“Hurricane Katrina and the Forgotten Coast of Mississippi” was the title of a presentation by IRDR SC member Susan L. Cutter in a session on FORIN (“Forensic Investigations of Disasters”) held during the recent IRDR Conference 2014. It is also the title of a new book which the academic, based at the University of South Carolina, Columbia/SC, USA, co-authored with colleagues from the IRDR International Centre of Excellence on on Vulnerability and Resilience Metrics, and elsewhere.
The description of the tome by Cambridge University Press says: “Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume examines the impact of Katrina on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast shared the impact, their socioeconomic and demographic compositions varied widely, leading to different types and rates of recovery. This volume furthers our understanding of the pace of recovery and its geographic extent, and explores the role of inequalities in the recovery process and those antecedent conditions that could give rise to a “recovery divide.”
The tome, which is expected to be especially appealing to researchers and advanced students of natural disasters and policy makers dealing with disaster consequences and recovery investigates historic antecedents in social relations and contemporary geographic patterns that drive recovery, focusing however on a location other than New Orleans where the impact of Hurricane Katrina was widely reported. The study combines archival research, interviews with residents, specialized datasets, photography, and geospatial technology.
