Download Katrina: After the Flood AudioBook Free
A decade after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Southeast Louisiana, journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm's immediate destruction, the town of New Orleans' attempts to rebuild itself, and the storm's lasting effects not merely on the city's geography and infrastructure but on the psychic, racial, and sociable fabric of one of the nation's great towns. Much of New Orleans still sat underwater the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the town after Hurricane Katrina. A staff reporter for The NY Times, he was proceeding into the town to survey the destruction. The interstate was eerily vacant. Soldiers in even and armed with assault rifles halted him. Water come to the eaves of residences for so far as the eye could see. Four out of every five residences - 80 percent of the city's property stock - have been flooded. Around that same percentage of universities and businesses were wrecked. The weight of most that drinking water on the streets damaged gas and drinking water and sewer pipes throughout town, and the deluge had drowned almost every electricity substation and rendered unusable the majority of the city's drinking water and sewer system. People residing in flooded regions of the city could not be likely to pay their house fees for the near future. Nor would all those boarded-up businesses - 21,000 of the city's 22,000 businesses were still shuttered six months after the surprise - be contributing their stocks of sales fees and other fees to the city's coffers. Six weeks following the storm, the town let go half its workforce - exactly when so many people were embracing its federal government for help. Meanwhile, cynics both in and from the Beltway were questioning the utilization of taxpayer us dollars to rebuild a city that sat mostly below sea level. How could the town possibly come back? This booklet traces the reviews of New Orleanians of most stripes - politicians and companies, instructors and bus drivers, poor and prosperous, black and white - as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our era and reconstruct, change, and, in some cases give up, a city that is the soul of the nation.
