98% of residents in the Lower Ninth Ward, which was flooded by a catastrophic breach in the nearby Industrial Canal, are black, and more than a third live in poverty. Many of the poor depend on welfare, Social Security, or other public assistance checks, which they receive on the first of each month, meaning that Hurricane Katrina made landfall just when many of the poor had exhausted their resources. Thus, many of the city's poor simply couldn't afford to flee the city before the hurricane struck.