America is unprepared for disaster due to lack of urban planning: study

A research study has found that urban evacuation planners in the United States of America did not quite learn lessons from the devastations that Hurricane Katrina caused in the country.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina ruined the city of New Orleans but the urban planners have only made small improvements to their disaster plans.

Before the Hurricane, evacuation planners had not considered many needs of people from different parts of the society like tourists, people with special needs, people without cars and low-income residents.

After the natural disaster ended, professionals like transportation planners promised to concentrate on these needs better. However, the study findings by researchers at Florida Atlantic University show that that never happened.

The study authors who published their work in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction wrote that only marginal improvements have been observed in the country's largest cities.

The research used data from plans collected and analyzed in the years right after the 2005 catastrophe. 

Experts suggested five dimensions of evacuation preparedness namely: specialized transportation plans for individuals with specific needs, special needs registries, pick-up location plans, pedestrian evacuation plans, and multimodal evacuation plans.

The cities that were found to be prepared with strong plans out thousands of cities were Miami, New Orleans, New York, Cleveland, Ohio, Jacksonville, Florida, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Philadelphia.

Another 20 cities were given a moderate rating by researchers and six achieved a weak rating. Some cities had no visible plans at all.