Rebuilding a Community Post Hurricane Katrina
By: Vernessa Shih
My topic of study was seeing the effects of the incredibly damaging Hurricane Katrina
on the State of Louisiana and particularly a five parish area that was geographically closest to
where the hurricane made landfall and saw the most damage. I also wanted to see how
Louisiana and the five parish area recovered from this natural disaster and what areas still
needed focused attention. My goal was to spatially show the areas in need of greater
assistance and perhaps hypothesize about abnormalities or patterns shown in the maps.
When I began my project I identified a few questions that I wanted to address.
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What happened?
What were the rebuilding goals?
What were parish priorities? (particularly those in the hardest hit region)
What areas saw the most success in rebuilding efforts?
What areas need the most attention as of NOW?
I started with looking at what actually happened by creating a map to show the exact path of
Hurricane Katrina and the strength category of the hurricane as is progressed from August 23
2005 to August 31 2005. Hurricane Katrina began as a category 1 tropical depression, peaked
at a category 6 hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall in Louisiana as a
category 4 hurricane with a high of 140 miles per hour wind speed.
Area of Study: 5 Parishes
Orleans, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, Jefferson, and Plaquemines Parishes
As you can see below, Plaquemines parish, St. Bernard parish and St. Tammany parish took a
direct hit from the hurricane path with neighboring areas Orleans and Jefferson parish also in very close
proximity to the hurricane path.
The effects of Hurricane Katrina have deeply affected not just the residents of Louisiana or any
other southern state that was physically affected, but it called into question how our nation as
a whole responds to geographic disasters. The actions of FEMA and the President were
criticized as being too slow and not drastic enough to account for projected damage that would
result from this hurricane. The levee failures that increased the amount of flooding to up to
90% in some parishes called into question the work of the US Army Engineers Corps, who is
tasked with building and maintaining levees all across America.
While accurate summaries of damage estimates are difficult to find due to changes in how
government agencies were categorizing damage, I complied a few generally agreed upon
facts. Over 200,000 homes were severely damaged, 1.4 million people were displaced with 15
million total people affected by the hurricane, over 1,800 deaths, extreme coastal erosion (up
to 50 years of coastal damage within one week) and an estimated $75 to $110 billion dollars’
worth of damage. Hurricane Katrina definitely earned the title of “Costliest Hurricane in
History” and this is only the monetary estimate, there is no possible was to estimate the
damage it has done to the culture and community of all the affected areas, as well as the
questions and doubt that arose from the mishandling by FEMA.
Recovery Efforts
When the waters receded and determined citizens began looking to rebuild, the state of
Louisiana formed the Louisiana Recovery Authority which produced “Louisiana Speaks – Long
Term Recovery Plan”. This joint effort plan held community meetings in 25 southern Louisiana
parishes over the course of two days and asked them a series of questions to rank their desired
priorities of action. Overwhelming, 98% of the parishes strongly agreed that they should build
back differently to address issues of poverty, hurricane/flood risk and environmental risk. 74%
of surveyed respondents agreed that some places in Louisiana are too at risk to rebuild. And
one perfectly divisive issue with a 50/50 split was whether or not everyone who wanted to
return could come back to their original home site. Overall, when the respondents were asked
to rank their most important priorities from a selection of about 20 options they favored
building better levees, encouraging development, improving schools, increasing business and
job opportunities as well as devising a workable evacuation plan.
One of the major criticisms of the handling of Hurricane Katrina was regarding how FEMA
reacted to the hurricane. It took multiple days to evacuate those in affected areas and then several
more days to get the necessary supplies to the Superdome which shelted up to 25,000 hurricane
survivors. In the map below, I aimed to show the approved FEMA evacuation routes for Louisiana and
highlight what I believe to be one massive error. The coastal areas of Louisiana are those which are
most succeptible to damage and regardless of the lower population density, those regions should be
more heavily covered with evacuation routes.
And as difficult as it was to track displaced citizens, I was able to calculate a breakdown of where
residents were tracked going through FEMA aid requests. It seems a majority of those that left the state
went to neighboring Texas (about 90,000 people) and Mississippi and Georgia (about 18,00 people per
state). Those moving instate favored Baton Rouge with about 34,000 displaced residents. Because of
the transient nature of disaster victims, I chose to represent their immediate preferences (between
2006-2007) with these pie charts.
In further study of displaced residents, I wanted to see how many parishes recovered their lost
residents by looking at population changes and changes in occupied housing between the years of 2000
and 2010. As you can see with the Population Change map, St. Bernard and Orleans parish lost a
significant percentage of their population with obvious gains in neighboring St. Tammany, Tangipahoa,
Livingston, and Ascension parish. Further evidence of this population shift is seen in the change in
occupied housing. Again, it is Orleans and St. Bernard Parish which saw the most drastic losses with
gains in neighboring parishes that suffered less damage.
Considering that infrastructure and improvements in schools were listed as major priorities to
the entire state of Louisiana as well as the 5 parish study area, I chose to look at the prevalence of
schools and hospitals in Louisiana. While initally, it seemed that the spread of schools and hospitals was
pretty even across the state of Louisiana, I decided to show a distance buffer of 5 and 10 miles over the
current state population to analyze whether there were underserved communities.
Looking at the Service Area for Hospitals map, I can identify many areas that are underserved
including much of Jefferson, St. Bernard, and Plaquemines parish. There is also a significant
underserved population in highly populated Alexandria area. When I created the Service Area for
schools map, I saw that there was much more complete coverage, except in certain areas in St. Bernard
and Plaquemines parish. While theoretically, it makes sense for there to be more schools than hospitals,
as hospitals have higher start up capital and associated costs, there are some highly underserved
communities that will require increased investment in hospital expansion. However, it is important to
note that up to 30 hospitals were affected or damaged by Hurricane Katrina with about 10 closing
permanently due to damage.
I then chose to look at dropout rates for students between 7th and 12th grade as an indicator for
improvement of schools. In order to do this I had to create an entirely new dataset that had specific
dropout numbers for each of the individual schools in the five parish study area. After geocoding each
of these schools, I was able to compare the number of students who dropped out in 2005 and the
number of students that dropped out in 2010 to see which areas saw the greatest decrease in dropout
students. I was personally interested to see if there would be a correlation between dropout rates and
race and as Orleans Parish in particular has a high rate of African American residents. Therefore, I chose
to overlay African American population data to see if there were any outstanding patterns. The largest
pattern I saw was that the majority of reduced dropout rates came from downtown metropolitan New
Orleans City which has a densely populated African American population. There actually seems to be no
strong correlation between population density of African American residents and reduction or increase
in dropout rates.
The final map I compiled was to look at multiple attributes and create an index to see the areas
that I believe require the most focus and attention for additional recovery and growth. I began by
collecting data for Louisiana as a whole, for residents living below the poverty line, the number of vacant
housing units per parish, the number of unemployed workers in the labor force and the number of high
school dropouts per parish. I created a raster for each of these attributes and reclassified them to show
areas of highest percentages to be of higher risk and thus importance. I then used map algebra to
create a Priority Need Index for the entire state of Louisiana. The findings from this map show that
Orleans, Jefferson, Lafayette, Calcasieu, Baton Rouge, Ouachita, and Caddo parishes have the highest
priority on the index. While I understand that these regions might have been identified due to the
economic downturn which increased unemployment rates across the entire nation, it is important to
note that Louisiana still has devastating lingering affects due to Hurricane Katrina that needs to be
addressed. As more disasters occur, we cannot forget the communities already affected by disaster and
call for change and growth with our nation’s disaster response, management and recovery.
Conclusions:
I found geospatial mapping to be extremely useful in showing dramatic areas of need or priority.
Using rasters and change maps, it is easy to quickly identify differences across multiple areas in a far
more dynamic method than showing changes in data tables. That being said, I identified several areas
across that state of Louisiana that should be hailed for their decrease in dropout rates or low percentage
of unemployed residents. However, I also identified several areas that are struggling to this day.
Orleans and Jefferson parish were hit particularly hard by Hurricane Katrina and while they have made
great strides to recovery, we can see with the Need index that they still have a long road ahead.
Complications:
I ran into several complications with data regarding access to databases and clearinghouses that
have since been closed to public access. Disaster data by nature is quite unreliable due to the constant
changes in population and displaced residents changing locations.
Skills:
For the creation of the base maps and attribute tables, I used geoprocessing clipping and joining
skills, as well as boundary sub-set selection, aggregating attribute fields and creating custom shape files
to create the 5 parish map and joining for attaching attribute data. To highlight features or points I used
point/line graduated symbols and KML files. I used images and pie charts to highlight additional
information that was not shown spatially. I then created original data by geocoding addresses and did
distance analysis by creating concentric buffers. I used spatial analysis and model building to create and
reclassify rasters in order to show hotspot analysis for a Priority Need index.
Sources:
 Esri Tiger for Geographic Shapefiles
 Social Explorer/Census for attribute data
 Google earth - Hurricane Katrina Route
 Louisiana Site Selection for Hospital and School data
 Louisiana Department of Education for 7-12th grader dropout rates
 Greater New Orleans Community Data Center for comparison data, Orleans Facts
 FEMA.gov for FEMA evacuation routes and post Katrina reports
Model: Used Model builder to turn features to rasters, I then reclassified the rasters and used map
algebra to create an index of Priority Need