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The Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

Katrina
August 29 was the fifteenth anniversary of when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. In his new, definitive history, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, Andy Horowitz shows how the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the twentieth century. Here is an excerpt.
On Sept. 29, 1915, at the muddy end of the Mississippi’s farthest reach into the Gulf of Mexico, 100 miles down river from New Orleans, an unnamed hurricane made landfall. An anemometer recorded wind gusts of 140 miles per hour there, at the town of Burrwood, La., where on easier days several hundred members of the Army Corps of Engineers lived in orderly cottages and worked to keep the shipping canal at the river’s mouth clear of sediment.

As the storm moved upriver, the barometer at Tulane University plummeted to 28.10 inches. The rain gauge filled with 8.36 inches of precipitation in 21 hours. Even in a region accustomed to hurricanes, these were extraordinary measurements. Isaac Cline, the chief meteorologist at the United States Weather Bureau in New Orleans, reported that the storm was “the most intense hurricane of which we have record in the history of the Mexican Gulf coast, and probably in the United States.”

On their own, these data reveal little about how the storm might have mattered to people, or how they might have responded to it. These precise metrics of wind speed, rainfall, and barometric pressure do not trace the shape of life in places that seem, repeatedly, to come under assault from the forces of nature. We need different tools to gauge those times when coincidences of earth, wind, and water upset the course of human events in ways so overwhelming that we name them with a word whose basic meaning suggests that the entire universe is out of joint: disaster.

Consider that during the 1915 hurricane, across the state of Louisiana, 275 people died. Property damage estimates ran to $12 million ($280 million in 2015 dollars). Upriver from Burrwood, only four houses remained standing in the town called Empire. East of New Orleans, in St. Bernard Parish, the settlement of Saint Malo was washed from the map entirely. A foot of water remained in parts of New Orleans for five days.

Nonetheless, once the storm passed, many New Orleanians celebrated. “Storm proof!” a newspaper proclaimed. The mayor quickly rejected outside offers of aid. Surveying the event a month later, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board, the agency charged with protecting the city from floods, concluded that its new drainage system had passed a defining test. “It is safe to say,” its report asserted, “that no city anywhere in the world could have withstood these conditions with less damage and less inconvenience than has New Orleans.” The report reasoned that the recent extreme occurrence of wind and rain “renders more remote the probability of a repetition of any of these things in the early future.”

It was a curious logic in a city that had seen 92 hurricanes or tropical storms since its European colonial founding in 1718. Despite this history, the Sewerage and Water Board believed that even if another big storm came, New Orleans would be safe. The report’s authors reflected on the storm’s “lessons” this way: “there is no reason why this city and its surrounding country should not continue, even more successfully than heretofore, [its] developments in all directions.” The experience of the 1915 hurricane affirmed the consensus among engineers and investors, city planners and politicians, home builders and home buyers, that New Orleans should grow.

The city they created became one of the most celebrated places in the world. “Ain’t no city like the one I’m from!” the women in the Original Pinettes Brass Band sang a century later. New Orleans’s admirers lauded it as “The Land of Dreams,” “The Big Easy,” “The City that Care Forgot,” “America’s Most Interesting City,” and “the soul of America.” With its jazz, Mardi Gras, and other iconic contributions to world culture, more than any other place in America, New Orleans called to mind creativity, cosmopolitanism, and love of life.

But today, New Orleans also calls to mind catastrophe…

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