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 failing to defend the city against the floodwaters, while politicians from Mayor Ray Nagin to President George Bush were called to account for the tragically incompetent evacuation and relief efforts. Critics frequently drove their points home with invidious comparisons to the Netherlands. Flood control in the United States was fragmented, environmentally indifferent, callous about safety standards, and undermined by pork-barreling and deceitful contractors, went the refrain; the Dutch, in contrast, were a nation of honest, clever, hardworking, technologically advanced Hans Brinkers.

Hastily dispatched television news teams from all three U.S. national networks, poised photogenically in front of the mammoth Maeslandt floodgates in Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Waterweg or the Oosterscheldt storm-surge barrier in Zeeland, reported glowingly (and in prime time) on Dutch excellence in water management. The Dutch (so the stories went), unlike the Americans, had historically faced up to their precarious situation on the low-lying North Sea coast, whatever the cost. Surely their experience held lessons for the reconstruction of New Orleans and the construction of effective and ecologically responsible flood-control systems in the Mississippi Delta. The favorite case in point was the ambitious Delta Plan, which closed off the estuaries of the Rhine and Meuse rivers in response to the catastrophic storm-surge flood of February 1953. To the American reporters, that flood seemed quite analogous to what had just befallen New Orleans, and now it was clearly time for the United States to launch its own Delta Plan. None dwelled for long on the fact of the 1953 flood itself, or on the large number of deaths (1,870) it caused. That the Netherlands should have been so unprepared for such a devastating storm surge did not fit the image of the nation as indomitable master of the flood.

The earliest news features focused on the hardware of water management—the need for something like the Oosterscheldt barrier in Lake Pontchartrain and a Maeslandtkering for the Mississippi—but later press coverage tended to stress the ecological turn that Dutch flood control had taken. In an interview on 8 September 2005, National Public Radio’s Ira Flatow declared that the Dutch had learned “that while you can’t stop the waters from rising you can work with nature,” a reference to the “half-open” design of the Oosterscheldt storm-surge barrier and the current “room for water” projects on the Rhine and Meuse rivers. (The Oosterscheldt barrier, though it provides a solid bulwark against storm surges, allows a measure of tidal action in the estuary under normal conditions, thereby helping to preserve wetlands as well as the flourishing oyster and mussel industry.) The lesson for the United States was that it was high time to abandon the venerable Corps of Engineers tradition of constraining the Mississippi in a corset of levees, which had robbed the Delta of riverborne silt and nutrients, accelerated its subsidence and erosion, and deprived New Orleans of much of its natural buffer against storm surges.

How accurate was the U.S. media’s portrayal of flood control in the Netherlands? At best it is an open question. Even as American reporters heaped praise on Dutch flood defenses, major newspapers in the Netherlands were running articles that framed the New Orleans disaster as a warning. Several experts gave it as their opinion that Dutch dikes were also substandard in many places and that, without new investment, the Netherlands might well take up where New Orleans left off.

Contrary to the romantic view expressed in the American media, staying one up on the floods is not a genetic proclivity. Hard political and rhetorical work has gone into maintaining the vaunted defenses that keep the Netherlands more or less dry and allow it to prosper. Still, the easy access of a vocal “hydraulic lobby” to the Dutch media betrays the vitality and persistence of what I call “water culture” in the Netherlands—and contrasts starkly with the fragmented and sporadic attention paid to water in the American national media. That is one reason why there is no storm-surge barrier (yet) in Lake Pontchartrain.

The 32-kilometer-long Afsluitdijk, which closes off the Zuiderzee from the North Sea. To the right is the ocean, to the left the freshwater Ijsselmeer. Due to a negative climate scenario, the entire dike will have to be raised nearly a meter in the next few years to meet the ten-thousand-year-flood standard. (Author’s photo.)

We may grant the claim that Dutch coastal defenses, with their endless kilometers of uniform “Delta-level” dikes (fig. 1), meticulously maintained dunes and beaches, and ingenious dams and storm-surge barriers, provide more adequate and equitable flood protection than exists in the Mississippi Delta, particularly in and around New Orleans. Of course, the Rhine is no Mississippi, and North Sea storms are no match for the likes of Katrina. That partly explains why Dutch safety norms, although they too are calculated on the basis of presumptive losses in case of flooding and therefore privilege the wealthy, densely populated ring of cities near the western coast, are orders of magnitude higher than those in place for New Orleans. The Dutch “design flood” is expected only once in ten thousand years for the urbanized west, once in four thousand years for rural Zeeland. Compare this to thirty or forty years for a Category Four hurricane on the Louisiana coast.

That said, there remains the idea that the Dutch have learned to work with nature and that that knowledge has helped produce a more sustainable system of flood defenses. While the Mississippi Delta is eroding at an alarming rate, in their better world (so the story goes) the Dutch are reestablishing and preserving wetlands.

There is a germ of truth in this, but also considerable mystification. It is certainly the case that since the 1970s Dutch hydraulic engineers have discovered (or, rather, been painfully taught to respect) the value of accommodating nature. This might be elevating were it not for the fact that in the previous thousand years the inhabitants of the Lowlands single-mindedly bent themselves to exactly the opposite task: transforming their realm into a huge garden in which nature—save wind and rain—is thoroughly domesticated. This provided them with a country, but at a price. A third of this garden presently lies below mean sea level, and nearly 60 percent is vulnerable to flooding. Producing and maintaining such precarious real estate was only possible by incorporating nature into human order—that is, by creating a hybrid of nature and culture. This hybrid order was based on constraining the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers, along with a host of minor watercourses, between levees and more or less hermetically closing off the Delta from the sea, a project that started in about the year 1000 with damming up smaller rivers and culminated in the Delta Works. Against this violent background, working with nature appears a marginal and recent accomplishment. Indeed, it was only possible to envision such a “soft” approach on the basis of the “hard” insurance that had already been taken out. To reconstruct the Mississippi Delta along the lines of the Dutch Delta would require raising existing levees to the level of a four- or ten-thousand-year design flood and building a ring of dikes around the outer islands, connected by hurricane-proof dams across all the river outlets. As a sop to nature, one or two of the dams could be built as open storm-surge barriers in order to conserve some small portion of the doomed wetlands.

Still, for the moment the Dutch appear to have achieved both a degree of safety and some measure of accomodation to nature—an achievement that seems unthinkable in the Mississippi Delta, at least in the short term. What differences in geography and history account for this discrepancy? The answer, in a nutshell, is threefold: scale, time, and water culture.

The Netherlands is a small country—just about as big as the Mississippi Delta, in fact. Hydrologically speaking, these two regions are quite comparable. However, in the Netherlands the Delta, one way or another, comprises almost all of the country. The concerns and problems of its several parts have in the course of time become the concerns and problems of the nation as a whole. New Orleans’s tragedy is that the Mississippi Delta is a small tail attached to a great big dog, and the tail’s problems are not necessarily the dog’s most pressing ones.

The inhabitants of the Dutch Delta have also been in the business of organizing their hydraulic environment for much longer—more than a millenium. New Orleans has only been in existence since 1718, and the earliest drainage and levee improvements date only from the 1790s, a scant two centuries. The Netherlands’ head start meant that water management could become a formative component of social and political organization in a way that was patently impossible in the Mississippi Delta, subject as it initially was to the vagaries of imperial competition among the Spanish, French, and Americans and then to the military and commercial interests of an expanding United States. Doubtless hydrological concerns occupied as high a spot on the political agenda in towns like New Orleans and Morgan City as they did in Rotterdam, but on the national level they were victims of cost-benefit calculations that can seem cold-blooded if not cynical. What were New Orleans or Morgan City worth to Montana or California? What are the poor black neighborhoods of New Orleans or the Cajun towns of the Atchafalaya Basin worth to Cincinnati or Vicksburg?

Dutch water culture developed over centuries within a framework of local and regional water boards dominated by landowners. Land-based tithes and contributions of labor in the form of building and patrolling dikes and sluices kept the boards solvent. The Dutch honed negotiating skills over the course of centuries of conflict within and among the water boards, throughout which they remained united by a shared awareness of the treacherousness of the common enemy. The keystone of Dutch water culture was the conviction that conflict, left unresolved, would ultimately undermine everyone’s defensive posture. Sea-level rise and anthropogenic soil subsidence required continual improvements in drainage and flood defense systems. It was not so much “sink or swim” as “sink or organize.”

The founding of the Rijkswaterstaat at the end of the eighteenth century elevated responsibility for water management to the national level, though the new system necessarily built on and incorporated the existing local and regional infrastructure. The Rijkswaterstaat’s mandate was to execute hydraulic works on a super-regional and national scale. In practice this came down to managing the major rivers and reengineering much of the coastal defenses. Over the course of the last two centuries, the fine-grained local systems of drainage and flood defense—including the autonomous water boards that managed them—have been transformed into something like clients of encompassing and standardized national systems.

Dutch water culture is not only a concatenation of multilevel technological systems and modes of organization. It is also a mentality. The original medieval settlers, in colonizing the low-lying peat bogs, made a Faustian bargain with nature. The price of remaining was constant vigilance and arduous toil to maintain the unnatural order and keep the water and the land in their humanly ordained places. A shared determination to pay that price, despite the enormous sacrifices exacted, marked the emergent nation, no less than the shared determination to drive the Spanish out during the Eighty Years War did, and eventually it became the cornerstone of a national religion for a country whose borders more or less also describe the Dutch Delta. Major projects like the Zuiderzee closure and the Delta Works are merely the latest expressions of this national sentiment.

Memorial bronze at the point of final closure of the Zuiderzee Afsluitdijk. “A vital people works on its future.” (Author’s photo.)

In 1932, on the occasion of the dedication of the Zuiderzee Dike, a plaque was unveiled at the monument marking the point of closure (fig. 2). The inscription reads: “A vital people works on its future.” Twelve years later, in 1944, Allied bombers ripped three gaping holes in the dikes of Walcheren Island to flush out the German garrison that held closed the shipping lanes to the strategic harbor of Antwerp. The operation was a brilliant success, but large parts of Walcheren disappeared beneath the waves. With the northern half of the Netherlands still Nazi-occupied and the country stripped of resources, a debate ensued over whether the island was worth reclaiming. The task was daunting. For months, savage tidal currents had scoured the ever widening dike breaches, creating troughs more than 20 meters deep. The queen, exiled in London along with the Dutch government, proclaimed that there could be no question of sacrificing Dutch territory to the sea, whatever the cost. After a heroic effort lasting more than a year that succeeded only thanks to a nationwide mobilization of resources and a gift of caissons left over from the Normandy invasion, all three breaches were closed and Walcheren was restored. Meanwhile, children on the island had had to time their going to school by the tides, and some had even learned to swim in the periodically submerged hallways of their homes.

So what might the U.S. learn from all this? Interesting engineering details, to be sure, but that is hardly where the problems lie. Respect for nature? Given the Dutch record over the past millenium, a phrase that comes to mind is “physician, heal thyself.” A new attitude toward risk and water? Perhaps, but it is hard to see how such a new attitude could result in concrete flood-control policies given the ingrained, constitutionally buttressed, and currently hyped-up American distrust of big government. And it stands to reason that big government, of which the Corps of Engineers is a paragon, is bound to—has, in fact, repeatedly—run into trouble in a nation as extensive and geographically diverse as the United States. In the Netherlands, what’s good for southerly Walcheren is, mutatis mutandis, also good for northerly Schiermonnikoog. What’s good for Louisiana is often a far cry from what’s good for North Dakota.

Like the postage-stamp-size Netherlands, many states in the United States are reasonably homogenous geographical and climatological entities, and their inhabitants share similar histories and cultural adaptations vis-à-vis a specific and limited set of natural threats—floods, forest fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, blizzards. States seem the most sensible political units for dealing with threats stemming from natural disaster: to each his own. And with disaster-management protocols sensibly embedded at the state and city level, the distributive logic of the pork barrel can cut in where local resources fall short.

One problem with this scheme is that from the perspective of natural disasters not all states are created equal. Some are even victimized by the efforts of others to manage their own natural threats. Louisiana, threatened not only by hurricanes from the south but also by the Mississippi from the north, is a case in point. As the upstream riparian states improve their own drainage and flood defenses, aided and abetted by the Corps of Engineers, the floodwaters keep rising and the walls around New Orleans and Morgan City have to be built higher and higher. The Constitution of the United States was not designed to handle these sorts of inequities. River-basin management would of course be a good strategy, but the tough residue of states’ rights at the heart of the Constitution makes it difficult in practice. That’s why New Orleans ended up with a cut-rate and racist evacuation scheme instead of adequate flood and hurricane defenses.

In the end, the lesson offered by the history of Dutch water management touches such a fundamental constitutional nerve as to make it an unlikely occasion for learning. The lesson is that major natural threats like hurricanes and coastal flooding are too big for individual citizens to cope with, too big for local authorities, and too big even for states. But while the U.S. federal government has historically been empowered and in general eager to deal with clear and present dangers, it has been less willing and less able to face vague and distant ones, like the chance of flooding sometime in the next century.

Meanwhile, nature works its own course. The Dutch say, “A vital people works on its future.” But only time will tell whether even such determination can prevail over the ever rising waters and the ever subsiding land. A New Orleans–like apocalypse may yet prove to be the very future the Dutch are so diligently working on.

Cornelis Disco teaches at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He has published extensively on Dutch water management and is working on a book exploring the interrelationship of the Dutch and the international Rhine.

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.

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.

More unsettling, though, was my publisher’s request to produce a new “post-Katrina” preface to my book. Ideally, she said, it should be in the sort of journalistic prose style that I use for my more popular writing. With New Orleans still under water, I quickly said yes, not really thinking through the implications. What resulted was an odd document, a hybrid between a short-form magazine essay and an introduction to a scholar’s book. I did my best. But I now realize that I came up wanting in important ways. What I created, I think, was far more a historical document, a chronicle of my views of unfolding news, than good history. I was stricken by reports coming out of New Orleans. I could not step back. Worse still, I was too naive to realize how caught up I was in the moment. I should have done what historians do when they don’t have ready answers for hard questions: read history.

In the aftermath of that experience, Technology and Culture kindly offered me the chance to write a review essay about the literature on urban disasters. What follows is my effort to do that. I have not tried to be comprehensive. Instead, I have chosen five books that I think might help readers understand Katrina: John McPhee’s Control of Nature, Craig Colten’s Unnatural Metropolis, Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear, Philip Fradkin’s The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906, and Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella’s Resilient City.{1} Writing this essay has certainly allowed me to organize my own thinking on the subject. Unfortunately, I cannot go back and rewrite the preface to my book, which will have to stand on its own merits. What I can do is suggest how these books, read in concert, suggest precedents for the Katrina debacle, even for the leveling of great cities. Each documents an overreliance on technology, a belief in artifice’s ability to tame nature. This deep faith, no matter how misplaced, has permeated American history. And the consequences have been severe, with the bill yet again coming due in New Orleans. On the one hand, I find these authors’ insights somewhat hopeful; I am sustained by the idea that history can help us to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. But I cannot help but wonder how it is that we seem to have learned so little from our past.

New Orleans used to be a sort of American Amsterdam: romantic, architecturally alluring, and entirely dependent on flood-control technologies for its survival. Much of the city, as we learned during Hurricane Katrina, lies below sea level. A ring of artificial levees, likely now the nation’s most notorious public works, is the only thing keeping the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain from flowing downhill into it. This technological fix, even when it works, brings its own problems to a place that has a high water table and no natural drainage. Because of the levees’ growth through the years, it has become ever harder to get water out of New Orleans once it finds its way in. Every drop of rain must be pumped over the embankments. And so the city relies on even more technology: hundreds of miles of drainage canals and a network of huge pumps, a system designed to shunt excess water to the levees and then push it over the top. All of this artifice makes New Orleans one of the world’s most engineered landscapes, a remarkable example of human confidence that it is possible to “control nature.”

That pithy phrase belongs, of course, to John McPhee. The first of McPhee’s case studies in his 1989 collection The Control of Nature, “Atchafalaya,” is about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ battle to keep the Mississippi River from leaving its current channel for another route to the sea—a potential death blow for New Orleans, which would become a river city without its river.{2} McPhee notes that “for the Mississippi to make such a shift was completely natural” (p. 6). But nature could not be allowed to run its course in this case, because “in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature” (p. 6). More succinctly, McPhee concludes that “nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state” (p. 7). And so the state brought its vast resources to bear on the problem, building a structure that has kept the Mississippi flowing past New Orleans for nearly two decades since McPhee’s essay first appeared in the New Yorker. {3} This span is long beyond what the river would have wrought if left to its own designs. And thus we are left with a tragic irony: for McPhee, it seemed that the greatest threat facing New Orleans in the future was going to be too little water. Oops.

McPhee got that one wrong. But forgive him, because he was right and prescient about so many other things, particularly the politics of technology, the way in which applying artifice to complicated environmental dilemmas creates winners and losers, not to mention unintended consequences. He was equally right about the deep hubris (which some would call the real threat facing New Orleans) necessary to think it possible to domesticate something so wild as the Mississippi. In “Atchafalaya,” McPhee, as he always does, takes his readers on an extraordinary journey: up and down the lower Mississippi with Corps of Engineers officers, a crawfisherman, scholars, and environmental activists, characters almost too colorful to be true. It is a bumpy ride, because everyone wants something different from the river: high water or low, more saltwater incursion or less, some flooding or none at all. There are even some heretics who claim that controlling the river is, at best, a short-term proposition. McPhee clearly sympathizes. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Corps of Engineers show a kind of blank certitude about their mission. One general blusters: “The Corps of Engineers can make the Mississippi River go anywhere the Corps directs it to go” (p. 50). In the end, though, readers know that any victory against the river, and by extension against nature more broadly, will be fleeting. Nature always bats last. Or, as a river pilot puts it, “Nature has more time than we do” (p. 24). The book’s title, then, is suffused with irony. The control of nature is a costly illusion.

Craig Colten agrees. In An Unnatural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans from Nature, he explores the city’s tortuous efforts to keep unwanted water out and reclaim the local wetlands, as well as other examples of the place trying to engineer itself out of harm’s way.{4} A renowned historical geographer and environmental historian, Colten acknowledges that this process has been driven by culture, politics, and economics. That said, he is an unashamed materialist, far more interested in what he calls the “environmental circumstances that city builders faced” (p. 5) in New Orleans than in anything else. For anyone interested in how New Orleans found itself under water for much of the fall of 2005, this book is essential.

Indeed, in the wake of Katrina it is hard not to approach An Unnatural Metropolis teleologically, as if Colten somehow knew that swaths of New Orleans would be destroyed the year his book appeared in print. Reading the past backward carries all manner of risks, not least presentism. Even worse is the tendency to miss small increments of change over time, subtleties that, better understood, might have recast our understanding of events. Assuming inevitability is both less elegant—we have no term of art for this mistake—and more damaging, as it leaves no room for contingency, the gold standard of current academic nuance. An Unnatural Metropolis is filled with small decisions made at the local level and based on inchoate reasoning or flawed logic, decisions that eventually made New Orleans more rather than less vulnerable. It is filled, in other words, with historical contingency along the road to disaster.

Colten begins with flood control. This is a sensible place to start, because without levees there could be no New Orleans. Actually, without commerce there would be no levees and therefore no New Orleans. The city is a product of imperial ambitions, dreams predicated on the notion that nature can be mastered. French, Spanish, and then American settlers, all entranced by booster myths, viewed the landscape of the Mississippi Valley and decided a city would thrive near the mouth of the continent’s greatest river system. The city would be a metropolitan entrepôt, poised to gather up the produce of a huge hinterland. Where New Orleans now sits, on relatively high ground blessed with connections to Lake Pontchartrain, seemed a more likely location for such an urban project than others in the area. That the place was a bit of a fixer-upper, in need of massive technological interventions to keep it going, was deemed a reasonable tradeoff. After all, the people living there would get rich. They could use some of their profits to tame the local environs, which otherwise would be chaos unbound. Colten subscribes to arguments made decades ago by Peirce Lewis, who called New Orleans “impossible but inevitable”—talk about pith.{5} And so it was that New Orleanians began building levees and trying to drain their city, becoming ever more reliant on technology to keep them safe and nature at bay.

An Unnatural Metropolis next features a chapter on regulating the urban environs, which is framed in terms of “nuisance” abatement: trash and sewage disposal, the quest for potable water, the location of cemeteries, and park planning (pp. 49–50). Again and again, the city pushed its nuisance landscapes away from the urban core. Municipal authorities never seemed to learn that they could not hide from their own filth. What was out of sight and mind one moment kept reappearing the next: rotting trash carried downstream on the river’s current, corpses uncovered by hard rain, yet another eyesore or hazard to be cast farther beyond the pale. At the same time, as with drainage, inadequate municipal financing made real reform difficult. Although this material is fascinating, it demonstrates how current events, far beyond any author’s control, can alter the reception of a book. Following Katrina, most readers, save for specialists, likely will view this chapter as little more than a bridge to the next two, fine-grained inquiries into questions of race, environmental inequalities, and urban space.

In a post-Katrina literary landscape, Colten really hits his stride in chapters 3 and 4, detailing the ways in which the poor and people of color, most often African Americans, typically occupied the lowest, worst-drained, and most-polluted land in New Orleans. For anyone paying attention to the Katrina debacle, this is not news. Colten, though, offers important historical context, noting that this turn of events coincided first with the era of Jim Crow and later with postwar white flight to suburbs made possible as drainage technologies finally improved. Here and elsewhere, Colten is leery of mistaking correlation for causation. He has no hard proof, no smoking gun indicating that white New Orleanians forced African Americans to occupy the low ground and then chose not to extend the city’s drainage apparatus to areas where black people lived. So he is extremely careful with his prose. For instance: “The lapse in sewer service to this low-lying, largely African-American district suggests that a Jim Crow mentality perhaps continued to prevent full engineering efficiency” (p. 97). Absent clear evidence, this is all that Colten offers, a passage typical of the book’s tone: measured and thoughtful, if not always as impassioned as readers shocked by images of Katrina might like.

Colten concludes his book first with threats and then whimsy. As New Orleans expanded, new flood dangers emerged, in part because the illusion that nature was under control had become so convincing. With the massive levees separating the city from the river and lake, and with the urban wetlands reclaimed, New Orleanians could forget the danger they faced. They had to scale the levee to catch a glimpse of the Mississippi; even now, the river roils its way to the Gulf of Mexico largely hidden from view. Stunned tourists in the French Quarter sometimes gazed up from their coffee and beignets in astonishment as a containership glided by, high above street level. But the danger was still there. Colten suggests that New Orleans became dependent on “structural methods” as other cities began embracing “land-use approaches to flood control” (p. 160). While other better-planned cities were starting to work with nature, New Orleans was still trying to control it. The results were predictably bad. For places like the Ninth Ward, a downpour usually meant flooding. And, Colten adds with eerie prescience, a serious hurricane could spell disaster for the lowest-lying areas of the city.

A final chapter details the halfhearted efforts to reintroduce wetlands in recent years. Born of a cultural climate in which to many New Orleanians nature no longer seemed a frontier awaiting conquest, these efforts nonetheless bemuse or frustrate Colten. New Orleans, once a city of swamps, had by the 1960s become a place whose only wetlands could be found on exhibit at the zoo. Additional preserves on the city’s boundaries also disappoint. They represent nature cleansed of its rough edges—hardly nature at all, but instead another tableau of progress in a city convinced that it controls its once-wild environs. The warnings that follow are haunting now, particularly when Colten takes off the gloves in his epilogue. Having drained the wetlands that used to provide reservoirs during floods, New Orleans had put itself in peril. In the event of a severe hurricane, “the city could find itself under water for months. Evacuation would face serious bottlenecks due to the limited number of escape routes across the water-logged terrain.” More chilling: “federal authorities might not be willing to make the investment necessary to save a city that cannot afford to save itself” (p. 191).

No matter how down on its luck the Crescent City may now be, compared to Mike Davis’s vision of Los Angeles, New Orleans remains the city that care forgot. For Davis, L.A.’s glass is not just half-empty, it has long since been shattered in an unfair bar fight and its shards used to wound some poor, unsuspecting passerby. Actually, it is not a glass at all, but a panoptic cylinder, manufactured by an oppressed proletariat and later deployed by urban elites to contain their city’s working classes. Or something like that. Kidding aside, Davis’s Ecology of Fear is an unrelenting neo-Marxist exposé, a polemic that might leave readers afraid to visit Los Angeles for fear of fires, mudslides, earthquakes, killer cougars, poisonous snakes, and flaming bunnies. (Seriously. If Davis is to be believed, the place is absolutely overrun by rabbits on fire.) Oh, and please don’t forget the tornadoes, which are more common in L.A. than in Oklahoma City—at least they are if one accepts Davis’s rather controversial statistics. Wide-ranging, funny, extraordinarily well-written, Ecology of Fear is a crazy quilt. It is often overstated, and tendentious in places. But it is also instructive. And once again, in the aftermath of Katrina, it has a new resonance and feels more timely than ever. Indeed, Davis predicted the carnage that the nation witnessed in New Orleans after the hurricane. He just thought that it would be another city, Los Angeles, that would be destroyed.

Beyond the critique of the way Davis treats evidence—as a rather more plastic substance than many scholars would like—the most damning thing that can be said about Ecology of Fear might also be the book’s greatest virtue: it is as scattered, fragmented, far-reaching, and diverse as Los Angeles itself. Chapters cover the city’s infamous disregard for public space, Southern California’s misunderstood and apparently deadly twisters, and mountain lions hunting humans along the edge-habitats that have been created by the city’s endless sprawl. Another chapter juxtaposes Malibu’s chaparral wildfire cycle with tenement blazes in the heart of downtown L.A., and another conducts a foray into literary studies to examine fictional accounts of Los Angeles’s demise. Finally, there is material that may or may not be about the Los Angeles riots (honestly, having read the book at least ten times, I’m still not entirely sure).

All of that said, Ecology of Fear’s fascinating thesis can be found in its fast-paced first chapter, “The Dialectic of Ordinary Disaster.” It is here that Davis makes his case that Los Angeles is a fraud—not a slice of paradise, blessed with endless summers and miles of lovely beaches, but a disaster just waiting to happen. In fact, calamity in LA is the norm rather than the exception. Even if the city’s elites have papered over this ugly truth with sunny propaganda, Davis explains that “for generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense” (p. 9). The result of this skirting of limits has been tragedy. And when disasters have struck in L.A., time after time those in power have shirked the culpability that Davis believes is rightly theirs by insisting that fickle nature is at fault. This notion of unnatural disasters predates Ted Steinberg’s similar insight, which lies at the core of his Acts of God.{6} Most recently, the idea that natural disasters are not always natural, that they sometimes are socially produced, has run throughout the best coverage of the Katrina tragedy, particularly as the media confronted its own shocked response to the chaos after the hurricane hit. When officials at all levels of government tried to hide behind the rhetoric of a “natural” disaster, they found a skeptical audience armed with reams of studies suggesting the mayhem had been caused by poor planning, an inadequate response, and a culture addicted to technology.

Davis makes four points about disasters that may be applicable throughout urban America. First, L.A. was settled during a period of relatively calm weather following an era of unusually high rainfall in the West. Consequently, assumptions about the city’s disaster future are flawed, based as they are on too narrow a temporal data set. Second, disasters are often products of feedback loops that are too complicated to predict or comprehend, rather than just an outgrowth of an immediately understood causal chain. In these cases, technologies intended to control nature sometimes exacerbate the problems they were designed to solve. Third, most people believe that technologies that may actually be worse than useless will keep them safe in the event of a catastrophe. Fourth, “disaster amnesia is a federally subsidized luxury” (p. 47). This quartet, when mingled in an unstable urban environment, makes for a dangerous cocktail. This is true in LA. And we can see how true it was in New Orleans, which now may be in the midst of a period of more intense storms than ever before in the city’s history, where the post-Katrina chaos was born of factors so complex that the real cause of the disaster may never be fully revealed, where people had misplaced faith in a drainage system and levees that failed them, and where the wealthiest citizens likely will rebuild with federal flood insurance bankrolling their efforts to forget.

Davis’s most compelling material is found in his chapter on fire, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” Picking up where McPhee left off in another New Yorker essay that became the third chapter of The Control of Nature, Davis suggests that fire suppression in the mountains bordering Los Angeles is a fool’s errand.{7} Wildfires not only are part of a natural cycle; the longer vegetation grows between burns, the worse the eventual conflagration will be. Had Davis stopped there, he would have been writing in McPhee’s long shadow. Instead, he deepens the discussion by adding the case of apartment fires in inner-city buildings. Not as worried about the line between causation and correlation as Colten, Davis notes archly that the incidence of wild and urban fires in LA is statistically similar. From there, the two cases diverge: expensive cliff dwellings perched on the urban edge are protected by armies of firefighters; tenements burn with little attention from the city. Federal insurance provides seed money to movie stars who will rebuild mansions in the hills; immigrants in the city lose everything and move on. It’s a brutal story, filled with sarcastic asides. By the end of the book Los Angeles seems a cruel city, equal parts Sodom and Gomorrah, a place deserving of the fate that Davis is certain lurks in its near future. That nearly a decade has passed since Ecology of Fear was published and yet L.A. still stands might surprise readers of this book. Davis, one expects, would shake his head and say, “Just wait.”

Philip Fradkin may be angling to become Northern California’s answer to Mike Davis—ideally, one suspects, without the nasty controversies, but with the brisk sales, if you please. Fradkin’s caustic observations about San Francisco’s disaster history and pessimism about the city’s future match Davis’s views of Los Angeles, even if he lacks Davis’s flair for metaphor and creative juxtaposition. Fradkin also shares Davis’s grave doubts about efforts to control nature, particularly in a dynamic environment like San Francisco’s. If he does not quite see disaster as ordinary there, he remains certain that the next quake is coming. And that the city is not ready.

The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906 is one of a trio of new books about the San Francisco earthquake, all presumably released to capitalize on the hundredth anniversary (18 April 2006) of what Fradkin insists was the worst urban disaster in the nation’s history.{8} He dismisses the 1900 Galveston hurricane, which is sometimes awarded that mantle, as politically unimportant; so much for the six thousand people who died in the storm surge and the rise of Houston as a result of the carnage. Chicago’s 1871 fire was not even half as large as the blaze that followed the San Francisco quake, he notes, and he does not even mention the 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood, which is considered a contender in circles easily mesmerized by David McCullough’s stirring voice and print narration. Of course, such squabbles do not seem quite as interesting now that Katrina has taken the title outright, a bit of renown New Orleans surely can live without. When it comes to his thesis, though, Fradkin is less focused on scale, list-making notwithstanding, than on causation. He insists that the earthquake was not natural. Or rather, while the quake may have been natural—Fradkin seems willing to concede the point—the disaster was caused by people, elites who ignored well-known hazards embedded in the city’s accident-prone site and then collaborated with the media to keep the danger quiet. “San Franciscans, not the inanimate forces of nature, were primarily responsible for the extensive chaos, damage, injuries, and deaths in the great earthquake and firestorms of 1906” (p. xl). So important is the argument, familiar to readers of Colten, Davis, and McPhee, that it is the first line in Fradkin’s preface. Cut to the chase, indeed.

Fradkin spends half of his book describing the earthquake, whose gruesome particulars are already well known. Still, this exposition is gripping, if grim. Fradkin is a commendable researcher and a totally committed and capable social historian. He recovers the voices of a wide array of common people, allowing his varied subjects to speak for themselves. The text, consequently, can sometimes seem a bit like a parade of quotes. Overall, though, the effect is laudable, as even well-worn terrain like the intentional destruction of Chinatown feels fresh again, though the accompanying tone of righteous indignation can be tedious. Fradkin is also an excellent storyteller, keenly aware of the importance of engaging characters. Fortunately, he has no shortage of these. The book is peppered with colorful anecdotes, including the case of opera singer Enrico Caruso, whose presence in the earthquake and later escape from the ruins tells readers volumes about San Francisco’s Gilded Age culture.

The meat of the book, what’s new here, arrives in the second half, which concerns the disaster’s aftermath. It was then that “the rich and powerful . . . usurped the functions of government” (p. xl): first by having a citizens’ committee order looters (as fluidly defined here as they were in post-Katrina New Orleans) shot on sight; then by persecuting Asian Americans as part of a concerted Anglo land grab that may seem familiar to observers paying attention to the politics of rebuilding (or not rebuilding) parts of the Crescent City’s battered Ninth Ward; and finally by cooking the books to ensure that the rich did better than San Francisco’s common folk during the relief effort. Fradkin is also interested in the politics of reconstruction, particularly the ways that powerful California Progressives like James D. Phelan used the quake as justification for race baiting, which then brought them expanded power and popularity.

In the end, though, the most poignant part of a book that now lives in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina may be Fradkin’s lament for how little San Francisco learned from the tragedy. The city rose from ruin too quickly to implement proper planning, instead building on loose soil—so-called made land—and hushing up talk about the next major earthquake. Fradkin notes that the death toll, which is still unknown, would have been much higher had the temblor taken place during business hours. Most troubling, seismologists predict that the next major quake will happen soon, likely some time in the next three decades. Worse still, it will be centered in an urban region that is approximately twenty times larger than it was in 1906.

If you are looking for an antidote to the depressing fare typical of the disaster literature, pick up The Resilient City, a collection edited by Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella. These well-illustrated essays examine topics ranging from the aftermath of the recent terrorist attacks on Oklahoma City and Manhattan to the rebuilding of Washington following the British invasion in 1814, the rise of Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo from the rubble and ashes of World War II, and the reconstruction of Mexico City and Tangshan, China, following earthquakes. These and several other cases make up a “global tour of disaster and recovery”(p. 335). Despite all the included destruction, The Resilient City maintains an optimistic tone, in refreshing contrast to Davis and Fradkin. The book is also commendable for its vast geographic reach and long temporal arc, and for drawing from a variety of disciplines: Asia to North America, the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first, art history to urban studies. On the opposite side of the ledger, despite its remarkable sweep and recent publication, the book feels somewhat timebound, even anachronistic in places. This is a book written in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, and one has the sense that the editors and authors might now regret having used the destruction of the World Trade Center as their baseline for urban catastrophe.

The backdrop of 9/11 does not, however, undermine the book’s utility or its principal argument, which is that modern cities, no matter how severely they’ve been damaged, almost always have recovered. As Vale and Campanella put it: “Although cities have been destroyed throughout history—sacked, shaken, burned, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and poisoned—they have, in almost every case, risen again like the mythic phoenix” (p. 3). This is an upbeat point, at least in the context of disaster studies, and something New Orleanians might celebrate. But Vale and Campanella complicate their thesis by recognizing that observers must pay attention to the meaning of “recovery.” Does the word refer to a city’s return to its predisaster population, economic activity, or emotional stability? And who comes through the horror unscathed or able to move on most easily? Although these insights would be interesting enough on their own as we cope with our hurricane hangover, The Resilient City goes further, suggesting why cities recover from even the worst calamities: namely, that they are rebuilt because of their symbolic value, their economic centrality, and the influence of their citizens. In other words, the reconstruction of cities confers renewed legitimacy on governments, forestalls economic downturns, and placates a significant portion of the electorate. In sum, cities are rebuilt because it is politically expedient for those in power to rebuild them.

Thus it is that New Orleans’s future, which might at least briefly have seemed rather bright during stretches of The Resilient City, begins to appear cloudy again by the book’s end. Despite a full slate of examples of cities that have weathered episodes just as or even more destructive than Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans may have an even bigger problem, unrelated to technology or inclement weather. The city, unfortunately, makes a lousy symbol for those in power right now; it is a constant reminder of the state’s failure to secure the safety of its citizens. Nature, therefore, is no longer an enemy of the state along the lower Mississippi. Moreover, if rebuilding comes down to questions of power, New Orleans is in deep trouble. The city has lost population, economic clout, and even some of its cultural standing over the last two decades. Its port remains a crucial feature in the nation’s commercial landscape, and its food, music, and architecture, not to mention social complexities, are all foundations of the American scene. But the city was suffering long before Katrina battered and then drowned it. Sadly, New Orleans must now go to Washington with hat in hand in order to secure its future. The city needs federal funding to keep paying for technologies that purport to control nature. Without this money, and the artifice it buys, the city will die. There it is: New Orleans, once our Amsterdam, may become an American Atlantis, forgotten beneath the waves.

So, with the Gulf Coast cleanup ongoing—although in many parts of the region it has not even really started—people are looking for some way to envision a future for New Orleans and its hinterlands. The city’s mayor, Ray Nagin, and Louisiana’s governor, Kathleen Blanco, have put together advisory panels comprising activists, experts, and muckety-mucks (who have been duly criticized for being too heavily weighted with muck). These people, we are told, will make the decisions that will lift New Orleans from its current prostrate state, wring the city out, and make it safer in the future. In doing so, they will have to face choices—a great many of which will be about technology and the environment—that boggle the mind. Most difficult, perhaps, will be the issue of which neighborhoods will be rebuilt and which will not. For the moment the committees are trying to punt; they have suggested allowing the market to make the choice for them. But if McPhee, Colten, Davis, Fradkin, Vale, and Campanella offer any single conclusion, it is this: disasters outmuscle not only the invisible hands of capitalism but also the finest technologies arrayed by flesh and blood to control nature. And if I have learned anything from the depressing spectacle of Katrina and its aftermath, it is this: in considering the present and the future, one should not forget the past. That may seem self-serving coming from a historian. It may also be a bit of a cliché. But Louisiana’s reconstruction committees could do far worse in thinking about their job than to consult the literature on cities, technology, and urban disasters.

{1}John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York, 1989); Craig Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge, 2005); Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998); Philip Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco nearly Destroyed Itself (Berkeley, Calif., 2005); and Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella, eds., The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (New York, 2005).

{2}The second chapter of The Control of Nature, “Cooling the Lava,” deals with a volcanic eruption in Iceland. In a classic scholar’s dodge, I will just say that it is beyond the scope of this essay. McPhee’s third chapter, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” will figure later in this review.

{3}John McPhee, “The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya,” New Yorker, 23 February 1987, 39–44.

{4}By way of full disclosure, I read Colten’s book in manuscript. I liked it then. I like it now. I have a blurb on the back jacket. If that seems like inside baseball, let me suggest that this essay is less an academic review than a rumination about nature, technology, and urban disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

{5}Peirce Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe, 2003).

{6}Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000).

{7}John McPhee, “The Control of Nature: Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” pts. 1 and 2, New Yorker, 26 September 1988, 45–78, and 3 October 1988, 72–90; reprinted in The Control of Nature, 183–272.

{8}The others are Dennis Smith, San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires (New York, 2005), and Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (New York, 2005).

Ari Kelman is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award in 2004. His essays on Katrina and New Orleans have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Nation, Slate, and a variety of other newspapers and academic publications.

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Hurricane Katrina was natural. The disaster that hit New Orleans was not. No amount of rationalization, of posturing, of caviling about this or that interpretation can change that fact. The ruin of New Orleans resulted from human error and self-delusion, from hope that trumped reality. If one looks back over the years, the disaster unfolds like a Greek tragedy, inevitably, with periodic pain and horror, and with protagonists oblivious to warnings about coming catastrophe. The tragedy of New Orleans (and of many other areas of the Gulf Coast) is not a watershed in American history because of the devastation and suffering, as horrible as they were, but because once and for all it leaves us without so much as a fig leaf to cover human conceit. Now more than ever we recognize the arrogance implicit in the term “natural disaster.” Such disasters are rarely inevitable but involve questions of choice. Nature is not responsible. As Pogo Possum said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Almost daily, newspapers publish stories that suggest mistakes and miscalculations in constructing the defenses of New Orleans against floods and storm surges. In the months ahead, various teams of experts will bring forth reports that apportion blame and suggest remedies. In the deluge of ink it is easy to forget that this disaster had many antecedents, and historians have the special responsibility to provide context and perspective. One needn’t go far back into the past for material. Hurricane Audrey in 1957 killed 557 victims near St. Charles who had refused to evacuate. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 seriously damaged six thousand homes near the Port of New Orleans; deluged the Lower Ninth Ward with twelve feet of water, carrying away corpses and cars; and blocked the lower Mississippi with a hundred destroyed or grounded barges and dozens of other sunken obstructions.{2} Following Hurricane Camille in 1969, one Pass Christian newspaper publisher called the recovery effort “as colossal a snafu as I’ve ever seen in my life,” and an African-American leader in Biloxi said it was “a dehumanizing and degrading experience.” Politicians criticized the relief effort, especially the response of the federal Office of Emergency Preparedness, the forerunner of the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Even the Red Cross received criticism for giving less money to a black than to a white, even though both men had the same size families and the black man had a significantly lower income.{3}

Nor should that context be confined to hurricanes in the New Orleans region, or even to the United States. The parallels between Katrina and the 1953 storm-surge flood in he Netherlands are truly remarkable. The Dutch catastrophe killed 1,835 people, left 800 kilometers of dikes and 43,000 homes damaged, 3,000 homes destroyed, and 72,000 people evacuated. As with Katrina, lack of communication and coordination among various governmental and relief organizations added to the death toll, and lack of logistics support, especially helicopters, significantly hindered relief efforts. Perhaps the most surprising, in both the Netherlands in 1953 and in New Orleans in 2005 engineering plans existed that, had they been implemented, would have saved lives and property. Budgetary concerns prevented the implementation of the Dutch plan, while environmental and commercial concerns transformed the New Orleans plan prepared by the Army Corps of Engineers into something less expensive, less environmentally destructive, and less protective.{4}

In his essay elsewhere in this issue, Nil Disco contrasts the Dutch “water culture,” which dates back centuries and has been incorporated into a multitude of regional political structures, with a U.S. system that must handle far more diverse water issues, ranging from Western drought to Eastern floods. Despite some superficial similarities, the United States and the Netherlands have profoundly different political cultures. In the Netherlands following the 1953 flood, the federal government assumed more authority and the number of local water boards was drastically reduced. A similar increase of federal authority in the United States must overcome deeply held biases. Americans have distrusted “big government” from the earliest days of the Republic, and a system of governments within government, with separately defined powers, continues to challenge any notion of centralized administration. Both culture and the Constitution, then, thwart national water planning and, as the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort shows, can also obstruct efficient relief operations.

In the United States and the Netherlands neither flood problems nor their solutions are new. For a large flood control system, such as exists in New Orleans, engineers continue to stress structural defensive bulwarks, perhaps supplemented by nonstructural solutions such as raised floor levels, flood-proofed buildings, flood insurance, expanded wetlands, and improved warning systems. Environmentalists and natural scientists point out the dangers to ecological systems when gated structures interfere with water flow; the fishing industry warns about damage to various commercial fish species; and others sound the alarm about windfall profits falling to real estate agents and land developers as a consequence of land creation and increased flood protection. In Louisiana the debate is often loud, always predictable, and rarely easily resolved.

Social solutions in response to actual or potential economic or environmental degradation are equally controversial and again have a long pedigree. To give one example, in 1968, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert C. Weaver, testified in a joint House-Senate hearing during deliberations that eventually culminated in passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969.{5} Discussing the urban environment, Weaver recommended that the country “develop a national urban land policy, a policy that can serve to guide both public and private action”; “evolve—invent if necessary—metropolitan organizations to meet problems that cannot be handled between historic boundaries of local government”; “take the responsibility—on both a national and at the local level—of rebuilding our inner cities so that the environment is once again amenable to human life”; and “realize that we cannot attain a decent environment without social justice. I do not state this as a theory, but as a fact.” It hardly seems necessary to suggest that all these points remain relevant and especially for a city like New Orleans.

Although the Katrina disaster echoes earlier problems and solutions, its magnitude raises our sensibility to certain issues. Two questions, I suggest, are paramount: the appropriate federal interest in providing protection against floods and the appropriate level of risk to be applied to the design of flood control facilities. The question of federal interest is not the same as was raised a century ago, when conservative congressmen and presidents questioned whether the Constitution even permitted federal involvement in flood control. The courts long ago resolved that issue. Rather, the question now is, how can the federal government ensure that federal monies are used effectively and wisely to promote national benefits? To put it another way, at what point does the federal investment no longer make sense? Such questions are especially difficult when human life is at stake. The issue goes back at least to the 1808 Gallatin Plan, but has never been satisfactorily answered. After nearly two hundred years of water resources development and a hodgepodge of statutes and executive orders, the United States still has no institutional framework for developing nationwide, coherent, comprehensive water resources programs, including programs for flood control. Congress, not the bureaucracy or outside experts, remains the final arbiter.

In the case of Hurricane Katrina (as in other similar major catastrophes), Congress will receive reports and recommendations from many organizations, including the Army Corps of Engineers, but ultimately it alone will decide how many billions of dollars to give to Louisiana to restore and improve hurricane protection and evacuation facilities. Levee board members, state politicians, and transportation, agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests have descended on Washington to plead their case. Out of this turmoil will emerge some sort of idea of the appropriate federal interest, or, to put it more parochially, how much the North Dakota farmer will have to pay for New Orleans floodwalls. Should that farmer, acting through his congressional representatives, be able to demand some sort of quid pro quo from the city of New Orleans for the use of his money? Should he, for instance, be able to demand that certain parts of the city be evacuated, or that all buildings within the city be flood proofed? Conversely, how much freedom should New Orleans residents relinquish in order to obtain federal money? Were New Orleans residents to give up land for levees, buildings for parks and marshland, savings accounts for flood insurance, and their architecture for flood-proofed buildings on stilts, they might decrease risk considerably, but at what cost? As the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky argued, “No risk may be the highest risk of all.”{6} Hardly any issue guarantees more debate with less prospect for resolution than the appropriate balance between public good and private freedom.

Cost sharing between federal agencies such as the Corps of Engineers and nonfederal agencies such as levee boards and towns complicates flood control planning.{7} Should the nonfederal interests have inadequate funds to cover their share of the costs—or should Congress refuse to appropriate the authorized federal share—the temptation is to keep the project alive by redesigning it to reduce its cost, which usually also means reducing its benefits. Congressional demands, bureaucratic attempts to avoid a declining workload, and the Corps’ desire to satisfy its nonfederal “partners” increase the pressure to find a solution. The Corps sometimes finds itself facing a choice between half a loaf and none at all—between constructing a project at less expense but with a greater risk of structural failure or insisting on an engineering solution that provides more protection for life and property but may not be built at all if Congress or local interests refuse to accept the additional costs. New Orleans hurricane protection offers an instructive case study.

The question of risk is tied to the issue of the appropriate federal interest. The measure of flood risk using probability analysis is a bit over a century old. In 1923 the California Department of Public Works plotted the probable frequency of floods occurring in 100 years for 140 rivers or groups of rivers within the state. For example, a ten-year flood would have a probable frequency of ten per hundred years. At first hydrologists used the term “California Method” to describe this approach. In 1930, engineering consultant Allen Hazen suggested that the term “one percent flood” be used instead of “hundred year flood.” The change clarified that a one percent chance existed that the flood would occur in any one year. Although many professional hydrologists supported Hazen’s proposal, terms such as “hundred-year flood” gained wide popularity and led to much misunderstanding among the public.

The danger to this entire approach—only really appreciated in the last couple of decades—is that it translates what Ed Constant, in his comment in the January issue of T&C, called “narratives about nature” into something that is negotiable through the manipulation of hydrographs and frequency curves. It allows for infinite tinkering with engineering skill, legislative appropriations, and scientific modeling to achieve the illusion of a relatively risk-free solution. In short, as Tom Hughes has suggested in his recent book Human-Built World, it furthers our faith in technological fixes. Politicians demand these fixes, and planners respond with a barrage of studies that provide much data but often conflicting and unhelpful conclusions. Still, the public assumes that it is protected. At the most recent American Historical Association Meeting in Philadelphia, I participated in a special panel on Hurricane Katrina. During the discussion that followed the panel presentations, a woman from New Orleans expressed surprise that there was any risk at all in living behind the massive levees the Corps has built along the Mississippi River. I guess I didn’t make her day when I assured her that there was.

Complex systems lower the level of predictability, and certainly the hundreds of miles of levees and floodwalls surrounding and within the New Orleans metropolitan area qualify as a complex system. However, as Craig Colten and Barbara Allen remind us in their essays, the problem is not simply one of quantity—reducing flood water—but also of quality. Writing about the petrochemical industry along the Mississippi River and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, Colten and Allen raise issues that the geographer Gilbert White first identified during the New Deal. New flood control facilities invite industrial, commercial, and residential growth that results in greater damage when floodwalls and levees are breached. When chemical and petroleum processing plants are devastated, the water supply and the environment are degraded, threatening human life and health. All too often, the people most hurt are minorities who live close to some of the refineries and chemical plants. It is easy to predict that environmental justice will be one of the hardest issues to resolve as a new New Orleans emerges.

Craig Colten reminds us in his book The Unnatural Metropolis that geographers portray the human-environment interaction in two different ways: “Relations with positive outcomes define resources, while negative results constitute hazards.”{8} Yet most water bodies are both hazard and resource—shallow Lake Pontchartrain no less than the Mississippi River itself. Most of the time, the lake provides commercial fishing and public recreation. But when a hurricane churns up its waters and a surge threatens its levees and floodwalls, Lake Pontchartrain becomes a hazard of horrific proportions. Todd Shallat’s essay illuminates how this contest between hazard and resource has played out in New Orleans. Today, environmentalists—and many engineers—argue the necessity of restoring marshland to act as a buffer against storm surges, but it is not clear how to do this without causing financial hardship and dislocation. Shallat notes the spotty success of restoration research and wonders whether the Corps can undo its destruction of wetlands. Such attempts almost inevitably call for adaptive management, for periodically modifying operations in response to new challenges. Both time and costs are difficult to calculate, and cynics see natural scientists holding a bottomless tin cup into which Congress drops the national wealth. But recovering from Hurricane Katrina requires the restoration of both society and the environment. Adaptive management must address economic as well as natural forces in an attempt to provide equity, security, and stability to the human population while minimizing negative impacts on the environment. It won’t be easy, and it will be expensive.

However, Carolyn Kolb need not worry about the Corps of Engineers’ commitment to restoring the hurricane protection levees and floodwalls in New Orleans. Both the Chief of Engineers and the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works have publicly committed the agency to restoring the structures to their pre-Katrina condition by this coming June.{9} Upgrades and improvements await further reports and congressional approval and authorization. Nor can I, writing as one who has traveled to New Orleans and seen some of the destruction as well as the beginnings of recovery, doubt that the city will survive and recover much of its vitality. In this, I differ from the pessimists—many of whom were in attendance at that AHA session I mentioned above—who question whether New Orleans will ever be able to restore its culture and uniqueness. The city may be smaller, but it will come back.

Finally, Ed Constant made one comment in his short piece that bears repeating: “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.” Amen to that, Ed, and I would add this: The more we know about nature the more inclined we are to try to change it. Every time we do invite disaster.

Epilogue: Bourbon Street, New Orleans, January 19, 2006, 8:30 p.m. The street is not so crowded as usual and some of the restaurants are still boarded up, but the strip clubs are open and people are drinking in the street. Souvenir shops display t-shirts that say “FEMA is a four letter word” and “FEMA is the other F-word”. Other t-shirts refer to the two “bitches” who almost destroyed the town—Katrina and Rita. The black humor masks both gloom and contempt. I doubt that New Orleans residents find the shirts as humorous as tourists do. Looking around, one cannot help but feel that the manufactured passion of Bourbon Street pales in comparison with the passion that lies just beyond. Still, fires, earthquakes, and floods often lead to a better understanding of nature’s command. In the end, the Greek dramatists, not Francis Bacon, had it right. Knowledge is not power. Reason is. To which Sophocles might have added more specifically: Remember that the affairs of the community are the affairs of all.

{1} See Melinda Deslatte, “Governor Unveils Plan for Levee District,” The Advocate (Baton Rouge), 26 January 2006. Deslatte notes that the New Orleans Levee Board operated “a police force, an airport, two marinas and a $47 million budget” in addition to its levee duties. There is now a plan to consolidate and professionalize Louisiana’s levee boards.

{2} Todd Shallat, “In the Wake of Hurricane Betsy,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change, ed. Craig E. Colten (Pittsburgh, 2000), 124.

{3} Robert Walters, “U.S. Disaster Aid Stirs A Storm of Criticism,” Washington Evening Star, 22 December 1969. See also, Martin Reuss, “Katrina: Historical Perspective Needed,” Public Works History 88 (winter 2006): 8.

{4} G. P. van de Ven, ed., Man-Made Lowlands: History of Water Management and Land Reclamation in the Netherlands, 4th ed. (Utrecht, 2004), 399–400; Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Oosterschelde Storm Surge Barrier: A Test Case for Dutch Water Technology, Management, and Politics,” Technology and Culture 43 (2002): 569–84.

{5} “Statement of Robert C. Weaver, Secretary, Department of Housing and Urban Development,” in U.S. Congress, Joint House-Senate Colloquium to Discuss a National Policy for the Environment: Hearing Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, United States Senate, and the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, 90th Cong., 2d sess., 17 July 1968, 19–22.

{6} Aaron Wildavsky, “No Risk Is the Highest Risk of All,” in Readings in Risk, ed.Theodore S. Glickman and Michael Gough (Washington, D.C., 1990), 121.

{7} In the nineteenth century, “flood prevention” was the preferred term. In the early twentieth century, the term of art was “flood control.” This term is still used, although the Corps of Engineers now favors the term “flood damage reduction.” Each term clearly marks increased engineering modesty. Since 1986, cost sharing on federal flood control projects has been required.

{8} Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge, 2005), 17.

{9} Mark Schleifstein, “Prestorm Protection Promised by June: Congress Expected to Strengthen System,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 20 January 2006.

At the end of April 2006, Dr. Reuss retired from his position as senior historian in the Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He plans to remain active in water resources history and looks forward to completing his book on the history of hydrology in the United States. T&C asked for his reaction to the essays concerning Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath that appeared in the January 2006 issue of the journal, and he replied with the essay that follows. The views expressed in it are his, and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.

©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.