What was being covered during Hurricane Katrina? More recovery than 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.
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 (McMahon 2022). 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.
In this video, the residents are heading into the Superdome as a shelter. The Superdome was perhaps one of the more covered aspects of Louisiana,
I implemented 6 articles into Voyant to see which common words were being used by all six. Each article covered at least one day that Hurricane Katrina was still presiding in the United States. From what it seems to appear, some trends include orleans, damage, hurricane, impact, water, etc. These are some of the bigger, more commonly used words. Comparing it to smaller words such as management, help, dead, intense, it appears that news outlets are focused more on the actual hurricane itself and its damage rather than some words that can be associated with community preparedness.
