Words cannot adequately convey the human dimension of the devastation wreaked on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Thomas Neff's photographs can. As a volunteer in the city in the early days after the flood, this Baton Rouge photographer witnessed first hand the confusion and suffering that was New Orleans - as well as the persistence and strength of those who stuck it out. Neff subsequently spent forty-five days interviewing and photographing the city's holdouts, and his record is a heartbreaking but compelling look at the true impact of the disaster. At a time when New Orleans residents felt isolated and abandoned, Neff provided the ear that many needed. The friendship he extended enabled him to capture remarkable images and to write sensitive commentaries that approach his subjects from a uniquely personal perspective. Here are Antoinette K-Doe assessing the future of her ruined Mother-in-Law Lounge; Juan Parke, who ferried scores of people to safety in his silver canoe; Ashton O'Dwyer defending his property from looters; Ride Hamilton pausing in his work as a freelance medic. These portraits and dozens more tell the story of the storm through many voices - and collectively they tell a story of their own. Other books have documented the wrath of Katrina, but none has captured the human dimension as powerfully as ""Holding Out and Hanging On"". Through these intimate, intense images, readers will meet people from all walks of life who are exhausted by grief and shock but who are determined to hold on to their culture and their city. Neff's gripping black-and-white images and equally poignant narratives show individuals who are reorganizing their lives, trying to maintain their individuality, and even enriching their souls as they help one another. These are the stories that New Orleans citizens told each other - a view of the disaster not captured by the news cameras - and photographs that show the city as it knows itself. Together, Neff's portraits and stories form a sensitive documentary of survival and stand as a testament to the extraordinary individuals who endured one of the most calamitous disasters of our time.

. . . the authors sound a pessimistic note about society's short-term memory in their sobering, able history of Camille --Booklist This highly readable account aimed at a general audience excels at telling the plight of the victims and how local political authorities reacted. The saddest lesson is how little the public and the government learned from Camille. Highly recommended for all public libraries, especially those on the Gulf and East coasts. --Library Journal online As the unsettled social and political weather of summer 1969 played itself out amid the heat of antiwar marches and the battle for civil rights, three regions of the rural South were devastated by the horrifying force of Category 5 Hurricane Camille. Camille's nearly 200 mile per hour winds and 28-foot storm surge swept away thousands of homes and businesses along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Twenty-four oceangoing ships sank or were beached; six offshore drilling platforms collapsed; 198 people drowned. Two days later, Camille dropped 108 billion tons of moisture drawn from the Gulf onto the rural communities of Nelson County, Virginia-nearly three feet of rain in 24 hours. Mountainsides were washed away; quiet brooks became raging torrents; homes and whole communities were simply washed off the face of the earth. In this gripping account, Ernest Zebrowski and Judith Howard tell the heroic story of America's forgotten rural underclass coping with immense adversity and inconceivable tragedy. Category 5 shows, through the riveting stories of Camille's victims and survivors, the disproportionate impact of natural disasters on the nation's poorest communities. It is, ultimately, a story of the lessons learned-and, in some cases, tragically unlearned-from that storm: hard lessons that were driven home once again in the awful wake of Hurricane Katrina. Emergency responses to Katrina were uncoordinated, slow, and--at least in the early days--woefully inadequate. Politicians argued about whether there had been one disaster or two, as if that mattered. And before the last survivors were even evacuated, a flurry of finger-pointing had begun. The question most neglected was: What is the shelf life of a historical lesson? Ernest Zebrowski is founder of the doctoral program in science and math education at Southern University, a historically black university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University's Pennsylvania College of Technology. His previous books include Perils of a Restless Planet: Scientific Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Judith Howard earned her Ph.D. in clinical social work from UCLA, and writes a regular political column for the Ruston, Louisiana, Morning Paper. Category 5 examines with sensitivity the overwhelming challenges presented by the human and physical impacts from a catastrophic disaster and the value of emergency management to sound decisions and sustainability. --John C. Pine, Chair, Department of Geography & Anthropology and Director of Disaster Science & Management, Louisiana State University

More than fifteen years later, Hurricane Katrina maintains a strong grip on the American imagination. The reason is not simply that Katrina was an event of enormous scale, although it certainly was by any measure one of the most damaging storms in American history. But, quite apart from its lethality and destructiveness, Katrina retains a place in living memory because it is one of the most telling disasters in our recent national experience, revealing important truths about our society and ourselves. The final volume in the award-winning Katrina Bookshelf series Higher Ground reflects upon what we have learned about Katrina and about America. Kai Erikson and Lori Peek expand our view of the disaster by assessing its ongoing impact on individual lives and across the wide-ranging geographies where displaced New Orleanians landed after the storm. Such an expanded view, the authors argue, is critical for understanding the human costs of catastrophe across time and space. Concluding with a broader examination of disasters in the years since Katrina-including COVID-19-The Continuing Storm is a sobering meditation on the duration of a catastrophe that continues to exact steep costs in human suffering.

"Local Planning for Terror and Disaster" gives voice to experts in key fields involved with local preparedness, assessing the quality of preparedness in each field, and offering directions for improvement. Introductory chapters provide overviews of terror medicine, security and communications, which are indispensable to successful preparedness, while subsequent chapters concentrate on a particular field and how responders from that field communicate and interact with others during and after an event. Thus, a chapter by a physician discusses not only the doctor's role but how that role is, or should be, coordinated with emergency medical technicians and police. Similarly, chapters by law enforcement figures also review police responsibilities and interactions with nurses, EMTs, volunteers and other relevant responders.

Developed from topics at recent Symposia on Terror Medicine and Security, "Local Planning" also encompasses aspects of emergency and disaster medicine, as well as techniques for diagnosis, rescue, coordination and security that are distinctive to a terrorist attack. Each chapter also includes a case study that demonstrates preparedness, or lack thereof, for a real or hypothetical event, including lessons learned, next steps, and areas for improvement in this global era which increasingly calls for preparedness at a local level.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the world and left turmoil in every facet of society in its wake. As in-person activities came to an end for public safety, businesses closed, classrooms scrambled to transition online, and society was forever changed. As the pandemic comes to a close, it is essential that researchers take this opportunity to study the changes that have occurred so that society may revive what has been lost and promote resilience should another crisis arise. Societal Transformations and Resilience in Times of Crisis focuses on the revival of societal institutions after events such as natural disasters, pandemics, political turmoil, and global crises, and looks toward building more resilient structures. It contributes novel approaches and provides implications for countries to improve the social system through novel approaches. Covering topics such as employee psychological distress, democracy, and higher education institutions, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for government officials, community leaders, non-governmental organizations, students and faculty of higher education, sociologists, business executives and managers, human resource managers, researchers, and academicians.

The Asian tsunami in December 2004 severely affected people in coastal regions all around the Indian Ocean. This book provides the first in-depth ethnography of the disaster and its effects on a fishing village in Tamil Nadu, India. The author explores how the villagers have lived with the tsunami in the years succeeding it and actively worked to gradually regain a sense of certainty and confidence in their environment in the face of disempowering disaster. What appears is a remarkable local recovery process in which the survivors have interwoven the tsunami and the everyday in a series of subtle practices and theorisations, resulting in a complex and continuous recreation of village life. By showing the composite nature of the tsunami as an event, the book adds new theoretical insight into the anthropology of natural disaster and recovery.

David Strohmaier's long career as a firefighter has given him intimate knowledge of wildfire and its complex role in the natural world of the American West. It has also given him rare understanding of the painful losses that are a consequence of fire. Strohmaier addresses our ambivalence about fire and the realities of loss to it. He also examines the process of renewal that is yet another consequence of such destruction, from the infusion of essential nutrients into the soil, to the sprouting of seeds that depend on intense heat for germination, to the renewal of species as the land restores itself. ""Drift Smoke"" is a powerful and moving meditation on wildfire by someone who has seen it in all its terror and beauty, who has lost colleagues and beloved terrain to its ferocity, and who has also seen new life sprouting in the ashes. The debate over the role and control of fire in the West will not end soon, but Strohmaier's contribution to the debate will help us to better appreciate both the complexity of the issues and the possibilities of fresh solutions.