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 taken in the spring of 1962 there was no other streetcar line in the world that ran through a setting as lush as St. Charles Avenue, and probably never had been. In most North American cities, this would have been called “private right-of-way” or “the median.” New Orleans Public Service Inc. (NOPSI) called it “neutral ground.” NOPSI had once operated thirty streetcar lines, but by 1962 there were only two remaining. The other one, running the length of Canal Street, would be shut down in 1964 and reborn forty years later, largely for the entertainment of tourists. By then the St. Charles trolleys had been running for 111 years, and the line had been enrolled in the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the History and Heritage Committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

This NOPSI trolley, built in Philadelphia in 1922, was forty years old when the author snapped this photo on St. Charles Avenue. Nearly identical cars built in North Carolina remained a featured attraction in theme-park New Orleans until their long run was broken in August 2005. Other cities had rubber-tired tourist buses disguised as trolleys; New Orleans had the real thing.

Harper Charlton’s Street Railways of New Orleans was a harbinger of what is now an extensive literature on the history and heritage of the St. Charles line: on its origins as a steam railway during the 1830s, experiments with whimsical forms of motive power after the Civil War, electrification in 1893, the careful upkeep of rolling stock built in the early 1920s (of which the car in the photo is an example), and every aspect of its technology. But what catches the eye in this photo is the neutral ground. Along private rights-of-way one expects to see wooden ties and dirty gravel ballast—and often litter. Citizens living in the fine old homes lining St. Charles Avenue had had the political influence to ensure that its neutral ground harmonized with the Garden District and Uptown: azaleas, palms, well-tended fescue—the ambience of gentility.

But appearances are deceptive, and this scene was fraught with irony. After the institution of Jim Crow laws at the end of the nineteenth century, there had first been separate streetcars for whites and blacks in New Orleans. Then the city’s trolleys—on Canal, Carondolet, Claiborn, St. Claude, St. Charles, Dauphin, Dryades, Desire, and the rest—were outfitted with “race screens” that read “White Only” on one side and “Colored Only” on the other. These were inserted into brackets on the seatbacks and were movable. By law, any white person could transfer a race screen to any row of seats, as far back in the car as desired, no matter if this obliged African Americans to stand even when there were unoccupied seats in front. Over in Montgomery, Alabama, where public transit was provided exclusively by buses (as in all other Southern cities except New Orleans), Rosa Parks had kept her seat in the front of a bus on December 1, 1955 and had been arrested. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public transit was illegal, but NOPSI did not comply. While they were never mentioned in any of the articles or landmark nominations that enumerate every component, every dimension, every material from which they were constructed, the New Orleans trolleys kept their race screens.

Even when the race screens vanished in 1959, similar segregation could still be found all over the city, at lunch counters, drinking fountains, and along the periphery of the Garden District. Tulane University, one of the busiest stops on the St. Charles line, was still an all-white institution when this photo was taken. In numerous ways, literal and figurative screens persisted for decades, and the tourists who flocked to the crescent of high ground along the levee from the French Quarter to Audubon Park remained mostly clueless about the way things were off the beaten track. Then came Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and all at once the whole world saw.

In 1962, Michael Harrington, in The Other America, had written that poverty was always off the beaten track. The urban poor were “increasingly isolated from contact with, or sight of, anybody else . . . the victims of the very inventions and machines that have provided a higher standard of living for the rest of society.” Katrina brought the underprivileged, as President Bush’s mother Barbara put it, back into sight. Not that there were no hurried attempts to erect screens. On September 15, when the president made a speech on Jackson Square, the New York Times reported that “image wizards had put up a large swath of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung on poles to hide the president from the deserted and desolate streets.” In mid-October, the president visited New Orleans again, and the press reported that he and Mrs. Bush “dined at a French Quarter restaurant before spending the night in a famed luxury hotel.” As I write at year’s end, the French Quarter is to the rest of New Orleans what the Green Zone is to the rest of Baghdad. People are buying beignets at Café du Monde, there is jazz on Bourbon Street, there are plans for Mardi Gras. But you don’t have to go far from the French Quarter to find the deserted and desolate streets looking the same as they did on September 15 when they were screened from the president, and when he pledged that “the streetcars will rumble down St. Charles, and the passionate soul of a great city will return.”

In December, two of the thirty-five St. Charles trolleys were towed over to the Riverfront line, the “ride” to the French Market that provided a surprise for delegates to the Republican National Convention that nominated George Bush pére. The Riverfront line is still operational, and the two cars were staged for a photo-op. But there are no trolleys on St. Charles. The poles that supported the wires are flattened and the substations ruined, and it will be a long time before any repairs, maybe more than a year.

The Riverfront, the French Quarter, the Garden District, the eighty-year-old streetcars on their neutral ground—these have comprised America’s most authentic theme park. To Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, the backdrop for George W. Bush’s podium on Jackson Square looked like an “eerie blue-hued castle at Disney World”—but, really, this part of New Orleans surpasses anything of Disney’s. And yet . . . if there are no trolleys on St. Charles Avenue, in theme-park New Orleans, what is to be said about parts of town that are on “the outskirts of hope,” as Lyndon Johnson once put it? It now seems clear that “repopulation” is unlikely, that most of the people who once lived in areas like the Ninth Ward will not return, any more than the Okies returned to the Dust Bowl. A good thing, probably, given the growing consensus that Craig Colten has it right when he says that most of the city “should not be put back on the real estate market.” They will be living somewhere, of course, a few of them in those storied FEMAville trailers—still off the beaten track, still feeling, as Susan Straight put it in the Nation’s “Katrina: Three Months Later” issue, “as if they are not, even now, citizens of this country.” As in the years of race screens.

Robert Post is completing a history of urban transit for publication by Greenwood Press.

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.

The pattern of land-use along the lower Mississippi, which conditions the interaction between industry, environment, and people, has roots in the eighteenth century. European colonists subdivided the land along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge into long, narrow plantations, each with some relatively high ground fronting the water and gradually sloping down through flat agricultural land toward swampland and bayou. The larger plantations were typically located on the straighter sections of the river, because bigger and better docking facilities could be built there than at a bend and the planters depended entirely on river transportation.{1} After the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau made numerous small land grants to extended family groups of newly freed slaves, often on or near the plantations they had previously worked.{2} But the larger plantations remained in the hands of white planters. The result was a pattern of large contiguous blocks of open land under single ownership, many along straight sections of the river, separated by communities of freed blacks and poorer whites clustered in adjacent communities. When chemical and petroleum companies arrived in the area, they naturally preferred to deal with the large landowners, who could offer the best transportation facilities and the convenience of negotiating with a single seller rather that a multiplicity of them, some perhaps without clear title to their property.{3} This history helps explain how predominantly African-American communities and petrochemical facilities came to exist in such close proximity along the river.

Triad Chemical Corporation’s offices are located in the former Riverside Plantation house (1899) dwarfed by the immense facility directly behind it. (Photo by author.)

The first oil companies to locate in the region, Mexican Petroleum (now Amoco) and Standard Oil (now Exxon), were attracted by its advantages for transportation and assurances of favorable treatment from Louisiana politicians.{4} The discovery of vast oil reserves of the Sabine Uplift was a decided bonus. By 1918 Standard Oil’s facility at Baton Rouge was the company’s largest refinery, handling not only midcontinent crude but also local crude and imported Mexican oil. The tacit cooperative agreement between planters, state government, and outside interests in favor of commercial and industrial development had serious consequences for the local economy. When Standard Oil laid a two-million-dollar pipeline from the northern Louisiana oil fields to its new refinery in Baton Rouge in 1909, the company imported all of the skilled labor, materials, tools, and equipment, hiring only unskilled labor locally. Furthermore, because they controlled the transportation network the oil companies were able to freeze out all but the largest producers, concentrating the industry in the state in a few corporate hands. This extractive economy persisted into the chemical era, supported by regulatory agencies and Louisiana’s political elite.{5}

In the 1930s, as economic depression devastated other regions and sectors of the economy, the Gulf Coast experienced tremendous growth in both petroleum processing and chemical production. The technology of catalytic cracking allowed chemists and chemical engineers to process crude and petroleum distillates efficiently and precisely, and the region had an abundance of the raw materials on which the petrochemical industry depends: oil, natural gas, salt, water, and sulfur.{6} Innovation in plant architecture was also key. In late 1938 Dutch Buetel and another Dow Chemical Company employee took a fateful drive from Houston to the Texas coast and were fascinated by the natural gas flares of the oil wells along their route. They spotted a saltwater estuary adjacent to the wells and thought it an ideal location for a new plant.{7} Buetel made the risky but ultimately profitable decision that enclosing the plant’s vast tangle of pipes and tanks in a building envelope, as in the north, would be unnecessary in the mild climate of the Gulf Coast and opted instead for what is now called an “open architecture.” This saved a tremendous amount of investment capital and made southern locations extremely competitive in the growing petrochemical industry. Low wages, a nonunion labor force, and regulatory freedom were other primary reasons for petrochemical companies’ relocation to southern states.{8}

Dow Chemical’s postwar expansion typifies that of the petrochemical industry in the South during that period. The company sought to decentralize largely in response to the issue of pollution, fearing problems with water, waste, and disposal if its operations remained concentrated in Texas and Michigan. Fierce competition brought a change in plant economics. Automation processes made the hiring of most blue-collar workers obsolete. One regional journal of the period noted that “it is not uncommon to find new multi-million dollar plants operated by a handful of men.”{9} As the chemical plants grew larger, the cost per unit of material decreased, most of the savings coming from labor economics. The growth curve for the Mississippi River chemical corridor became even steeper during the 1960s, thanks to numerous factors, among them Louisiana’s decision to reduce the tax on natural gas, cheap labor, and a political climate that minimized the problem of pollution.{10} Companies were aware that with the passage of the 1966 Federal Water Quality Act pollution would soon be a major consideration, and the Mississippi River’s high discharge rate, which dispersed contaminants more rapidly than any other place along the Gulf Coast, made it an ideal location under the coming regulatory regime. And enforcement was less of a concern in Louisiana than elsewhere.

In 1964, the small African-American town of Geismar, now one of the centers of the environmental justice movement in Louisiana, was targeted for development by several companies. Multicorporation networks featuring an interconnected piping system and symbiotic production had by this time become common along the river, as one facility’s waste or product was another’s feed stock. Mobil, MonoChem, BASF, Morton, Allied and others all bought riverfront property and began operations in the Geismar area, attracted by a lucrative government package: no local property taxes; stabilization of the riverbank by the Corps of Engineers, insuring excellent docking facilities; new state highways, including the new Sunshine Bridge, to make the small community accessible to all modes of transportation; and, last but not least, a “no politics attitude from the governor’s office.”{11} But the local residents, most of whom owned their own homes and some of whom were living on the same land their families had received from the Freedmen’s Bureau in the aftermath of the Civil War, were not seen as a potential labor pool for the new plants. As one trade journal put it, “the town has no manpower . . . most of the workers . . . commute.”{12}

Concerns about industrial pollution were to emerge over a decade later. In 1978, a young truck driver named Kirtley Jackson was hauling hazardous waste to open disposal pits near Bayou Sorrel, just south of Baton Rouge. The waste from his truck reacted with the waste in the pit and Jackson was overcome by the fumes; he died instantly. That same year a reform-minded attorney general, William Guste, hired Willie Fontenot as an environmental outreach specialist.{13} For the next twenty-seven years Fontenot would help local citizens better understand and navigate the regulatory process of permitting and disposal, so that their voices could be heard.

Some of the first citizens to come forward with Fontenot’s help were from small African-American communities that, because of historical circumstance, shared a fenceline with industry. These citizens’ fight against the poisoning of their communities marked the beginning of the environmental justice movement in the state, and Louisiana would see many watershed events that brought publicity to the national struggle.{14} In 1989 hundreds of residents of the chemical corridor participated in the Great Louisiana Toxics March, a ten-day march down the corridor from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Around the same time, Greenpeace released a study alleging that cancer deaths in the chemical corridor were twice the national average.{15} Though the state and the chemical industry countered with a questionable joint study claiming no adverse health affects, environmental activists nicknamed the region “Cancer Alley.”{16}

The 1980s also saw the destruction of three predominantly African-American communities along the river by chemical-industry pollution. The towns of Morrisonville (founded 1790), Sunshine (founded 1874), and Reveilletown, an ex-slave settlement, were bought out and their citizens forced to move because of chemical exposure. In each case, the residents were scattered and the communities dispersed—except for the cemeteries, which were left intact. Recently a fourth African-American community, the Diamond neighborhood in the town of Norco, has been bought out and dismantled by Shell Oil and Chemical Company.{17} The loss of historic African-American communities due to environmental degradation is thus a recent memory for many residents of the region—a memory now recharged by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

President Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order 12898 added steam to the environmental justice movement. The order states that “each federal agency shall make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority and low-income populations.” This decree helped fuel one of the biggest environmental justice battles in the United States to date.

In 1996, with the endorsement of Governor Mike Foster, the giant Japanese multinational Shintech applied for a permit to build a 700-million-dollar polyvinyl chloride plant, one of the largest in the world, on agricultural land near the town of Convent. The facility would have added over 600,000 pounds of toxic emissions to Saint James parish, which was already home to thirteen plants and ranked third in the state for industrial pollution. In 1997, with the help of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, the citizens of Convent filed two environmental justice complaints, one against the state regulators alleging bias, the other charging that the new plant’s siting would violate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (Under Title VI, following Clinton’s executive order, a plaintiff need not demonstrate intent to discriminate, only a discriminatory effect—a much easier burden of proof.) This was to be the first test of using the Civil Rights Act for environmental-justice purposes, and it made state regulators and industry nervous. Almost two years later, Shintech and its allies decided to drop their plans to build a new chemical plant in Convent before a landmark decision could be handed down and instead built a much smaller facility on the Dow Chemical campus in a nearby parish upriver.

Today Louisiana’s corporate tax-exemption programs shelter plants like Shell’s Norco facility and Exxon’s Baton Rouge refinery. Thanks to the state’s industrial-property tax exemption, those two companies avoided paying over 175 million dollars in taxes during the 1980s. The exemption dates to 1936, and it has become a corporate welfare roll in recent years. Although many southern states offer this exemption, Louisiana is the only one that grants it without local approval or input. Since much of the tax revenue that corporations save would have gone to local schools and public facilities, the communities that house these industrial facilities are left underfunded and unable to provide adequate basic services. Many lack running water and municipal sewers, and others do not have even basic medical services. And even aside from claims of elevated cancer rates, illness abounds; Louisiana ranks third in the nation in percentage of a family’s income spent on healthcare. According to a seven-parish survey of residents living within a mile of the river, where industry is most heavily concentrated, 35 percent suffer from respiratory problems, 21 percent from allergy problems, and 17 percent from other sinus problems.{18}

Louisiana now produces less than 7 percent by value of the nation’s chemicals but almost 13 percent of all the hazardous waste reported nationally. The plants along the chemical corridor produce ninety-eight major chemicals, eleven of which are recognized carcinogens. In 2001 the industry emitted or released over 145 million pounds of hazardous waste, according to its own reporting for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). Citizens have won some victories against polluters. But their main guide for decades through the legal and regulatory system, Willie Fontenot, was given a choice of retiring or being fired from his position as environmental liaison to the state attorney general’s office in early 2005; leading college students on educational and fact-finding tours of communities in the petrochemical corridor in Louisiana is now evidently considered a breach of homeland security.{19} Open-access websites with public information on evacuation and worst-case scenarios regarding industrial accidents have been closed down since 2003. In the name of national security, citizens and scientists in the region are being refused access to information on what chemicals are produced or stored at various facilities.{20} Proposed changes to criteria for the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory would make reporting of hazards less complete and less frequent.{21} None of this bodes well for the future of the environment in the chemical corridor.

But now all eyes are on Louisiana and New Orleans as they rebuild in the wake of Katrina and Rita. Perhaps globalization will lead the petrochemical industry to relocate plants to countries with looser regulatory structures so as to evade conflicts such as those that have been intensifying in Louisiana’s chemical corridor. But perhaps burgeoning communication networks outside the mass media and the globalization of the environmental justice movement will serve as a prophylaxis against the simple transfer of polluting technologies and a business-as-usual attitude.

The history of the building of the petrochemical industry on the lower Mississippi holds cautionary lessons for the rebuilding of New Orleans. The importation of outside labor, materials, and corporations did little for the region’s economy in the beginning. Industry did not employ local residents to any significant degree, and tax breaks depleted public coffers that funded schools and other services. The collusion of state government with wealthy planters and outside corporate interests encouraged policies that were harmful to the majority of local residents.

But a more hopeful future may be imagined. There is movement in the petrochemical industry to improve production processes in ways that reduce both the amount and the toxicity of waste. Proponents of “green chemistry” are developing new materials whose production byproducts are nonhazardous.{22} This desirable industrial transformation may serve as an optimistic metaphor for the rebuilding of New Orleans. A city remade on sustainable environmental principles will surely weather coming storms better than one that simply reinscribes old technologies and their power structures on the damaged Lower Mississippi River terrain.

{1} See Mary Ann Sternberg, Along the River (Baton Rouge, 1996) for a mile-by-mile description of the plantation history of the lower Mississippi River region.

{2} Records of the assistant commissioner for the State of Louisiana, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, 1865-1869; Register of Applications of Freedmen for Land, vol. 77, M1027, roll 34, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

{3} For a thorough discussion of land ownership and economic conditions leading to inequities in Louisiana’s industrial development, see Barbara Allen, Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), chapter 1.

{4} Henrietta M. Larsen, Evelyn H. Knowlton, and Charles Popple, History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey): New Horizons, 1927–1950 (New York, 1971), 3-4.

{5} See Allen, chap. 1, for a longer discussion of the political economy of oil in the state in the early twentieth century.

{6} Lee N. Davis, The Corporate Alchemists (London, 1984), 118.

{7}Peter H. Spitz, Petrochemicals (New York, 1988), 89.

{8}William Haynes, Southern Horizons (New York, 1946), 273.

{9}H. McKinley Conway, “Automatic Processes for Southern Industry,” Journal of Southern Research, September-October 1952, 22.

{10} Edystone C. Nebel III, Factors Affecting the Location of the Petrochemical Industry in the Gulf South (Baton Rouge, 1971), 51.

{11} “Louisiana Oil Prospers by ‘No Politics’ Rule,” Oil and Gas Journal, 27 January 1964, 114.

{12} “Petrochemical Boom Hits Tiny Town of Geismar,” Oil and Gas Journal, 4 May 1964, 50.

{13} Jim Schwab, Deeper Shades of Green (San Francisco, 1994).

{14} For a more in-depth discussion of the beginnings of the environmental justice movement in the United States, see Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, Colo., 1990), and Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York, 2001). For a longer environmental history of the region, see Barbara L. Allen, “The Making of Cancer Alley: A Historical View of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor,” in Southern United States: An Environmental History, ed. Donald E. Davis (Santa Barbara, Calif., forthcoming).

{15} J. Timmons Roberts, and Melissa M. Toffolon-Weiss, Chronicles From the Environmental Justice Frontline (New York, 2001), 47.

{16} No one has been able to prove whether or not there is a higher incidence of cancer in the chemical corridor because most of the state’s cancer data has been kept hidden. For an analysis of the lawsuits that citizens and medical researchers have filed to gain access to the data, see B. L. Allen, “The Problem With Epidemiology Data in Assessing Environmental Health Impacts of Toxic Sites,” in Environmental Exposure and Health, ed. M. M. Aral et al. (Southampton, 2005).

{17} Steve Lerner, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

{18} Raymond J. Burby, Through Their Eyes: Survey Results of Lower Income Residents in the Louisiana Industrial Corridor—Seven Parish Combine Sample (New Orleans, 1995), 2.

{19} Mark Schleifstein, “Activists’ Ally Snared in Security Net,” New Orleans Times Picayune, 5 April 2005.

{20} See John D. Echeverria and Julie B. Kaplan, “Poisonous Procedural “Reform”: In Defense of Environmental Right to Know,” Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute, http://www.law.georgetown.edu/gelphi/, accessed 4 December 2005. For an extensive list of public information that has been removed or limited to approved access see “Post 9/11 Age of Missing Information,” Clary-Meuser Research Network, http://www.mapcruzin.com/news/rtkpost911.htm, accessed 4 December 2005.

{21} Under the EPA’s proposal, companies “would report their releases of toxic chemicals every other year instead of annually, and more chemicals would be eligible for less-detailed disclosures.” Janet Pelley, “EPA Proposes to Relax TRI Reporting Rules,” Environmental Science and Technology A-Page Magazine, 1 December, 2005, 479A.

{22} See “Green chemistry is the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances.” Green Chemistry Website, http://www.chemistry.org/portal/a/c/s/1/acsdisplay.html?DOC=greenchemistryinstitute.html, accessed 27 November 2005; and Jody Roberts, “De-/Re-Constructing Green Chemistry” (Ph.D. diss., Virginia Tech, 2005).

Barbara Allen, a native of south Louisiana, has published extensively on environmental justice, science and expertise, and public health struggles in this region. She is the director of the Science and Technology Studies Program for Virginia Tech’s National Capital Region campus and author of Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes (2003).

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Holding Louisiana has vexed the nation’s preeminent builders since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers first assumed control of the New Orleans levees in 1917. The Corps, founded in 1802, has defended the Mississippi from foreign invasion, from Confederate rebellion, from snags that impaled steamboats, from hurricanes and floods. In the wake of Katrina, however, the agency confronts a conundrum beyond the scope of its dam-it, ditch-it tradition: how to let the world’s third-ranking river approximate the rhythms of nature, to meander and spread its replenishing mud blanket across the delta, without disrupting navigation or risking a serious flood. Construction interferes with the land-building process: levees contain the silt needed to replenish the lowlands, dredging loosens the land by killing freshwater plants, floodgates and reservoirs further aggravate marsh subsidence. To abandon these kinds of projects is to court economic disaster; to build as before is to invite a worse catastrophe. “It’s ironic,” writes Robert Brown of New Orleans, a Corps publicist. “The system which brings prosperity and security to humans is literally costing them the earth beneath their feet.”{2}

Like vengeance wreaked on a state famous for resisting wetland regulation in a nation that plows and paves about 800,000 wet acres each year, the tragedy of the marsh has become, as Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt observed a decade before Katrina, “the single most important environmental issue of our times.”{3} And it’s not just a coastal problem. Upriver the flood-protected long for the grassy streams that once braided through sodden woods and cattail marshes in Minnesota, where urban sewage and PCBs have poisoned backwater marshland; in Missouri, where navigation dikes have quickened sedimentation; in Kentucky and Tennessee, where the clearing of flood-prone creeks has aggravated forest erosion; in Arkansas, where farming behind federal levees has decimated floodswept woodlands; in Louisiana, where the river below Baton Rouge is a sewer for chemical toxins; and in Mississippi, where the draining of the Yazoo delta has replaced a watery habitat for songbirds and heron and a sanctuary for migratory geese and ducks with furrows of cotton and soybeans.{4}

How to restore America’s mainstream is a technological quandary clouded by foreboding and doubt. Our expectations are jaded, and our fear of what engineers might yet do to nature makes it hard to imagine the serious battle against engineering’s most harmful effects. Yet the Corps swings with the nation. Pliant and decentralized, it answers first to Congress, but also to the president, the secretary of the army, the courts, regional commissions, public opinion, the laws of physics and finance, and its own historical sense of purpose. Critics say that inner-directedness creates a bias toward massive construction. Defenders say the Corps has learned to rethink the meaning of river improvement as the green agenda gains influence. Oystermen want freshwater diversions. Duck hunters want reedy lakes and hardwoods in the bottomlands. The Mississippi Wildlife Foundation wants to preserve a riverine corridor for migratory fruit bats. The president of the Baton Rouge Audubon Society wants to reclaim strips of healthy woodland by reflooding forests and farms.{5} “We need to be a sophisticated customer,” says wetlands advocate Mark Davis. “It’s carrot and stick. When they [the engineers] do it right, we pat them on the head. When they do it wrong, we hit them. If engineers don’t have the authority [to replenish the marsh, to protected fish and wildlife], we’ll get it. If they don’t have the money, we’ll find it. They have the bulldozers. They’ve engineered us into this dangerous situation. We need to help them engineer a way out.”{6}

Replenish or perish. But how? To unmake a fluid machine more sprawling than Western Europe would be ambitious beyond the store-for-the-future programs that Congress calls conservation. Ecologists want restoration. A 1992 report from the aquatic restoration committee of the National Research Council targeted 10 million acres of impaired but repairable wetlands along 400,000 miles of overbuilt rivers and streams. Dike notching, dam breaching, marsh building, and the reflooding of riparian farmland were hailed as effective ways to buffer human disturbance and promote biodiversity-to emulate, as the report put it, “a natural, self-regulating system that is integrated ecologically with the landscape in which it occurs.”{7} Never mind that scientists remain deeply divided over how the dynamic Earth functioned in prehuman times; biology and smart engineering could “approximate” liquid nature in its “predisturbance state.”{8}

The hope is that engineering contrivance can sustain enough watery chaos to keep a larger balance in place. For now, however, the research on restoration is as soft as the nodding grasslands. What is the measure of human disturbance? After twelve thousand years of Mississippi civilization-a history of hunting with fire, of fishing with weirs, of managing water with drainage canals and levee-like burial mounds-how can an infant science relying on ambiguous historical data pick out a point in the past and call it pristine? It can’t. “Wilderness,” writes William Cronon, “is quite profoundly a human creation-indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in history.”{9} The pristine is a cultural construct. No science can restore a river to the state of nature because Nature-defiant, erratic, a mirror of our own expectations-never freezes into a state.

Nowhere is the nature of Nature more elusively problematic than in the alluvial valley of the Lower Mississippi, home to 8.3 million people in 219 counties of seven states from southern Illinois to Louisiana, some of the South’s most productive soil. That fertile, fragile valley is the spout of a mud funnel that drains 1.2 million square miles, or 41 percent of the continental United States. Soft and unstable, a rich belt of topsoil as much as 50 feet deep, the dark alluvium spread by the river has always defined the valley. “Creamy and sweet-smelling” was how William Alexander Percy described the famous silt in Lanterns on the Levee, the memoir of a patrician who pined for the premodern landscape yet understood that his Mississippi cotton plantation would be ankle-deep in syrupy water if not for levees built by the Corps of Engineers. For Percy the river that formed the murderous, magical delta was “the shifting, unappeasable god of the country . . . gaunt and terrible . . . beautiful and dear . . . wise . . . aloof . . . an imbecile blind Titan.”{10}

The managing of that mythic river is complicated by the fact that the Corps’ most concrete solutions have been proposed and rejected before. In 1964, for example, the New Orleans district advocated building a phalanx of steel gates that would have lain across the path followed by Katrina. The next year Hurricane Betsy drove a monstrous swell into the city’s Ninth Ward. Six thousand houses sustained serious damage. Twenty thousand people barely escaped with their lives. Betsy, said an insurance spokesman, was “the worst natural disaster in [the history of] America-greater even than the San Francisco Earthquake and the Chicago Fire combined.”{11} Damage estimates ran as high as 2.4 billion dollars-more costly than any storm on record, the inflation-adjusted equivalent of thirteen billion dollars today. Six hours into the flooding President Johnson was stepping from Air Force One onto the tarmac at New Orleans’ Moisant Field. “I am here,” he said, “because I want to see with my own eyes what the unhappy alliance of wind and water have done to this land and its people.”{12} Wind and water and man, he might better have said, because the storm had landed hard where Texas investors, Lady Bird Johnson among them, planned to levee off 32,000 acres for 250,000 people in a new suburb and industrial park. New Orleans East, as it was called, would need flood protection; so would the northshore suburbs, Jefferson Parish, the Port of New Orleans, the Port of Venice, Morgan City, and a dozen or more other storm-battered sites.

Johnson pressured Congress to approve two hundred and fifty million dollars for Gulf Coast hurricane projects, including a fifty-six-million-dollar down payment on New Orleans levees and those storm gates, a fortress-like hurricane barrier in the Rigolets pass of Lake Pontchartrain with sixteen rotating doors to allow plankton to wash in with the tide during normal weather and steel gates to seal off the lake during dangerous storms.{13} Although biologists worried that a “dead zone” behind the gates might disrupt water circulation in the lake, an environmental impact statement minimized the threat to marine life. Environmentalists scoffed.{14}

More was at stake than marine life. Luke Fontana of New Orleans, an attorney who had fished for crab and hunted ducks in the black lagoons now slated for subdivisions, led a crusade linking hurricane engineering to tax-supported “land enhancement” schemes. Fontana noted that the plan would help developers drain construction sites in New Orleans East and also featured protection for housing projects in the crab-rich north-shore wetlands that builders called Eden Isle. He and other critics feared a “piracy” that would “lead to the collapse of the Pontchartrain basin as a viable system.”{15} It was “pure pork-barrel,” said Fontana.{16} Builders would reap “windfall profits” by trashing the public domain.{17}

Chastised and sent back to the swamps with a team of Environmental Protection Agency biologists, the Corps by 1984 had eliminated the gated barriers from the hurricane protection design. During seventeen years of delays the cost of the gates had ballooned from $85 million to $924 million. Dirt was less expensive. Reluctantly the Corps returned to a simpler but less effective system of earthen and concrete levees. Still, it was common knowledge that lakeside earthen embankments were not enough to withstand another Betsy. “Today humans are playing too large a role in natural disasters to call them natural,” said a 1984 report from the Swedish Red Cross. “People are changing their environment to make it more prone to some disasters, and are behaving so as to make themselves more vulnerable to those hazards.”{18} In 1996, in the hurricane office at Corps headquarters on River Road in New Orleans, division chief Robert Guizerix predicted that the lakeside levees would fail if relentlessly hammered by swells from a Category 3 storm.{19}

As the earth experiences its most dramatic climatic shift since the time of Julius Caesar, the forecast is for more of the same. Global warming and rising oceans will make major storms more frequent, their impact more intense. The toe of Louisiana will vanish, according to that dismal forecast, and the battle to hold the alluvial delta will consume more tax and engineering resources than were spent originally to reclaim it. Therein lies the tragedy of safety innovations that promote unsafe construction. Katrina underlined what we already knew. We know that the levees prevent the river from replenishing the delta landscape. We are aware that our activities in the saltwater marshes further their destruction as natural defenses against storms. We understand that the cost of maintaining deepwater shipping canals in the Gulf can be much greater than any savings gained from faster shipping. We know that a moving shoreline is not much of a problem until we try to stop it, that concrete solutions to coastal erosion can steepen a beach by deflecting its sand supply. But we also realize, or we should, that there is no turning back from all that we’ve made of the marsh without risking economic disaster. Technology is seldom an unmixed blessing. Certainly it is not in Louisiana, where the levees that shield New Orleans also intensify the processes that are consigning it to the Gulf.

{1}Donald F. Boesch, et. al., “Scientific Assessment of Coastal Wetland Loss, Restoration and Management in Louisiana,” Journal of Coastal Research, no. 20 (May 1994): 1-6; Karen Wright, “Diluvan Tremens: Policy Initiatives Could Turn Tide on Wetlands Loss,” Scientific American, October 1989, 32-34; Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Conservation Task Force, Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Restoration Plan, n.p., November 1993, 2.

{2}Robert D. Brown, “Restoring Louisiana’s Wetlands,” Military Engineer, no. 550 (July 1992): 4.

{3}Bruce Babbitt, “Saving Tomorrow’s Wetlands Today,” Water Marks: Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration News (spring 1995): 1.

{4}Constance Elizabeth Hunt, Down By the River: The Impact of Federal Water Projects and Policies on Biological Diversity (Washington, D.C., 1988), 146-47, 164-69. For the environmental impact of river engineering, see U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District, Upper Yazoo Projects Reformulation Study (Vicksburg, Miss., 1993) 1:13-19, passim.; R. K. Yancy, “Our Vanishing Hardwoods,” Louisiana Conservationist, March-April 1970, 26-31; and Philip V. Scarpino, Great River: An Environmental History of the Upper Mississippi, 1890-1950 (Columbia, Mo., 1985).

{5}Charley Fryling, Baton Rouge Audubon Society, interview by author, Baton Rouge, 13 June 1996. On the Corps’ changing constituency, see Leonard A. Shabman, “Decision Making in Water Resource Development and the Potential of Multi-Objective Planning: The Case of the Army Corps of Engineers,” technical report no. 2., Cornell University Water Resources and Marine Science Center, Ithaca, N.Y., 1972.

{6}Mark Davis, Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, interview by author, Baton Rouge, 20 June 1996.

{7}National Research Council, Restoration of Aquatic Ecosystems (Washington, D.C., 1992), 18.

{8}Ibid., 10, 12, 18, 498-99. On scientific debate over the state of nature, see Michael G. Barbour, “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1995).

{9}William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground, 69.

{10}William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (Baton Rouge, La., 1941; reprint 1973) 3, 4, 24, 248.

{11}Joe Englert, ed., The Great Disaster: Hurricane “Betsy,” September 9, 1965 (Chalmette, La., 1965), 1. See also U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Report on Hurricane Betsy (New Orleans, 1965), 1-13, 32.

{12}“President Tours Hurricane Area,” New York Times, September 11, 1965.

{13}A similar project in the same location is under discussion now; see John Schwartz, “Full Flood Safety in New Orleans Could Take Billions and Decades,” New York Times, 29 November 2005.

{14}Fred Chatry of the Corps’ New Orleans District provided a helpful chronology of events. Sue Hawes, Corps of Engineers New Orleans District, interview by author, New Orleans, 1 November 1996; Barry Kohl, New Orleans Audubon Society, interview by author, New Orleans, 13 June 1996; Cornelia Carrier, “Expert: Lake’s Productivity in Danger,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 19 November 1974.

{15}John Fahey, “Pontchartrain: Cesspool or Playground? Environmentalists, Dredgers Differ,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 23 January 1975.

{16}Luke Fontana, Save Our Wetlands, interview by author, New Orleans, 4-6 November 1996.

{17}“Dredging Foes Win One Round,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1 November 1974. See also Fahey, “Pontchartrain: Cesspool or Playground?”; Cornellia Carrier, “Wetlands Dispute New Trial Denied,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 21 February 1975; Cornellia Carrier, “Lake Plan Hit as Private Windfall,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 23 February 1975; Gordon Gsell, “SOWL Files Suit against Lake Plan,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 6 December 1975; John LaPlace, “Could a State Panel Save Pontchartrain?” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 25 March 1977; Cornellia Carrier, “Louisiana Delegation is Environment’s Foe,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 15 June 1977; and “Environmental Group Asks to Join Hurricane Plan Suit,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 7 December 1977.

{18}Anders Wijkman and Lloyd Timberlake, Natural Disasters: Acts of God or Acts of Man (London, 1984), 11.

{19}Robert J. Guizerix, Corps of Engineers New Orleans District, interview by author, New Orleans, 19 June 1996. See also “Reconsidering the Barriers,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 4 January 1978; “Lake Study Falls Short,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 30 January 1978. For a more detailed history of the dispute over Pontchartrain storm barriers, see Todd Shallat, “In the Wake of Hurricane Betsy,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, ed. Craig Colton (Pittsburgh, 2000), 121-40.

Todd Shallat directs the Center for Idaho History and Politics at Boise State University. His writings include Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Austin, Tex., 1994).

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.

A little over a century ago, the discovery of the Jennings field, near Lafayette, began a frenzy of oil exploration and extraction in Louisiana. Although early production centered on the rich oil fields in the northern part of the state, by the 1930s the industry had advanced well into the coastal zone, and by the 1940s many small rigs clustered off the marshy coastline. Louisiana’s huge reserves lured major refiners. The construction of Standard Oil’s Baton Rouge refinery in 1908 signaled the beginning of development in the lower Mississippi River chemical corridor; its flood-proof site, on high terraces near the head of navigation for ocean-going ships, offered ready access to crude oil and natural gas, ample water for industrial processes, and a giant sink for wastes, in addition to the favorable winter climate.{1} Other refiners and chemical manufacturers quickly followed Standard Oil’s lead, and there was an accelerated program of federal investment during World War II. By 1947 there were 177 refineries and chemical plants in Louisiana, and their numbers continued to grow: 211 in 1962, 284 in 1981, 320 in 2002. Along the lower Mississippi River, the number of oil-refining and chemical-processing plants rose from 126 in 1962 to 196 in 2002. A landscape once dominated by sugarcane fields had been thoroughly transformed.

But geography and geology alone don’t account for the nature of that transformation. Government had a role as well. In addition to wartime federal investment, state tax policy came in to play. Tax exemptions for plant construction and expansion spurred the continual development of petrochemical facilities.{2} The Louisiana Stream Control Commission issued waste discharge permits with few questions asked during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly along the Mississippi, where the commission turned down only one application between 1958 and 1966.{3} And maintenance of the massive levee system by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provided an indirect subsidy to refiners and processors that located facilities in the Mississippi floodplain.{4}

While employment in the refining industry has declined since the 1960s, growth in chemical manufacturing has so far more than offset those losses: the number of Louisianans working in the petrochemical industry rose from slightly more than thirty thousand in 1962 to over thirty-seven thousand in 2002. These are jobs that offer good pay even for workers with only a basic education. Consequently, Louisiana has continued to encourage the petrochemical industry, and many see the chemical corridor as a key to the state’s economy. Yet, while the number of jobs and plants have increased, the industry’s momentum has diminished as production has shifted to more vulnerable locations and environmental problems grow more pressing.

Louisiana was rarely buffeted by hurricanes during World War II and for about ten years afterwards. Beginning in 1956, however, a series of storms began to alter the equation of offshore production and onshore processing. Hurricane Flossy blew onshore near the mouth of the Mississippi in September of that year, with winds between 90 and 110 miles per hour. Flossy did considerable damage to offshore facilities and onshore production in the coastal wetlands, as waves battered drilling derricks, sediment filled canals dug for moving product out of the wetlands, and storm-driven waves severed underwater pipelines.{5} Eight years later Hurricane Hilda struck south-central Louisiana with winds of 100 to 120 miles per hour. A 10-foot storm surge inundated some 3 million acres of coastal wetland. There was heavy damage to oil fields and onshore support operations in Lafourche Parish, and offshore operations suffered even worse; every offshore platform in the storm’s path was damaged, six rigs were lost, and many wells destroyed. But even as the oil extraction sector sustained an estimated thirty-two million dollars in losses, manufacturing operations along the river were relatively unaffected.{6}

Then in September 1965 came Hurricane Betsy, the worst storm to hit the Louisiana coast since the petrochemical buildup began. With winds in excess of 120 miles per hour, Betsy drove a massive storm surge across much of the lower delta, causing flooding in several parishes. In New Orleans the water crested at over 12 feet. In addition to disrupting some eight thousand active oil wells, it also battered onshore support facilities and pipelines; production fell by 7.1 million barrels.{7} Still, the rich offshore reserves prompted the industry to rebuild, while less vulnerable and still plentiful onshore reserves provided a buffer against refinery shortages. Louisiana oil production peaked in 1970 during another period of quiet weather following Hurricane Betsy.

After that, inland and near-shore production declined—onshore output fell from more than 500 million barrels per year in 1970 to around 100 million barrels in 2000—while output from rigs located along the outer continental shelf increased dramatically, approaching 500 million barrels per year in 2000. That is to say, the vast majority of production was now occurring in a zone most exposed to damaging hurricanes. In contrast to the practice in 1970, when each rig serviced a single well, deep-water extraction is now done with fewer fixed drilling platforms, and each rig generally collects oil from several wells. Although this reduces the number of facilities exposed to hurricane-force winds, repair costs can be much higher and disruptions to production much greater.{8}

At about the same time as Hurricane Betsy delivered its reminder that an extended period of calm autumn weather along the Gulf Coast is an exception to the rule, the environmental costs of the petrochemical boom began to intrude on the public’s attention. A huge fish kill during the fall and winter of 1963–64 heightened concerns over toxic releases into the Mississippi River. Although authorities eventually identified the Velsicol Chemical Company’s plant in Memphis, Tennessee, as the culprit, this calamity led to greater regulatory oversight of waste management practices downstream in Louisiana as well. In the early 1970s, as the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 was making its way through Congress, a survey by the Environmental Protection Agency highlighted the threat posed by industrial discharges. The EPA identified forty-six organic chemicals attributable to industrial releases that were showing up in the public water supplies of the lower Mississippi Valley, and activists charged that these chemicals were increasing cancer rates in parishes along the river.

Such public scrutiny, in conjunction with the enforcement of federal water quality and hazardous waste laws, began to impose new costs on the petrochemical companies, which increasingly chose to dispose of chemical wastes on land rather than discharging them into the river.{9} Those chickens came home to roost in the 1980s, when the designation of a number of Superfund sites placed a further burden on companies that the EPA identified as responsible parties. One of the most notorious was the Petro-Processors facility near Baton Rouge, which was used by several major petrochemical manufacturers. In 1970 a lagoon at the poorly managed site had flooded an adjacent farm, resulting in a lawsuit, and massive quantities of untreated wastes released to impoundments eventually threatened local groundwater sources. In 1984 the EPA estimated clean-up costs at fifty million dollars—not a devastating amount when spread among many corporations, but enough to appreciably affect their costs of operation.{10} According to the Louisiana state inventory, there were forty inactive or abandoned hazardous waste sites along the chemical corridor by 2003.{11} While few of these were Superfund sites, and some had no ties to the petrochemical industry, the concentration of hazardous wastes in the region fueled public concern.

That concern was intensified by the regular incidence of explosions and other industrial accidents throughout the chemical corridor. Hurricane Betsy caused a chlorine barge to break loose from its moorings, and authorities fought desperately to recover it before it could release a cargo that would have caused massive fatalities. Explosions at the Shell refinery at Norco in 1979 and 1988 killed several workers and scattered debris through neighboring residential areas.{12} A 1989 explosion at the Exxon refinery in Baton Rouge blanketed surrounding neighborhoods with a residue of asbestos.{13} During the 1980s New Orleans led the nation in chemical plant accidents with seventy-one and Baton Rouge was fifth with thirty-nine.{14}

More recently, huge toxic releases have been permitted throughout the corridor, and in 1997 chemical plants along the lower Mississippi accounted for more than 77 percent of Louisiana’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) emissions. The top five TRI-producing parishes—Ascension, Jefferson, St. Charles, St. James, and East Baton Rouge, all along the river—accounted for over 142 million pounds of chemicals spewed into the environment. While the state reported a significant decline by 1999, this mainly reflected a change in the regulation that exempted one plant from the reporting requirements.{15}

Even before the storms of 2005, rising natural gas prices had taken a toll in the chemical corridor. Louisiana lost about four thousand chemical-industry jobs between 1999 and 2004. The decline began in methanol and ammonia production facilities, which derive their products directly from natural gas. Horizontal integration produced a ripple effect: fertilizer makers padlocked their gates as ammonia became scarce, and plastics manufacturers did likewise in response to methanol shortages.{16} Louisiana is now pushing for construction of liquid-natural-gas (LNG) terminals along the coast in order to alleviate shortages of that essential raw material, even though such facilities will be vulnerable to tropical storms. A few years before Katrina and Rita, powerful meteorological events had demonstrated once again the vulnerability of the existing oil-production infrastructure: tropical storm Isidore and Hurricane Lili in 2002, and Hurricane Ivan in 2004, which blew across offshore oil fields and destroyed seven major platforms, seriously damaged another six, and ruptured twelve pipelines, disrupting production and refining for four weeks.{17}

But Katrina and Rita have been the most devastating. These back-to-back hurricanes showed the vulnerability of the petrochemical industry despite the construction of safer and stronger platforms. Rita took a path across the offshore production area and disrupted operations around Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Port Arthur, Texas. Thirteen rigs suffered serious damage—a huge impact in an era of larger platforms collecting oil from numerous sea-floor wells—and nine pipelines delivering crude to onshore operations had to be temporarily closed. Katrina disrupted refining activity at fifteen plants in Louisiana and Mississippi. At this writing, refineries in the New Orleans area have been closed for more than four months, while those near the Texas-Louisiana state line endured shorter disruptions. Refinery production fell by more than 1.7 million barrels a day (to put that in context, total U.S. daily consumption is about twenty million barrels).{18} Katrina also caused a massive spill at the Murphy Oil refinery at Meraux, Louisiana. More than 670,000 gallons of crude oil escaped from a damaged storage facility, and early assessments have suggested the necessity of razing four thousand houses and removing two or three feet of contaminated soil in the affected area.{19} New Orleans-area refineries had not seen a major hurricane since Betsy in 1965, and the southwest Louisiana coast had been spared since Audrey in 1957. The costs to the industry from Katrina and Rita have been staggering. And in an era of declining supplies and little relatively safe onshore production, the implications are much greater than in the 1960s.

When one adds to these storm-related disruptions the growing influence of the environmental justice movement, it is clear that the petrochemical industry in the Mississippi River corridor is facing significant challenges. That movement began to take shape during the BASF labor dispute during the 1980s. Locked-out workers allied themselves with environmental groups and began to push for safer waste management practices. They forced BASF to clean up its operations and pushed the state to monitor industrial wastes with greater care.{20} Since then, petrochemical manufacturers have bought out some adjacent landowners and citizens groups have successfully opposed the siting of new chemical plants, forcing costly delays and searches for secondary sites.{21}

The technological infrastructure of the petrochemical industry in the Gulf Coast has become more vulnerable in recent years for several reasons. Declining global crude oil and natural gas reserves have rendered supply chains more tenuous and less flexible. Storms have struck the area with increasing ferocity and frequency. Vulnerable new drilling operations in deepwater locations compound the industry’s problems, as do environmental regulation and an active environmental justice movement, which add to operational costs and foreclose previously available options for disposing of wastes. In the context of a global economy, it is reasonable to predict that oil refining and chemical processing will begin to shift to other locations with lower potential risks from tropical storms, less stringent governmental regulations, and less well-organized environmental justice activists. Meanwhile, rising prices for crude motivate oil companies to push into ever more vulnerable locations in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast.{22} The combination of these two factors foretells an ever more tenuous supply for American consumers. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita put in sharp focus the impact that severe storms can have on an industry in an already precarious situation.

{1}Robert N. McMichael, “Plant Location Factors in the Petrochemical Industry in Louisiana” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1961).

{2}Barbara L. Allen, Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 67.

{3}Craig E. Colten, “Too Much of a Good Thing: Industrial Pollution in the Lower Mississippi River,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs (Pittsburgh, 2000), 148-49.

{4}Albert Cowdrey, Land’s End: A History of the New Orleans District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Its Lifelong Battle with the Lower Mississippi and Other Rivers Wending Their Way to the Sea (New Orleans, 1977).

{5}U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District, Memorandum Report: Hurricane Flossy, 23-24 September 1956 (New Orleans, 1957), 17.

{6}U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District, Hurricane Hilda, 3-5 October 1964 (New Orleans, 1966), 7-17.

{7}U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District, Report on Hurricane Betsy, 8–11 September 1965 (New Orleans, 1965), 39–40.

{8}Dianne Lindstedt et al., History of Oil and Gas Development in Coastal Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1991), and Minerals Management Service, Deepwater Gulf of Mexico 2002: America’s Expanding Frontier (New Orleans, 2002).

{9}U.S. Department of the Interior, Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, Endrin Pollution of the Lower Mississippi River (Dallas, 1969); U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Industrial Pollution of the Lower Mississippi River in Louisiana (Dallas, 1972); Colten, “Too Much of a Good Thing.”

{10}U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “NPL Site Narrative for Petro-Processors of Louisiana Inc.,” 21 September 1984, http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl/nar757.htm.

{11}Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, “Inventory of Active or Abandoned [Hazardous Waste] Sites, 2002-2003” (2003). http://www.deq.state.la.us/remediation/ias/ar/2002-03/Confirmed%20Sites%20by%20Parish.pdf.

{12}“Cause of Shell Blasts Sought,” New Orleans Times Picayune, 23 June 1979, and “Six Still Missing in Norco Blast,” New Orleans Times Picayune, 6 May 1988.

{13}Raymond J. Burby, “Baton Rouge: The Making (and Breaking) of a Petrochemical Paradise,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, ed. Craig E. Colten (Pittsburgh, 2000), 160–77.

{14}Susan Cutter and John Tiefenbacher, “Chemical Hazards in Urban America,” Urban Geography 12 (1991): 417–30.

{15}Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, Louisiana Toxics Release Inventory Report 1997 (Baton Rouge, 1997), 58; and Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, “DEQ Reveals Drastic Reductions in Louisiana’s Toxic Release Inventory for 1999” (Baton Rouge, 2001). The key to the 1999 reductions was the elimination of phosphoric acid from the TRI tabulations. This was a major item released by the fertilizer industry along the chemical corridor both before and after the modification in the inventory reporting process.

{16}“Will Natural Gas Prices Turn Off Louisiana’s Chemical Industry?” New Orleans Times Picayune, 1 August 2004.

{17}National Hurricane Center, “Tropical Storm Report, Hurricane Ivan,” June 2005, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/2004ivan.shtml?.

{18}MSNBC, “Rita Wreaks Havoc on Oil Rigs, Platforms,” 28 September 2005, and BBC, “US Counting the Cost of Katrina,” 1 September 2005, http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/.

{19}“Katrina’s Oily Wake: Cleaning Up and Environmental Mess,” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 12 September 2005.

{20}Timothy J. Minchin, Forging a Common Bond: Labor and Environmental Activism during the BASF Lockout (Gainesville, Fla., 2003).

{21}Allen; Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley, Calif., 2002); Steve Lerner, Diamond: Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

{22}“New Offshore Drilling Could be off New Shores,” Baton Rouge Advocate, 30 October 2005.

Craig Colten is the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University and author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (2005).

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Some years ago, when I was in graduate school at Northwestern University, we had a Friday noon seminar on aspects of science and technology. I recall one meeting that featured a paper on high-energy physics. One of the senior physicists, Arnold Siegert, who had been a student of Heisenberg’s, got into an argument with a charming but not overly reverent mathematician (whose name I regrettably don’t remember) about the physical interpretation of mathematical formalisms. It was the ancient quarrel about whose reality was better, the mathematicians’ Platonic idealism or the physicists’ experimental materialism. At issue was some particle-decay process with a probability of ten to the minus something or other, which, when translated, meant that it should occur approximately once every thirty or so billion years, or once in twice the believed age of the universe. Finally, the mathematician, in some exasperation, asked, “Arnold, what would you do if you observed this phenomenon?” There was a silence. Then Siegert replied, almost impishly, “Not tell anyone.” It’s a splendid stratagem for improbable events in subatomic physics, but it doesn’t scale well for hurricanes. Too big.

What’s striking about Hurricane Katrina is that, like the nuclear physicists, everybody knew it was going to happen—sooner or later. Certainly anyone who’d lived in New Orleans or in Louisiana or on the Gulf Coast for very long knew. My grandmother was born and raised in New Orleans, in what’s now more hopefully than veridically called the Garden District, and I grew up with the folklore of the River and hurricanes. Later, when I was at Tulane, we lived in an apartment building that faced South Claiborne Avenue but backed up to the old Sugar Bowl. Between our building and the stadium were the university’s practice fields, five or six of them. On each side of each regulation 100-yard field were two or three gently contoured, sodded sumps, perhaps 30 yards long and 10 yards wide, maybe 4 or 5 feet deep, with a large drain at the bottom. When the cloudbursts came, which was often, the sumps would rapidly fill up. South Claiborne is about 60 yards wide at that spot, with two lanes in each direction separated by a broad grass esplanade, which covers one of the several major canals that drain New Orleans. From our sixth-floor apartment we could see the end of South Claiborne as it curved around, and we would watch for the pumps down there to come on. Sooner or later we’d see the smoke from the big diesel engines that drove the pumps, and pretty soon the water in the sumps would go down, usually in only ten or fifteen minutes. When it was later rather than sooner, there wasn’t much mystery about what would happen if it were ever never.

I also remember one blurry morning sitting in Jackson Square, as gentle night gave way to merciless day, watching the strippers go home, tired and flat-footed. I had one of those “what’s wrong with this picture?” moments as it dawned on me that the hull of the freighter I was looking up at was visible above the top of the levee. We clambered across the railroad tracks behind the old Jax brewery (in those less troubled days the night watchman only fussed at us a little) and up onto the levee. Sure enough, the river stage was a good 20 or 25 feet higher than where I’d been sitting in Jackson Square.

The river levees at New Orleans are challenged, severely, at least once a year, usually more often, and the powers that be have quite rationally devoted the most attention to them.{1} The rest of the city is protected too, but driving around in the then recently built subdivisions out by City Park and Lakefront Airport, on Lake Pontchartrain, it was pretty obvious what the consequences would be if the northeast quadrant of a “perfect storm” got into Chandeleur and Mississippi Sounds: a massive storm surge would be driven through Lake Borgne into Lake Pontchartrain, and then into New Orleans. Sooner or later.

Some years later, I drove over to Old River, where the Red River, the Mississippi, and the Atchafalaya come together, about 300 river miles above New Orleans. Old River Control, so memorably portrayed in John McPhee’s Control of Nature, is a set of massive spillways, a gargantuan navigation lock, and now a hydroelectric power station (then under construction) that together regulate the flow of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya Basin. The entire complex was nearly obliterated in the great 1973 flood. The basic problem is that the River—the Mississippi, anthropomorphized since the beginning of time—“wants” to go down the Atchafalaya; the distance to the Gulf is about one-third, and the gradient is twice as steep. We don’t want it to.

I stood on the lock structure, at least half a mile long, talking to the solitary lock-tender, a native Cajun. The lock was so big—to admit the huge tows that pass between the rivers—that he used an old Schwinn bicycle to commute between the gate-control houses at either end of it. We were talking about the River and what had happened in 1973. I noticed a big island off to the northwest and asked if it were Turnbull Island, allowing that my granddaddy had logged it in 1910. That and the fact that I’d said “Turnbull” correctly (think about how Creedence Clearwater Revival says “turnin’” or “burnin’” in “Proud Mary”—it’s a pronunciation unique to about four parishes in central Louisiana) put him at ease. I wasn’t some outsider come to make trouble, dinky little foreign car or not, but a near-native, come home to talk about the River. We chatted for a while, and I finally asked him straight out whether he thought the works at Old River would hold. He laughed and said something to the effect that the River had been doing what it wanted for a lot longer than we had been trying to control it, and “sooner or later . . . .” I asked what he was going to do when it happened. He laughed again and, pointing to where he stood on the massive concrete lock structure, said, “I’m gonna come right here. It’s the highest point in eight parishes.”

What’s curious about these little vignettes is that they’re all implicitly cast as narratives about nature, when they’re really as much about what Tom Hughes calls “the human built world.” We do live on a restless, if not malevolent, planet, whose dynamics we barely grasp. But we also do stupid things. Short-run avarice always trumps long-run prudence, and so we build taxpayer-insured houses on barrier islands and in known floodplains. Our interventions have unintended, if not unforeseeable, consequences. The land inside the levees, along the rivers, is higher now than the land outside, which the levees ostensibly protect, as the land outside, deprived of sediment, slowly subsides.

These vignettes also have something else in common: an attitude toward certainties of very low probability. It’s not bravado or fatalism; too melodramatic. And it’s not a “form of life” or “a life world”; too highfalutin. It’s just there. People in New Orleans and south Louisiana know about the River and about hurricanes the way people in other places know about earthquakes or volcanoes or mudslides or the lethal build-up of carbon dioxide in deep lakes. It’s part of natural-born culture, like the way “ur” is pronounced in four parishes in Louisiana. It doesn’t diminish the human (and animal) tragedy of a Katrina to say that everybody knew. What historians of technology might want to think about is how we think about what’s ours and what’s nature’s, why we conflate the two, and whether our tacit intuition that they are the same speaks more wisely than we know.

{1}Rational in this sense: The expected value of a probabilistic bad event is its probability times its cost. A risk portfolio comprises the sum of the risks’ expected values. If resources can be applied to reduce probabilities or ameliorate costs, the value of the entire portfolio (total risk) is minimized when the marginal decrement in expected value per dollar spent is equal for all risks. Thus, assuming it’s immaterial whether New Orleans is flooded by the river or by a storm surge, it is rational to expend disproportionate resources to combat the more likely risk, which is river flooding.

Ironically, publicly funded flood-control measures more often than not have contradictory results. Usually they are undertaken explicitly as economic development initiatives and, if successful, as in New Orleans’ eastern wards, increase the cost of a disaster at the same time they putatively reduce its probability. Thus expected value is little improved. Moreover, implementation of this rationalist risk-management strategy assumes perfect knowledge and perfect foresight (known probabilities and costs), which is usually transmogrified into the assumption that the future will be pretty much like the past. Thus economics, that allegedly most rigorous of social-science disciplines, routinely makes an assumption that few if any professional historians would defend unequivocally.

Edward Constant taught history of technology at Carnegie-Mellon University, and is a native of Louisiana.

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.