Katrina Ten Years After

The authors of this important text about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath include Laurence Hudson, Michael Marks, Betty Press, David Reynolds and Linda VanZandt.

A decade ago Hurricane Katrina rocked Louisiana, Mississippi, and the whole country. Now Katrina Ten Years After explores the devastation and the aftermath with personal stories and photographs, socio-economic analysis, and tales of rebuilding a community.

This book tells the truth about the resiliency of the people of the area, buffeted by not only a storm but by the Great Recession over the last decade. The rebuilding of the area is a reflection of who we are in the South. There was a great amount of generosity, but there were also conflicts between classes and ethnic groups over the spoils of aid funds. Among the chapters is the story of the Lower Ninth Ward’s struggle to rebuild, the environmentally concerned salvage business in New Orleans the “Green Project,” the efforts of Vietnamese communities to respond to yet again another devastating series of events. We also make use of a unique set of data to analyze the socio-economic struggle to rebuild in the face of the Great Recession, the BP oil spill and attempts by powerful forces to stunt that regrowth.

Based on years of work by the authors to conduct interviews with the people in the front lines, many of those interviews available with audio files embedded in the book, this is a story that needs to be told to understand one of the greatest disasters to hit the U.S. and to be prepared for the next “big one.”