ABSTRACT
Previous accounts of Hurricane Katrina have focused on two disasters: the hurricane and the flood. In contrast, I highlight a third, socially based disaster: the unusual and unexpected amount of civil strife that emerged following Katrina. Although structured as an explanation of that civil strife, the wider purpose of this chapter is to develop a theoretical perspective that fuses Klinenberg’s (1999) socio-ecological perspective with Perrow’s (1999) concept of a system accident in order to understand disasters as an emergent characteristic of socio-ecological systems involving interactions among three different systems (natural, technological, social) each of which operate across a variety of spatial-temporal scales (from micro to macro).
