Summary: Author Laura Hatcher discusses her article from the September 2012 issue of Journal of Applied Social Science, The USACE and Post-Katrina New Orleans: Demolitions and Disaster Clean-Up. In this article, we present demolition data to explore the way the patterns of demolition carried out by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) were constituted as a social problem by residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and members of the broader New Orleans community. Through a study of newspaper stories and press interviews about the implementation process, we find evidence of a gap that exists between the interpretation of the demolitions by residents of the Lower Ninth, and the need to carry out disaster clean-up among city officials and the USACE. This gap, we suggest, is constitutive of an implementation problem that may best be dealt with in policymaking processes focused on planning for disasters. http://jax.sagepub.com/content/6/2/176.abstract
