In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

New Orleans is a special case in the story of vulnerability and environmental justice. The city lies on the hurricane coast, next to two lakes, and near the end of the immense Mississippi River. The lower third of Louisiana is made of river silt deposited over the ages. Federal river and hurricane levees have prevented river silt from depositing, causing nearly all of New Orleans’s land to compact and sink below the normal water levels of the nearby Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. The city must run pumping stations to remove water from its storm sewer system into city-built drainage canals even after the slightest rainstorm . Protective coastal wetlands had also been historically replenished by silt deposit. They are now deprived of silt, are crossed by canals and oil and gas pipelines, and are rapidly being washed away. Katrina’s storm surge broke federal hurricane levees and the federal- and city-built floodwalls and levees along drainage canals leading to the lake, easily flooding the city. Although the massive federal levees along the Mississippi River stayed intact during Katrina, these river levees did the most to make the city subside in the first place. This chapter focuses on the origins of the federal flood control program, which built all the federal projects and which, I argue, was responsible for the policies that left the city vulnerable.1 Hurricane Katrina showed graphically how policy by increment—in this case, policies related to public works, flood control, and housing—harms the weakest. Public works are physical and cultural systems for ordering social life. Public works also tether us to places. Many people therefore viewed the extreme disorder after Hurricane Katrina as the failure of systems that, they assumed, were designed to ensure safety and security. But U.S. flood control was never designed with safety foremost in mind; rather, it began in the late nineteenth century as a program to promote economic development and to unify the nation. For decades, whatever public safety protections existed were limited to 1 VVVVVVVVVVV Who Sank New Orleans? How Engineering the River Created Environmental Injustice KAREN M. O’NEILL 9 KAREN M. O’NEILL 10 partial levee lines in a few cities west of the Appalachian range. Over time, the number of people living near flood-prone rivers increased dramatically, with poor African Americans and other marginalized groups often clustering in hazardous areas. Demands to improve the safety of these more recently settled lands grew, but those demands taxed a program that was created primarily to extend farming onto floodplains. Fundamentally then, the system has no mandate to assess the cumulated conditions that make some people keenly vulnerable. The Katrina disaster reveals clearly how tensions between the historic goals of public safety and economic development have been left unresolved in the federal flood control program, primarily because within the federal system of government, legislators have little interest and limited leverage to create comprehensive , long-term plans for any area of policy. Moreover, national and state legislatures do not directly supervise the bureaucracies that administer government policies. So rather than reforming an agency’s overall program when new needs emerge, legislators usually just add the new tasks to the agency’s docket. As a result of these general features of the federal system, while public expectations about safety have increased, they have not been matched by coordinated policies to reduce our exposure to hazards, to protect socially essential areas that remain vulnerable, and to provide emergency services when protections fail.2 In lieu of coordinated policies that reduce exposure and risk, a variety of government programs to build flood control works (like those described above for New Orleans) and to respond to flood emergencies have accumulated at the national, state, and local levels. Policies like these—which grow by increment—often yield dangers that go unnoticed, and particularly harms to the weak. Indeed, a world of previously unnoticed risks became tragically evident in the wake of Katrina. Calling attention to unnoticed harms is the purpose of the environmental justice movement .3 Researchers of environmental injustice in the United States typically take two approaches: making statistical comparisons to see whether some groups experience more injuries than others do, or studying individual cases of environmental harm to trace how patterns of injustice develop. Statistical studies have not found consistent results, but they tend to show that some social groups are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards. Case studies find that harms almost always result from the interaction of...

Share