![]() ![]() But New Orleans peaked, relative to other American cities, back in 1840, and has been losing ground ever since. Then there are the city’s celebrated charms-the food, the music, the generally soft, seductive atmosphere. In its immediate vicinity are many natural resources: rich soil for growing rice and sugarcane, and plenty of cotton, sulfur, seafood, and, beginning in the early twentieth century, oil. ![]() It is the natural port for the vast interior of the country, from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Even now, fifteen years after Katrina, New Orleans has not fully recovered, in population and otherwise.īy the standards of one’s middle-school geography class, New Orleans ought to be one of America’s most prosperous cities, instead of one of its poorest. The floodwaters had receded, the Superdome had emptied, the national press had left, and we weren’t anywhere near the city’s most famous devastated neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward-but still what you saw was a landscape of abandoned buildings, moldy refrigerators set out on sidewalks, downed trees and electrical wires, and a thick impasto of mud covering everything. Efforts to gentrify neighborhoods in order to promote a new post-Katrina economy left the city’s lower-income residents without the means to return.When we came home to New Orleans for the first time after Hurricane Katrina, over Thanksgiving weekend of 2005, my then three-year-old son, looking out the window on the drive in from the airport, said, “You told me we were going to New Orleans, but now we’re in Iraq.” This was three months after the storm hit. Consequently, the lack of affordable development, the renovation of rental properties, and the demolition of several public housing projects meant that many displaced residents remained without homes. In New Orleans, urban renewal projects were implemented in the years following the storm in an attempt to revitalize the shrinking city and jumpstart the economy, as much of the loss occurred in the housing sector. This was the first time in the country’s history that the national average gas price exceeded $3. As a result, Louisiana refineries began to halt production, and gas prices across the countries rapidly increased in the weeks following Katrina. 20 offshore rigs sustained significant damage by either sinking or running adrift. oil production, as 24% of the country's natural gas supply is housed in or around areas impacted by the storm. Katrina impacted up to 19% of the total U.S. The storm’s economic effects were also felt by the country at large. ![]() In New Orleans alone, an estimated 95,000 individuals lost their jobs in the 10 months following the hurricane, accounting for $2.9 billion in lost wages. This number does not account for the additional costs associated with the economic fallout of the storm, which includes the loss of homes and jobs, as well as the interruption of the export industry, the tourism industry, oil production and supply, and tax collection. ![]() Hurricane Katrina is tied as the costliest hurricane to have ever hit the United States, with $125 billion in damages. ![]()
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