Speaker says Katrina was decades in the making

This past Friday a guest speaker shed light on the factors responsible for creating Hurricane Katrina.

Vijay Singh, head of the environmental engineering department at Texas A&M University, hosted a lecture in which he explained that the devastation caused by the 2005 hurricane had in fact been building up for several decades.

"New Orleans is an area that had become very vulnerable to any level of hurricane attack, even more so in Katrina's case due to it being a level five (storm)," he said.

The levees surrounding the city were designed to withstand a hurricane with the power of a level three, Singh explained. However, Hurricane Katrina's winds exceeded 155 miles per hour and held a storm surge of 18, which is substantially more powerful than a level three storm.

Singh also attributed the slow disappearance of the outlying islands and the outskirts of New Orleans as a central cause for the immense devastation of Katrina.

"The Louisiana coast loses nearly forty miles a year, which has been happening for the past forty years," he said. "Eliminate this area, and there is nothing between New Orleans and the Gulf Coast."

Singh mentioned several other causes for the destruction, most notably the ineffectiveness of the levees and pumping stations.

"Not only were the levees unable to withstand the force of a level five storm, but they were already almost completely eroded and overtopped," he said.

The pumping stations, designed to pump the water of flooded areas back into the ocean, were considered very outdated and almost completely useless in the process of water removal from the streets of New Orleans.

The government, according to Sing, was well aware of the potential catastrophic possibilities of the surrounding areas of Louisiana, and offered no assistance until it was far too late.

"It is the said situation of people living up to the old axiom of 'out of sight, out of mind,'" Singh said. "And given that Louisiana is very far from Washington, D.C., the potential environmental support was put on the bottom shelf."

The people of New Orleans also played a significant role in bringing about their own misfortune, Singh said. People had enough time to vacate their homes and reach safe ground, yet due to lack of communication and disbelief of the severity of the storm, many people's lives ended tragically.

"There isn't one sole cause for the horror that was Hurricane Katrina, rather a series of unfortunate events combined that led to the immense devastation," he said. "We can only hope in the event that something like this happens in the future, the area is adequately prepared to deal with such a storm."