NOVA: Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned A City

NOVA: Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned A City

NOVA; Hurricane Katrina; The Storm That Drowned A City (2006)

Distributed by PBS/WGBH-Boston

(www.pbs.org)

56 min.

We think of hurricanes as natural disasters that strike randomly and unpredictably. The stories we tell about them after the fact emphasize that randomness by focusing on the experiences of those who had the bad luck to be caught in their path. The implied moral is nearly always the same: "There, but for the grace of God, could go anyone who chooses to live on the coast between Corpus Christi and Cape Cod." The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on 30-31 August 2005, however, was anything but random. The storm made landfall just east of New Orleans and - as scientists, engineers, and disaster-relief officials had warned for years - overwhelmed the system of levees, floodwalls, and pumping stations that kept the city dry. Water from Katrina's storm surge overtopped and breached...