When disaster strikes, it is usually very painful for the victims. When it's caused by forces of nature that we are often powerless against, the situation becomes even more poignant. Hurricane Katarina received a lot of coverage due to the immense swath of destruction that it left in its wake, and rightfully so. Such coverage normally results in some good coming out of it - more people become aware of the damage to human life and property, and that usually results in more people becoming willing to help those in need.
When these things happen in developing countries, say India, there's a phenomenal amount of press coverage on how badly things have been managed, how the city / district was totally unprepared, how the poor have, as can only be expected, borne the brunt of the damage, how life will never be the same for the displaced and affected victims, and so on and so forth. It's another story, and one that isn't known as widely, that such disasters cause havoc even in developed countries like the US of A. Apparently, according to this article, New Orleans has not exactly bounced back from the depths of despair as readily as we'd like to think. Much of the city seems to resemble a ghost town, and even three years after the hurricane and the resultant floods struck the city, life can hardly be described as having returned to normal.
Having said all that, hope still lurks amidst gloom and painful memories, as it always does when human enterprise undertaken with intelligence is tinged with compassion and benevolence.
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