Crescent City, Post-Apocalypse

This past August my husband and I evacuated New Orleans, the first time we had ever fled the city because of an approaching storm. Before we left I wrapped the family portraits in wool blankets and left them in the stairwell in hopes of protecting them from wind and rain, thinking to myself that this is what Southern women had done as the Civil War approached. Then we crept slowly out of town, our technically perfect highway system near parking-lot status, and headed north toward refuge in a spacious country house filled with friends and good food and talk. It was like being Dorothy in technicolor Oz after the black and white tornado.

No one ever talks about what home looked like when Dorothy clicked her heels and went back there.

Katrina was so vast, so horrendous, so biblical in scope that I have trouble wrapping my mind around it. Places I know and love are fractured, demolished, flattened, coated with mold. Some New Orleanians, like us, were fortunate. Our homes and roots are in the older sections of the city near the river, and we have our little community back. After being gone a month we returned, and quickly enough the phone and lights and gas and even television cable were working, the neighborhood grocery store open, along with some restaurants. What’s missing is that newer part of the city, the areas near the lake and toward the east. And the people who lived there are missing, too. Gone is the port, the framework of the vast petrochemical industry. The pine forests north of the lake are no more, the resort areas along the Mississippi coast are no more, our protective marshlands and barrier islands are barely there.

Coming back home after Hurricane Katrina, I returned, in a sense, to the city of my great-grandmother. As at the end of the nineteenth century, there is a crescent of populated area on the high ground along the Mississippi River, while to the north and east the low-lying earth verges into swamp and marsh, with habitable housing sparsely dotted across the expanse. The new subdivisions of the twentieth century, the areas of post–World War II expansion, filled again with floodwaters, as they have regularly done since the city was founded in 1718 by French-Canadian fur traders looking for an entrepôt in the south. A typical eighteenth-century Louisiana house (say, Madame John’s Legacy, on Dumaine Street) attests to the realities of living here. The first floor is intended for storage only, the living area on the second floor is raised far above the ground, the walls are thick and strong, overhanging roofs shade all the openings, shutters cover the windows. It is a habitation designed for a hot climate with frequent flooding.

New Orleans is a city with a good situation: located where trade routes cross, near the mouth of a river that drains one of the great agricultural regions of the world, with the Gulf of Mexico accessible by river or bayou and the inland South via the rivers that empty into Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans is also a city with a bad site: a bowl of land rimmed on one side by the river and on the other by the brackish lake. The city exists only by virtue of a massive, and massively complex, technological system for dealing with water, the city’s best friend and worst enemy.

The technological tragedy of New Orleans historically lies at the confluence of science and engineering, on the one hand, and power on the other—the power to choose the science and technology we get. The city’s colonial Spanish governors might have availed themselves of the same technology that drained and made habitable Mexico City, but their crumbling empire’s finances made that impossible. After the Louisiana Purchase its American rulers might have used public funds to build levees and drain the swamps, but they left that mostly to the private sector. Of course, the profit motive can be a powerful stimulus, and the private sector built the technological infrastructure that supported the pre-Civil War cotton-and-sugar economy that fueled New Orleans’ slavery-era expansion.

The profit motive influenced public infrastructure technology choices, too. New Orleans gave the lie to the old real estate bromide: “Land—they’re not making any more of it.” Private companies built drainage canals, installed steam engines to pump water from adjacent land, and profited from the increase in its value. After the nineteenth-century expansion toward the interior, stretches along Lake Pontchartrain were filled in the 1920s and the area far below the Industrial Canal (another Progressive-Era project) was drained. New Orleans East became a mass of subdivisions beginning in the 1970s.

The city’s current water infrastructure involves drainage, sewerage, and water supply. When it was built, circa 1910, it was the largest infrastructure project undertaken in the United States up to that time. The Sewerage and Water Board is a nongovernmental agency, administered by appointees who include elected officials. It has a say in the operation of all three subsystems, although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approves engineering. Sewerage is pumped from the city, treated, and discharged into the Mississippi River downstream. The river supplies the city’s potable water as well. Rainwater is drained off toward Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne via a maze of canals, some open, most covered. Twenty-three pumping stations and 140 pumps lift the water up and out.

But despite New Orleans’ valiant and creative attempts to design its water infrastructure, the city has little effective control over it. Power has shifted from local and state governments to the federal government, and along with it the ability to make the crucial technological choices.

In the case of flood protection, decision-making power now resides with the Corps of Engineers, as it has for some time. Historically, the federal government began making flood-control policy with the Swamp Land Act of 1850, which gave federal riparian lands to states so they would build levees to protect land they could then sell to private owners. Gradually the Corps of Engineers assumed control of the river levees, and after the 1927 Mississippi River flood the federal government took on an even greater role in engineering the river. Today the levees, the canal walls, the entire hurricane protection and flood control system are all controlled by the Corps of Engineers. And the technological choices made by the Corps and the rest of the federal government have often been poor ones. By now the litany is familiar: the inadequate (but Corps-approved) construction techniques used in the walls of the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal, whose failure led to the disastrous flooding after Katrina, and the subsequent failure of repairs to the Industrial Canal that let the waters back in after Rita struck; the canals cut by the petrochemical industry that have helped destroy the system of barrier islands and marshes that could have absorbed the storm’s impact; the Corps-constructed Mississippi River Gulf Outlet east of the city, which also seriously damaged marshlands; the hubris of building in a flood zone.

Of course, the tragedy of New Orleans is not exclusively, or even primarily, a technological one. Business and politicians did more than acquiesce in decisions to build in unbuildable areas. A political structure fraught with mendacity and a class system tinged with racial antipathy contributed to the magnitude of disaster. Hurricane Katrina occasioned a classic complex systems failure. All the systems necessary to survive and recover from it—the drainage pumps, the first responders, the communications systems, the power grid—ultimately failed, one by one, a pitiful situation aggravated by the late and inadequate response of the national government. But the key event was a technological failure: the collapse of the canal walls.

Now the question is: Can New Orleans be rebuilt as a major city? Some city will continue to exist here at this bend of the Mississippi. The same factor that determined its unlikely location still applies: it sits at a crossroads. A city could be rebuilt with better hurricane protection, more efficient drainage, a building code assuring residents they could safely invest again in homes. New Orleans could also have improved public schools, viable neighborhoods, better opportunities for employment, a vibrant economy. The choice is whether or not that vision will be fulfilled. Those who favor rebuilding tout the importance of the city’s river trade, its importance to the petrochemical industry and as an entrepôt for the Mississippi River Valley, its potential as a gateway to Latin America. There is also New Orleans’ history as a multiracial city whose gifts to art and music and cuisine and American culture are legendary and invaluable.

As I write, the debate over that great question is ongoing, not only locally but worldwide. Legislators, officials, planners, academics—almost everyone, it seems, in New Orleans and Louisiana and outside, has an opinion on the future of the city. The truth is that the state and the city lack control over New Orleans’s fate. Ultimately, the power to choose rests in Washington. Will the federal government decide to invest in the infrastructure that will make the city safe from other hurricanes, other floods, or in the many improvements the city sorely needs?

Whatever the federal government chooses to do, New Orleans will endure—changed, but not deserted. New Orleanians, like the African-Americans of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, will endure. Some, like me, who could live nowhere else, will still inhabit this place. I hope that the federal government, and the Corps of Engineers, will decide the city is worth not only saving, but improving. Whether they do or not, we will be here.