1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910812450603321

Autore

Kroll-Smith J. Stephen <1947->

Titolo

Left to chance : Hurricane Katrina and the story of two New Orleans neighborhoods / / Steve Kroll-Smith, Vern Baxter, and Pam Jenkins

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Austin, Texas : , : University of Texas Press, , 2015

©2015

ISBN

1-4773-0385-5

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (181 p.)

Collana

Katrina Bookshelf

Disciplina

976.3/35064

Soggetti

Hurricane Katrina, 2005

Disaster victims - Louisiana - New Orleans

Racism - United States

Social classes - Louisiana - New Orleans

Neighborhoods - Louisiana - New Orleans

United States Race relations

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

CONTENTS; Acknowledgments; Foreword by Elijah Anderson; Prologue; Introduction: Water, Conversations, and Race; 1. ""Katrina Takes Aim""; 2. Geographies of Class and Color; Part II: From Evacuees to Exiles; 3. Life on the Road; 4. From the Road to Exile; Part III: Traversing and Rebuilding; 5. It's Available, but Is It Accessible?; 6. Rebuilding in a Broken City; 7. ""The Katrina Effect""; Epilogue: Making a Space for Chance; Notes; About the Authors and Series Editor; Index

Sommario/riassunto

How do survivors recover from the worst urban flood in American history, a disaster that destroyed nearly the entire physical landscape of a city, as well as the mental and emotional maps that people use to navigate their everyday lives? This question has haunted the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and informed the response to the subsequent flooding of New Orleans across many years. Left to Chance takes us into two African American neighborhoods—working-class Hollygrove and middle-class Pontchartrain Park—to learn how their residents have experienced “Miss Katrina” and the long road back to normal life. The authors spent several years gathering firsthand accounts of the



flooding, the rushed evacuations that turned into weeks- and months-long exile, and the often confusing and exhausting process of rebuilding damaged homes in a city whose local government had all but failed. As the residents’ stories make vividly clear, government and social science concepts such as “disaster management,” “restoring normality,” and “recovery” have little meaning for people whose worlds were washed away in the flood. For the neighbors in Hollygrove and Pontchartrain Park, life in the aftermath of Katrina has been a passage from all that was familiar and routine to an ominous world filled with raw existential uncertainty. Recovery and rebuilding become processes imbued with mysteries, accidental encounters, and hasty adaptations, while victories and defeats are left to chance.