Reviewed by: Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz Cornelis Disco (bio) Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 By Andy Horowitz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 296. Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 By Andy Horowitz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 296. A history of Katrina from 1915 to 2015? A century of history? But wasn't Katrina a natural event, a hurricane that wreaked havoc and destruction along the Gulf Coast, flooded New Orleans, and then went away again? Not if you ask Andy Horowitz. He sees Katrina as not just a passing storm, but as the inevitable culmination of a century of disaster-in-the-making. For a storm like Katrina to become a disaster, he argues, nature's momentary fury is not enough; disasters do not just impinge on society, they "come from within." And so Katrina is an extended exploration of hurricane Katrina's specific "within." Horowitz relentlessly pursues how the history of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the United States produced Katrina over the course of a century. The main ingredients are greed, corruption, the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the gulf oil industry, the Army Corps of Engineers, sub-standard levees, the pre-1994 Democratic Party, and racism by the bushel. Horowitz's argument, drawing on a version of the sociology of disaster articulated by Kai Erikson, has the potential to make a radical contribution to the history of technology. To be sure, we have our own proper tradition of disaster studies. And in this tradition, disasters (like Three Mile Island, Challenger, or Tacoma Narrows) are also generally framed as the perverse interaction of long-embedded socio-technical traditions, routines, and systems with proximate breakdowns and human error. We have Erikson's Yale colleague Charles Perrow to thank for this concept of "normal accidents." Horowitz has taken this to another level by showing that the logic of perverse deep structures not only clarifies breakdowns in large and complex socio-technical systems, but can also explain what are commonly called "natural" disasters. These too are embedded in "deep" history, though a far more inclusive and heterogeneous one than the socio-technical normalities underlying Perrow's approach. [End Page 584] The five chapters of the book are framed by an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction lays out the idea of disasters as long-term social constructions and previews some of the main issues involved in the Katrina disaster. With the body of the book divided into two parts, the first describes the political, cultural, economic, and technological germination of Katrina over the course of the twentieth century (chs. 1, 2, and 3). Getting its own chapter, Hurricane Betsy (1965), a disaster in itself, clearly revealed the fault lines making an even more destructive successor like Katrina nothing short of inevitable (ch. 3). The book's second part deals with the devastation of Katrina itself and the reconstruction efforts that followed. The epilogue is a somewhat wistful reflection on how Katrina has made space for chilling visions of a new New Orleans: a safe and antiseptic modern city estranged from its historical cultural roots. The writing is masterful, at times transcendent. Despite the book's conceptual quest, Horowitz manages to stay close to the skin. The text abounds with first-person accounts, newspaper clippings, official documents, and personal histories. Though Horowitz's guided tour along the long muddy road of Katrina's making and aftermath inevitably has its tedious moments, there are villains and angels aplenty to keep the plot moving along. The downside of Horowitz's deep delving is that the tragic etiology of Katrina fills the whole screen. This lends credence to the pessimistic conviction that societies—specifically (southern?) American society, or perhaps all liberal democratic (especially federalist?) societies—congenitally and inevitably produce disasters. Though there may be a grain of truth here, surely this is not the whole story. May not our better angels sometimes work at mitigating disasters? In the Dutch polity, for example, despite egregious historical lapses, it is not enabling floods, but predicting and preventing floods, that rules—at least for the time being. Here, not only disasters, but effective protocols for disaster management, have emerged "from within." While...
Read full abstract
May 1, 2021
Mary Oster + 2
Open Access
