Growth Machine Up-links and the Manufacture of Flood Risk in Mid-twentieth Century New Orleans

Abstract

Environmentally destructive megaprojects, which substantially shift the topography and hydrology of the ecosystems in which they are embedded in ways that potentially exacerbate preexisting disaster risks, are created through a combination of lobbying by municipal growth machines and applications of higher level state authority, resources, and control. New Orleans’ manufactured hurricane storm surge risk provides a crucial case study of this dynamic. After Hurricane Katrina, forensic engineers found that the proximate cause of the New Orleans flood was the levee and floodwall failures along the city’s shipping and drainage canals, but this disaster cannot be fully understood without an examination of the city’s mid-twentieth century political economy, particular regarding the power of the local shipping industry and its up-links to entities in the federal government. During this time period, local New Orleans elites were able to take advantage of the two world wars and postwar economic expansion to dramatically enlarge the city’s shipping canal system with massive funding and expertise from the Maritime Commission and the Corps of Engineers, massively amplifying the city’s flood risk in ways that ultimately led to the Katrina catastrophe.