Perilous Place, Powerful Storms: Hurricane Protection in Coastal Louisiana (review)

The deadly hurricane season of 2005 that included Hurricanes Katrina and Rita reified the convoluted and contested history of coastal protection in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Craig Colten’s Perilous Place, Powerful Storms: Hurricane Protection in Coastal Louisiana pushes our understanding of the long history of levee construction while highlighting how this process has been marred by political disagreement and protests over acceptable and unacceptable uses of technology between 1965 and 2005. Colten’s book is premised on an important and well-understood concept: the construction of levees throughout the twentieth century around vulnerable landscapes laid the foundation for increased construction, building, and human settlement, but also entailed environmental changes of considerable concern to environmental groups and activists. Levees, Colten suggests, are not just “costly to build and maintain, they consume land that might be put to other uses” (p. 6).

While most scholarship on levees emphasizes earlier periods of construction and politics—usually between the Swamp Land Acts of 1849 and 1850 and the Flood Control Act of 1928—Colten’s study takes on a much more modern framework. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 stimulated conversations and policies for hurricane protection in Louisiana that were never fulfilled, ultimately setting the stage for Katrina forty years later. The discussion of post-Betsy legislation and conflicts between different groups and organizations—including the ever-present Army Corps of Engineers—is the most valuable contribution of the book.

Historically, disasters have the ability to transform the way people think about civic affairs, disaster response, city planning, and protection. The “Big One” has come in many guises, including hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, as blocked legislation and stalled construction plans have been pushed through after a disaster. After 1965, hurricane protection was elevated in the consciousness of Americans through conversations around disaster and evacuation response and a federal flood insurance program. This period of increased consciousness was followed by delays in the 1970s and beyond that, Colten argues, ultimately led to flooding in 2005. Delays came in the form of interactions between the Army Corps of Engineers and local organizations and community groups on the basis of design methods and their impact on local environments.

Colten suggests that the most acute delay in construction of hurricane defenses came with the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969. Even though the Corps submitted environmental reports to various agencies in the past, the 1969 legislation forced it to submit detailed impact assessments that opened the organization (known for engineering but not for environmental protection) to further challenges of its expertise and decision making on the local level. An example was the Corps switching by 1985 from its long-standing barrier plan of hurricane protection to a high-level plan that activists argued was more environmentally friendly, even if it added considerable delay and time to completion.

Perilous Place, Powerful Storms is, in short form, a powerful indictment of the complex negotiations, delays, and chronic underfunding of hurricane protection around New Orleans that, in part, led to substandard protection during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Those not interested in levee dynamics, politics, and flood and hurricane projections will find parts of the book overwhelming. Its strengths lie in a much deeper examination into exactly why levees failed during Katrina.

As is often the case, the answer to this question is much more complicated than it might seem. Colten also raises other questions of interest to scholars and commentators. Post-1965 highway construction in Louisiana meant that evacuation planning was no longer local but had transformed into a complex and personal vehicle-driven process based on urban sprawl, the result leading in part to the images of Katrina victims floating down canals and streets and marooned in the Superdome. Perilous Place is an important reminder of the lessons not learned from previous disasters that resulted in Hurricane Katrina. It is also timely, as more than five years after Katrina the historical amnesia that often follows disasters...