Sixteen years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina devastated a large swath of the Gulf Coast, forever altering the Southern landscape—both literally and figuratively. Today, Tropical Storm Ida grew into a Category 4 hurricane, prompting the mayor of New Orleans to order a new generation of residents to yet again evacuate the city.
This week last year looked similar, too, when two storms hit the Gulf Coast and ignited a chemical fire near Mossville, Louisiana, a free Black community already ransacked by the ever-present reach of environmental racism. Today's impending storm will test both New Orleans' reconstructed levee system and the state's capacity to co-manage environmental destruction alongside spiking COVID-19 hospitalizations.
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But most of the devastation we associate with storm season is not the result of "natural" disasters. The difference between catastrophe and inconvenience has everything to do with intersections of wealth, race, and place. Our communities risk being split between those who are increasingly vulnerable to disaster, and those who encounter these events from a distance, as one more drop in the torrent of bad news.
Today, we're sharing some of the best writing from the Scalawag archives on Louisiana's storied crusade against both man-made and environmental attacks. Individually, these stories present intimate accounts of disaster, recovery, and resilience. Taken together, they give a sense of what it means to be down South when the water runs high. Stay safe, y'all.
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A principal leaves his beloved school after an intense year
Katy Reckdahl, The Hechinger Report
Early in the pandemic, the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies began their assessment of school staff, after a social worker described teachers walking into her school office and falling apart. "We had been focused on the pandemic's effect on students. But we realized that we couldn't expect children to do well if the people responsible for them were not well."
Some 45 percent of school principals have stated that the pandemic has prompted them to either consider leaving the profession, or sped up their plans to do so. Principal David LaViscount was committed to carrying out the huge task of creating a welcoming and equitable school environment at Audubon Gentilly Charter in New Orleans. Now, just three years into it, he’s leaving the job after a hectic pandemic year that often focused more on operational matters than academics. As the school year was winding down in the spring, he was still weighing his options—he wanted to continue his work in education, but differently. "I'm trying to go back to my purpose, to remember why I do this work," he said. [Link]
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Here are the voices of survival and solidarity in Louisiana
Claire Bangser, Scalawag
"Once we were able to come back and just look—I can't describe. This is the house I grew up in. And all my memories here, I see all this stuff coming out, and I can't process it yet. My parents were married for 53 years, so 53 years of their life together is going in this trash pile. It's the little things like my grandmother's desk that Mom restored after Grandma died. She probably can't do anything with it now. I don't know. I just thank God I have wonderful friends willing to lend their bodies and their muscles. They're exhausted from gutting other houses, giving their time just to do this. This is hard work."
Five years ago this week, Claire Bangser spent some time on the ground in Baton Rouge, six days after historic rainfall and flooding brought a torrent of water into an unprecedented number of homes and businesses across southern Louisiana, in what was referred to as the Louisiana Flood of 2016. Along the way, she spoke with people as they began to pick up the pieces of their homes and their communities. Here are some of their stories—and portraits—of that flood and its aftermath. [Link]
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The Curious Loss of a Friendly Stranger
Katy Reckdahl, Scalawag
“The contrast with other places was probably most stark after Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of New Orleans evacuees tried, unsuccessfully, to continue the tradition in other cities by talking with other people while waiting in line for groceries or sitting in a waiting room at a doctor’s office. As an evacuated New Orleans news reporter who followed Katrina displacements closely, I discovered that while evacuees might gripe to me about food or climate, the most common complaint about life in other cities was: ‘People here don’t even speak.’”
From 2017, this is the story of a woman whose body went unclaimed for three months in the city morgue, and how a community could mourn someone without ever truly knowing anything about them. Katy Reckdahl set out to investigate the widespread web of a personal legacy left behind when a beloved local cashier suddenly became an enigma in death, but what she found left her with more questions than answers. "Should I see it as triumph or tragedy that after a life spent without family, she was lovingly laid to rest by other strangers?" [Link]
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After two devastating hurricanes, southwest Louisiana worries the rest of the country has already moved on
Xander Peters, Scalawag
“It’s like living in a town where a bomb went off and the whole city is destroyed, and you don’t see a way out.”
In the aftermath of last year's elections, many Gulf state evacuees were hoping the nation would turn its attention back to the region for much needed disaster relief after Hurricanes Laura and Delta. Calcasieu Parish used to be a "no man’s land" between Spanish and U.S. territory after the Louisiana Purchase, attracting many Indigenous and Black folks to live there. Now, the region has been battered by both hurricanes and toxic industry, and its residents are fighting for its continued existence. [Link]
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The water will never not be here
Lisa O'Neill, Scalawag
"I want to talk about what it means to try to repair the irreparable, about how sometimes a place is never the same and how pretending it is creates an act of incessant denial, an erasure of what was lost and what could have been."
Back in 2015, when we put the finishing touches on our first print issue, Hurricane Katrina loomed large in our thinking. The 10th anniversary of the storm was coming up, and it was a gift when Lisa O'Neill pitched us this haunting essay about how the flood—and the recovery—transformed her native New Orleans. This is an intimate meditation on the city, with lessons for all of us, no matter where we seek to remember and rebuild. [Link]
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