Media and community preparedness.
During the entirety of Hurricane Katrina, the media shifted its focus to more on recovery rather than the preparedness of the community. This was done through the form of government response while placing a limited scope on how the community was prepared. Which we talk about below.
In the 5 minute video below, WWL-TV, a news station serving both New Orleans and French Quarters is talking about the levee system failure down below. We can see that the community preparedness is heading off a rough start given that the levee system is frail and therefore was overrun by the overflooding caused by Katrina.
“Engineers who criticized the levee failure pointed out that many of the levees were poorly reinforced, or built on substrata with a low shear strength, which meant that when floodwaters pushed against the levees, they simply gave way. In addition, the levee sections were often not interlocked, which would have increased their strength, and some of the levees were built over dirt or peat levees which were severely eroded by the floodwaters, causing those levees to break.”
-Mary mcmahon of unitedstatesnow (november 12, 2022)
The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USAE) bulit the levee system. According to them, the levee system was only strong enough to withstand a Category 3 storm, leading to them to fail due to Hurricane Katrina being a Category 5. They also explained that the limited funding has also been restrictive on what extra protections they can add. Despite the USAE at first not admitting blame from other engineers, they did their own investigations. They admitted fault after they concluded what they found.
Sheltering in place.
In another video by WWL-TV, it was covering the evacuating of people waiting and entering the Superdome to be protected from the hurricane. Notice how the reporter is doing the report, as he talks about the number of people staying there, what supplies were being brought in, and reasons why people were heading into the Superdome.
Common trends in words…
https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=718cce82d50d0c386d685a84d72f4d56&visible=315&view=Cirrus
5 articles were implemented into Voyant to see which common words were being used by all 5. Each article covered one day during the time Hurricane Katrina was presiding over the South-eastern area of the United States. The largest words were commonly used words to describe the situation at the time, such as storm, Louisiana, and Katrina. However, some trends seem to be damage, killed, emergency and other words to describe a sense of urgency. Smaller trends were evacuated, shelters and homes. This implies that the more larger words were used to bring awareness to what was happening rather than addressing how the communities has prepared. This is seen as being focused more on the government response from the articles that were covering each day that Hurricane Katrina was welding damage.
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