Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans by Don Brown

It was an odd moment for me when I realized that most of my current students are too young at this point to remember Hurricane Katrina. At the time, I was working full time at the library. The year before, Hurricane Ivan made landfall on the coast, the storms pushed ahead of it drenched the library in driving, almost horizontal, rain. Gallons of water flooded into our 100 year old building. We spend a week mopping floors, rescuing books, and mending damage. When Hurricane Katrina came a year later, we were all on high alert. Luckily for the library, Katrina zipped along the southern tip of Florida and swung up the gulf to make landfall further west in Louisiana.

Our good fortune, however, felt a little selfish though as we watched the news coming in about New Orleans. It was a mess. The national government was at a loss and directionless. Local governments were either paralyzed by the destruction or arguing over logistics. News casters reported the horrors of corpses floating in the streets and thousands of stranded people while the government was telling the nation that all was well. I'd never lived through such a surreal experience.

Emory, like many schools, took in several dozen displaced New Orleans students - mostly from Tulaine.

Drowned City gives an overview of the events. The tone of the text is clinical and distant, but combined with the art it succeeds and being both chilling and sobering. We take so many things for granted and it seemed like in New Orleans, many things were taken for granted. They took it for granted that the levees would hold. The National Government took it for granted that it would be handled. Everyone took it for granted that it just couldn't be that bad in this day and age. It was bad. It could have been worse, but it was pretty darn bad and it should just how sadly lacking the government's large scale emergency response preparation was.

I'm a fan of graphic novels. It's a persuasive medium. For a strong reader, a graphic novel is a quick read and feels like a treat. For a struggling reader, the visual medium helps to draw them in and the graphics assist with comprehension.