Katrina takes toll on Gulf coast jobs
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 11:16 AM

Law and order, food and water are the immediate needs in devastated New Orleans. But following on from Steph Daniel's entry in the Job Blog on the impact of Huricane Katrina on the economy, here's a piece from ABCNews.com about
the projected effect of the storm on the region's employment situation, where some anlaysts are predicting a jobless rate of Depression-era proportions:

Hundreds of thousands of people are finding themselves out of work and their livelihoods in limbo following the wrath of Hurricane Katrina.
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"New Orleans is an economic disaster. This tragedy is so unprecedented people could be out of work for three, six, nine months or longer," said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the economic forecasting project at Georgia State University.

By Dhawan's estimates close to 1 million people have been thrust out of work in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama because of Katrina.
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The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the area of New Orleans. . .was 4.9 percent in July, [Phil] Hopkins [managing director of U.S. regional services for Global Insight] said based on his calculations. The jobless rate there could easily climb to 25 percent, he estimated.