Free Essay About Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina, which occurred in 2005 in New Orleans, was one of the most destructive and deadliest hurricanes that have ever taken place on American soil. This natural disaster claimed the lives of 13.000 people total, with 700.000 left homeless. Almost 10 years after the disaster hit we still question ourselves as to whether this hurricane could have been avoided, and why so many settlers were caught almost unprepared. Now it is quite apparent that such an outcome did not have to happen in the first place, as all the available evidence was indicating that Katrina was going to hit hard with no mercy, sparing no one. The year before that, in 2004, a group of scientists has run a disaster exercise that was based on a computer model, which predicted the possible outcomes of a level three hurricane. This prognosis used the data collected from watching the hurricanes over the past several decades, and it clearly concluded that the City of New Orleans would be mostly flooded if such a natural disaster was ever to occur. Moreover, this exercise was held in a presence of state officials that were quite well aware of the situation, therefore the needed precautions should have been taken starting from that point in time. But no effective preventive measures were taken, and it is when the collected data indicated that the Gulf coast has entered the active period of hurricanes that was supposed to eventually result in such a tragedy, which took so many lives. Even though the government did not have the money to rebuild the net of safety constructions, it could have efficiently notified the city settlers about the coming danger using all means of agitation. But unfortunately this has never been done, and such negligence allowed Katrina to take so much from American people along with it.