Fatalities Due to Hurricane Katrina's Impacts in Louisiana

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina bore down on the U.S. central Gulf Coast and pushed a record setting storm surge ashore. The levees around New Orleans, Louisiana failed, and a major urban area suffered a catastrophic flood that quickly cascaded into a humanitarian emergency. This book examines fatalities that resulted from the disaster's impacts in Louisiana. Beginning with the geologic and human history of southeast Louisiana, this book traces the sequence of key events that set the stage for this disaster. It then provides a quantitative and spatial recounting of the preparations and response. It also provides reliable estimates of the populations exposed to the many hazards of this complex event. It then focuses on the deceased victims of the disaster, and concludes that the documented 1575 victims in Louisiana can be put into one of three categories: 1) Direct Flood Deaths, 2) Emergency Circumstances Deaths, and 3) Evacuation/Displacement Deaths. Finally, focusing on the direct flood deaths, the book brings together data on the fatalities, the background population, the evacuation and sheltering, and the flood characteristics into a statistical flood fatality model.