>. But Katrina is by far the costliest hurricane in economic terms, running up $108 billion in costs.</p>
<p>Much of this damage was likely unavoidable: Katrina was a huge, category 3 hurricane when it hit Louisiana and Mississippi, and it hit areas — including New Orleans — that were largely below sea level and therefore vulnerable to flooding. But many of the issues were worsened — if not caused — by a government response that was unable to deal with the storm before, during, and after it made landfall. The incompetence plagued multiple levels of government, from local police to federal agencies like FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the US Army Corps of Engineers.</p>
<h3>2) The levees failed because of bad engineering, not just because Katrina was too big</h3>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="A view of the Lower Ninth Ward and Industrial Canal of New Orleans near a point where a levee was breached during Hurricane Katrina." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LHKhrO_vLcbYnsxW5xx11x380S0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3990580/GettyImages-484523958.jpg">
<cite><p>Lee Celano/AFP via Getty Images</p></cite>
<figcaption>
<p>A view of the Lower Ninth Ward and Industrial Canal of New Orleans near a point where a levee was breached during Hurricane Katrina.</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One reason Katrina and the floods it caused broke through New Orleans's levees was because the storm was too strong. But reports since the hurricane have also exposed another culprit: shoddy engineering.</p>
<p>More than six months after Katrina hit, the US Army Corps of Engineers released a <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/katrina-report-blames-levees/">report</a> in which they took blame for the levees breaking, flat-out admitting that the levees were built in a disjointed fashion based on outdated data. Much of this, the report revealed, was due to a lack of funding — resulting in a flawed system of levees that was inconsistent in quality, materials, and design. Engineers also failed to account for the region's poor soil quality and sinking land, which created more gaps in barriers.</p>
<p>The federal government was largely culpable for this mess, since it was largely on the Corps — a federal agency — to oversee the construction of the levees after <a href="http://www.nola.com/175years/index.ssf/2011/12/1965_hurricane_betsy_smashes_a.html">Hurricane Betsy</a> flooded New Orleans in 1965. As the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/us/decade-after-katrina-pointing-finger-more-firmly-at-army-corps.html">New York Times's Campbell Robertson and John Schwartz</a> reported, a <a href="http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/projects/neworleans/report/Draft/Table%20of%20Contents.pdf">2006 report</a> placed some of the responsibility for the levees' failures on dysfunctional interactions between local officials and the Corps. But a <a href="http://www.iwaponline.com/wp/01704/0707/017040707.pdf">new paper</a> published in the journal <em>Water Policy</em> this year — and penned by one of the authors of the 2006 report — put the blame more squarely on the Corps, which allegedly made poor decisions during the construction of the levees to save money. The result was some short-term savings for taxpayers and the Corps, but ultimately a bigger disaster through Katrina.</p>
<p>This is just one of the many ways the federal government failed to prevent a disaster in the lead-up to Katrina. Even though there were always serious concerns about how a hurricane could destroy New Orleans, the federal agency in charge of building better levees and flood walls was at times more worried about money than about building proper protections, and relied on outdated data to build what turned out to be deeply flawed structures.</p>
<h3>3) Katrina caused the biggest evacuation in US history, but many people couldn't afford to leave</h3>
<p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zIUzLpO1kxI" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>About 1.3 million people left southeast Louisiana and 400,000 evacuated from New Orleans itself, culminating in one of the largest evacuations in US history, according to Jed Horne in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-hurricane-katrina/2012/08/31/003f4064-f147-11e1-a612-3cfc842a6d89_story.html">Washington Post</a>. But as the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/us/nationalspecial/from-margins-of-society-to-center-of-the-tragedy.html">New York Times's David Gonzalez</a> reported as the storm battered the region, tens of thousands of people remained in the city — not necessarily by choice, but rather because they were too poor to afford a car or bus fare to leave.</p>
<p>It was common during and after Katrina to hear people asking why everyone didn't just leave New Orleans. But the truth is that many of them couldn't leave — as the Times reported — and the government did little to nothing to help them get out of Katrina's path before the hurricane hit.</p>
<p>This is one of the reasons Kanye West <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIUzLpO1kxI">infamously said</a> that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Local, state, and federal officials were simply way too slow in helping largely poor, black populations, leaving them stranded to bear the brunt of the storm. And while New Orleans has <a href="https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/new-orleans-evacuation-hurricane-katrina-will-never-happen-again">reportedly made improvements</a> in its evacuation plans since 2005, the inadequate response at the time of Katrina led to more deaths and pain that could have otherwise been avoided — particularly among impoverished, minority communities.</p>
<p>"Is this what the pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?" Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American studies at Fordham University, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/poverty-our-nationand-poverty-our-politics/">wrote</a> at the time. "If September 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation rent by profound social divisions."</p>
<h3>4) Federal officials were slow to react to local and state officials' pleas</h3>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="President George W. Bush looks out the window of Air Force One as he flies over New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the region." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NWFsKTXRvrxaCS0APhefs-tswDo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3990590/GettyImages-97632045.jpg">
<cite><p>Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images</p></cite>
<figcaption>
<p>President George W. Bush looks out the window of Air Force One as he flies over New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the region.</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After the response to Katrina proved to be its own kind of unmitigated disaster, the Bush administration attempted to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301680.html">shift some of the blame</a> to local and state officials — particularly Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. Some media outlets, going by information from administration officials, claimed Blanco didn't declare a state of emergency.</p>
<p>In fact, Horne noted in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-hurricane-katrina/2012/08/31/003f4064-f147-11e1-a612-3cfc842a6d89_story.html">Washington Post</a>, Blanco declared a state of emergency on August 26 — a day before Mississippi and the White House did, and three days before the storm made landfall. And while President George W. Bush <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/30/AR2005083000945.html">vacationed</a> in Texas as the storm hit, Blanco <a href="http://www.pensitoreview.com/2010/08/27/worst-presidential-vacation-ever-5-years-ago-bush-took-time-out-to-politick-while-new-orleans-drowned/" target="_blank">pleaded</a> for the administration to send more aid. At one point, the Louisiana National Guard <a target="_blank" href="http://www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/11/chronology_of_errors_how_a_disaster_spread/">asked</a> FEMA for 700 buses — but, days later, the agency sent only 100, and it took a week to evacuate flood survivors.</p>
<p>This was just one of the many ways FEMA fell short even as local and state officials pleaded for help and issued warnings to federal officials. Staffed by political appointees with <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR2005090802165.html">little to no experience</a> in dealing with disasters, the agency bumbled its response to Katrina, causing unnecessary deaths and chaos across Louisiana and Mississippi. The horrible response would <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-bush-ratings-at-all-time-low/">eventually help tank</a> Bush's <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx">approval ratings</a>, with his administration's response to Katrina consistently viewed poorly by a majority of Americans.</p>
<h3>5) The Superdome wasn't the murderous hellhole government officials made it out to be</h3>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="The New Orleans Superdome in 2014." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dkNK8CIQ_uu3BDSE-XfnrKmlEek=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3990592/GettyImages-469590757.jpg">
<cite><p>Mike Coppola/Getty Images</p></cite>
<figcaption>
<p>The New Orleans Superdome in 2014.</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Narratives that came out of Katrina portrayed the Superdome, where <a target="_blank" href="http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/aug/21/new-orleans-superdome-stadium-hurricane-katrina">30,000 people</a> were stranded after the storm, as lawless, depraved, and chaotic — with reports of murders, rapes, and even sniper attacks on the crowds crammed into the sports stadium.</p>
<p>For example, New Orleans's mayor at the time, Ray Nagin, told Oprah Winfrey horror stories of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people," while Eddie Compass, then the city's police chief, told of "little babies getting raped," the <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2005/sep/27/nation/na-rumors27">Los Angeles Times's Susannah Rosenblatt and James Rainey</a> reported a month after the storm.</p>
<p>While the scene in the Superdome was far from a paradise, it was not the murderous hellhole that media reports and government officials made it out to be. In fact, just <a href="http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/reports-of-anarchy-at-superdome-overstated/">six people</a> died in the Superdome — four of natural causes, one of suicide, and one of a drug overdose. No one was murdered in the stadium, according to <a href="http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/reports-of-anarchy-at-superdome-overstated/">Louisiana National Guard Colonel Thomas Beron</a>.</p>
<p>Some of the blame for the sensationalist stories falls on journalists who breathlessly reported some of the outrageous claims about the situation in the Superdome. But a lot of the blame also falls on local, state, and federal officials who, already facing a lot of chaos and panic due to the impact of Katrina, echoed wild claims about the Superdome that helped foster even more chaos and panic. And this additional panic came with a real cost: In the aftermath, officials <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/aug/26/katrina-racism-us-media">focused resources</a> on supposedly restoring order in the Superdome — leaving fewer resources for some of the rescue and reconstruction work that was left to be done. So officials helped create unnecessary panic, and then they dedicated resources to address that panic.</p>
<h3>6) New Orleans still hasn't recovered from Katrina</h3>
<center>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="US Census stats for New Orleans 10 years after Katrina." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1IBYzgHkW88TebdjCkVqvqdy07M=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3990578/US%20Census%20Katrina.jpg">
<cite><p><a href="http://www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2015/cb15-ff16.html">US Census Bureau</a></p></cite>
</figure>
</center>
<p>A decade after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans metro area still hasn't recovered from the storm. Although the area has grown since 2006, it holds 134,000 fewer residents, more than 39,000 fewer housing units, and nearly 2,000 fewer business establishments since Katrina hit. Again, much of this damage was likely unavoidable in the face of a storm as strong as Katrina — but the harms could have been at least mitigated by better government preparation and a stronger response, based on the <a href="http://www.iwaponline.com/wp/01704/0707/017040707.pdf">many</a> <a href="http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12647">reports</a> that have reviewed the situation since Katrina.</p>
<h3>7) New Orleans isn't — and probably can't be — fully prepared for another Katrina</h3>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="New Orleans, one year after Hurricane Katrina." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JEYb-m0vIjcBQ69IWLW7S1caqZ0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3990594/GettyImages-71715040.jpg">
<cite><p>Mario Tama/Getty Images</p></cite>
<figcaption>
<p>New Orleans, one year after Hurricane Katrina.</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite the massive damage left behind by Katrina, another storm like it could still decimate the region again.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://thelensnola.org/2015/08/19/rebuilt-levees-dont-meet-goal-to-protect-new-orleans-against-category-5-hurricane/">report</a> from the Lens, a local news outlet in New Orleans, and Politifact found that the anti-flooding system built after Katrina couldn't handle another storm like it. The system could endure a 100-year storm — a storm with a 1 percent chance of happening on any given year — but Katrina was considered a much stronger 400-year storm. (Still, the new system is certainly <em>much</em> stronger than what existed before it, so it could diminish a lot of the damage that Katrina caused.)</p>
<p>Another <a href="http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12647">report</a> by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council concluded that levees and flood walls can never be large or sturdy enough to fully protect New Orleans from another disaster similar in scope to Katrina.</p>
<p>In fact, this is perhaps the most lasting, dangerous public policy failure after Katrina: The report noted that the new structures built around the city give a false sense of security, leading the public to believe that they will be protected if another storm like Katrina comes. But the reality is the nature of New Orleans — mainly, its status as a city largely below sea level — will always leave it exposed to these kinds of storms and floods. Ultimately, the report concluded that voluntarily relocating people from areas exposed to floods should be considered as a viable public policy option — otherwise, the same problems may repeat themselves in the future.</p>
<p>This is perhaps the most disheartening fact about Katrina: 10 years later, something like it could happen again.</p>
<h3>Watch: What a 6-magnitude earthquake does in China versus in the US</h3>
<div data-volume-id="366" data-analytics-placement="entry:middle" data-volume-placement="article" id="volume-placement-9126" class="volume-video" data-volume-uuid="5f7b81b68" data-analytics-label="What a 6-magnitude earthquake does | 366" data-analytics-action="volume:view:entry:middle" data-analytics-viewport="video"></div>
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/23/9191907/hurricane-katrinaGerman Lopez2015-08-28T10:01:01-04:002015-08-28T10:01:01-04:00People are still living in FEMA’s toxic Katrina trailers — and they likely have no idea
<figure>
<img alt="FEMA trailers purchased by the Lac Vieux Desert tribe in Watersmeet, Michigan, in 2014." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rn_ec2NovQJ4vtFTCWGzQTs2sI0=/75x0:2340x1699/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47043638/GettyImages-464930544.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>FEMA trailers purchased by the Lac Vieux Desert tribe in Watersmeet, Michigan, in 2014. | Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Originally published on </em><em><a href="http://grist.org/politics/people-are-still-living-in-femas-toxic-katrina-trailers-and-they-likely-have-no-idea/">Grist</a></em><em style="font-size: 1.3em; line-height: 1.65;">.</em></p>
<p>As soon as Nick Shapiro turned into the parking lot of the Tumbleweed Inn in Alexander, North Dakota, he recognized the trailers. They were off-white, boxy, almost cartoonish, and unadorned with any of the frills — racing stripes, awnings, window treatments — that a manufacturer would typically add to set a trailer apart on a display lot.</p>
<p></p>
<div class="chorus-snippet s-related" data-analytics-action="link:related" data-analytics-category="article">
<span class="s-related__title">Related</span> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.vox.com/2015/8/23/9191907/hurricane-katrina">Hurricane Katrina, in 7 essential facts</a><br>
</div>
<p>But these trailers had never seen a display lot. Shapiro had first seen them when he was living in New Orleans in 2010, doing fieldwork for his Oxford University PhD. In New Orleans, everyone knew what they were, and the city was desperate to get rid of them. They had been built fast, and not to last. The fact that some people were still living in them because they had never gotten enough money to rebuild their homes, or had run afoul of unethical contractors, was an unwanted reminder of just how far the city still had to go to recover from Hurricane Katrina.</p>
<p>But in the oil fields of Alexander, where Shapiro found them, people had, at best, only a dim memory of hearing something bad about the trailers on the late-night news.</p>
<p><q aria-hidden="true" class="right">The link between mobile homes and formaldehyde was well documented</q></p>
<p>Only one person in the improvised trailer park near the Tumbleweed Inn knew where the trailers were from. Now 19, he’d lived in one as a child, after his family’s home was destroyed when the levees around New Orleans broke in 2005. "It feels like home," he said, looking around the park. "Not the landscape. The trailers. I’m used to it."</p>
<p>Most of the people living in the trailer park were like him: men, young, drawn to North Dakota from all over the US by the prospect of making $16 an hour minimum in an oil boomtown. So what if they had to pay $1,200 a month to live in a trailer out on the prairie? They made it work. They slept in bunk beds, seven to a trailer, so that they could save as much as they could and then get the hell out of there.</p>
<h3>
<span>Get me 120,000 trailer homes, pronto!<br></span><img style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 24.75px;" src="https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4006432/Grist1.shapiro_020.jpg">
</h3>
<p>The story of the trailers — which Grist has assembled from Freedom of Information Act requests, interviews, and the public record — goes like this: Less than 24 hours after the New Orleans levees broke, trailer companies were in touch with local officials for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), setting up contracts to provide housing for people whose homes were destroyed in the flood. Since 80 percent of New Orleans, plus a whole lot of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coastline, had been flooded, the need for housing was overwhelming. At the time, there were about 14,000 trailers in lots around the country, waiting to be sold; FEMA needed 120,000. It ordered nearly $2.7 billion worth of travel trailers and <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/mobile_homes_and_trailers/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier">mobile homes</a> from 60 different companies, and the production lines cranked into overdrive.</p>
<p><em>(For a map of the initial deployments of FEMA trailers in Louisiana between September 2005 and October 2009, please see the original </em><em><a href="http://grist.org/politics/people-are-still-living-in-femas-toxic-katrina-trailers-and-they-likely-have-no-idea/">Grist post</a></em><em>.)</em></p>
<p>Still, a month after Katrina and Rita hit landfall, Louisiana <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/30/us/nationalspecial/housing-for-storms-evacuees-lagging-far-behind-us-goals.html">had only managed to get 109 families into trailers</a>. The alternatives were overcrowded shelters, or <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/us/nationalspecial/fema-slow-to-the-rescue-now-stumbles-in-aid-effort.html">squatting in the wreckage of the flood</a>.</p>
<p><q aria-hidden="true" class="right">30 of the 32 tested positive for high formaldehyde levels</q></p>
<p>As new trailers arrived, they brought hope: They were shiny and new and, most importantly, had never been buried under 12 feet of water. But when the people who were supposed to live in them opened the doors, many noted a strong chemical smell inside. Some thought it was okay: It smelled <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116952/new-car-smell-formaldehyde-could-have-killed-fema-trailers">kind of like a new car</a> in there! Others did not think it was okay, especially after they started to get nosebleeds and headaches, and began to have trouble breathing. Local pediatricians began to notice an epidemic of respiratory infections in children in the area — and all of them seemed to be living in FEMA trailers.</p>
<p>"After the storm, about half of the people I knew were in FEMA trailers," said Sierra Club organizer Becky Gillette. "Some of them were fine. The smokers didn’t complain much. But I had a friend who would wake up in the middle of the night, gasping for air." Gillette knew a fair amount about air pollution — she’d worked on social justice campaigns around the local oil refinery. The link between mobile homes and formaldehyde <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehhe/trailerstudy/pdfs/08_118152_Compendium%20for%20States.pdf">was well documented</a>; the low ceilings and small size concentrated any fumes emanating from the particleboard they were built with.</p>
<p>Even after the National Institutes of Health declared <a href="http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/formaldehyde/formaldehyde-fact-sheet#r1">formaldehyde to be a carcinogen</a>, the Department of Housing and Urban Development didn’t bother to regulate levels of formaldehyde for travel trailers or motor homes, under the theory that they were only temporary lodging. Formaldehyde test kits were about $35 apiece, and they added up fast. Gillette ordered 32 of them — over $1,200 worth. When 30 of the 32 tested positive for high formaldehyde levels, she shared the information with FEMA — which, she said, did nothing. So Gillette got a grant from the Sierra Club to buy even more kits.</p>
<p>FEMA — or at least some parts of FEMA — did know that the trailers were dangerous, though that would not emerge until the <a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-110hhrg47995/pdf/CHRG-110hhrg47995.pdf">congressional hearings on the issue in 2008</a>. FEMA appears to have stopped testing trailers in early 2006, after a field agent discovered that one trailer, which was occupied by a couple expecting their second child, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071901039.html">had formaldehyde levels at 75 times the recommended threshold for workplace safety</a>. The couple was relocated, and management pushed back against further testing, even after a man was found dead in his trailer a few months later. "Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK," a FEMA lawyer named Patrick Preston advised on June 15, 2006. "Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them."</p>
<p><q aria-hidden="true" class="center">FEMA — or at least some parts of FEMA — did know that the trailers were dangerous</q></p>
<p>That same month, the Sierra Club announced that out of 44 trailers tested with kits purchased from Gillette’s grant, 40 had dangerously high formaldehyde levels. Mary DeVany, an <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pub/mary-devany%E2%80%8E/10/249/b46">occupational safety consultant</a> who worked with the Sierra Club on interpreting the results, theorized that the plywood that was used to build some of the trailers <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14011193/ns/us_news-katrina_the_long_road_back/t/are-fema-trailers-toxic-tin-cans/#.VddegEV8mjw">wasn’t heat-treated properly</a>. Trailers built by three companies in particular — Pilgrim International, Coachman Industries, and Gulf Stream Coach — had the highest levels. Kevin Broom, a spokesperson for the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, told reporters that trailer residents <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14011193/ns/us_news-katrina_the_long_road_back/t/are-fema-trailers-toxic-tin-cans/#.VdvxyM58mjw">needed to open their windows</a>.</p>
<h3>
<span>Used trailers, warning stickers, and the free market<br></span><img style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 24.75px;" src="https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4006438/Grist2.trailers.dsc_0229.jpg">
</h3>
<p>FEMA ultimately succeeded in deploying 140,000 trailers up and down the ravaged Gulf Coast. Then it had to start figuring out what to do with them as people began to rebuild their lives and leave them behind. The agency had planned on getting rid of the trailers by selling them, possibly even to the people who were living in them, but that was no longer an option. In July 2007, FEMA <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29510684/ns/us_news-life/t/scrap-fema-mobile-homes-return-housing/#.Vdv9BM58mjw">suspended sales of the trailers to the public</a>, and in November, it announced plans to move as many residents as possible out of the trailers — partly, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/us/29trailer.html">a FEMA spokesperson said</a>, because of formaldehyde levels.</p>
<p>Around the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began running its own tests. It announced the results in early 2008: On average, the 519 trailers the CDC tested had five times the formaldehyde levels found in most modern homes, but a few were dramatically higher — about 40 times the recommended levels. The CDC’s then-director urged FEMA to relocate anyone still living in trailers, particularly children and the elderly, before summer, when heat would make the fumes even worse.</p>
<p><q aria-hidden="true" class="center">The GSA made buyers sign an agreement promising not to sell them as housing</q></p>
<p>Even unoccupied, the trailers were costing nearly $130 million a year to store, according to federal records, but what to do with them had become a loaded question. Congressional hearings held in spring 2008 established that the trailers were unsafe. In February 2009, the CDC started a $3.4 million pilot program designed to find people — especially children — who had lived in FEMA trailers and track their health over time. And a massive class-action lawsuit filed by trailer residents against FEMA and the trailer manufacturers continued to work its way through the court system.</p>
<p>But on January 1, 2010, a court injunction banning the sale of the trailers expired, and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031202213_2.html?sid=ST2010031700841">FEMA handed them off to the General Services Administration (GSA) to auction them off</a>, for about 7 percent what FEMA had originally paid for them. The GSA made buyers sign an agreement promising not to sell them as housing, and it slapped stickers on them saying that they were not to be used for human habitation — just storage or recreation.</p>
<p><em>This map shows the locations of FEMA trailer auction buyers. (For an interactive version, please see the original </em><em><a href="http://grist.org/politics/people-are-still-living-in-femas-toxic-katrina-trailers-and-they-likely-have-no-idea/">Grist post</a></em><em>.) Note that data are circa 2011–'12, and many trailers have been resold (and relocated) since then:</em></p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="US map of FEMA trailer action buyers" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ulQmtgMbd2a5QrW2O-G0-zNXkQY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4006516/grist.fema_trailers_1024.jpg">
<cite><p>Map created by Grist <a href="https://caldern.cartodb.com/maps?utm_source=Footer_Link&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Embed_v1&utm_content=caldern">caldern</a>, with <a href="https://cartodb.com/">CartoDB</a></p></cite>
</figure>
<p>Observers were aghast. "What if Toyota ordered a recall, then simply put a sticker on its vehicles saying they were unfit to drive before reselling them?" said Becky Gillette. In late 2008, FEMA had quietly sold about a thousand Katrina trailers and mobile homes as scrap; six months later, <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29510684/ns/us_news-life/t/scrap-fema-mobile-homes-return-housing/#.Vdv9BM58mjw">they were spotted in mobile home parks in Missouri and Georgia</a>. What was to stop the same thing from happening over and over again — stickers or no stickers?</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt='Trailer with sticker that says "Not to be used for housing"' data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZhIEvbrc6Fg3LPLoeO51ldUdAbg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4006444/Grist3.%20trailers.dsc_01713.jpg">
<cite><p>Nick Shapiro/Grist</p></cite>
</figure>
<p>As it turned out, nothing. FEMA trailers began to turn up everywhere, particularly in places where people needed a lot of housing fast, no questions asked. The stickers that read "NOT TO BE USED FOR HOUSING" were gone from the trailers almost as soon as they left the auction lot, though none of the buyers would admit to removing them.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Dirty window with what appears to be the outline of a missing sticker" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LnOVCxPAvpZcL8hNrPw3cc0v7o0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4006452/Grist3.missing-fema-trailer-sticker.jpg">
<cite><p>Grist</p></cite>
</figure>
<p>The trailers showed up later, in 2010 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/us/01trailers.html">at the Deepwater Horizon spill</a>. They showed up in 2011 in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee, <a href="http://thelensnola.org/2011/05/19/fema-trailers-formaldehyde-katrina-rita-tuscaloosa-tornadoe/">in neighborhoods that had been flattened by tornadoes</a>.</p>
<p>That was when Shapiro decided to follow up and started testing the trailers himself. He’d become preoccupied with them — how ubiquitous they remained despite their known risks. He defrayed his expenses by calling in favors; there was the analytical chemistry lab that agreed to run the tests for free, and a colleague who applied part of a grant from the National Science Foundation toward shipping.</p>
<p><q aria-hidden="true" class="right">Most of them told Shapiro they couldn’t afford to move</q></p>
<p>Word got out that he was testing trailers, and people from Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, and Illinois began to seek him out. Every test he did came in above the 16 ppm (parts per million) threshold that had been established as the new FEMA standard after the congressional hearings. None of the people who contacted Shapiro had been told, before they bought the trailers, that they were dangerous to live in. Most of them told Shapiro they couldn’t afford to move; they just appreciated knowing the risk.</p>
<p>Those who did try to get rid of the trailers, though, found that it wasn’t easy. Marty Horine of Clinton, Missouri, bought a 32-foot ex-FEMA Gulfstream Cavalier for her son in 2007, two weeks before the trailers were <a href="http://gsaauctions.gov/html/fema.htm">officially declared unfit to live in</a>.</p>
<p>Horine tried to return the trailer. The seller refused, and promptly declared bankruptcy. Horine contacted the GSA, the government agency that had handled the trailer auctions. ("I’m a retired schoolteacher," she says, dryly. "We’re a little bit of a bulldog, schoolteachers.") But the GSA told Horine that it would only take back the trailer if she brought it to Hope, Arkansas, the site of the original auction, and would only buy it back for what the GSA had sold it for. Horine had bought hers from a reseller, for $6,000, while that reseller had bought it at auction for around $1,000.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Trailers in a field" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8v5BdjqEBpgvbdtg7IAVSzV-mr8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4006448/Grist4.dsc_0144.jpg">
<cite><p>Nick Shapiro/Grist</p></cite>
</figure>
<p>Horine still sees FEMA trailers for sale in Clinton from time to time. Three years ago, more than a hundred of them appeared for sale on a nearby lot, with the stickers scraped off. "I went over there, just acting dumb, because that’s not hard to do," Horine drawled. "Then I said to the girl who was in charge of selling them, ‘You know this is illegal.'" The woman said that she didn’t know what Horine was talking about, but Horine noticed that the trailers were gone the next day.</p>
<p>Horine’s trailer remains unoccupied. She feels that selling it would be unethical. Even if she sold it on the cheap to someone who was aware of the risks, who’s to say <em>that</em> person wouldn’t turn around and sell it as a home to someone else? "It’s still sitting down there," she said when I called her, as though she were describing a visitor that had overstayed its welcome.</p>
<p>Shapiro began to file public records requests to find out as much as he could about the trailers and where they went. Now, when people contacted him, he had a collection of spreadsheets that he could search through to verify whether their trailer was one of the 120,000.</p>
<p>
<style>.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }</style>
</p>
<p> </p>
<div class="embed-container"><iframe scroll="=" frameborder="0" src="http://assets.grist.org/article/what-do-i-do-if-i-am-living-in-a-fema-trailer/index.html"></iframe></div>
<h2><br></h2>
<h3><span>When a boomtown looks like a refugee camp</span></h3>
<p>When Shapiro arrived in North Dakota, he was following a rumor: that the oil boom in the Bakken shale had attracted the Katrina trailers from across the country like filings to a magnet. What he didn’t expect was to find the trailers surrounding the towns of the Bakken boom at Katrina-level densities. These boomtowns were hard to distinguish from refugee camps.</p>
<p>How the trailers had made their way to North Dakota from Louisiana was a riddle. Back in 2010, FEMA donated several hundred trailers<a href="http://www.rvbusiness.com/2010/06/fema-trailers-headed-for-indian-reservation/"> to the local Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa</a>; it would not have been hard for the trailers to migrate again out of Turtle Mountain and into the oil fields. Shapiro was expecting to find oil and gas workers living in them. But instead the trailers were occupied by young men seeking their fortunes in the service economy that had sprung up <em>around</em> the oil and gas workers.</p>
<p>The oil and gas workers lived in nicer trailers, a few feet away. But the ones the service workers occupied were falling apart: Mold was blooming out of vents and improperly sealed crevices. In a sense, the trailers had been embalmed; now they were beginning to decompose.</p>
<p><q aria-hidden="true" class="right">[N]o one has systematically studied how the toxic trailers might have actually harmed their residents</q></p>
<p>The good news was, after four years of air-quality readings in FEMA trailers, the levels of formaldehyde were dropping. This spring, Shapiro returned to retest a trailer owned by a retired Mississippi couple <a href="http://thelensnola.org/2011/11/30/fema-trailers-test-toxic/">that he had tested when they contacted him back in 2011</a>. Back then the air had measured 105.6 ppb of formaldehyde – dangerously high.</p>
<p>In 2015, the level was down to 20 ppb — a fifth as high, but still over the 16 ppb safety threshold. What exactly did this mean? It’s hard to say, because no one has systematically studied how the toxic trailers might have actually harmed their residents. The CDC had a plan, known as KARE (a.k.a. <a href="http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/publications_health_registries.html">Katrina and Rita Exposures</a>), to register and track the health of FEMA trailer residents, but it never moved past the pilot stage. Shapiro says he asked CDC why and received a letter saying that the decision to not proceed rested solely with FEMA.</p>
<p>Shapiro gave the couple a prototype "air remediation device" – <a href="http://publiclab.org/wiki/diy-indoor-air-quality-remediation-kit">a houseplant hooked up to an aquarium pump with the diaphragm reversed</a>. In the past year, he’d been working with a research group called Public Lab on low-cost ways that people could monitor and clean the air in their own homes. For Shapiro, the project was a morale booster in the face of the relentlessly dispiriting trailer research. But he also worried that the plant was a kind of cop-out — a form of potted surrender to the fact that not all environmental justice campaigns result in actual environmental justice.</p>
<p><a href="http://publiclab.org/notes/nshapiro/05-06-2015/field-test-of-diy-testing-and-remediation-kit">He tested the couple’s trailer again, anyway</a>. A month after the installation of the "remediation device," the formaldehyde levels had fallen 40 percent, to 12 ppm. A decade after Katrina had summoned the trailers into existence, the ill-fated homes might almost be safe to live in.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://grist.org/article/what-do-i-do-if-i-am-living-in-a-fema-trailer">Live in one of FEMA’s Katrina trailers? Here’s what you can do.</a></em><em> </em></p>
<p><em>Video by Mariel Carr.</em> <em>Special thanks to reporter Nick Shapiro. Maps by Clayton Aldern. VIN look-up tool by Cory Simmons. Video produced by The Chemical Heritage Foundation, a library, museum, and center for scholars in Philadelphia that fosters dialogue on the role of science and technology in society. Find out more about their multimedia magazine at </em><em><a href="http://distillations.org/">distillations.org</a></em><em>.</em></p>
<p><em>Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter </em><a href="http://grist.org/subscribe/"><em>here</em></a><em>, and follow them on </em><a href="https://www.facebook.com/grist.org"><em>Facebook</em></a><em> and </em><a href="https://twitter.com/grist"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/28/9217971/fema-trailersHeather Smith2015-08-24T12:10:01-04:002015-08-24T12:10:01-04:00Hurricane Katrina showed what "adapting to climate change" looks like
<figure>
<img alt="Flag, adapted." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xcQ314o_G9C6rYKCRxipWO5fTA4=/0x40:1000x790/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47015302/hurricane-katrina-flag.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Flag, adapted. | (Shutterstock)</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I don't have a ton to add to the <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/8/20/9183479/hurricane-katrina-anniversary-new-orleans">retrospectives and analyses</a> prompted by the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I just want to make one small point, something that struck me about Katrina at the time and has been on my mind ever since.</p>
<h3>Why not just adapt to climate change?</h3>
<p>There is a certain line of thinking that goes like this: Climate change may well be happening, but disrupting the world's economic and energy systems to reduce carbon emissions is too expensive and difficult. Why launch some crazy, probably doomed effort to control the weather? We'll just do what people have always done, which is adapt to the changes.</p>
<p>Here's <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/03/25/37070/barton-climate-shade/">Rep. Joe Barton</a> (R-TX):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When it rains we find shelter. When it’s hot, we get shade. When it’s cold, we find a warm place to stay. Adaptation is the practical, affordable, utterly natural reflex response to nature when the planet is heating or cooling, as it always is.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I suspect this view is fairly widespread, even among people who might not be able to fully articulate it. Trying to prevent (the worst of) climate change by rapidly reducing global carbon emissions is a huge and politically fraught task with uncertain success. On the other hand, humans have always shown immense resourcefulness in adapting to what nature throws at us. We live in all sorts of places with extreme heat or cold; we live in swamps, on mountains, in deserts, atop tundra; we live in places beset by monsoons and tornadoes and droughts. We've shown that we can adapt to just about anything. Why wouldn't we be able to adapt to whatever climate change brings?</p>
<h3>Adapting to the old climate isn't the same as adapting to the new one</h3>
<p>The "let's just adapt" view has two key problems.</p>
<p>First is the fact that people are extremely bad at envisioning inclement circumstances they haven't experienced or witnessed. We are generally familiar with natural disasters as rare and extraordinary one-offs. This leads people intuitively to underplay both the severity of the damages climate change threatens and the effort and expense required to prepare for them.</p>
<p>In fact, if climate change remains unchecked, there will be multiple simultaneous disasters: heat waves, droughts in key agricultural areas, rising sea levels and more frequent floods, food shortages, resource conflicts, and mass migrations. Even if we think it's better to adapt to those things, we are certainly nowhere <em>near</em> prepared at present. Getting prepared will be extremely expensive — <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/11/1176411/adaptation-mitigation-misery/">much more expensive</a> than reducing carbon emissions up front — and just as politically difficult.</p>
<p>But the second problem with the adaptation view is the one Katrina always makes me think about. People often imagine mitigation and adaptation as substitutes, different ways of preventing the same amount of suffering. In fact, mitigation and adaptation are not equivalent. One key way they differ is <em>morally</em>. (I once wrote a <a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/preventing-climate-change-and-adapting-to-it-are-not-morally-equivalent/">longer post</a> about this if you want to dig in.)</p>
<h3>Mitigation is altruistic and universalist; adaptation is tribal and local</h3>
<p>Put simply, every unit of mitigation (preventing CO2 emissions or pulling CO2 out of the air) helps everyone.</p>
<p>Carbon dioxide is not a local pollutant like smog. Its only negative effects are global; it holds heat in the atmosphere, thus tweaking the entire planet's climate systems.</p>
<p>Similarly, the effects of preventing CO2 emissions are not local but global. Any little bit of climate change that is forestalled helps everyone on the planet and everyone in future generations. (For simplicity's sake, I'm putting aside the "co-benefits" of reducing carbon for now.)</p>
<p>In other words, mitigation is an altruistic, universalist undertaking. Jesus would dig it.</p>
<p>Adaptation is very different. It is not global but local, not universal in impact but highly targeted. A billion dollars of mitigation helps everyone a little bit; a billion dollars of adaptation helps a few people a lot. Specifically, adaptation helps people who have the luck to live in areas that can afford it.</p>
<h3>Mitigation slows the spread of inequality; adaptation speeds it up</h3>
<p>Among its other ill effects, climate change threatens to exacerbate global inequality; it will hit first and hardest in countries that are already poor, <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/11/23/new-climate-normal-poses-severe-risks">setting back decades of development efforts</a> aimed at raising them to a decent standard of living.</p>
<p>Mitigation helps prevent that acceleration of inequality. Adaptation does not. Adaptation, in fact, is likely to <em>further exacerbate it</em>.</p>
<p>One's ability to adapt is tied directly to one's wealth. Rich countries will be able to do more of it than poor countries; within rich countries, wealthier cities will be able to do more of it than poorer cities and rural areas; and even within wealthy cities, it will be the more affluent residents who have access to the most adaptation and the poor who have access to the least.</p>
<p>It's not just that money can buy more sea walls, drought-tolerant agriculture equipment, private water supplies, and other material aids to adaptation. It's that money also tends to come along with social capital, and one of the most important findings in research on resilience is that <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/report/2015/05/11/112873/social-cohesion-the-secret-weapon-in-the-fight-for-equitable-climate-resilience/">social cohesion is just as important as technology</a>. It is the places with strong social networks that tend to have plans, civic institutions, early warning systems, and systems of aid and support that help communities through crisis.</p>
<p>It is socially cohesive communities, in which people are "in it together," that survive disaster and rebuild afterward. Places without those social networks fragment; their suffering becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, economic inequality also tends to reduce social cohesion, leading to lack of trust and fewer shared resources. So if the people who support adaptation were being honest, they would acknowledge that perhaps the first and most effective form of adaptation is to <em>reduce economic inequality</em>, to create more cohesive communities defined by fellow-feeling rather than mutual suspicion and resentment. That's true on the local level and also on the national and international level, as resource transfers between and within countries will need to rise markedly to prepare the most vulnerable places for what's to come.</p>
<p>Spoiler alert: That won't happen. The people most likely to be pushing the never-mind-mitigation-we'll-adapt line also tend to be the people most hostile to attempts to reduce inequality.</p>
<h3>Katrina shows what adaptation looks like for a segregated city</h3>
<p>Which brings us back to Katrina.</p>
<p>The debate over whether the hurricane was strengthened by climate change — which tends to be the focus of any attempt to link the two — is utterly beside the point. We know events like Katrina are going to become more common in coming decades. And what Katrina reveals is that adaptation, in this world at least, is a cruel joke.</p>
<p>The failure of New Orleans to properly prepare for a foreseeable hurricane has been written about a great deal and there's no need to rehash it. One key factor in that tale is the role played by the extraordinary inequality and segregation within the city, which made lawmakers and taxpayers loath to spend money on shared resources.</p>
<p>So when disaster struck, all of New Orleans's submerged dysfunctions rose to the surface. There was shockingly little solidarity. Wealthier white people fled; poorer black people were trapped. The authorities were grotesquely racist in every stage of their response, nowhere more unforgivably than in the way <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/8/18/inside-a-post-katrina-police-massacre.html">police treated dislocated black residents</a>. It was a nightmare in slow motion and an uncomfortable experience for everyone who watched it unfold on television. This was a wealthy city in the wealthiest country in the world. And <em>this</em> is what happens?</p>
<p>What's it going to look like when climate change brings storms, droughts, and floods to more and more places, more and more often?</p>
<p>Perhaps New Orleans isn't a fair example. It's unique in many ways, not all of them good. New York seemed to handle Hurricane Sandy at least somewhat better. But even there, residents in lower Manhattan made out a whole lot better than residents of <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/12/rock-d12.html">Rockaway, Queens</a>. And what city in the world has more social and economic capital than New York?</p>
<h3>Real adaptation begins with reducing inequality</h3>
<p>US policymakers face two trends, proceeding in tandem. One is accelerating climate change. The other is accelerating economic inequality and racial and class-based segregation.</p>
<p>The trends are not unrelated. Climate impacts will put communities under greater stress even as economic and racial inequality make them more brittle and vulnerable.</p>
<p>Those who oppose climate mitigation in favor of adaptation need explain how they are going to reduce inequality and segregation, not only within US cities but between them, and between nations. Otherwise, their talk of adaptation is little more than a veneer for selfishness: "We'll be fine; everyone else is on their own."</p>
<p>As things stand now, Katrina shows exactly what adaptation looks like: The wealthy escape while the poor suffer.</p>
<div class="volume-video" id="volume-placement-8111" data-volume-placement="article" data-analytics-placement="entry:middle" data-volume-id="566" data-volume-uuid="fedcba417" data-analytics-label="A visual tour of the world's CO2 emissions | 566" data-analytics-action="volume:view:entry:middle" data-analytics-viewport="video"></div>
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/24/9194707/katrina-climate-adaptationDavid Roberts2015-08-23T16:10:01-04:002015-08-23T16:10:01-04:00What we know about Katrina victims’ health, wealth, and happiness 10 years later
<figure>
<img alt="A home in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward, abandoned during Katrina, is still vacant." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZHKaJCXzbRBnq42J8GzX6p3659I=/0x0:3600x2700/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47015072/GettyImages-484801584.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A home in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward, abandoned during Katrina, is still vacant. | Lee Celano/AFP via Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hurricane Katrina pushed hundreds of thousands of people from their home in New Orleans, some never to return. After a decade, we know more than ever about what happened to them next — and about the hurricane's lingering impact on their education, their health, and their happiness.</p>
<p>Some of the research came from following and interviewing displaced New Orleans residents to determine what effect the storm had on their mental and physical health. Others came from the "natural experiment" that Hurricane Katrina created: The hurricane forced people to move who might not otherwise have done so, and researchers investigated how that affected their lives in the long term.</p>
<p>The results are a confusing picture. The storm left residents of the Gulf Coast displaced and suffering, physically and psychologically. (Nationwide, even the happiness of people not directly affected by the storm dropped in its aftermath.) But it also led some to establish new lives in better neighborhoods, and an increase in income.</p>
<h3>1) Overall, incomes for hurricane victims rose after the storm</h3>
<p>Hurricane Katrina was terrible for the short-term financial lives of the people affected: Their incomes fell by 6 percent in 2005 and 10 percent the following year when compared with similar people who weren't affected by the hurricane. But <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w20713">research published</a> in December 2013 showed those effects didn't last. The income of people affected by Hurricane Katrina eventually rebounded, exceeding the similar, unaffected people by 6 percent by 2009.</p>
<p>The authors of the study found the results to be pretty remarkable, and they said it suggested that aid to victims was effective. But they cautioned that it might not have meant that Katrina victims were actually better off. It's possible, they wrote, that the cost of living went up as their wages increased.</p>
<h3>2) Katrina had lasting, terrible effects on displaced children in precarious situations</h3>
<p>The majority of children displaced by Hurricane Katrina to trailer parks, hotels, or other unstable housing situations still didn't have stable housing, were suffering from emotional or behavioral disorders, or both, even five years after the storm. And most parents of those children thought they needed psychological help, but didn't know how or where to get it.</p>
<p>These findings are from the <a href="http://www.childrenshealthfund.org/sites/default/files/files/Five-Years-After-Katrina-Web.pdf">Gulf Coast Child and Family Health Study</a>, which tracked children and families displaced by Hurricane Katrina for five years. (A <a href="http://publichealth.nyu.edu/sandy-child-and-family-health-study-2015.html">similar study</a> is now underway on children who were displaced by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.)</p>
<p>They found that 36 percent of children displaced to "congregate settings," such as hotels or other transient settings, had symptoms of significant emotional disturbance, nearly five times the rate of American children as a whole. More than one-third were at least a year behind in school, and 7 percent were still homeless.</p>
<p>The study hasn't continued to follow those children. But they found that after five years, these families' situation was still an emergency in need of "urgent assistance," and warned of significant future challenges for the 20,000 affected children.</p>
<h3>3) Evacuees from flooded neighborhoods ended up in better neighborhoods than they were living in before</h3>
<p>Hurricane Katrina pushed people out of New Orleans, and out of their neighborhood, who might not otherwise have left — and many of those families never returned.</p>
<p>Corina Graif, a researcher at Tulane University, studied more than 700 mostly low-income and African-American women from New Orleans who were enrolled in community college when the storm hit.</p>
<p>She <a href="http://www.riskproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2011.Graif-Waters.MovingToOpportunity.pdf">found</a> that after the storm, they lived in more diverse, higher-earning neighborhoods with lower concentrations of poverty. This was particularly true for families who lived in neighborhoods that flooded, neighborhoods that were poorer and more disadvantaged before Katrina. After Katrina, families who left flooded neighborhoods moved to dramatically better neighborhoods, in some ways better than those that never flooded in the first place.</p>
<p>"The poverty traps in which low-income minority families tend to repeatedly find themselves even as they move from a neighborhood to another can be escaped," Graif wrote — and the challenge is now to help families do that without needing a disaster.</p>
<h3>4) Hurricane Katrina made Americans as a whole unhappier, even outside New Orleans — but they bounced back quickly</h3>
<p>Researchers looked at a survey administered to a sample of adults all over the US in August, September, and October 2005, the period preceding and immediately following Hurricane Katrina. The survey, the Michigan Survey of Consumers, asks about people's emotional well-being as well as their finances.</p>
<p>The analysis, <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w12062.pdf">published</a> in 2006 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that nationally, people were more likely to report feeling sad or depressed about a week after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, particularly in the first week of September, once it was evident how much damage the hurricane had done. The effects were particularly strong in the south central US, near where Katrina struck.</p>
<p>But for those not directly affected by the storm, the effects didn't last. For most of the country, happiness returned to normal within two weeks. In the south central region, it took an additional week.</p>
<h3>5) Happiness for people affected by the hurricane dropped, but eventually rebounded</h3>
<p>Another <a href="http://www.riskproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/happiness-paper.pdf">study</a>, this one published in 2014, looked at 491 women affected by Hurricane Katrina, the same group of community college students studied in Graif's research on neighborhoods. It found that in the first year after the hurricane, the women reported being substantially less happy than they were before the storm. Perhaps unsurprisingly, women who had suffered the most in the hurricane or who had experienced the death of a loved one were the most likely to be unhappy a year later.</p>
<p>But by the time four years had passed, their happiness had returned to pre-hurricane levels — for the most part. The exception was a group of 38 women who were mostly living alone and reported they had low levels of support from their social circles.</p>
<p>Self-reported happiness, though, could mask deeper levels of trauma. <a href="http://www.riskproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2011.Paxson-Fussell-Rhodes-Waters.FiveYearsLaterRecovery.pdf">Another study using the same data set</a> found that nearly 30 percent of the women had levels of emotional distress high enough to suggest mental illness. One-third of the women could have been suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. "The effects of exposure to traumatic events during the hurricane on mental health have not faded over time and, in some cases, have become worse," the researchers wrote.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/23/9194511/katrina-survivors-researchLibby Nelson2015-08-20T08:01:02-04:002015-08-20T08:01:02-04:00I worked for the governor of Louisiana during Katrina. Here are 5 things I learned.
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Fk_g4sC4Rj-l7sHvqCuPUtuDEQk=/1120x0:4775x2741/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46991340/GettyImages-474788756.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Mario Tama, Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p> </p>
<div class="chorus-snippet center">
<p>I first suspected Louisiana was in deep trouble on the evening of Sunday, August 28, 2005. Hurricane Katrina was barreling toward the Gulf Coast. The next day, the storm would slam into Buras, Louisiana, devastating New Orleans, the Mississippi coast, and much of southeast Louisiana. My moment of clarity came when I realized that Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was a pretentious blowhard.</p>
<p>I was with my boss, Gov. Kathleen Blanco, as she met for the first time with Brown in a small office at the state's emergency operations center in Baton Rouge.</p>
<p>I distinctly remember my first impression of President George W. Bush's FEMA director: He was remarkably self-assured. I knew nothing about his background, but I suspected he might be a former governor. Surely no one else would be so patronizing to my boss, I thought, so he must regard her as a peer or outrank her in some way. He told Gov. Blanco to get plenty of rest. It almost sounded like, "You let me handle this situation, little lady."</p>
<p>As the meeting ended, I thought that something about this guy wasn't right. He didn't seem genuine. He came off as someone pretending to be important, not somebody who had the situation under control. Little did we know just how underqualified the man appointed to lead the federal response to Katrina really was. His previous job? He had run the International Arabian Horse Association.</p>
<p>That first meeting was an omen. We didn't know it yet, but we were on our own.</p>
<p>I've spent the last 10 years largely trying to forget Katrina. Friends have encouraged me to write a memoir about what I saw and experienced as Gov. Blanco's communications director in those chaotic days and weeks. My wife agrees. But while I've spoken and written a bit about the disaster, I've never published a "tell-all" account. I don't want to. My view of events was incomplete. The situation was chaos. Those around me were doing the best they could under enormous strain. We made mistakes, uttered embarrassing statements, and sent ill-advised emails. I have no desire to dredge up those memories.</p>
<p>But I did witness some astonishing political drama, and I saw what happens to people and to governments when a disaster like Katrina strikes. Here's just some of what I learned.</p>
<h3>1) In the middle of a crisis, you don't know as much as people think you do</h3>
<p>Despite spending six weeks or more at Gov. Blanco's side, I often felt like one of the least informed people in the world. My days were frenzied, and I had little time to stop and read the papers or to monitor the cable news channels. I was too busy bouncing from one meeting to another.</p>
<p>One hour, I might be drafting a statement for a press briefing. The next, I could be hunting for the state official who could help me answer a reporter's question. Some days I spent hours trying to confirm or debunk crazy rumors: One day it was reports that stranded New Orleans residents were shooting at rescue helicopters; another day it was the state prohibiting the Red Cross from entering New Orleans. Neither was true.</p>
<p>I sat in on as many meetings with the governor and various officials as possible, and I accompanied her to New Orleans as often as I could. Still, it bothered me that my view of events was so narrow. I owe a lot to good friends who were home watching the news and who would call or send an email alerting me to some brewing controversy. I tried to stay informed of the broader story about Katrina's devastation, but new stories, rumors, and distractions kept coming.</p>
<p>The national cable news networks camped outside our front door, but I often had no idea what they were reporting. Finally, a former congressional staffer from California, Mark Looker, arrived and said, "Put me to work." We embraced him and gave him a chair in front of a bank of televisions. He began to monitor the networks.</p>
<p>But even that didn't necessarily solve the problem. When Mark heard a TV journalist report incorrect information, either Denise Bottcher, our press secretary, or I would walk out the front door, find the correspondent, and set the record straight. To my surprise, those television reporters were often reluctant to issue a correction. They simply changed their stories slightly the next time. I learned, especially with TV news, that the truth is mostly a work in progress.</p>
<h3>2) If it's not on television, it didn't happen</h3>
<p>Shortly after the storm passed, Louisiana National Guard helicopters and state Wildlife and Fisheries boats rushed to New Orleans to rescue stranded citizens. I asked if a few reporters and photographers could tag along. The leaders of both agencies told me there was no room for the press. One official even told me, "Every spot on one of those boats that we give to a reporter is one less person we can save." At the time, I thought that was a compelling argument, so I didn't press the matter.<b></b></p>
<p>Now I know I should have urged the governor to order both agencies to make room for reporters and photographers on just a few boats and choppers. Rescuing people was clearly the priority, but public confidence in government is also essential during times of crisis. The public deserves to know that public servants are working effectively on their behalf — and showing them is far more effective than merely telling them. If I had told reporters, "You can go, but you might have an evacuee on your lap for a hour," most would have eagerly accepted the arrangement.<b> </b></p>
<p>While the US Coast Guard did a heroic job of plucking many people from rooftops, there are people today who think that federal agency made all the rescues. In truth, there were more people saved by state employees on Wildlife and Fisheries boats and National Guard helicopters. The Coast Guard, however, had cameras mounted on its choppers and captured dramatic rescue video. We had no pictures and no video — <a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-109shrg26751/html/CHRG-109shrg26751.htm">just statistics and anecdotes</a>.</p>
<h3>3) When disaster strikes, the political knives come out</h3>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p>I had been in government nearly 20 years before coming to work for Gov. Blanco. I worked on several statewide campaigns. I served as press secretary to two United States senators. I was no neophyte. I knew that in Washington and Baton Rouge, politics never stops.</p>
<p>Still, I hoped that the devastation in New Orleans would prompt the kind of bipartisanship we saw after 9/11. I thought government leaders at all levels would focus on rescue and recovery for at least a month before launching the inevitable political blame game.</p>
<p>It turns out I was naive — or maybe just too busy to stop and ponder why Katrina might not be like 9/11. It did not immediately occur to me that the Bush White House would deflect blame for its failures or try to pin the botched response almost entirely on Louisiana officials. I believe it was Wednesday morning — just two days after the storm hit — when James Carville called me. "Get ready," he said, "the White House is about to start putting the blame on you guys. It's gonna get ugly."</p>
<p>He was right. Within 24 hours, a barrage of negative stories began. Some were outright lies: By Friday, the Washington Post and Newsweek were reporting, on the word of a Bush aide, that Blanco had not yet declared a state of emergency. In fact, she had done so three days before the storm. The document was on our website. No one had called to ask us for comment. The Post quickly ran a correction, but it was clear that <a href="http://www.salon.com/2008/06/06/rove_katrina/">Karl Rove</a> and other Bush aides were <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/us/nationalspecial/white-house-enacts-a-plan-to-ease-political-damage.html?_r=0">working hard</a> to shift the blame, to paint the governor and the state as incompetent.</p>
<p>This is how foolish I was: One day, then-House Republican Minority Leader Tom DeLay visited the emergency operations center in Baton Rouge. I pulled him aside and said, "Look, we are doing our best to deal with a disaster of epic proportions, but our job is being made so much harder by all the political backstabbing. Can you do anything to help stop it?" Delay looked me in the eyes, smiled, nodded, and assured me he would try to help.</p>
<p>I now realize he was probably thinking: "Who is this idiot, and why does he think we won't destroy his Democratic boss if we have the chance?"</p>
<p>We didn't even try to fight back. I wanted to — although in retrospect, I wonder if it would have made any difference. From the beginning, Gov. Blanco emphatically forbade anything that could be interpreted as an attack on President Bush. "We are going to need this president to help us rebuild this state," she told the staff. "Let them politicize this storm. We're not going to do that."</p>
<p>She meant it. Seared into my memory is the moment the governor learned that I had met briefly with a Democratic group looking to conduct a poll on attitudes about the state versus federal response. I didn't tell the governor that I had spoken with the group's representatives. A few days later, we were in Houston visiting the evacuees when she learned of my meeting. As we were preparing to return to Baton Rouge that night, a furious governor pulled me aside and let me have it for a solid five minutes (it seemed like 20). Back home that night, I had just fallen asleep when the phone rang. It was Gov. Blanco, calling to chew me out again.</p>
<p>I got the message: We would let others worry about the politics of Katrina. In retrospect, she was wise to hold her fire. History is beginning to vindicate hers and the state's record. We now know the state's immediate response to the storm was far more effective than most people initially understood. And Blanco's decision not to wage war on Bush was one reason why Louisiana eventually got most of the federal funds it needed for the region's recovery.</p>
<h3>4) When basic infrastructure is destroyed, cooperation between public officials often becomes impossible</h3>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p>The day before the storm, I was with the governor at New Orleans City Hall. She and the city's mayor, Ray Nagin, had just held a lengthy press conference begging people to evacuate in advance of the storm. Afterward, we all retired to Nagin's spacious office for some rest before returning to Baton Rouge. Blanco and Nagin talked warmly about how they would cooperate.</p>
<p>As we were leaving, Nagin pulled me aside to offer the number to his satellite phone. "If the governor needs me, call this number," he said.</p>
<p>The phone never worked, or Nagin quit using it. Whatever the case, we never reached him on it. For a solid week after the storm, every part of the city's communications infrastructure was demolished. Phone and power lines were down throughout the city. Cellphone service was nonexistent. It was difficult, if not impossible, to get into the heart of the city without a helicopter or a boat. For a week or more, the only way Blanco and Nagin could speak was if the governor flew to New Orleans and hunted him down. <b></b></p>
<p>That wasn't always easy. One afternoon, I arrived in New Orleans with Gov. Blanco, and we went directly to City Hall. But Nagin was gone, and nobody knew where he was. On another occasion, reaching Mayor Nagin meant me calling one of his staff members who had evacuated to Houston. She relayed the message to someone in New Orleans who, in turn, got our message to the mayor.</p>
<p>This is how the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans communicated for over a week.</p>
<p>I'm confident if Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin had been able to communicate freely in the days immediately after Katrina (that is, if the region's communications infrastructure hadn't been shattered), the response to the storm might have been smoother, better coordinated, and far less acrimonious.</p>
<p>There were emotional consequences, too. As soon as the winds died down, Fred Cerise — Gov. Blanco's health secretary — left for New Orleans to oversee recovery operations at the city's public hospital. None of us heard from him for days. Then, later that week and without warning, he reappeared in Baton Rouge, walking into the room while Gov. Blanco was holding a press briefing. When the governor saw him, she stopped the briefing, went to Fred, and threw her arms around him.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<h3>5) In the middle of a crisis, there's little time to cry (but you should do it anyway)</h3>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p>During the long days immediately after the storm, we all just tried to do our jobs. Sometimes, under such extreme stress, tempers flared — but I'm proud that those around me continued to largely work as a team. We supported each other.</p>
<p>This was made easier by Baton Rouge's location. We weren't surrounded by floodwater. After about 10 days the power at my house was restored, and home life began returning to normal.</p>
<p>But while I had never lived in New Orleans, I had hundreds of friends who did. Before the storm, I was in the city almost every week for business or pleasure. Like many of its residents, my affection for that magnificent city is deep and almost spiritual.</p>
<p>I will never forget the sickening sight of an underwater New Orleans the first time I flew there with Gov. Blanco. Even today, I can't quite fathom all that black water, houses and business submerged, as far as anyone could see.</p>
<p>Still, I kept it under control for the first week or so. Then, very early one morning, I was driving to work through the dark, empty streets of Baton Rouge. A song familiar to any Louisianian began playing on the radio: Randy Newman's haunting ballad <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGs2iLoDUYE">"Louisiana 1927."</a> When Newman reached his emotional refrain — "Louisiana, Louisiana / They're tryin' to wash us away / They're tryin' to wash us away" — my pent-up grief burst forth. I began to bawl. The moment was so unexpected and intense that I almost pulled over so I wouldn't lose control of my car. I kept driving through tears.</p>
<p>Then I felt a little better. The moment was cathartic, and I realized that I did not have to work so clinically, like a doctor without attachment to his patient. I was attached. The patient was my state and its people, many of them dead already, and a city that I loved.</p>
<p>I realized that working like hell to rebuild Louisiana was not just a job; it was a calling, and a deeply emotional one. It was one that required hard work, but it could not be separated from my emotional attachment to Louisiana.</p>
<p>That's how many of us responded: We worked hard as hell during the day — and we cried at night. As with my drive to work that morning, we didn't have time to pull over and weep. We had to keep moving, but we also didn't need to pretend it was okay.</p>
<p>What Michael Brown told Gov. Blanco was wrong. There was no time to "get plenty of rest." But there was time to work, and to cry.</p>
<p><i>Robert Mann, a journalist, political historian, and former US Senate and gubernatorial aide, holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. </i></p>
<hr>
<p><a target="new" href="http://www.vox.com/first-person">First Person</a> is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our <a target="new" href="http://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8767221/vox-first-person-explained">submission guidelines</a>, and pitch us at <a href="mailto:firstperson@vox.com">firstperson@vox.com</a>.</p>
</div>
<p>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://apps.voxmedia.com/tools/stylesheets/tools/related-links/app-public-1532b1c7.css">
</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/20/9176225/hurricane-katrina-governmentRobert Mann