10 years after Katrina, are American cities prepared for disasters?

The consensus, at least from School Chair Reginald DesRoches and President Emeritus Wayne Clough, would seem to be “no.”

Ahead of a Washington D.C. roundtable August 5 on disaster preparedness, DesRoches and Clough talked to the Georgia Tech News Center about the challenges for many of the country's communities.

Their discussion comes just a few weeks before the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall along the United States’ Gulf Coast. The disaster was the costliest in U.S. history.

Read more from the Georgia Tech News Center.

Watch video from the roundtable conversation at the National Academy of Engineering.

Learn more about work by School of Civil and Environmental Engineering researchers after Hurricane Katrina.

(Teaser Image: The wrecked Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans in October 2005, after the water receded. Water poured into the neighborhood when flood walls for the nearby shipping channel gave way, and the area remained flooded for weeks, creating some of the most enduring images of Katrina's aftermath. The School's Hermann Fritz, Reginald DesRoches and Glenn Rix were part of several survey teams that assessed the damage in the weeks after Katrina's landfall. Researchers took this picture on their second trip to area.)