"Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume examines the impact of Katrina on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi's Gulf Coast shared the impact, their socioeconomic and demographic compositions varied widely, leading to different types and rates of recovery. This volume furthers our understanding of the pace of recovery and its geographic extent, and explores the role of inequalities in the recovery process and those antecedent conditions that could give rise to a "recovery divide." It will be especially appealing to researchers and advanced students of natural disasters and policy makers dealing with disaster consequences and recovery"--

Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume examines the impact of Katrina on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi's Gulf Coast shared the impact, their socioeconomic and demographic compositions varied widely, leading to different types and rates of recovery. This volume furthers our understanding of the pace of recovery and its geographic extent, and explores the role of inequalities in the recovery process and those antecedent conditions that could give rise to a 'recovery divide'. It will be especially appealing to researchers and advanced students of natural disasters and policy makers dealing with disaster consequences and recovery.

An interdisciplinary volume on impacts of and recovery from Hurricane Katrina in southern Mississippi, for natural hazard researchers, students and policy makers.

August 29, 2005, was the day that Mother Nature decided to once again "slam dunk" the Gulf Coast as she sent Hurricane Katrina careening into basically the same area that Hurricane Camille hit in 1969. This book describes the events as Katrina roared into Diamondhead, Mississippi, a 35-year-old retirement community of 8,000 residents that sits on the top of the Bay of St. Louis, five miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. Diamondhead is located just to the right of where the eye of the storm hit. The book also touches on the devastation of surrounding towns such as the Kiln, Waveland and Bay St. Louis and more. (Title) is a gripping portrait of a small community, convinced that water would never come over Interstate Highway 10 (I-0) and reach its streets. Diamondhead was thrown into chaos as the fury of Katrina sent tornadoes and floodwaters of up to thirty feet of water into its streets and homes. The national media failed to consider this community as hard hit by Katrina although some 500 homes were uninhabitable following the storm. First-hand, personal and bizarre survival stories of real people, many who stayed for the storm, are revealed as they remember that terrifying day. These detailed anecdotes are accompanied by dozens of photos. This is the story of a community that was left to rely on its wits, ingenuity, generosity and neighbors in order to return their lives to normalcy. It is definitely a book for armchair storm chasers.

This book presents the fullest account yet written of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Rooted in a wealth of oral histories, it tells the dramatic but underreported story of a people who confronted the unprecedented devastation of sixty five thousand homes when the eye wall and powerful northeast quadrant of the hurricane swept a record thirty-foot storm surge across a seventy-five-mile stretch of unprotected Mississippi towns and cities. James Patterson Smith takes us through life and death accounts of storm day, August 29, 2005, and the precarious days of food and water shortages that followed. Along the way the narrative treats us to inspiring episodes of neighborly compassion and creative responses to the greatest natural disaster in American history. The heroes of this saga are the local people and local officials. In often moving accounts, the book addresses the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s long struggle to remove a record-setting volume of debris and get on with the rebuilding of homes, schools, jobs, and public infrastructure. Along the way readers are offered insights into the politics of recovery funding and the bureaucratic bungling and hubris that afflicted the storm response and complicated and delayed the work of recovery. Still, there are ample accounts of things done well, and a moving chapter gives us a feel for the psychological, spiritual, and material impact of the eight hundred thousand people from across the nation who gave of themselves as volunteers in the Mississippi recovery effort.

Over 50 full-color photographs of the Mississippi Gulf Coast after the passage of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 as seen by Claude Adams.

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline.