How To Plan A Disaster: Politics, Nature, and Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

How To Plan A Disaster:Politics, Nature, and Hurricane Katrina Camden Burd (bio) Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. 296 pp. Photos, maps, notes, and index. $35.00. The Atlantic Hurricane season lasts only a few months. Spanning from early summer through autumn, the season is limited by varying environmental conditions. Winds crossing over the African continent move westward, passing over the seasonally warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean. As the water evaporates and rises into the atmosphere, it cools and condenses to form large clouds that continue to billow across the Atlantic basin. The combination of cold air at the top of clouds and the warm, humid air below creates an unstable cloud mass, in which the settling cold air descends only to be sucked up again in a swirling, thunderous storm. The vortex expands; wind speeds increase; torrential rains ensue. The hurricane is seemingly unstoppable—until it hits a landmass where the storm loses its warm, watery fuel. Before its demise, however, a hurricane will often leave its mark. The torrential rain, whipping wind, and massive swells can remake an entire landscape in just a few hours. This seasonal pattern is something of a meteorological ritual for those who have built their lives amid the well-established pattern of the Atlantic hurricane season. They know—are convinced—that by the winter months, the equatorial waters will have cooled, bringing an end to the hurricane season and providing momentary respite from the storm's massive power. The timeframe for a disaster, however, is different. There is a no such thing as a catastrophe season. No calendar can neatly mark the beginning and end of a calamity. This fact is made evident in Andy Horowitz's Katrina: A History, 1915–2015—a text that argues that in order to understand the history of a disaster, one must take into account a variety of factors including economic forces, political decisions, and social bias. "I begin the story of Katrina in 1915 in order to pursue a different idea," he notes, "that disasters come from within" (p. 3). Rather than focus his attention on the immediate impacts of one of the nation's most historically significant hurricanes, he takes readers back nearly a century before the storm crashed into the southern coast of Louisiana. This temporal sweep, he argues, helps us to reimagine disasters [End Page 304] as a culmination of various contingencies over a much longer period of time. "Seeing disasters in history, and as history, demonstrates that the places we live, and the disasters that imperil them, are at once artifacts of state policy, cultural imagination, economic order, and environmental possibility" (p. 3). The history of Katrina is not a story of environmental anomaly or even an act of God, as some contemporary politicians argue. Instead, Horowitz demonstrates that the "disaster" that developed around Hurricane Katina was designed by a series of separate but interrelated economic and political decisions. Horowitz divides the monograph into two sections, before and after Katrina. This architecture is meant to "emphasize that it is what happened before and after the levee failure after the levee failures that gave Katrina its significance" (p. 8). In the first section, the author finds the origins of the 2005 disaster in the political aftermath of a 1915 hurricane. After disastrous flooding and the failure of the nearby levees, politicians sought new ways to control floods. The Louisiana state legislature pursued the creation of spillways by destroying levees that, until the 1915 flood, were seen as the preferred method to control the river and open lands for economic development. The new flood lands, called "waste weirs," came under control of the state of Louisiana after levee boards bought out—or forced out—longtime residents who now lived in the spillways. After a short-lived boom, the state's fur industry gave away to a new commodity that would define Louisiana for the remainder the 20th century—oil. The discovery of oil, however, created a conflict of environmental interests for Louisiana politicians. "The same marshes that had been designated waste weirs, suitable for sacrifice during times of flood, were now among the most coveted pieces...