Water Damaged: Disaster History in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast

Abstract

The hurricane slammed into the city, with sustained winds of more than 150 miles per hour. Mundane objects became deadly as they hurtled through the air. Flying bricks, for instance, killed several people unlucky enough to be caught outside. Roofs blew off and traveled for miles. Buildings collapsed from the pressure of the gale. And then the flood came, carrying away whole blocks of houses, erasing entire neighborhoods. The aftermath was no better: searching for corpses amidst the wreckage of ruined lives; cataloging the missing, while hoping a child, a sibling, a cousin, a friend might turn up despite the long odds; worrying about disease, insult atop injury; and considering what sort of future a place so badly damaged might have in a new century. Sound familiar? The following may strike as close to home. When the floodwaters came, they lingered, leaving not just a single city but parts of an entire region under water for months. Hundreds of thousands of victims lost their homes, beginning a mass migration too huge and disparate to be measured accurately, a sudden diaspora stretching across the country. White skin and class privilege insulated many people from the worst perils. People of color, the impoverished, the elderly, and the frail suffered disproportionately. But there was plenty of anguish to cut through all social strata. Media descended; journalists provided non-stop coverage that captivated the nation and helped shift the political landscape for years. Onlookers, overwhelmed by the scope of the calamity, opened bibles to the Book of Revelations. Despite countless parallels, neither of these descriptions refers to the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Instead, both are composite sketches—first of Galveston’s 1900 hurricane and then of the 1927 Mississippi River flood—drawn from books