Katrina Project Impact

1692 Words7 Pages
August 25th, 2009. Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans, Louisiana, flooding the city and destroying establishments. Then, just moments later, Lake Ponchartrain’s levees break and the Ninth Ward of the city is destroyed and many residents are dead. However, the deaths do not stop there. In the days to come, thousands of lives will be lost and the entire city will be in dire need of aid. In order to comprehend what happened and how to move forward from this disaster, it is important to analyze the events surrounding this catastrophe. History played an important aspect in the mismanagement of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA had just recently cut a program called Project Impact, a project that worked to create disaster-resistant…show more content…
The Answer? Hurricane Pam. Hurricane Pam was a FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) funded disaster simulation exercise in which a strong, fictional, category three, almost category four, hurricane named Pam hit New Orleans. The purpose of the exercise was to help officials develop joint response plans for a calamitous hurricane on the Louisiana coast. While many found the Pam exercise to be useful in executing a better response to Katrina, there were many faults in the plan that left it, overall, unsuccessful. According to Walter Maestri, the emergency and homeland security coordinator for Jefferson Parish, there were three major reasons the Hurricane. The first reason was that there were promises made by individuals and companies that were not followed through with when Hurricane Katrina hit. The second was the fact that the project was cut halfway. Because of this, many key components of the plan—such as medical care, shelter, communication, and transportation—were not yet worked out and officials did not know how to approach them. The third reason was that there were weaknesses in the plan that were not discovered until the hurricane actually hit the city. In fact, many people claim that the plan placed more emphasis on managing the aftermath of the catastrophe than creating initiatives and working out ways that would diminish the extent of the catastrophe. Overall, is the plan had been completed, then officials would have known the necessities required to help their residents, yet it is not certain if it would have succeeded in diminishing the effects of the disaster since there were still several unanticipated weaknesses in the

More about Katrina Project Impact

Open Document