FEMA’s Response to Hurricane Katrina On August 23, 2005, Katrina, a category 5 hurricane made landfall along the Gulf Coast and devastated the coastline from Louisiana to Texas. The destruction to New Orleans was particularly catastrophic because the levees protecting the city were breeched, flooding a sizeable portion of the city. This was a natural disaster of tremendous proportions, but the focus of media coverage soon became, not the hurricane damage per se, but the inept handling of the government‟s emergency response. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, better known as FEMA, is the federal agency responsible to responding to such situations. After the disaster, the American public witnessed media coverage of frustrated survivors who were without water, food or shelter. The public perception was that the government delayed action in helping the people of New Orleans because those people who did not evacuate the city were primarily lower-income African Americans. For the government, it was a public relations (PR) debacle. The different publics involved in the case study The various publics involved in this PR case study encompass the entirety of the US population, as there is the potential for a natural disaster to occur, under various circumstances in any area of the country and those populations would turn to FEMA for emergency aid. In particular, however, the publics involved encompassed the population of the Gulf Coast, across the states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Key stakeholders also included the public officials of those states and those in the federal government, particularly FEMA and the Bush administratio