Katrina As An Extension of the US Environmental Justice Problem

"For years, these advocates have been telling anyone who'd listen that blacks in New Orleans were far more affected by environmental problems than the white folks in, say, the Garden District -- and would be far more vulnerable in a disaster. They've long realized a truth that the response to Hurricane Katrina seems to be proving: people in power viewed the city's poorest residents as, says Robert Bullard, 'expendable in some sense.'

...Katrina offered another painfully vivid illustration of the way inequities can pervade government planning for an emergency. Bullard explains that the evacuation strategy for a Gulf Coast hurricane, a long-anticipated event, 'did not plan for people who did not have lots of money, do not own cars, the poor, sick, elderly.'

...'This may sound cold, but I think the [city's real-estate developers] are doing a break dance right now,' Wright says. 'They are really happy to have us gone.' Wright and others fear that the city could be rebuilt as a massive gentrification project, one with no room for Katrina's displaced."