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A Disaster 100 Years in the Making
Eric Klinenberg
OCTOBER 22, 2020 ISSUE
Katrina: A History, 1915–2015
by Andy Horowitz
Harvard University Press, 281 pp., $35.00
“I ain’t proud to be American no more,”
Dean Blanchard, a shrimp distributor, told
a reporter in 2015.1 Ten years earlier, his
business was nearly ruined when Katrina,
one of the most ferocious hurricanes in
American history, pummeled New
Orleans, killing at least 1,440 people and
causing $150–$200 billion in economic
damage, including nearly $1.5 billion to
the local seafood industry. Five years later,
Tyrone Turner/National Geographic
BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded off
A house damaged by Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward,
the coast of Louisiana, spewing more than
New Orleans, 2005
134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of
Mexico and its coastlands and decimating
food populations. A lawsuit brought by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection
Authority to hold oil companies responsible for the environmental damage they had caused
was opposed by the governor, then dismissed by a federal court. Blanchard became
convinced that nothing—not government, not infrastructure, not the courts—was
protecting him or his neighbors, that no one was fighting on their behalf.
Blanchard was not alone in this view. As Andy Horowitz, a historian at Tulane University,
shows in his new book, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, “The experience of Katrina,
compounded with the oil spill, increasingly served Louisianans as a metonym for federal
illegitimacy.” He argues that while President Obama described the oil spill as “the worst
environmental disaster America has ever faced,” and the media presented it as “an efficient
drama” unfolding over the course of eighty-seven days, “few people on the coast
experienced that tight narrative arc.”
Disaster histories are usually written for entertainment, not diagnosis. They tend to begin
in a calm, tranquil moment. Suddenly, there is a disruption: water from a tsunami breaches
the nuclear power plant; Patient Zero leaves the market; the levee breaks. When political
leaders arrive on the scene, they attribute the damage to an “Act of God,” “Mother
Nature,” an unforeseeable error. Horowitz argues that Hurricane Katrina obliterated this
narrative. “The more I have thought about Katrina,” he writes, “the more uncomfortable I
have become with the idea of ‘disaster’ altogether.” Disaster, Horowitz believes, is a
political category—“at best an interpretive fiction, or at worst, an ideological script”—one
that’s usually invoked to defend or maintain the status quo. His book asks a necessary
question: What happens to the story of this one moment in time if we stretch it forward and
back, looking for causes and consequences that reach beyond the storm?
New Orleans has always been a rich, divided, violent, and beautiful city. Set in a deep
depression between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, it is surrounded by
water on three sides, including Lake Pontchartrain. It’s a hotspot for hurricanes and
tropical storms, and climate change makes it hotter still. So, too, does the steady erosion of
its marshes and wetlands, natural resources that are capable of absorbing storm surges,
unless development destroys them.
Starting in the eighteenth century, fishermen and trappers of European origin laid claim to
the area’s rich coastal and riverfront territories, attracted by its unique ecology, which
nourished shrimp, oysters, muskrats, and other aquatic life, and by its unparalleled access
to other markets along the river and the sea. New Orleans was the largest slave market in
the United States during the antebellum period, a place where human beings were
trafficked citywide, from public plazas to private homes, hotels, and commercial arcades.
It was, and remains, the capital of Creole culture, a place where people, languages, and
customs mix promiscuously, and sometimes violently—where norms change with the
tides.
The oil industry arrived in the early twentieth century, and when it came it transformed the
land, the sea, and the marshes, swamps, and bayous that were a little of both. Big business,
and the people it attracted, required infrastructure—roads, rail lines, and bridges, as well as
deeper, wider shipping channels and larger ports. For decades, Louisiana residents watched
federal agencies, local officials, and industry leaders attempt to tame nature with
expensive, highly engineered water management systems. Each new project arrived with a
promise of increased ecological security and prosperity, but also set up those in low-lying
areas for the next collapse.
In 2005 President George W. Bush had just begun an ambitious second term in the White
House with hopes of expanding the “war on terror,” deregulating the oil and banking
industries, and beefing up his enormous new federal agency, the Department of Homeland
Security. Then, in late August of that year, New Orleans was inundated by Hurricane
Katrina. On television, the world watched as residents, mainly Black, were stranded on
their rooftops, pleading for rescue; thousands more, sick, hungry, and also mainly Black,
crowded into a convention center that, as Jesse Jackson put it, looked “like the hull of a
slave ship”; an inept president failed to deliver basic goods and services; and a city
drowned, and with it, a fantasy about what America means.
This country’s great myths of exceptionalism have lost currency with many, and
Americans who once viewed their homeland as “the shining city upon a hill” now feel
themselves going under. This year, we are focused on the growing death count and
economic crisis stemming from Covid-19 and the racially targeted police brutality that’s
causing outrage and protest throughout the US. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century,
the first wave of self-destruction that made people ask if this really was America had
another name: Katrina. The catastrophe, Horowitz writes, “brings together several of the
defining concerns of our time”: racial segregation, paramilitary governance, diminished
public services, and indifference to the poor, among others.
Horowitz set out to tell a good story, but he also has another goal: to explain what made
New Orleans so vulnerable before, during, and after Katrina. In the process, he calls
attention to the policies that privileged economic development over human and
environmental security; to the faith in the power of technology, engineering, and
infrastructure to control nature, along with the failure to fully invest in the systems that
experts designed; to a persistent commitment to racial segregation in city planning and a
deep suspicion of federal authorities who challenged the established order; and to a local
power elite that proved willing to tolerate and reproduce the everyday disasters—poverty,
violence, insecurity of all kinds—that New Orleans generated, even on its finest days.
Horowitz’s account begins on September 29, 1915, when the most powerful American
hurricane then recorded hit Louisiana, killing 275 and washing out entire settlements
around New Orleans. Despite the damage, city leaders celebrated their resilience. “Storm
proof!” the New Orleans Item proclaimed. The mayor rejected all outside offers of
assistance. “It is safe to say that no city anywhere in the world could have withstood these
conditions with less damage and less inconvenience,” boasted the New Orleans Sewerage
and Water Board, which managed the city’s flood protection systems. It shared other good
news, too. Since extreme weather is atypical, it reasoned, the recent hurricane “renders
more remote the probability of a repetition of any of these things in the early future.” Such
hubris was common in US cities at the time. But New Orleans was rising from an
unusually precarious foundation, one where water and wetlands mingled freely with firm
ground. It needed smart, careful planning. Instead, it expanded straight into harm’s way.
Horowitz does a masterful job of describing the public and private engineering projects
that made possible real estate construction, oil exploration, and other forms of economic
expansion in New Orleans during the twentieth century, building fortunes for a few while
putting thousands in the path of the next big storm. Oil, the “black pearl in the oyster,” was
first discovered over a salt dome in southwest Louisiana in 1901, and soon thereafter
wildcatters rushed in to drill new wells. Suddenly, Horowitz writes, a booming market for
Louisiana crude “transmuted worthless marsh into liquid wealth.” The state allowed local
governments to lease land to fossil fuel companies, and they in turn reshaped marshes and
wetlands, dredging new canals and developing “a massive new infrastructure for
exploring, drilling, piping, shipping, and refining oil.” Roads, highways, housing, and
power lines followed. Thousands of workers settled on the coastal floodplain. A sprawling
urban agglomeration formed, and by the early 1930s the land began to sink.
Humanists often overlook the importance of infrastructure when they write social history,
but Horowitz vividly illustrates how it shapes life and land around it, in both planned and
unplanned ways. Consider canals: they are an essential means for transporting goods,
equipment, and workers between inland areas and the coast. To enhance its industrial
shipping system, New Orleans built the Industrial Canal through the Ninth Ward in 1923,
and in 1933 the federal government linked it to the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which
spanned the Gulf Coast. Horowitz documents the rapid construction of a dense network of
smaller canals in the next three decades. Between 1939 and 1948, dredging companies dug
out forty-six miles of canals in the Barataria, a land of bayous and swamps slightly south
of the city, and another 156 miles of canals by 1962.
Canals are helpful to commerce but destructive to coastal ecosystems. They must be built
by plowing, dredging, and moving massive quantities of earth, including in wetlands that
provide habitats for a variety of animals and absorb salt water from the Gulf. Canals
connected to the sea carry that salt water into the marshes, killing grasses, plants, and
species of all kinds; they also allow sediment that formerly fed the swamplands and bayous
to flow into the ocean basin, speeding coastal erosion. The first scientific study warning
about the dangers of coastal erosion in Louisiana was published in 1936. Between 1932
and 1954, Horowitz reports, “the shoreline retreated an average of nearly nineteen feet per
year.”
Instead of pausing to consider ways of restoring the wetlands, Louisiana’s growth machine
—a network of builders, shippers, petrochemical businesses, and state officials aiming to
boost the economy and increase tax revenues—advanced new development plans. The
centerpiece, which Congress funded in 1956 and the Army Corps of Engineers began to
build two years later, was the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or MRGO (later referred to
colloquially as “Mister Go”), a seventy-six-mile deep-draft channel designed to
enable ships to enter New Orleans without venturing into the Mississippi River or
Lake Pontchartrain at all, but rather by cutting across the wetlands…[and] heading
straight into the Industrial Canal.
Residents of St. Bernard Parish, home to an expanding, white, middle-class community,
protested that MRGO would do little to help the economy but would surely destroy
wetlands and increase their vulnerability to floods. The corps plowed forward anyway,
building the channel and making everyone who lived near it more likely to be deluged in a
storm.
Neither the corps nor Louisiana’s political leaders denied the threat of major flooding.
After all, about half of New Orleans, including much of the Lower Ninth and St. Bernard
Parish, is below sea level, and storms both strong and mild inundated them often. In 1955,
Horowitz writes, the corps had been directed by Congress to “consider the problem of
hurricane protection in metropolitan New Orleans.” In July 1965 the corps delivered plans
for the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project (LPVHPP), which
Horowitz calls “a concrete wall around the metropolis.” On September 9, before the plan
was approved or construction begun, Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans. “Looking back
after Betsy,” Horowitz writes, the authors of the congressional report on the LPVHPP
proposal
asserted that the levee system the Corps had proposed “would have eliminated the
flooding of developed areas in the city of New Orleans [and] the Chalmette area of
St. Bernard,” decreasing the cost of damages by $85 million and “greatly reduc[ing]
the number of deaths.”
“This is what happened during Hurricane Betsy,” Sarah Broom writes in The Yellow
House, her extraordinary recent memoir of life in New Orleans East2:
One-hundred-plus-mile-per-hour winds blew in from the east, pushing swollen Gulf
waters across Lake Borgne, a vast lagoon surrounded by marshes and open to the
Gulf. Water entered the funnel formed by the Intracoastal Waterway and MRGO.
Within this network of man-made canals, the storm surge reached ten feet and topped
the levees surrounding it, breaching some. This is how…water came to flood more
than 160,000 homes, rising to eaves height in some.
It’s how New Orleans experienced $1.2 billion in damages, how more than 70,000 were
left homeless, and how, according to Horowitz, at least fifty people drowned, many in the
attics of their own homes.
In Broom’s telling, locals believed that bad faith played
as big a part as bad engineering in the destruction of
poor sections of New Orleans. It’s an established fact
that the federal government blew up levees to protect
prosperous, mainly white neighborhoods during the
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, even though that
meant flooding Black and poor communities that
otherwise would have stayed dry. “The levees were
blown on purpose” during Betsy, too, Broom’s brother
and many others in the deluged areas of the city say.
They “knew the sound of dynamite” from when the
government blew up marshes to dredge MRGO, and
they insist they heard it again during the storm. Broom
doesn’t take a position on whether it really happened,
but she draws attention to the fact that her neighbors
told the same story after Katrina, when they tried to
explain why their neighborhoods got inundated, why
the levees broke.
Bettmann/Getty Images
People evacuating flooded areas after
Hurricane Betsy, New Orleans, September
1965
President Lyndon Johnson gave a different account
after Betsy. He lamented the “injury that has been done by nature,” as did local leaders.
This had a clear political purpose. If it’s “an act of God that government had no role in
causing,” Horowitz writes, then it’s a problem that the government has “no obligation to
fix.” In a fine chapter on Hurricane Betsy, Horowitz argues that New Orleans residents had
come to see the welfare state as being “like a levee: politicians could make cuts for some
to give security to others.” He tells the story of Lucille Duminy, a Black woman whose
house was one of some six thousand to be flooded in the Lower Ninth, most owned by
African-Americans. She and her neighbors applied for disaster relief, only to be offered
small amounts of charity or government loans. For Duminy, Horowitz explains, “The
policy seemed perverse. The loans forced people into debt to the same government they
believed responsible for their losses in the first place.” Rather than accept loans, Black
residents joined with civil rights organizations and placed posters claiming “FORTY
YEARS OF DEBT IS NOT FREEDOM!” throughout the Lower Ninth.
In the late 1960s New Orleans communities made vulnerable by big engineering projects
demanded better protection and more substantial relief. Instead, Congress gave them the
LPVHPP, having approved it in October 1965, only after Hurricane Betsy. It was designed
to keep more than 150 square miles of New Orleans dry in what the Weather Bureau
referred to as a “Standard Project Hurricane” like the 1915 disaster, but not in a “Probable
Maximum Hurricane.” The corps deemed this lower level of protection sufficient for the
city, since a “maximum hurricane” seemed unlikely to arrive. It justified the federal
investment with a controversial cost-benefit analysis that projected the population of the
metropolitan area to double, economic activity to spike, and, because of its own
engineering, flood damage to decline.
In 1968 Congress added one more layer of protection, the National Flood Insurance
Program. Originally, this law provided subsidized insurance for homeowners living in
identified flood-prone areas but not for new construction. Lobbyists pressured lawmakers
to expand eligibility, however, and by the 1990s, Horowitz argues, the program became a
system for encouraging and authorizing development in flood-prone areas, rather than
preventing it. Americans, in Louisiana and beyond, settled where the water wanted to go.
In New Orleans, the most desirable land has always been on the higher elevations, and in
the twentieth century the city’s mainly white economic elite established strongholds in dry
neighborhoods, such as the Garden District and the French Quarter. Poor and workingclass people were largely relegated to the swampy parts, including the Lower Ninth and
Gentilly. As New Orleans expanded and more Black workers arrived for jobs in the
booming oil and gas, shipping, and tourism industries, however, the pattern changed.
Boosted by New Deal housing policies that subsidized new building projects and
mortgages for people who lived in predominantly middle-class white communities (but not
for those whose neighborhoods had been redlined), white residents began settling in floodprone areas that had previously been undeveloped. Louisiana whites, Horowitz argues,
were more concerned about racial integration than inundation.
When Hurricane Katrina arrives in August 2005, midway through Horowitz’s book, we
see, as we did then, the city survive the initial downpour, only to drown when the
floodwalls fail and the levees break. We see the abject suffering of thousands who were
abandoned by government in the hour of their greatest need. We see battered Black people
confined, without potable water, in the Superdome. We see dead Black bodies, face down,
on water-logged streets. We see the media depict African-Americans as “looting” grocery
stores and Whites “finding” food on the shelves. We see false reports of rampaging gangs,
babies being raped, and, as The New York Times put it, “a total breakdown of organized
society.” We see President Bush on Air Force One, flying over New Orleans for a photo op
instead of sending millions of meals or hundreds of buses for evacuation. We see police
and the National Guard treating city residents like refugees, criminals, animals, and worse.
We see America as a failed state.
But Horowitz’s analysis of the storm’s impact also contains surprises. Were Black city
residents more vulnerable to the hurricane? Yes, but not exactly as the early reporting
suggested. Low-lying Black neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth were eviscerated
during Katrina, but so were flood-prone white neighborhoods, such as St. Bernard Parish,
located in marshlands or near doomed levees and canals. According to state statistics,
Blacks accounted for 67 percent of New Orleans’s population in 2005 and 67 percent of
the city’s flood fatalities. At least 800,000 people across Louisiana were displaced by the
storm. “It was not primarily poor New Orleans or rich New Orleans, nor was it white New
Orleans or black New Orleans, that flooded during Katrina,” Horowitz writes. “It was
twentieth-century New Orleans”—by which he means the fantasy of a magical place,
charmed by culture, safeguarded by engineers, always able to bounce back. In the twentyfirst century, that idea would drown.
Flooding, though, was just one of Katrina’s many plagues. The others—including illnesses
(from interrupted cancer care to acute stress and PTSD), uninsured damage (at least $45
billion), economic losses (roughly $250 billion), missed education (in 2006 20 percent of
New Orleans children either left school after the hurricane or missed more than ten days
per month), and permanent displacement—took a greater toll on African-Americans.3
Most American disaster policies aim “to return things as they were before,” Horowitz
writes, and in an unequal society, that means restoring inequalities—through disparate
insurance payouts or medical care, for example—instead of alleviating them. Political
opportunists, particularly libertarian champions of market-based programs, routinely
exploit crises to advance their preexisting goals. After Katrina, critics of public housing
successfully lobbied to demolish public housing stock that could have been restored
quickly, effectively forcing thousands of residents out of the city for good; charter school
advocates pushed to dissolve the Orleans Parish public school system, leading to
privatization and the termination of unionized teachers; the state university system closed
Charity Hospital, an essential public health facility in Mid-City that had served poor
people in New Orleans since 1736.
The effects of these policy changes are fully apparent in contemporary New Orleans,
where out-migration of Blacks and gentrification have made the city smaller, whiter, and
durably unequal. “Katrina Washed Away New Orleans’s Black Middle Class,” the website
FiveThirtyEight reported on the storm’s tenth anniversary. “More than 175,000 black
residents left New Orleans in the year after the storm; more than 75,000 never came back.”
Those who remain are far more likely than whites to say that their community has not yet
recovered. In 2015, Horowitz notes, nearly 40 percent of the city’s children lived in
poverty; 40 percent had witnessed a shooting, stabbing, or beating; 16 percent worried
about having enough food to eat or a place to stay; and 12 percent were clinically
depressed. That was a relatively prosperous time in New Orleans. Today, as the Covid-19
pandemic rages, these numbers are likely to get significantly worse.
Covid-19 and climate change are drastically intensifying insecurity in New Orleans. The
“Great Wall”—the local name for the enormous, $14.5 billion “Hurricane and Storm
Damage Risk-Reduction System” that the Army Corps of Engineers designed after Katrina
and completed in 2018—is hardly sufficient to safeguard the city from future hurricanes.
Despite warnings from climate scientists, urban planners, and anxious residents, the wall
was built to protect New Orleans only from a “hundred year” flood event—a flood with a
one percent chance of happening each year under climate conditions at the time of
construction, but a higher chance as the planet warms. (For perspective, the Netherlands,
where about half the land is below sea level, designs its flood protection systems for a tenthousand-year storm event.) The corps has hardly hidden the shortcomings of its project:
note that it calls the wall a “risk reduction system” rather than a flood protection project.
Here, as in so many other fundamental areas of human security, the US government has
considered the costs of protecting its citizens from twenty-first-century hazards, and
decided against the investment.
This year is the fifteenth anniversary of Katrina, and we’re so immersed in the current
disaster, a pandemic whose name, Covid-19, once again fixes our attention on an
exogenous threat rather than on the true source of our fragility, that it’s hard to focus on
what happened years ago. In New Orleans, the social fault lines that make hurricanes so
unequal have shaped the course of Covid-19 as well. In June researchers at the Data Center
reported that Blacks accounted for 77 percent of the city’s coronavirus deaths, and, even
more disturbingly, 88 percent of deaths outside long-term care facilities.4 The authors of
the study told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that the pattern “reveals that racial
disparities are even greater than previously thought.”
Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and
unwilling—to protect. They can shame us, incite outrage, inspire protest, and make
transformation seem necessary, if not inevitable. It’s tempting to believe that the Covid-19
pandemic and the Trump administration’s complete failure to manage it have opened the
country’s eyes to its own systemic vulnerabilities and to the urgency of what progressives
call “structural change.” It’s possible that we’ll get it, but disaster guarantees nothing.
1 Julie Dermansky, “Five Years After the BP Oil Spill, Gulf Coast Residents Say ‘BP Hasn’t Made Things Right,’” DeSmog, April 21, 2015. ↩
2 Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House (Grove, 2019).
↩
3 See Lisa Wade, “The Devastating Effect Hurricane Katrina Had on Education,” The Pacific Standard, September 1, 2015. ↩
4 See Rachel Weinstein and Allison Plyer, “Detailed Data Sheds New Light on Racial Disparities in Covid-19 Deaths,” The Data Center, June
25, 2020. ↩
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