Three years since Hurricane Katrina in the USA

This video from the USA is called Hurricane Katrina.

By Naomi Spencer in the USA:

Three years since Hurricane Katrina

30 August 2008

Three years ago, on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the US Gulf Coast. The storm devastated nearly 100,000 square miles and displaced over a million people. New Orleans, Louisiana, bore the brunt of this disaster, after the levee system failed and nearly 80 percent of the city was submerged.

Overwhelmingly those most deeply affected by Katrina were among the poorest layers of the working class in a long-impoverished and neglected region of the United States. In the days following the hurricane’s landfall, the initial tragedy in New Orleans was compounded by official neglect, incompetence, and military repression.

The storm and its aftermath exposed in the starkest way the gross inequality at the heart of American social life. Thousands of New Orleans residents stayed behind after a last-minute evacuation was ordered—many of them extremely poor, without means of transportation, disabled or elderly. The low-income and minority neighborhoods—low-lying and long neglected—were virtually obliterated when adjacent levee walls gave way.