Minority Health and Health Equity Archive
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769
Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.
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Item Hurricane Katrina - Two Years Later: In Their Own Words (part 3)(2007) Barry, John M.The most important thing that people need to understand about the New Orleans area is the interplay between geology and engineering, and their unintended consequences. This involves two issues: how the city became vulnerable and rising sea level. Nature did not make New Orleans vulnerable to hurricanes. Engineers did.Item Hurricane Katrina - Two Years Later: In Their Own Words (part 4)(2007) Blakely, EdwardNew Orleans is a city that cherishes its past yet has not taken many steps to design its future. Katrina changed all of that. On August 29th, 2005, New Orleans came face to face with the errors of the past. The levees were inadequate and caused mass flooding. The systems the City had to cope with the problems after the levees broke were not ready. Under Mayor Nagin, the city was just beginning to deal with over 50 years of urban decline and decay.Item Hurricane Katrina - Two Years Later: In Their Own Words (part 2)(2007) Shearer, HarryI'll cheat enough to say New Orleans needs two things: a true hurricane-flood-protection system and the restoration of Louisiana's coastal wetlands. The Dutch have done it right — a state-of-the art system engineered to a 1-in-10,000-year factor of safety. We've been promised 1-in-100-years, by 2011.Item Hurricane Katrina - Two Years Later: The Threatening Storm(2007) GRUNWALD, MICHAELThe most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe. They should. Two years after Katrina, the effort to protect coastal Louisiana from storms and restore its vanishing wetlands has become one of the biggest government extravaganzas since the moon mission—and the Army Corps is running the show, with more money and power than ever. Many of the same coastal scientists and engineers who sounded alarms about the vulnerability of New Orleans long before Katrina are warning that the Army Corps is poised to repeat its mistakes—and extend them along the entire Louisiana coast. If you liked Katrina, they say, you'll love what's coming next.Item COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT: LEADERSHIP TOOL FOR CATASTROPHIC HEALTH EVENTS(2007) Schoch-Spana, Monica; Franco, Crystal; Nuzzo, Jennifer B.; Usenza, ChristianaDisasters and epidemics are immense and shocking disturbances that require the judgments and efforts of large numbers of people, not simply those who serve in an official capacity. This article reviews the Working Group on Community Engagement in Health Emergency Planning’s recommendations to government decision makers on why and how to catalyze the civic infrastructure for an extreme health event. Community engagement defined here as structured dialogue, joint problem solving, and collaborative action among formal authorities, citizens at-large, and local opinion leaders around a pressing public matter—can augment officials’ abilities to govern in a crisis, improve application of communally held resources in a disaster or epidemic, and mitigate communitywide losses. The case of limited medical options in an influenza pandemic serves to demonstrate the civic infrastructure’s preparedness, response, and recovery capabilities and to illustrate how community engagement can improve pandemic contingency planning.