Flood control is a national religion in the Netherlands. In 49 U.S. states, it’s Louisiana’s problem. —John McQuaid, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 13 November 2005 The whirlwind that swept through the American media after the devastation of New Orleans last August was hardly less ferocious than Hurricane Katrina itself. The Corps of Engineers was lambasted for [...]

NEW ORLEANS! Fabulous, vivacious, romantic New Orleans—city of contrasts and contradictions. . . . It is cosmopolitan to the n-th degree, and at the same time as provincial as a small town off the beaten track. —E. Harper Charlton, Street Railways of New Orleans (1955) When this photo on the cover and following page was [...]

The 150-mile stretch of the lower Mississippi River that winds from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, once lined with indigo and cotton and sugar plantations, is today home to more than 150 petrochemical plants. This part of Louisiana is among the most toxic places in the United States, the site of acrimonious struggles between industry [...]

Since the destruction in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina last August/September, I have pondered the strained links among cities, technologies, and catastrophes. In this I am probably like millions of other people. The only difference is that a few years ago I wrote a history of New Orleans’s relationship with the Mississippi. So, when Katrina [...]

Prologue: The Wyndham New Orleans Hotel, 19 January 2006, 6:30 p.m. Huge glass windows stretch from the eleventh floor reception area to the twelfth floor, where the ballroom is. It is the sixty-fifth annual meeting of the Association of Levee Boards of Louisiana. The association’s motto: “Without Flood Protection, Nothing Else Matters.” Behind me, the [...]

Land sinks. Water rises. Coastal Louisiana is losing ground to the ocean as fast as any region on Earth-an acre every twenty-five minutes, a slab the size of New Orleans every five or six years.{1} Geologists call it subsidence. Swampers say the salt marsh trembles and floats where the toe of Louisiana points toward Havana, [...]

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were only the most recent in a long series of damaging blows to the Louisiana petrochemical industry. The lower Mississippi River region once offered an alluring prospect to the oil and chemical companies: ready access to raw materials, deepwater transport capabilities, cheap fuels, a mild climate, and a favorable political situation. [...]

Oxymorons are paradoxes gone bad. We learn simple causal relations with great facility. As Clark Glymour has observed, even infants know this: to get the pacifier, tug on the blanket it lies on. But we have a harder time getting our minds around the meaning of very small probabilities over very long time scales, likely [...]