Before I watched this documentary, I was totally unaware of the impacts of Hurricane Katrina. Of course I had heard the name and had known it had flooded New Orleans. However, I was unaware of the mismanagement of disaster relief as well as the depth of the flooding. I was also unaware of the racial discrimination and lack of help many of the city’s residents faced following the devastation, going so far as to bar the only way out of the city. Following the documentary, I looked up the official death count of the Hurricane and 1,833 people died in total and 1,577 died just in Louisiana. (Hurricane Katrina Statistics Fast Facts, CNN.com) Seeing how the government totally abandoned them during a time of immense crisis, was eye opening.
While watching this film I had this enduring question, how did people rebuild their lives after such an event? Survivors must have had and still have lingering effects of having survived this, as they saw friends/family die, often of highly preventable causes during and after the Hurricane; as well as the destruction of their homes and property. I am also morbidly wondering if the death count is accurate because of one main reason.
There was a clear and almost total lack of disaster management for both the living and dead in New Orleans. A YouTuber that I had been familiar with before this documentary, Ask A Mortician, explains the steps to retrieving and storing bodies after a natural disaster. Being a mortician herself, she explains why these steps must be followed and in what order. (Ask A Mortician, “Managing Corpses After A Natural Disaster,” YouTube) It seems that in Hurricane Katrina, at least in New Orleans, most of these steps and rules were disregarded and abandoned. This probably not only gave the families of the victims a complete and total lack of closure, but also prevented accurate identification. This would have presented obvious problems as to determining the death count, especially given how much time passed between the disaster and relief. If I had more time, I would have further researched disaster management in the weeks and months following Hurricane Katrina; but given the inhumane conditions and further misconduct by the U.S government, it would not be surprising to me if the death count was much higher.