Searching for Sophocles on Bourbon Street

Prologue: The Wyndham New Orleans Hotel, 19 January 2006, 6:30 p.m. Huge glass windows stretch from the eleventh floor reception area to the twelfth floor, where the ballroom is. It is the sixty-fifth annual meeting of the Association of Levee Boards of Louisiana. The association’s motto: “Without Flood Protection, Nothing Else Matters.” Behind me, the levee board commissioners, their staffs, and spouses—overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, and, it would appear, prosperous—are enjoying dance music and an elaborate buffet. The commissioners are mostly products of Louisiana’s deeply embedded political patronage system; their appointments depend on connections more than expertise.{1} In front of me, beyond the glass, lie Jackson Square, the desiccated Ninth Ward, and, across the Mississippi, Algiers. Behind me is hope borne of undiminished faith in technology. In front of me is passion borne of despair. “Surreal” does not begin to describe a scene so out of joint.

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.