H/t to People Get Ready for producing this table, which was culled from this article in The Times-Picayune:
| Hurricanes Katrina & Rita | California Wildfires |
|---|---|
| In New Orleans alone, 140 of 180 square miles flooded, — rendering uninhabitable a residential zone seven times the size of Manhattan. Across the region, its winds and rains wreaked havoc to a 90,000-square-mile swath of the Gulf Coast, an area twice the size of the entire state of New York. | The California fires had burned about a half-million acres, an area twice the size of New York City. Much of the burned area was forest. |
| The number of homes destroyed or still threatened in California is about 1 percent of the roughly 200,000 left uninhabitable by Katrina and the often overlooked Hurricane Rita, which struck three weeks later. | 1,700 homes were lost to the California fires. |
| In Louisiana, problems that cannot be blamed on state government. Indeed, a commander with the Arkansas National Guard who helped secure Convention Center Boulevard told reporters he did not even receive an order to go to New Orleans until two days after the hurricane. | The federal government response was swift in California. |
| Financial losses from the fires based on initial estimates are about 2 percent of the damage caused by Katrina and Rita, which so far stands at $91 billion. | While damage estimates are still climbing in California, initial estimates are about $2 billion. |
| Katrina forced the evacuation of 1.2 million people — 500,000 remained displaced after four months. Almost 2,000 people died in Katrina. | Probably fewer than half that many southern California residents were displaced from their homes by the wildfires. According to a Los Angeles Times report Thursday, the number of evacuees at any one time in the region was significantly less than the 800,000 widely reported by officials earlier this week. Many residents began returning to their homes on Wednesday. More reliable estimates of the number of people instructed to leave their homes put the number at between 350,000 and 500,000, which is still the largest evacuation in California history. A statement earlier in the week by the San Diego Sheriff’s Office that more people had been evacuated in southern California than left in advance of Katrina has been dismissed as greatly exaggerated. The death toll from the fires stood at seven as of Saturday. |
| Once the levees failed in New Orleans, floodwaters swamped nearly every major road in and out of the city. Louis Armstrong International Airport shut down. Ground access into the city was largely limited to U.S. 90 from the West Bank and River Road on the east bank. Many supplies and support personnel had to be airlifted into the city by military aircraft, many of which did not arrive until well after the disaster. | The fires did not wipe out every remnant of infrastructure. Many California evacuees drove to shelters on roads unaffected by the disaster. Most of the blazes are burning in sparsely populated areas. While the fires continue to pose some challenges to getting around in greater San Diego, the infrastructure of the city remained largely unfazed. Some highways have been closed, but the city’s main interstate arteries and airport have remained open. The main San Diego airport is operating normally. Amtrak and regional commuter train service was restored on Thursday. “There’s a big difference – we have a functioning city,” said Kevin McCoy, a crisis counselor from the Harbison Canyon Community Resource Center, who was among the hundreds of volunteers at Qualcomm Stadium this week. “When you walk out of this stadium you aren’t stepping into 4 feet of water.” |
| Katrina and the subsequent flood obliterated power, water systems and nearly all traditional forms of communication — cell phone towers, phone company switching centers and 911 call centers. The almost complete loss of communication for several days resulted in deadly consequences for many storm victims and first responders. | The wildfires destroyed dozens of cell phone towers and land lines in California, causing service outages in isolated areas, companies have compensated with the use of mobile transmission equipment. Cell service and land-line use in San Diego, Anaheim and Los Angeles remain largely unaffected. |
CenLamar 
Very interesting and powerfull statistics. You could make the argument hat the more severe the disaster (Katrina), the more inept the Federal Government’s response is. However., when you really think about the scale and breadth of the damage from Katrina and compare it to a much smaller disaster (California Wildfires) it isn’t suprising that the Satet and Federal response to Katrina was slow. Also, the social, political, and economic conditions in California are much different than they are in Louisiana. Aren’t we really comparing apples to oranges though?
Hey Darren,
I totally agree that the comparison is inapt, yet some commentators have attempted to make this comparison. People Get Ready singles out Sean Hannity; I also heard Dan Abrams, the news director of MSNBC, say that the California evacuations were the largest exodus of people in American history (simply untrue). The disasters are different in both scale and nature, and though no one denies the severity of the wildfires, the attempt to politicize and hyperbolize this disaster (by drawing comparisons to Katrina) really misses the mark. That is why I find People Get Ready’s table to be instructive; it clearly shows the fundamental differences between these two events. By juxtaposing these events, you can understand why any attempts to link this to Katrina are, like you said, akin to comparing apples to oranges.
lamar, i agree that its important to highlight the very different nature of the two disasters.
i want to point out a small mistake, in the second row of the table it states that the number of homes destroyed in california is only up to ten percent of those destroyed in the hurricanes, but actually it is less than one percent (1,700 compared to 200,000).
keep up the good work!
Please note also that the vast majority of these home were probably insured, and normal homeowner’s insurance covers fire damage, so there will not be the battle over coverage like in New Orleans, where “flood” damage is not covered by homeowners, and most folks did not have flood insurance. The California folks will get a check to rebuild and replace their homes and belongings.
Thank you Michael. I have made the correction.
Mung, you make a really good point, though I guess what the insurance companies will do still remains to be seen.
Lamar
Read a book, start with The Great Deluge by Brinkley. Read newspaper coverage in say the LA Times, or the San Diego Union Tribune.
You’ll find no one in California broke into stores and took “dumps” in the cash register after stealing everything in sight.
You’ll find no one in California started shooting at rescuers.
You’ll find all the police stayed on the job and did not run for the hills.
You’ll find no video of Cops loading up shopping carts full of emergency supplies like Plasma TV’s.
You’ll find the mayors in the area did note hole up in a hotel and suffer a complete melt-down.
You’ll find citizens that actually per part of the solution, not part of the problem.
You’ll find the Governator actually showed some leadership instead of playing the overwhelmed ‘MaMa.
But sorry, you won’t.
It doesn’t fits your victim hood mime, it must not be considered. Paraphrasing the late Johnny Cochran.
This is a great comparison! To see more differences between Katrina and the California wildfires, check out the post of 10/30/07 at teachingthelevees.org