ABSTRACT

After landfall of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and adjacent St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, were inundated with gale force winds, storm surge, and weeks of flooding that destroyed the majority of the area’s physical and social infrastructure. The human and social disaster that followed left affected residents with few places to turn and few resources to draw from in rebuilding their communities (Rathke and Laboistrie 2006). In St. Bernard Parish, the failure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet levees siphoned a surge of water inland, flooding the entire parish and rendering uninhabitable all but a few structures. The scope of the damage forced residents to begin the rebuilding process with a widely dispersed population and an empty shell of what stood before.