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Katrina

Written on: August 29th, 2009 by: in News

Hurricane Katrina landed along the Gulf Coast 4 years ago today, with devastating consequences for New Orleans and other coastal communities in Louisiana and Mississippi. According to the NOAA, Katrina was the single most devastating storm ever to strike the US and the damage to the city of New Orleans seemed so incredible that many experts at the time spoke of abandoning the city entirely to the water and resettling its population elsewhere.

During the storm and the recovery, the Times-Picayune, although having lost its printing presses entirely to the storm along with most of its offices, continued to publish new in an exclusively online format, and made sure that the desperate situation in the city stayed in the public eye. Their retrospective and archive on the storm and its aftermath is still required (online) reading for anyone interested in the impact of the storm and the redevelopment and resurrection of the city and its various communities.

There’s a tremendous number of books and other media available from the Delaware Library Catalog about the hurricane and its aftermath. Breach of Faith by Jed Horne is considered to be one of the better books, and Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke is a superlative documentary about the disaster and the apparent abandonment of the people of the city. James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blowdown is one of many fictional works which take the hurricane devastated city as a location or theme.