Katrina Was Not An Equal Opportunity Disaster
Although current New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and others have labeled Katrina an equal-opportunity storm, a Black homeowner in the city was four times more likely to live in a flooded area than a white homeowner, according to the book Katrina by Gary Rivlin. Additionally, 51 percent of Louisiana residents who were killed by Katrina were Black while in Orleans parish, 68 percent of deaths (459 out of 680 total) were African-Americans, according to a 2008 article in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, entitled, “Hurricane Katrina Deaths, Louisiana, 2005.”
The Government’s Disastrously Slow Response To Katrina Was Racist
It was five days before sufficient federal or state help arrived for the tens of thousands of Blacks who were marooned in the city, according to a 2010 PBS timeline. A number of African-American political leaders charged that the response would have been far quicker had the victims been in the predominantly white cities of Palm Beach or Boca Raton.
