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Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Oct 2005

Katrina did her worst. For many years geologists have predicted that the Mardi Gras city of New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. Situated between a river, a lake and the ocean, New Orleans is also significantly beneath sea level. There are levees (like the Dutch dikes) which exist to prevent the city from being swallowed by the sea. The old French settlers discovered that the city went under water in the summer and so built their houses on stilts.

Despite all such man-made attempts to turn back the basic rules of nature, hurricane Katrina, a force four, ripped through the barriers and destroyed a famous city at the end of August. The news and the pictures and the stories coming out of the area are simply horrific. Not now is there simply the natural disaster (of biblical proportions as one secular commentator noted), but there is also the human chaos inflicted on a society broken down, and rumours and eyewitness accounts of brutality and looting begin to abound.