The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is upon us. Many of us city planners invested whatever skills we thought we had, plus a heavy dose of passionate naivete, to recovery planning in the wake of the 2005 storm.
"This week kicks off the anniversary month of Hurricane Katrina, which walloped the Gulf Coast states on August 29, 2005, killing more than 1,800 people and causing more than $150 billion in property damage. While anniversary summaries have dribbled into the mainstream already, August will be the big month for looking back and guessing at what was learned."
Ben Brown speaks from his own extensive experience, as well as quoting several articles and reports on the Gulf Coast.
"This discussion is an important one, not only because it comes as part of the tenth anniversary look back, but also because it speaks to the future of planning and governing in our cities and regions beyond the storm zone. Disasters are stress tests."
"What experts on disaster recovery and resilience tried to tell us before and after recent catastrophes like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the BP Oil Spill is that communities’ abilities to bounce back after such events depend largely on how well things were working before disruptions struck. That’s a more complex observation than it sounds, because the definition of “what’s working” has all kinds of caveats."
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