Left to chance : Hurricane Katrina and the story of two New Orleans neighborhoods / Steve Kroll-Smith, Vern Baxter, and Pam Jenkins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kroll-Smith, J. Stephen, 1947- author.

Baxter, Vern K., author.

Jenkins, Pamela, author.

Series:

Katrina bookshelf

The Katrina bookshelf

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hurricane Katrina, 2005.

Disaster victims--Louisiana--New Orleans.

Disaster victims.

Racism--United States.

Racism.

Neighborhoods.

Social classes.

United States.

United States--Race relations.

Race relations.

Social classes--Louisiana--New Orleans.

Neighborhoods--Louisiana--New Orleans.

Louisiana--New Orleans.

Physical Description:

xiii, 164 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Austin : University of Texas Press, 2015.

Summary:

How do survivors recover from the worst urban flood in American history, a disaster that destroyed nearly the entire physical landscape of a city, as well as the mental and emotional maps that people use to navigate their everyday lives? This question has haunted the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and informed the response to the subsequent flooding of New Orleans across many years. Left to Chance takes us into two African American neighborhoods-working-class Holly-grove and middle-class Pontchartrain Park-to learn how their residents have experienced "Miss Katrina" and the long road back to normal life. The authors spent several years gathering firsthand accounts of the flooding, the rushed evacuations that turned into weeks- and months-long exile, and the often confusing and exhausting process of rebuilding damaged homes in a city whose local government had all but failed. As the residents' stories make vividly clear, government and social science concepts such as "disaster management," "restoring normality," and "recovery" have little meaning for people whose worlds were washed away in the flood. For the neighbors in Hollygrove and Pontchartrain Park, life in the aftermath of Katrina has been a passage from all that was familiar and routine to an ominous world filled with raw existential uncertainty. Recovery and rebuilding become processes imbued with mysteries, accidental encounters, and hasty adaptations, while victories and defeats are left to chance. Book jacket.

Contents:

Water, conversations and race : an introduction

"Katrina takes aim"

Geographies of class and color

Life on the road

From the road to exile

It's available but is it accessible? : traversing the world of disaster assistance

Rebuilding in a broken city

"The Katrina effect" : is there a Coda?

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781477303696

1477303693

9781477303849

1477303847

OCLC:

890912598