[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 how three
other historic storms help further contextualize Katrina.
1)
Hurricane
Betsy (1965): Betsy is the historical hurricane most frequently referenced as
a context for Katrina, and for good reasons: one of the deadliest tropical
storms in US history, Betsy caused more than 150,000 New Orleans homes to
flood, among many other effects that led to more than $1 billion in damages and
the nickname “Billion
Dollar Betsy”; and in response the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers created a
new Hurricane
Protection Program which built new levees in the city. That those levees failed so fully
and spectacularly in August 2005 only adds one more layer of context, as well
as dramatic and tragic irony, to this comparison.
2)
Hurricane
Sandy (2012): There have been a few particularly bad hurricanes since
Katrina (and the predictions are for a bad hurricane season this year; I’m
drafting this in late May and I hope I won’t have to update it before it goes
live), but only one to my knowledge has been called a “superstorm,”
and that was Sandy. While the destruction caused by Sandy was certainly
comparable to (and more
widespread than) that of Katrina, however, the federal
and governmental responses were far, far quicker and stronger. There are
various possible factors in that difference, including of course having learned
from Katrina’s many failures. But it’s difficult not to see the racial and
economic demographics of the affected communities as having contributed to these
contrasts as well.
3)
Galveston
Hurricane of 1900: Betsy and Sandy are the two hurricanes I’ve seen most
frequently compared to Katrina, and for all those good reasons. But neither of
them, nor Katrina, is known as “the deadliest
natural disaster in United States history”; that dubious honor goes to the
Great Galveston hurricane or the Great Storm of 1900. Given that the storm
landed in an era when there was no way of capturing video footage (and when even
photography was a far more laborious and infrequent practice), it’s
understandable that we don’t think or talk as much about this hurricane, either
in relationship to Katrina or on its own terms. But of course many of the
topics I cover in this space are in one way or another distant, and if anything
that makes it more important to engage them and consider both their own stories
and their potential connections to us. To cite two such compelling, American stories
about this storm (and leave the connections for further thought): the job of
loading the storm’s dead onto a barge to be dumped at sea was apparently given
to 50 African American men
recruited at gunpoint; and the city’s drastic population loss after the storm
was countered by the
Galveston Movement, a campaign to bring Jewish immigrants from East Coast
communities to this Texas city.
Last
KatrinaStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Katrina histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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