[I can’t quite
believe it, but this week marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating
landfall in New Orleans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the hurricane, its
even more devastating aftermaths, and a few other contexts for this tragic
and telling 21st century story.]
On two distinct ways
to frame a disaster, and what our current crisis helps us understand.
In the 15 years
since Hurricane Katrina hit, meteorologists
and other scientists have frequently used it as an example of a “perfect
storm” (or at least the hurricane version of that concept, as opposed to
the one that most fully entered our lexicon through the Gloucester-set book
and film of the same name). A tropical depression meeting a tropical wave,
and moving through warm water with no wind shear to help slow down or dissipate
the building storm; intensity that didn’t seem to lessen much when the storm
moved over land (which apparently is normally what happens); a particularly
warm Gulf Loop current that sped up Katrina’s wind speeds by more than half
(from 75 to 110 mph); and continued intensifications in the days leading up to
the storm’s Louisiana landfall. From what I understand, many of those
individual ingredients are present in any number of hurricanes or tropical storms
each season that don’t turn out to be anything out of the ordinary (hence the
repeated line in Treme’s depiction of
the approaching storm, about which more later in the week, that the storm will
veer off before it gets to New Orleans “as they always do”). But this time, they
all came together and created what does indeed seem to be a perfect
hurricane, in the worst sense of that phrase.
So that’s the
more “natural” explanation for Katrina’s unprecedented levels of destruction
and devastation, and to this non-scientist at least it makes sense. But there’s
also an
equally compelling argument for “nurture”—that it was decades of neglect
and corruption and mismanagement and malfeasance, coupled with a truly horrific
governmental response in August and September 2005 (“Heckuva job, Brownie”),
which made Katrina’s effects on New Orleans and its vicinity so unusually
extreme and awful. This is why, to cite another Treme line and perspective to which I’ll return in a couple days, John
Goodman’s wonderful character Creighton Bernette insists on calling Katrina
a “man-made disaster”
(rather than the natural variety); or, as Bernette puts it so evocatively in
that last hyperlinked clip (which you should really watch in its entirety, and especially
through the end), while the storm itself was of course natural, “a hurricane,
plain and simple, the flooding of New Orleans was a man-made catastrophe, a federal
fuck-up of epic proportions, and decades in the making.”
Obviously these
two narratives can (and I would argue do) coexist in the overarching story of
Katrina, but there is nonetheless a matter of emphasis, at least when it comes
to the crucial question of why the storm hit New Orleans so potently. While the
analogy is far from an exact one, I can’t help but think, here in 2020, about
the clarity that our own currently unfolding disaster might provide. To put it
bluntly: COVID-19 seems like a
perfect storm of disease, in its originality, in how potently contagious
and aggressive and destructive it is, even in its ability to evolve
right before our eyes as we try to get a handle on it; but to my mind none
of those aspects explain why the United States has been hit so horrifically
hard (as I draft this in late May we are nearing
100,000 deaths in three months or so) while other nations have done so much
better (most famously, South
Korea, which saw its first diagnosed case on the same day as the US but
remains well under 1000 deaths here in late May). Which is to say: natural
disasters are gonna happen, all the more frequently as climate change continues
to change our world in all the ways it has and will; but what those disasters
do to us, and how we respond, are very open questions, and ones for which we
now have all too clear examples of the worst versions, in 2005 and 2020 alike.
Next
KatrinaStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Katrina histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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