Rebuilding After Hurracane Katrina

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On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina brought a death toll in the thousands and millions of dollars in damage. It was a severe storm “with winds in excess of 150 miles per hour [that] caused 20-foot-high waves to pound the coastlines of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi” (Dass-Brailsford 24). Other than the rescue missions, the city was also concerned with clean up efforts and restoring basic service to residents, which was a huge challenge to the city government. On the other hand, different voices from residents are also caused city government moving slow in decision-making and implementation of the recovery plans. Some progress on recovery plan has been made, but the city is struggling with the slow planning process, the lack of skilled workers, and the low number of returning residents.

The slow planning of recovery is one of the major problems of rebuilding. Before all the recovery started, “planning and decision processes have been constrained by the slow speed of information [flow]” (author page). Due to different perspectives and mistakes from poor information flow, the recovery plan was going slower than what was expected and the equity issues made more noises to settle. Several important aspects, such as the effectiveness after rebuilding and the costs for rebuilding, needed to be considered and estimated in advance. The pace of recovery had been forced to slow down. It was because “most of the planning efforts [had] made mistakes due to haste, believing that they lacked the time to stop and fix them” (author page). Yet, when mistakes accumulate, they may easily break the constructions, and the city government will need to spend more time and money on rebuilding. As long as the actions of rebuilding keep repe...

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