Dedication
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Hurricane Katrina, Biloxi, and the Past
Chapter 1: Setting the Scene
Chapter 2: Hurricane History
Chapter 3: Hurricane Katrina
Chapter 4: Trying to Go Home
Chapter 5: Recovering Over the Long Haul
Conclusions
Bibliography
About the Author
Jennifer Trivedi is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and member of the Disaster Recovery Research Center at the University of Delaware.
Although it did not receive as much attention as New Orleans,
Biloxi, Mississippi, suffered catastrophic damage from Hurricane
Katrina--53 people lost their lives and 20 percent of the city was
completely decimated. In the aftermath, 65,000 jobs disappeared and
the population fell by roughly 8 percent. When trying to rebuild,
residents faced massive infrastructure damage and higher insurance
rates. Trivedi (Univ. of Delaware) assesses the role of "political
economy" in mitigating people's vulnerability and recovery in
coping with natural disasters. Employing Katrina as a case study,
she examines how Biloxi residents' socioeconomic status and
political power determined their risk to disaster and ability to
recover from devastating events, both immediately after the event
and years later. By interviewing several groups about their
experiences pre- and post-Katrina, she found that those with the
most political and economic influence not only made quicker
recoveries, but also dictated the community-wide response and
recovery to the disaster. Much of this group's initial focus
centered on efforts to maintain their power and influence.
Understanding the power dynamic of disaster recovery is an
important part of hazard mitigation, making this a much-needed
study in the area of hazard mitigation. Summing Up: Recommended.
Advanced undergraduates through faculty.
Jennifer Trivedi, in Mississippi after Katrina, takes the reader to
ground zero and ground level of Hurricane Katrina, documenting,
through careful ethnographic and documentary research, the events
in Biloxi, Mississippi, from the first warnings, to the trauma of
the storm itself, through the immediate aftermath, and into the
next decade of recovery. Trivedi captures the experiences,
concerns, and drama of regular folks caught in an unprecedented
disaster, while also framing those experiences within the larger
structural issues of race, class, and inequalities of coastal
Mississippi. It is a spellbinding and wholly timely analysis of how
natural disasters are not always natural.
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