Environmental Impact of Katrina

At the end of August, Hurricane Katrina swept through and desecrated a lot of New Orleans, the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, and parts of Alabama. The environmental impacts on these cities were all over the news. Did it have to cause such a disaster though? Politicians and people all over the world are now openly discussing what Scientist and environmentalist believed for years, "that the widespread destruction of wetlands along the Gulf coast eliminated a natural buffer zone which in the past had served to slow down powerful hurricanes before they hit dense population areas." Ezine Articles. Due to the destruction of wetlands Katrina was able to do a lot more harm than it should have.

New Orleans had created a manmade levee system. The levee system is now under strict criticism because with the levee and the Mississippi river took some blame in the environmental destruction. The levee was supposed expand the fertile farmland of the Mississippi delta by disrupting the natural process. However, the disruption of the water caused subsidence which lowered large parts of New Orleans under sea level making them large target for flooding even without the breech of the levees.

Katrina has now become a horror book lesson of how if we fail to protect the world natural environment it can come back to bite us in the end. Now, it has opened politician's eyes to how they need to start taking environmentalist and scientist seriously. Some of the consequences of environmental pollutions are, "Floods on the Malibu, California coast periodically wash away million dollar estates - a result of the soil on hillsides being weakened by clear cutting which eliminated the root systems of trees that had served to hold the soil in place. High priced residential communities encroach into previously virgin old growth forests, and then are destroyed as wildfires, often a natural result of lightning storms,