August 23, 2005; Hurricane Katrina, which formed in the Bahamas, hit Florida. By the 29th, on its third landfall, it struck and devastated the city of New Orleans, becoming the deadliest hurricane of the 2005 season and one of the five worst hurricanes to make landfall in U.S. history. Taking a look at the years leading up to Katrina, preventative actions, racial and class inequalities, and governance, all of this could have been prevented. As presented in the journal article An Autopsy of Katrina: Four Storms, Not Just One, we must ask whether “natural” disasters are truly natural or are they the product of people failing to take necessary actions? to undertake? The Years Leading Up to Katrina In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released a report on the three most likely disasters to hit the United States. Among these probable disasters that hit the United States, one was a hurricane that hit New Orleans, the other two; a terrorist attack in New York City and a major earthquake that hit San Francisco. (course package) However, very little was done to prepare for the deadly storm that four years later would leave New Orleans in devastated chaos. After Hurricane Betsy flooded the city in 1965, Congress authorized the first flood protection system. The project was expected to last 13 years and cost about $85 million. When Hurricane Katrina hit land nearly 40 years later, the system had not yet been completed and the cost had risen to $738 million. (news article) Knowing that New Orleans had a good chance each year of being hit by a category five hurricane, leaving its levees at a category three strength was like playing Russ... middle of paper... five bloody hurricanes. Even the poor and black population would have been better off if the story had not been discovered. They would have been treated the same as the white population, if not better, because their homes were in the lower, less desirable part of town, making them more vulnerable in a storm like Katrina. Considering events like these and others described above, it's easy to say that Hurricane Katrina was not a natural disaster. Instead, it was an unnatural disaster that could have been avoided if people had done their jobs properly. Works Cited Schwartz, J “An Autopsy of Katrina: Four Storms, Not Just One.”, May 2006, Gavin, A, “Reading Katrina: Race, Space, and an Unnatural Disaster.”, New Political Science, p.325 – 346Brym , R", "Hurricane Katrina and the myth of natural disasters", Sociology as a question of life and death, p.53 - 78