© Copyright 2006 by the Wyoming Department of Employment, Research & Planning

WYOMING LABOR FORCE TRENDS

Vol. 43 No. 8

The Labor Market Impact of Hurricane Katrina

Excerpted from the Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 2006

Last August and September, Louisiana’s 397 miles of gulf shoreline were breached twice by significant hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina, the more violent and destructive of the two, also wreaked havoc on the shorelines of Mississippi and Alabama, and tore inland through a wide swath of eastern Louisiana and western Mississippi. Hurricane Rita lashed western Louisiana and eastern Texas. This issue of the Review examines the impacts of these storms from several perspectives: labor market impacts on the local economies, program impacts on the Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] and other data-gathering agencies, and the nature of the coastal economy at risk.

The displacement of people and destruction of property complicated the collection of labor force information from households and businesses in the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment programs. A further description of the BLS adjustments to data collection and estimation methodologies for Katrina-affected areas is available in accompanying articles in the August issue of the Monthly Labor Review (Vol. 129, No. 8) or online at http://stats.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/08/contents.htm