Why We Returned to New Orleans

摘要

In thinking about katrina, mostrnAmericans consider the disaster to have been a random event, a force of nature that couldn't be controlled or predicted. I know I did. But two years after Katrina drowned New Orleans, I'm persuaded that what happened in the Big Easy was less an act of nature than a man-made disaster. Katrina was not the Big One that the city had long feared; it was a Category 3 storm that mostly missed the city. But through a mixture of shoddy engineering, poor planning and selfish politics, a survivable hurricane was turned into an epic disaster. The storm was not the tragedy—that was an act of nature. The tragedy is how unprepared we were— and how, today, we still have not learned the lessons of Katrina.