Hurricane Katrina made landfall.
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| Hurricane Katrina is raging and you are inside the Superdome! Miles has only lived in New Orleans with his dad, a musician, for a few months when Hurricane Katrina hits. Father and son haven?t exactly been getting along. Miles is obsessed with football; his dad?s passion is jazz. But when the storm strikes, they?re forced to work through their differences to survive a torturous few days in the Superdome. Paul Volponi, known for writing books that capture the pulse of urban life in New York City, creates a gripping hour-by-hour portrayal of what life was like for those left behind once the floodwaters began to rise. |
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana-on August 29, 2005-journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm's immediate damage, the city of New Orleans's efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm's lasting effects not just on the city's geography and infrastructure-but on the psychic, racial, and social fabric of one of this nation's great cities. Much of New Orleans still sat under water the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina. Then a staff reporter for The New York Times , he was heading into the city to survey the damage. The Interstate was eerily empty. Soldiers in uniform and armed with assault rifles stopped him. Water reached the eaves of houses for as far as the eye could see. Four out of every five houses-eighty percent of the city's housing stock-had been flooded. Around that same proportion of schools and businesses were wrecked. The weight of all that water on the streets cracked gas and water and sewer pipes all around town and the deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable most of the city's water and sewer system. People living in flooded areas of the city could not be expected to pay their property taxes for the foreseeable future. Nor would all those boarded-up businesses-21,000 of the city's 22,000 businesses were still shuttered six months after the storm-be contributing their share of sales taxes and other fees to the city's coffers. Six weeks after the storm, the city laid off half its workforce-precisely when so many people were turning to its government for help. Meanwhile, cynics both in and out of the Beltway were questioning the use of taxpayer dollars to rebuild a city that sat mostly below sea level. How could the city possibly come back? This book traces the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes-politicians and business owners, teachers and bus drivers, poor and wealthy, black and white-as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age and reconstruct, change, and in some cases abandon a city that's the soul of this nation.
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| Four acts document distinct perspectives on the pivotal events that preceeded and followed Katrina's passage through New Orleans, a catastrophe during which the divide between race and class lines has never been more pronounced. |
