Hurricane+Katrina

On August 29, 2005 the deadliest hurricane in the United States since 1928 killed over 1,300 people, trampled towns and cities in Missippi and Louisiana, and ended up dislocating hundreds of thousands of people for months. This hurricane was Hurricane Katrina. Most of the deaths occured in New Orleans, where the levees that protected the part of the city that was below sea level were destroyed. This caused the city to flood majorly and trap many people on the roof tops of their houses. 50,000 people jammed into the Superdome and the city's convention center. There they waited several days with little food, water, medical care and sanitation facilities. Evacuees were terrorized by gang members and random gunshots. Outside looters roamed around; murders, rapes and mayhem increased tensions among refugees; dead bodies floated in the water, and rescue teams tried to save those who were abandoned. When Mayor Nagin described the problem of drug illegal drug handlers in the mayhem of Hurricane Katrina he said: "You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will. And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug-starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, that are wrecking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not overrun." (Mayor Nagin's September 2, 2005 Interview with Garland Robinette).

Katrina started as a tropical depression, then grew its way into a tropical storm by the time it hit Florida on August 24. It gathered more stregth when it hit Louisiana and Mississippi on August 28, becoming a Category 5 hurricane with winds at 125 mph. That morning Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered that the city's 485,000 residents to evacuate. It was one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history and one of the most costly. Damage from the storm was estimated to be hundreds of billions of dollars. Gas prices went sky high after Katrina and unemployment rose. It was also costly for President Bush's administration. U.S. citizens felt his response to the storm was "slow and incompetent" ("National Weather Service on Katrina"). People were also critical of Mayor Nagin in the fact that he wasn't prepared for a storm that was predicted to occur sooner or later.