Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2011 Fatalities due to Hurricane Katrina's impacts in Louisiana Ezra Clay-Kelly Boyd Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Boyd, Ezra Clay-Kelly, "Fatalities due to Hurricane Katrina's impacts in Louisiana" (2011). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2734. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2734 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. FATALITIES DUE TO HURRICANE KATRINA’S IMPACTS IN LOUISIANA A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Geography and Anthropology by Ezra Boyd B.A., The University of Chicago, 1999 M.A., The University of New Orleans, 2003 August 2011 © Copyright 2011 Ezra Clay-Kelly Boyd All Rights Reserved ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the people of southeast Louisiana who lost their homes and family members to the 2005 flood disasters. iii Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincerest appreciation for the support and assistance from the many people who helped make this dissertation possible. My committee members, Dr. Barry Keim, Dr. Marc Levitan, Dr. Ivor van Heerden, Dr. Craig Colten, and Dr. Troy Blanchard, all provided extremely helpful advice, insights, encouragement, and companionship. I would like to particularly acknowledge the personal sacrifices that Dr. van Heerden has had to endure because of his dedicated pursuit of the true underlying causes of this horrible disaster. During a time of tragic loss and overwhelming sorrow, Dr. Louis Cataldie and Frances Kosak, of the Louisiana State Medical Examiner’s Office, embraced my research goals, allowed me into their world, and shared their data and experiences with me. Their openness and support made this research possible. A number of my classmates and colleagues have provided invaluable advice and data. These people include DeWitt Braud, Hampton Peele, Ahmet Binselam, Stephanie Pedro, and many others. Also, I want to thank the many LSU students who assisted in the field surveys. The Louisiana Board of Regents provided the financial support for this project with additional funding from the McKnight Foundation and the Louisiana State Medical Society. Finally, Amy Thompson has been a wonderful companion and has helped me accomplish much. For five years, she patiently waited as I keep telling her “my dissertation is almost done and we’ll soon have the time to do all things we want to.” iv Table of Contents DEDICATION ………………………………………………………………………………… iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………………… iv ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………………… vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND PROBLEM STATEMENT ……………………………… 1 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ………………………………………………………….. 26 3 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE STUDY REGION …………………….... 56 4 THE HURRICANE KATRINA DISASTER IN LOUISIANA ……………………. 82 5 STUDY AREAS, BACKGROUND POPULATION, AND EXTENT OF HAZARDS …………………………………………………………………………. 117 6 FATALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH HURRICANE KATRINA’S IMPACTS ON LOUISIANA ……………………………………………………………………….. 149 7 THE FLOOD FATALITY RATE FOR ORLEANS AND ST. BERNARD PARISHES …………………………………………………………………………. 182 8 REGRESSION ANALYSIS OF THE FLOOD FATALITY RATE ……………… 203 9 CONCLUSION ...………………………………………………………………….. 222 REFERENCES ……………………………………………………………………………… 231 APPENDIX A COMPILING THE LOUISIANA KATRINA VICTIM DATABASE …….… 249 B GEOCODING HURRICANE KATRINA VICTIMS MASTER DATABASE ………………………………………………………………….. 256 C DETERMINING CIRCUMSTANCES OF DEATH …………….....………... 264 D PERMISSIONS TO USE COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL …..………………. 269 VITA …………………………………………………………………………………………. 279 v Abstract This dissertation presents a comprehensive analysis of the loss of life in Louisiana associated with Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic failure of the federal hurricane protection system. While Louisiana officials attribute 1,464 deaths to this disaster, a Louisiana Katrina Victim Database compiled for this dissertation lists 1,575 victims whose death can be linked to circumstances related to the disaster. First, this dissertation presents a comprehensive assessment of the multiple hazards impacting a dynamic population within southeast Louisiana. This is followed by a comprehensive descriptive analysis of victims’ characteristics. Both of these assessments point to an important conclusion: circumstances matter in interpreting the observed trends in victims’ characteristics. Drawing inferences from the available data, three categories of circumstances of death are identified: (i) direct flood deaths, (ii) emergency circumstances deaths, and (iii) evacuation/displacement deaths. As a whole and within each category, age is the most important demographic attributes with nearly 60% of deceased victims over 65 or older. However, the role of other demographic attributes varies between different categories of circumstances, with flood victims being predominantly African-American males and evacuation/displacement deaths being predominantly Caucasian females. Deaths directly related to flood exposure constitutes one major class or category of victims. Using the available data, these victims are identified, and then merged with population data to calculate and map the direct flood fatality rate (FFR). The overall mortality among the flood exposed population for this event was approximately 1%, which is similar to findings for historical flood events. The FFR is then used as the dependent variable in a regression analysis meant to build upon previous research in modeling flood deaths. In a final step, a set of regressions examine the influence of (i) the flood hazard characteristics and (ii) the population vulnerability characteristics in determining the FFR. It was found that water depth and flow velocity explain much of variance in the observed FFR, with age and race also being significant. These results provide important insights into the deaths caused by this complex disaster along with the relationship between flood mortality and the characteristics of the flood and the affected population. vi Chapter 1: Introduction and Problem Statement 1.1 Introduction Hurricane Katrina and levee failures that occurred during this disaster event resulted in an unprecedented flood catastrophe for modern America. In Louisiana over 1,500 people lost their lives to the immediate and short term effects of the flood (Boyd 2006, Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals 2006, Louisiana Family Assistance Center 2006). Furthermore Stephens et al. (2007) estimated that many thousands of deaths may be linked to the long term impacts of the flooding in New Orleans. This dissertation examines the loss-of-life associated with the impacts of Hurricane Katrina in Southeast Louisiana, with particular emphasis on the direct flood deaths that resulted from levee failure flooding in Orleans and St. Bernard parishes. Hurricane Katrina essentially consists of a meteorological event characterized by its central pressure, trajectory, and wind field. However, the Hurricane Katrina disaster largely resulted from the cascading effects of the windstorm. In particular, the sea surface response to the wind storm consisted of a storm surge that exerted damaging loads on levees around New Orleans. In turn, numerous levee failures caused catastrophic flooding of a large urban area along with an acute regional breakdown of basic public safety systems, an extended displacement emergency, and a long-term medical crisis. The Physical Event After passing over Miami as a Category 1 hurricane, Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico as a tropical storm early on Friday, August 26, 2005. Over the next two days, Katrina would move west and strengthen. The storm crossed over the Mississippi River delta in southeastern Louisiana early Monday morning as an officially designated Category 3 storm with landfall windspeeds officially logged at 127 mph (Knabb, Rhome, and Brown 2006). The storm then continued north and made final landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi Gulf Coast around 11:00 a.m. on Monday, August 29, 2005. This massive windstorm tore roofs off of houses, generated destructive wind borne debris, and spawned forty-three confirmed tornados (Knabb, Rhome, and Brown 2006). As an indicator of the windstorm’s extent and strength, most of Mississippi, all of southeast Louisiana, and parts of southern Alabama lost power. While awesome in its power, the worst impacts resulted not directly from the windstorm but from the sea level response to this atmospheric forcing. Storm surges consist of extreme high tides that result from surface winds and decreased air pressure associated with tropical weather systems. Generally speaking storm surges are the most lethal aspect of hurricane disasters and Katrina was no exception to this trend. Based on the limited data available, an estimated that 175 persons drowned directly due to storm surge flooding along the Mississippi1 while 45,000 1Information on deaths in Mississippi has been very limited, and with