Environmental
historian pessimistic that New Orleans will ever recover
By Jen Beasley
April 9, 2007 | Lawrence Culver, an environmental
historian and assistant history professor at USU, knows
his is a pessimistic field.
"The stereotype of us is that our job is to go
on the History Channel, lean into the camera, and say,
'We're doomed,'" said Lawrence Culver.
"But we pretty much are."
So Culver did just that Thursday, leaning into a room
of about 20 others, mostly professors, to strip from
them any delusion of silver lining that they may have
believed accompanied the clouds of Hurricane Katrina
to her destruction of New Orleans.
"They're a long way from recovery, to say the
least," Culver said. "I'd love to be optimistic,
but I don't think I am very optimistic about it ever
recovering."
Culver gave his presentation in response to what he
saw when he recently visited New Orleans while attending
the annual conference of the American Society of Environmental
History, held in Baton Rouge.
Culver said the devastation wrought by Katrina had
a wide base of causes.
President Bush, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Lousiana
Gov. Kathleen Blanco and FEMA Director Michael Brown
all made the response a "failure on every level,"
Culver said. But he acknowledged that many of the sources
of failure in Katrina pre-dated any administration.
It began when the lower areas in New Orleans were
pumped dry to make room for new housing developments
in the 1920s and '50s, converting natural swamps into
neighborhoods.
Additionally, the system of levees built by the Army
Corps of Engineers to maintain the navigability of the
Mississippi River resulted in the control of the Mississippi's
annual flood cycle, which had once deposited silt to
form the land of New Orleans, and the wetlands neighboring
the Gulf of Mexico. The annual renewal of silt used
to balance the erosion of the wetlands caused by the
ocean, but when the canal system was built, the river
moved faster and the silt was carried out to the Gulf
of Mexico, resulting in the reduction of the wetlands.
The loss of those wetlands meant the loss of land
that once would have borne the initial tidal surge and
wind force of Katrina, Culver said.
And finally, because of the greater surge of water,
the internal canal levees of New Orleans were inundated
with water, and failed. They had been built to withstand
hurricanes greater than the Category 3 that was Katrina
at landfall, but in some places were not built on bedrock
-- a violation of the Army Corps of Engineers' own specifications
-- and were breached as water ran over, and in some
cases under, the levees. The water that rushed into
New Orleans then found its way downward to the neighborhoods
that used to be swamplands, and in some neighborhoods,
flooded houses all the way up to their rooftops.
"It was a natural disaster, it was a hurricane,
but it was greatly exacerbated by human activities,"
Culver said.
The result of the hurricane, 18 months later, Culver
said, is a "moonscape." Entire neighborhoods are
still abandoned, and businesses are closed. He said
the population of New Orleans has been cut in half,
and the Road Home Program, which has been set up to
issue grants for rebuilding, has been bogged down by
bureaucratic rules which require applicants to supply
things like home titles to receive grant money.
"If your house is gone, if your county courthouse
is gone, you don't have those records," Culver
said.
Out of 130,000 applicants to the Road Home Program,
only 2,700 had been approved by the end of February,
Culver said. And even those who get to move back aren't
greeted by the Crescent City they once knew, Culver
said.
"If you're moving back into New Orleans, you're
moving back into a ghost town. Roads are gone, bank
branches are gone, your neighbors are gone, all the
infrastructure you need is gone," Culver said.
During his presentation, while describing the devastation
of the 9th Ward, one of the poorer neighborhoods where
houses were literally swept from their foundations during
the hurricane, Culver became noticeably emotional and
had to pause several times to gather himself.
"It's just -- what happened to these people?"
he said. "You can see by walking around these houses
everything that was in these people's lives, because
it's all still there."
Culver said he is especially frustrated by the lack
of attention the ongoing problem is getting. He said
he was "furious" that President Bush did not mention
Katrina in the State of the Union Address, and that
the characterization of the disaster as something that
was "the wrath of God for a sinful city" angers
him.
"The stereotype that goes along with this, that
they were all on government assistance, that they were
all unemployed, are simply not true," Culver said.
He said that Bourbon Street, the French Quarter and
the other tourist areas that have long associated New
Orleans with the "sinful" lifestyle are almost
fully recovered, and that the usual tourist ephemera
has been replaced with books, bumper stickers, and T-Shirts
about Katrina. There are even tours available that guide
tourists through the destruction.
"I'm worried that what we're going to end up
with is a sort of Disneyworld New Orleans," Culver
said about the possibility that New Orleans' tourist
economy, "which would provide only low-wage jobs"
will be the only thing to fully recover.
Culver concluded his presentation with a reminder
that natural disasters can and do happen everywhere,
and that Utahns are particularly vulnerable, living
in an area where a major earthquake could cause the
same level of destruction as Katrina.
"A major rupture event on the Wasatch Front is
as certain, as predictable, as a hurricane in New Orleans,"
Culver said. He said people should be empathetic for
the Katrina victims now, because someday it could even
be Cache Valley. He encouraged anyone who could to donate
money to a relief foundation, read more about the disaster,
or visit New Orleans to see it for themselves.
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