As category 4 Hurricane Ida makes landfall this morning along the Louisiana coast on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in 2005, those who haven't wisely evacuated (or can't afford to) are bracing for a devastating 24 hours. Hurricane Katrina exposed many flaws when it comes to our preparedness and response to a natural disaster on that scale, but as Professor Michael Eric Dyson has noted in his 2006 book "Come Hell or High Water", it exposed the deadly effects of poverty:
"Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this."
We're hoping for the best, but expecting the worst, during the days and weeks ahead for the people that will suffer the most as a result of this monster storm because their economic condition predicts it.`
(photo: Katrina victims. News Muse / Creative Commons)
