Humans have an innate tendency to attach themselves to objects on their cultural landscape. After a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, people seem to hold on to objects left behind by the disaster. This paper examines several of the concepts and reasons as to why attachments may have formed to objects left on New Orleans' landscape after Hurricane Katrina. I explored human reactions after a natural disaster, and discussed how memories, collective and individual, often lead to personal attachment to objects. In an attempt to get a better understanding of this phenomenon, 250 surveys were distributed to residents in the New Orleans metro area. The surveys were used as a tool to discover if attachments were formed and if so, what led to the attachment. The results from the survey revealed that 38% of the people surveyed formed an attachment to an object left by Hurricane Katrina.

The wetlands of Louisiana have provided protection against floods and storms for thousands of years. With the construction of the Mississippi River levees and increased urbanization the wetlands are quickly disappearing, thus leaving the area vulnerable to hurricane storm surge. Since Hurricane Katrina, levees have been showcased as the only way of fully protecting southeast Louisiana from floods and storms; however, this is also being accompanied by a push for more funding for coastal restoration. There is evidence that hurricane protection levees and coastal restoration are incompatible. This research examines the implications of levees on the wetlands both directly and indirectly. Furthermore, a survey was conducted to discover public perception about the impacts of levees in southeast Louisiana by residents most as risk for flooding from hurricane storm surge.

The theme of this study is spatial mismatch, a concept that gave rise to an ever-expanding body of research concerned with how and why residential and employment distributions have shifted within cities and across metropolitan areas. The concept grew out of John F. Kain's research on how racial discrimination and segregation affects the spatial patterns of people/subgroups and jobs in the postwar American urban environment. Specifically, "Housing Segregation" posits that housing-market discrimination is at the root of increased unemployment among inner-city, nonwhite workers; concurrently, the pace and volume of decentralization (of residents and employment) from central-cities reinforces low-income, overwhelmingly African-American isolation and immobility. This study contributes to the New Orleans literature by providing a pre- and post-Katrina snapshot of spatial mismatch. The analysis addresses research questions aimed at gauging the extent to which mismatch and job-isolation have changed for poor workers in the New Orleans metro area since Hurricane Katrina.

Les Bon Temps is a collection of nine essays written about New Orleans between 2005 and 2007. Though not specifically about the effects of hurricane Katrina on the city, this collection provides a personal glimpse of post-Katrina New Orleans though the eyes of the author. The essays address subjects such as race relations, public protest, tap water quality, post-traumatic depression, energy monopolies, lifestyle, culture, and evacuation.

In 2006, Steven Oakley, an eighteen-year-old high school senior from Pennsylvania, is bribed by his father to go on a volunteer trip to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, Louisiana. During his time, he meets a broken family whose experiences change Steven’s perspective on his own privileged life.

This thesis is about the relationship between Hurricane Katrina and the television news industry. My goal was to record the experiences of my fellow co-workers at WWL-TV, which was the only local television station to remain on the air throughout the hurricane. I also wanted to perform a review of the news industry up until the point of the storm, in order to analyze any affects the hurricane may have had on news coverage in general.

Thesis advisor: Amy Frappier / Tropical cyclones (TCs), known as hurricanes in the Atlantic and Typhoons in the Pacific, are among the most destructive and deadly natural disasters that occur on Earth. Attempts to understand how TCs relate to the global climate system, and future risk assessments are dependent upon having records of TC activity that pre-date the modern meteorological records, which are commonly not older than 130 years (Nott, 2003). Paleotempestology is a sub-discipline of paleoclimatology that attempts to extend the TC record beyond the meteorological record through the use of proxies. Presented here is the establishment of a paleotempestology proxy based on clastic mud being suspended in the water column by floods caused by TCs and deposited in stalagmite CH-1, collected in June of 2007 from Cenote Chaltun-Ha, a low-lying cave from the Yucatán Peninsula. CH-1 was dated by a combination of <super>210</super>Pb, U/Th, and layer counting techniques, creating an age model for its entire length. The years with mud layers were compared to the historical TC record from 1852-2006. Nineteen mud layers were identified for this time period. All of the mud layers deposited in years with at least one TC passing within 330 km of Cenote Chaltun-Ha. A total of 265 mud layers were identified in CH-1 dating from 198 BC to 2006 AD. Relatively high TC frequency, ~16 mud layers/century, was recorded in CH-1 from 198 BC to ~1233 AD. This period was followed by eight centuries of relatively low TC frequency, ~7 mud layers/century. The low frequency period hit a low point in the 1600s with 4 mud layers. Since the 1600s the TC frequency recorded in CH-1 has been on the rise, indicating possible periods of higher than present TC frequency in the future for the Yucatán region. This trend of high TC frequency followed by a sudden drop and subsequent increase is also reported in published sand overwash deposit research. &#948;;<super>18</super>O and &#948;;<super>13</super> values collected from CH-1 provide insight into the timing of regional droughts. A low &#948;;<super>18</super>O value from 1815 provides evidence that "The Year Without a Summer" caused by the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia had a climatic effect on the Yucatán. A land-use signal related to the agricultural production boom of Agave Fourcroydes, a succulent plant known as Henequen, in the early 20th century was also detected in &#948;;<super>13</super>C values. / Thesis (MS) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Geology and Geophysics.

The first essay considers the relative effectiveness of government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as channels to allocate resources. I use a catastrophic climate-related shock--Hurricane Mitch--to examine the political economy of these channels of aid distribution at the micro level. I combine extensive data on aid received by Nicaraguan households with data on municipal election outcomes and an exogenous, precipitation-based measure of hurricane impact. I find that the hurricane had long-lasting effects on the aid received by households from both NGOs and the government. In the short term, however, the government did not provide aid according to the objective measure of hurricane damage but instead provided aid along political lines. The second essay presents estimates of a relationship between extreme hot temperatures during gestation and a child's subsequent physical well-being in a sample of children in Peru, thus extending existing evidence constructed from U.S. data. Estimates are constructed using high-resolution gridded climate data and geo-coded household surveys. The results suggest that a period of extreme heat (a month whose average temperature is more than 2 standard deviations above the local average) in the period 1 to 3 months before birth is associated with lower weight at birth and a reduction in height (measured 1 to 59 months after birth) that cannot be fully explained by birth weight. There is no evidence of differential maternal investment, as measured by duration of breastfeeding, according to a child's exposure to extreme heat during gestation. The third essay asks whether improved treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa can be achieved simply by paying health workers to do more. I present estimates of the impact of financial incentives paid to individual workers at public health facilities in Mozambique. The results suggest that piece-rate incentives increased the delivery of five out of fourteen health services for which treatment effects can be identified, with estimated increases ranging from 34 to 157 percent, depending on the particular service. I find no evidence of a corresponding decrease in the delivery of services that are not financially incentivized, suggesting that there is no "crowding out" of intrinsic motivation.

Beach morphology changes naturally with seasonal and event-driven variability in the wave climate, as well as due to anthropogenic activities such as erosion mitigation efforts. In 2017, category four Hurricane Irma caused beach erosion and dune overwash in Boca Raton, FL. Immediate post-storm perigean spring tides coupled with typical winter high-wind conditions imposed a regime of spatially and temporally extended meteorologic and morphologic variability. This study evaluates the morphologic evolution and post-storm recovery in the first year following Hurricane Irma. Time-series topographic surveys and surface sediment samples were collected. Patterns of accretion and erosion were evaluated with regionally measured water and wind levels. Recovery morphology was generally through berm-building, but lacked shoreline stability. Storm impact regime, mitigation structures, and sediment transport patterns drove the recovery. Total volume lost above the 0 m contour due to the storm was not fully recovered within the year, with a large volume measured in the south. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

In addition to the tragedy they cause, major natural hazard and disaster events place a large cost on the governments and aid organizations who help people prepare for and recover from them. Such organizations are in constant need of strategies for distributing aid efficiently and comprehensively. The emergence of social media in everyday life has provided a platform for such organizations to coordinate relief efforts and communicate with people affected by disasters. It also has allowed affected individuals to communicate with one another on a large scale. The present thesis examines the dynamics of Twitter during extreme climate events and their aftermath in order to shed light on potential strategies for aid providers. We begin by looking at the five most expensive natural disasters in the United States between 2011 and 2016. We isolate Twitter users for each disaster who are likely tweeting about food security or other basic needs during the event and its aftermath. We examine the follower count distributions of these users for each event. We then narrow focus to Hurricane Sandy, and look at the relationship between follower counts and relative increase in tweeting rate during the event. We find that users with fewer than 100 followers were more likely to increase their rate of tweet publication than influentials with many followers. We also use a synthetic model of Twitter's communication network to mimic the way Twitter stores and samples tweet data. We quantify the sensitivity of three measures of network centrality to these mechanisms. This provides insight relevant to those who build network representations of Twitter communication using the data Twitter provides. We see differences in the sensitivity of the centrality measures studied, differences in sensitivity to the different mechanisms, and a dependence between measure and mechanism. Finally, we construct a network representation of Puerto Rican Twitter users surrounding Hurricane Mar\'ia and its aftermath. We examine the evolution of this network over time, and communities present within the aggregate network. Using information theoretic tools, we discern differences in the body of tweets between different communities in the network and different periods of time surrounding the hurricane's landfall. We observe many differences between communities, with more focus on Puerto Rico in the community containing most local government figures, whereas major celebrities tended to talk about more general Latin American issues. We also hand-categorize Twitter users in the network as news outlets, politicians, citizens, weather stations, meteorologists, or journalists, finding that the distribution of user type has a temporal dependence.