To what extent was Katrina a natural disaster?
don’t call it a natural disaster in the city of new orleans or you’ll have an argument. we’re all paying attention to the 10th anniversary of hurricane katrina, but from new orleans’ perspective it’s the 10th anniversary of the levee failure. katrina, when it hit new orleans, it wasn’t a particularly bad storm, or at least it wasn’t the kind of storm we’d be talking about ten years later. it’s just that the storm surge it created brought down the levee system. half of the 350-mile flood protection system failed, even though it was supposed to be strong enough to withstand a category 3 hurricane, which was katrina.
You are reading: Books about hurricane katrina
in new orleans no one says natural disaster. it was the man-made levees that failed. The US Army Corps of Engineers, which built the levees, admitted that basic mistakes were made. in fact, several scientific teams studied it. One of the team leaders, a UC Berkeley engineering professor, called it “the worst engineering disaster since Chernobyl.”
He begins his book with the story of the police closing a New Orleans bridge to evacuees.
for many people, the only way out of the city was a bridge connecting new orleans with majority white suburbs. there were reports in the media of mass looting and rampant crime, so police cars blocked the bridge and officers were standing there with rifles. this was a blockade that prevented mostly African-American crowds from crossing to safety. the police just screamed in the faces of the evacuees and cursed. some of them are grannies in their seventies, little kids, new orleans cops. no one crossed that bridge into the white suburbs.
“It was not an equal opportunity disaster and it has not been an equal opportunity recovery.”
Can you describe the political and social atmosphere that leads to something like this happening?
in my opinion, it should be one of those racial contact points that, in the united states, we make synonymous with howard beach and ferguson. it was horrible what happened but so many things were happening, 80 percent of the city was under water, people were not being rescued. this story is lost.
what happened was that it shouldn’t have happened. the crescent city connecting bridge, the bridge we’re talking about, is run by the state. the governor can close a bridge, the secretary of transportation can close a bridge. They never gave that order. It was closed by the local police, from the small town of Gretna. the bailiffs of that parish just decided that they were going to close the bridge. the governor was furious, but she was concentrating on getting buses to the 50,000 people who were trapped. so, for two full days, it was closed without legal basis.
Now that ten years have passed since the hurricane, how have things changed for New Orleans?
somehow new orleans is looking better than ever. Anyone who has ever lost her belongings in a fire knows that they buy you new things. so there are all these new buildings, all these new houses. there’s a big starter camp, the youngsters flocked there. they discovered new orleans after katrina. the city center is in very good shape. neighborhoods are being revived.
The other half of the story is that much of the city is still in pretty bad shape. There are 100,000 fewer African Americans living in New Orleans today than at the time of Katrina. what you see is black working class communities, black middle class communities, even a more affluent black professional class, still struggling. in the lower 9th ward, which became iconic after Katrina (black, working class, poor), only 36 percent of its population returned ten years later. you look at the seventh district: black, working class, lower middle class, it’s maybe 70 percent after katrina. pontchartrain park, a black middle class community, 75 percent return. I could go on with more neighborhoods.
It was not an equal opportunity disaster and it has not been an equal opportunity recovery.
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your first book is a novel, tom piazza’s city of refuge. What can a novel tell us about disaster that nonfiction can’t?
focuses just before, during, and months after the disaster. has two characters. I feel compelled in my book to talk about the president, the mayor, the governor, and the local officials. what I love about a novelistic treatment is that there are two characters: one is a white, alternative weekly editor. the other character is a black male from the lower 9th ward ending in houston.
it was interesting to me because i was reporting on life in houston. if you were rescued from new orleans, there was a good chance you would end up in houston. At least 100,000 people from New Orleans ended up in Houston, which is a huge number. so i read quotes and talked to some people. but there was something about him spending half a book on this man as he tried to think about the fact that he lost everything, that his house was practically destroyed, his possessions, all his assets. him now he’s dealing with it in a hotel or on a sofa in houston and slowly trying to rebuild his life. he captured the strangeness of life there so well. you have to rebuild a life knowing that your best hope is to destroy that life and return to new orleans. you can’t just sit in houston indefinitely.
so it’s about these two people trying to figure out how to do what’s best for them while everyone else from the president to the governor to the mayor is clueless. tom, who i met once, a very nice man, a great writer, does a good job of weaving together the bigger story on the outside, of indecision, while really focusing on these two human beings struggling to figure out what happened and what do they need. do now.
Your second book is The Great Flood by Douglas Brinkley. why did you choose this book?
it’s just this amazing snapshot. what brinkley did so well was capture this extraordinary, horrific, surreal week in the life of the gulf coast. storm surge hit and destroyed many homes in biloxi, gulfport, places in mississippi along the coast, the ‘redneck riviera,’ as some sarcastically call it. so tell both stories at once. he had a team of people to help him do these interviews and he captured a cross-section of what life was like. he recreates what happened in the convention center, the superdome [places where survivors congregated and conditions deteriorated]. he’s an academic, but it’s this really vivid snapshot of those terrible early days and it’s very well written and very well told.
to the people who are interviewed for a book like this, to what extent is it useful for them as individuals that their stories are heard and then published?
I’ve got good reviews and it’s been rewarding, but the best feedback I’ve gotten so far is from a woman in my book (black, pro class) who told me ‘katrina might be one of the most covert stories in our time, thanks because this is the first time someone has told my story.” Even though we’ve had a lot of great reporting on new orleans, it was interpreted more as a simplistic narrative: rich white, poor black. the black middle class, the middle class black professional, her story was missing. when i went to the lower 9th district, it was the only place where someone turned me down to speak. there were three or four people who said ‘sorry i can’t tell this story anymore, move on’. i get it. but when i went to east new orleans, the second community i focus on, they all wanted to talk to me because, in a way, no one had talked to them. their story was missing. people appreciate their story being told.
The third book is about Jed Horne’s breach of faith. his newspaper, the times-picayune, won two pultizer awards for its coverage of katrina. What is the vision of him in this book?
is written in this fighting spirit, you feel the frustration on every page. to remind you, 25,000 people were not picked up at the superdome, a place that ran out of food and water two or three days earlier and was medically overwhelmed, for five days. the buses did not arrive at the convention center until day six, where there were another 20,000 people and where there were no provisions. that incredible frustration, anger and confusion are captured in the book.
It is written from the point of view of New Orleanians looking at these bankers and CEOs that the mayor appointed after the flood to decide whether to rebuild the entire city. for example, they were waiting for the federal government to give them flood elevation maps, because if you want flood insurance, which you need, they weren’t going to give it to you unless you followed the rules. It took them eight months to make that map. meanwhile, people were trying to live their lives.
Was the response in the months and years after Katrina basically a larger version of the slow response in the days after the flood?
there were two periods. there was that first week, and then there was the next nine years and eleven months. a little more than half of the book is that first week, and then he starts reporting on the following months. once the water receded and the national guard took over, 80 percent of the city was covered in water, schools were destroyed, utilities were destroyed, no 911, no police, no business, what do you do ? as jed is rebuilt that story begins.
the next book is the christopher cooper and robert block disaster, this one talks more about the federal response. To what extent was this response due to the ideology of the George Bush administration?
It’s interesting that you say that, because after the disaster people said it was all about race. i have no doubt there would be a difference between 50,000 black people trapped in new orleans and 50,000 mostly white people in orange county. I’m not saying race isn’t a factor. but ideology was also an important factor. when bush was running, he credited bill clinton for switching to fema [the federal emergency management agency]. became this amazing agency, it was finally being run by a professional, someone who understood emergency management rather than a political appointee. but then the bush administration came in and they believe in smaller government. one way to reduce the size of government was to cut funding for fema so they demoted the agency to a cabinet level which made a big difference it no longer had the support of the president it had to go through an intermediary And on top of that, I had a much smaller budget. for me, ideology played an important role.
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What I love about Disaster is that it’s co-written by two Wall Street Journal reporters. they tell the story through national security, through fema. they look at this disaster from the perspective of the apparatus that was supposed to be in place to rescue people. it is rich in stories. Michael Brown [the then-head of FEMA], who was licked by the bush administration and, in everyone’s mind, to blame for the failed response, actually looks pretty good in the book. he is not perfect, but he became a scapegoat. many other people also made big mistakes. there was a lot of political infighting.
“I’m not saying race isn’t a factor. but ideology was also an important factor. one way to reduce the size of government was to cut funding for fema.”
You really feel with this book as if you are in the rooms where decisions are made. you are in the rooms when the wrong decisions are made. they’re just two good reporters who did a good job of telling an important story. we need to understand what happened, why mistakes were made and maybe hopefully the people running fema have now read the book and can learn from it.
Has it changed much?
new orleans is much safer today than it was during katrina. it has a $14.5 billion flood protection system. some complain, but it’s a really good system. fema, however, cannot change. there are rules that our government came up with rules, our congress passed, our president has signed that say you have to follow these steps. there are regulations that have been created and then everything takes longer than you think. the city of new orleans and fema are still negotiating today, ten years later, how much money the city is owed from katrina. it is endless. one of my favorite anecdotes in the book is about this guy at city hall realizing how he wants to spend some discretionary recovery money. he sends it to the state and the state returns a flowchart eight feet long. this guy said “it took us eight months to get the first two feet”. if you thought something was going to take six months, that meant it was going to take six years.
It seems like in a crisis like this you have endless bureaucratic processes and then you have the obvious immediate need for people.
There were literally ambulances on the parish lines that FEMA wouldn’t let in because some regulation hadn’t been complied with. that’s a time when rules don’t exist.
his latest book is from a geographer, new orleans: the making of an urban landscape, by peirce lewis.
I can’t tell you how much I fell in love with this book. some of that is time in my life. I was in san francisco, working for the new york times covering silicon valley, and my phone rang. i was asked to go to new orleans and a journalist friend of mine said ‘you should read this book’. It was the first book I read. it is so splendidly written. this guy is a geographer, he didn’t really know new orleans when he got there, but he falls in love with her and just captures her. he doesn’t fetishize it like many others, he really captures what makes it unique: the architecture, the accents, the culture, the mix of French, Spanish, Haitian, free people of color, the jazz. he does a great job narrating that. but there were few seeds of concern for this city in this book when it first came out in 1976.
then it comes back in 2003, two years before katrina, and it’s a terrifying portrait. he is seeing how this city is being built more and more in what used to be a swamp, which is very dangerous. There are 96,000 people living in East New Orleans, almost all of them African American. They feel like they’re living the dream, but you read his book and you see they’re buying swamp land. Lewis is very angry that no one talks about the great risk of living there. he has this great line, that the elevator changed the new yorks and londons of the world, allowing him to build vertically, and the wooden pump, invented in the late 19th century, transformed new orleans. it gave humans the arrogance to build on anything. the marshy land is five feet below sea level. They turned it into an expensive subdivision and sold the houses for a few hundred thousand dollars.
It was a very interesting experience for me to read this book while the city was debating whether to rebuild the entire city or tell certain low-lying communities that they can’t rebuild. It’s such a complicated question, and he acknowledges it. what makes me like his book is that it deals with race. African Americans were not given the opportunity to own a home until the 1970s, at which point all the high ground in New Orleans was taken. So by saying we’re not going to rebuild these slums, he just told eighty percent of the city’s African-American population that he’s not going to rebuild their neighborhoods.
This book has a geographer’s perspective on a story that has to do with geography. fifty percent of the place is below sea level. one or two feet below sea level is fine, it leads to a little street flooding, but five or more feet and we’re talking about underwater communities and that’s what happened after katrina. new orleans was flooded, there was ten feet or more of water in parts of eastern new orleans. it’s prescient, though it wasn’t a deliberate warning.
what was the history of new orleans traced by the two editions of this book in 1976 and 2003?
there began to be many more urban problems, crimes and tensions. new orleans is the deep south. when they integrated the schools in 1960 that changed the shape of the city. some 150,000 whites left because that would mean their children would have to go to integrated schools. so a city that was two-thirds white was two-thirds black at the time of katrina. That is the background to what is happening as Lewis writes this book. changed the economy of the city. became a poor city, there was less money invested in schools. even the whites who stayed tended to live uptown with money and send their children to private schools, parochial schools. there is a defunding of the public school system that was over 90 percent black at the time of katrina. he captures this in both editions.
The really interesting thing about new orleans that I really understood after reading this book was that it is an absolutely absurd place to put a city. it’s low, it has terrible bugs, six months out of the year it has to worry about hurricanes. but if you didn’t have a new orleans there, you would have to build a city because it is the port of this incredibly important river, the mississippi, which touches about thirty states in the country. it is essential that there be a port city there. so that contradiction is the book: it doesn’t make sense to build a city there but they did it, and let’s see how it is.
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