ABSTRACT
The short-and medium-term effects of Hurricane Katrina have been chronicled in thousands of media accounts since its occurrence on August 28, 2005. Three months following the hurricane, we conducted interviews with local officials and small business owners in the Gulf Coast. The results of these interviews are part of a published study on small business and crisis,1 but can be summarized briefly as two findings. First, the small business owners in the study did not plan for any disaster, including Katrina. Second, they were having great difficulty recovering from the hurricane. Yet, three months after the storm seemed to be too short a time to assess the actual recovery of small businesses affected by the storm. Destruction in some of the towns near New Orleans was nearly total (e.g., Biloxi, Waveland, and Bay St. Louis, MS), with buildings being leveled or having completely disappeared. Other towns had seemingly untouched buildings (e.g., Pascagoula, MS), where businesses still suffered almost complete loss of inventory, equipment, and records due to the flooding from the storm’s thirty-four foot surge. A hurricane’s storm surge is the water that is pushed toward the shore by the force of the storm winds.2
