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Hurricane Katrina

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Hurricane Katrina
RESEARCH PAPER
Our environment and ecosystem allow us to live and enjoy our world. Natural disasters are not dependent on when man desires them or not. They can occur at any time in any place and we won 't necessarily be expecting them. But we can decide on how we preserve our environment by taking the proper precautions for these natural disasters. The levee failure of New Orleans greatly devastated the aquatic ecosystem of the nearby lakes from Hurricane Katrina. The failure of the levees caused the water to rapidly breach the area and become contaminated with the city 's sewage, chemicals, medical wastes and human remains which the city then pumped into the nearby lakes greatly destroying much of their ecosystem. During and following Katrina, water carrying all types of contaminants was pumped in to any available destination, as long as it didn’t submerge the city. Aside from Katrina wreaking havoc, one of the biggest failures of the government and the Army Corps of Engineers was the protection and efficiency of the levees. With the disastrous results of the levees and the water eventually engulfing the city, the damage on the environment was only amplified. We have to understand that the current "levee solution" causes more harm than good and must be reconsidered in how it is used. Thomas O. McGarity and Douglas A. Kysar from Cornell Law School quote the Association of State Floodplain Managers that states "There are only two kinds of levees, those that have failed and those that will fail" (3). Levee structure and design must be changed drastically in order to ensure and protect our ecosystems better.
The levees ' protection was disastrous and counterproductive. New Orleans sits on a very complex piece of land. Sherwood M. Gagliano 's testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works states that this complex piece of land is made of "faults" which are "components of regional linked tectonic framework" (4). A fault is "a fracture



Cited: Association of State Floodplain Managers. National Flood Policy Challenges Levees: The Double-edged Sword. ASFPM White Paper. 2007. Print. Brodie, Kate, Douglas Fettes, Ben Harte, Rolf Schmid. "Structural Terms Including Fault Rock Terms". Systematics of Metamorphic Rocks. IUGS Sub Commission. Web. 29 January 2007 Farris, G.S., G.J. Smith, M.P. Crane, C.R. Demas, L.L. Robbins and D.L. Lavoie. Science and the Storms: the USGS Response to the Hurricanes of 2005. U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1306, 283. Eds. 2007. Print. Gagliano, Sherwood M. Effects of Geological Faults of Levee Failures in South Louisiana. Washington D.C. U.S. Senate Committee of Environment & Public Works. 2005. Print. McGarity, Thomas O. and Kysar, Douglas A., Did NEPA Drown New Orleans? The Levees, The Blame Game, and the Hazards of Hindsight (2006). Cornell Law Faculty Publications. Paper 51. Print. Roper, William E., Kevin J. Weiss, James F. Wheeler. "Water Quality Issues in New Orleans during Katrina Recovery Operations". Paper No: UC 1604. n.d. Print. Schaefer, J., P. Mickle, J. Spaeth, B.R. Kreiser, S. Adams, W. Matamoros, B. Zuber, P. Vigueira. Effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Fish Fauna of the Pascagoula River Drainage. Session C: Katrina Inland Impacts. 36th Annual Mississippi Water Resources Conference. 2006. Print. Sheikh, Pervaze A. The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Biological Resources. The Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service Reports. 2005. Print. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "Impact of Hurricane Katrina and Rita on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Its Trust Resources". U.S. Department of the Interior. n.d.Web. 26 April 2012.

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