Introduction: Katrina, Ten Years Later

Published almost a decade after one of the most devastating disasters in US history, this cluster of essays on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina reflects on the hurricane, the measures that could have been taken to prevent the massive devastation caused by it, and the immediate and long-term responses by the government, private industry, and civil society. How has Katrina left a permanent mark not only on the Gulf South but also on our larger national imaginary? What lessons, if any, have we learned, and what actions and policies have we adopted to better mitigate against future disasters? Haunting though the images may be, the flooded homes and emergency rescues from rooftops were not the only impact Katrina had — it altered fundamental social contracts in cities such as New Orleans, from public education to public housing. It also awakened a new activism focused on issues ranging from calls for better levee protection to addressing the loss of wetlands in coastal communities.

Stephen A. Nelson, a geoscientist at Tulane University in New Orleans, starts off the discussion by providing correctives to five pervasive myths about Katrina: that the levees were breached the day after Katrina hit the city (they were breached on the same day), that it was the river that flooded the city (the river levees remained intact), that the corruption of the local levee boards was responsible for the negligence of the levees (it was an engineering failure on the part of the US Army Corps of Engineers), that Katrina was a storm so large that it could not possibly have been planned for (the storm was within the calculations of the levee system, with a force below what the levees had allegedly been designed to protect), and that the city was doomed to begin with since it was below sea level (some but not all parts of the city are below sea level). Nelson’s point in the essay and in the many voluntary tours that he leads for students and visitors to the city is not just to debunk these myths but to also ask why they are so pervasive. One reason, he suggests, was the power of the early media reports that remain in collective memory even after they were challenged, revised, or repudiated.

Attention to media coverage, then, is central to the ways in which the world at large witnessed the hurricane and the debates that it generated. That is the focus of Ray Taras’s piece on Cuban and Mexican newspaper coverage of Katrina. Both significant actors in the broader region of the Gulf South, and both having intimate experience of devastating hurricanes, Cuba and Mexico were critical of the ways in which the George W. Bush administration handled Katrina. Newspaper coverage of Katrina in these countries pointed to the post-Katrina rescue and recovery efforts as an example of the ineffective policies of a neoliberal state. Indeed, as the next essay by Graham Owen indicates, much of the post-Katrina recovery of New Orleans was lauded as a market-driven phenomenon heralded by the “familiar neoliberal rebranding of frontier self-reliance, of ‘personal responsibility’ as the foundation of rebuilding.” Owen charts citizens’ difficulties in moving back to the devastated city in the aftermath of the hurricane, the flawed decision-making process on which areas were to be rebuilt and which not, and the emphasis on individual volunteer work cast in a heroic register as indicative of what he sees as a maladaptive process. The emphasis on individual volunteerism, philanthropy, and social entrepreneurship in the post-Katrina environment has taken away the burden of responsibility from where it should properly belong — the government — which, Owen argues, has failed to live up to its commitments in its social contract with its citizens.

The next two essays by Jennie Lightweis-Goff and T. R. Johnson move us to more localized and personal takes on an issue that has gained significant political valence in post-Katrina New Orleans. Both “white professionals” living in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, they each reflect on the politics of race and class and their effects in the localized...