Don’t Call It Katrina

The tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina looms here in New Orleans, an event for which I had every intention of lowering my head and keeping quiet. I was on a mountain in the Catskills when Katrina hit, in August of 2005, awaiting the publication of a book of mine the following day. I belong to that ignominious group of people whose response to a disaster, no matter how fundamentally humane, nevertheless includes some voice in their head yelping, “This is not good for the book!” (Or movie, or exhibition, or conference, or birthday party, etc.)

I watched footage of a submerged New Orleans at a remove that was physical as well as emotional. I could not have imagined that our fates would one day be entwined. Then, in 2008, I moved here. And so my feelings about Katrina have always been bifurcated: empathy for the people who went through it, and a constant awareness—and guilt—about the way I felt while up on that mountain.

Almost the first thing I learned about New Orleans was how little I understood about Katrina. It happened during one of my interviews before being hired at Tulane University. The woman in whose office I was sitting was calm, professional, even a bit subdued. We were chatting amiably about New York City, where I lived at the time, and New Orleans.

“I guess Katrina was for New Orleans what 9/11 was for New York,” I said. “Except Katrina was a natural disaster and 9/11 was man-made.”

She brought her fingers to her mouth, thinking, perhaps, Here is a teachable moment. Or maybe, Resist the urge to hit him with the paperweight! She sat forward and explained, in a voice only slightly raised, that Katrina was a man-made disaster, too. I don’t recall the exact words, though I would bet “flood” and “levee failure” were mentioned. Part of my misunderstanding stemmed from my desire to find connections and echoes between New York and New Orleans, even to incorporate New Orleans into New York somehow, and make it a sixth borough, one long, last stop beyond Rockaway Beach.

All of this came back to me when I read a blog post by Eve Troeh, the news director of the local NPR station, in which she asked the public for feedback on a matter of language. “In newsrooms across the city and, yes, the nation and presumably the world, journalists are staring down blank whiteboards with the headline: Ten-Year Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina,” she wrote. “We are figuring out how often and in which contexts to gracefully add the phrase ‘and the federal levee failures’ without upsetting sentence structure, or whether to simply call everything ‘the flood.’”

This was, I felt, an attempt to include the people of New Orleans in a discussion about Katrina that is contentious and emotional. Part of the reason it’s contentious and emotional is because of how Katrina is understood, or misunderstood, everywhere else.

When I arrived in New Orleans, the streetcars had just started to run again. I found them beautiful but also incredible, creaking along in the heavy dusk of August, their wood interiors lit by a warm orange glow. The houses they passed had an equally unreal quality. It felt like a stage set. A performance of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” had recently been staged in the Lower Ninth Ward. Placards advertising the play had been stuck in the ground all over town, including along the streetcar route on St. Charles Avenue; they featured a drawing by the show’s producer, Paul Chan—two charcoal figures, their heads offset by blue. They seemed to be lying face down on the ground, like silhouettes of bodies at a crime scene. Some of the placards had been knocked over by wind. Everywhere, the feeling of aftermath.

New Orleans is famous for its distinct vernacular, and one of the things I had to absorb was the vernacular of Katrina. “Defend New Orleans” T-shirts were prevalent, and reflected the general mood. I realize that this iconography has become commonplace—I recently saw one that said “Defend White Plains”—but they captured a pride, an anxiety, and a defensiveness that was expressed in many others words and slogans: “It Was the Flood, Not the Storm”; “Make Levees, Not War”; “New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home”; and “Hold the Corps Accountable.”

This last one, about the Corps, is the work of Levees.org, an organization that has done more than any other to educate the general public that Katrina was not a “natural” disaster. The group believes that the blame for the destruction of New Orleans lies entirely with the incompetence—in the most generous iteration—of the people who built the levees that broke: the Army Corps of Engineers.

Eve Troeh, the NPR news director, moved here from a small town in Missouri after college, in 2000. When Katrina hit, she was out of town, on a fellowship, but she moved back as soon as possible, and witnessed the city’s ordeal of recovery. She left for Los Angeles in 2007—the departure precipitated by having been a victim of a violent crime—and on the way out wrote a piece for NPR called “Dear New Orleans, I’m leaving you.” It was, in form and in tone, a kind of break-up note. “I talk to friends about New Orleans like a dysfunctional romance,” she wrote. “I gush over it one day, then call up bawling and heartbroken the next. Why can’t it change? Stop being self-destructive and violent? It has so much potential.”

She moved back to the city in 2013 for her current job at NPR. I met her at a Mid-City coffee shop, the Bean Gallery, near her home; she was pregnant enough that I didn’t have to feel fearful about congratulating her on being pregnant.

Why, I asked, has this issue of blame remained such a hot-button issue in New Orleans? She suggested that just as the crisis itself was brought on not by the initial storm but by the subsequent flood, the trauma of Katrina was partly about what happened in the city, and partly about what everyone else had to say about it.

“There was something about the coverage at the time that suggested that New Orleans had been asking for it,” she said. “That it deserved what it got. “

I pointed out that there were fringe elements in America who said that about New York after 9/11.

“Yeah. But no one was saying, ‘Bad choice, New Yorkers, what did you expect living in the global finance capital?’” she said. “In the media, after Katrina, there was a lot of sympathy, not a lot of empathy. It was like, ‘Those poor people.’ When people suggested it might be best to not rebuild the city at all, the response was, ‘Jazz hands!’” She raised her hands and wiggled her fingers. “It felt like New Orleans was treated like an ornament. That it was expendable.

“With Katrina, there was a question of responsibility, and blame. New Orleans is associated in the public imagination with the enjoyment of sex, unhealthy food, drinking. It was somehow like the country was saying to the city, ‘Let’s look at your life decisions. What did you expect when you were wearing that sexy dress?’”

That line has stayed with me—New Orleans as victim of a kind of climatological slut-shaming.

Before it was a political football, a cultural touchstone, and a semantic battlefield, Katrina was a meteorological event. I asked Mark Schleifstein, who has been reporting on hurricanes and the environment for the New Orleans Times-Picayune for more than three decades, to weigh in on Eve Troeh’s question about Katrina, the flood, and the failure of the federal levees. His explanation went into considerable detail, as is to be expected from someone who knows his subject well. In 2002, he co-wrote, with John McQuaid, a five-part series called “Washing Away.” Part 2 was called “The Big One” and outlined what might happen to the levees along the city’s industrial canals if a strong hurricane hit—the meteorological equivalent of a baseball player at home plate pointing to the fence and then hitting one over (alas).

When I pressed Schleifstein on exactly how Katrina should be characterized, it was hard to pin him down. “Was it a man-made disaster or a natural one?” I finally asked, as though our conversation were an outtake from “A Few Good Men.” He at last offered this: “A man-made failure that a natural event took advantage of that resulted in flooding.”

The geographer Richard Campanella, in his forthcoming essay “A Katrina Lexicon,” takes stock of how language has evolved in relation to Katrina, including the degree to which Katrina is, or isn’t, thought of as a storm. The paper has an appendix that lists figures of speech used in connection with the storm: the first is “the big one,” the last is “the shock doctrine,” and in between are “apron of wetlands, “toxic gumbo,” “chocolate city,” and over a hundred others.

Campanella, a professor at Tulane (and therefore my colleague), is one of the city’s most avid and active historians. He often traverses the length of the city on foot, taking photographs to juxtapose against the historical record. He has been the source of valuable demographic data about who has moved to the city after the storm, and where they are from. He once shared with me his technique of controlling for his own subjective impressions when polling people on the street: he wears a baseball cap (he pretty much always wears a baseball cap) and keeps his face pointed toward the ground. The purpose of this is not to shield his subject from him but to shield him from his subject. In this way, he can be as objective as possible in choosing whom he approaches, and control for any internal bias of his own. Only at the last moment does he jerk his head up to see the other person’s face and, with clipboard in hand, start asking his questions.

When I asked for an advance read of his lexicon, he invited me to his office to pick up a hard copy. There is a map of Louisiana and its coast on his office wall, and he is ebullient when pointing to it and discussing soil accumulations, flooding, erosion. The Mississippi, he explained to me, at the bottom of its course should be thought of as a giant eel that you hold in your hand while it flops around. The river ends in a delta, a series of ridges and rivers. The soil on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain, he said, is a million years old. The soil on the south side, where the city of New Orleans sits, is about seven thousand years old.

In conversation, Campanella was sympathetic to the wish of Levees.org, and others, to place the blame for Katrina on the Army Corps of Engineers, even if this wish ignores what he calls “the hundred-year backstory”—i.e., what happens when attempting to control an uncontrollable eel of a river. He spoke of the changing nature of risk perception in our culture, how we are becoming less and less tolerant of risk, and how this has unexpected consequences. He cited the “hygiene hypothesis,” which states that some of the allergies today may be the product of too sanitary an environment. According to this theory, kids used to play in more dirt and develop more antibodies. Campanella’s implication being that floods, like getting sick, used to be accepted as a part of life.

New Orleans got sick with Katrina because of the artificial, unnatural acts of man stretching back over a hundred years. Reading John Barry’s “Rising Tide”—which does for the levees along the Mississippi River what Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” does for the highways of New York—it’s clear that the judgment of the Army Corps of Engineers has been lamented, often with good reason, more or less from its inception, in the mid-nineteenth century.

In person, Campanella is friendly and amenable, but his published work is tinged with a counterintuitive edge. A central thesis of his recent book “Bourbon Street” is that, in a city that makes a fetish of authenticity, it is Bourbon Street, reviled by many locals as a gauche vomitorium, that holds the prize for authenticity—it is unregulated, populist, popular, locally invented, and locally owned. It embodies New Orleans’s true cultural achievement. By contrast, he writes that Jazz Fest, beloved in the city by music fans and people who are happy to rent out their homes to visitors, “sees itself as a cultural refuge from all that phoniness. Yet Jazz Fest was invented by a man from Massachusetts as part of a worldwide mega festival circuit—essentially a local franchise of a global chain.”

It should not have surprised me, then, that when I returned home from our talk to read his “Katrina Lexicon,” I found impatience bordering on disdain for the “Federal Levee Failure crowd.”

Campanella and his family were in the city on Monday, August 29th, the day the storm hit. The name he gave for the ensuing events, as he lived through them, was “the apocalypse.” He and his family escaped the city the following Friday. “Only then,” he writes, “over car radio, did I begin to consume external media representations of the horrors, and they all called it, ‘Hurricane Katrina.’”

“External media representations” is an awkward, interesting phrase. It suggests a fundamental division as perceived by New Orleanians: either you were inside the city and understand, or you were not and do not.

At first, these “external representations” seemed appropriate to Campanella. “We all knew the big one would hit some day,” he writes. But later that September, he continues,

forensic engineers began to report shocking news, which was a re-thinking of the emerging shorthand. The flood, it turned out, was not the result of a worthy system simply overwhelmed by a category-5 mega-storm bearing the worst possible speed, size, and angle. Rather it resulted from a patchwork of under-engineered and poorly maintained levees, which had failed fundamentally vis a vis a declining category-2 storm, whose strongest winds and waves had actually spared New Orleans.

That this central fact was buried in the sensational coverage of Katrina is passed over lightly by Campanella, who quickly moves to note that among the first “verbal rituals” to emerge in New Orleans after Katrina was “the onomatological scold.” This would include the administrator who corrected my juxtaposition of 9/11 and Katrina.

He suggests various motives for the scolds—“The reprimand imparts in them the exhilaration of public venting and the catharsis of broadcast indignation”—the most prominent of whom, he says, is Levees.org, whose policy is to “pounce on hapless public figures who use ‘natural disaster’ and ‘Katrina’ in the same sentence.” He sneers at the e-mails he gets advertising the organization’s “Third Annual Levee Disaster Bike Tour.”
Campanella’s scornful tone toward the scolds is mediated in his paper by his acknowledgment that Levees.org and people like them are providing a useful pushback to the typical narratives around these disasters, which is that they are entirely “natural.” He cites studies about the language used in connection with such events such as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and Katrina: “spawned,” “growing,” “swelled,” “monster from the deep,” “out of the blue.” This is language that makes nature the culprit, and ignores the complicity of man. The onomatological scolds, he writes, “make no such mistake, placing nearly all the blame on a very specific subset of humans.”

It turns out that Sandy Rosenthal, the founder and president of Levees.org, is a neighbor of mine. I frequently see her walking her dogs. It took a few years to connect this amiable figure in warm-up pants with the signs, the bumper stickers, the legislative lobbying, and the e-mail blasts of Levees.org, to whose mailing list I belong. It was from this list that I learned of Eve Troeh’s call for public comment about the semantics of Katrina. Troeh shared the e-mails that her blog post generated. The most memorable image came from the one Rosenthal had written: “Saying ‘Katrina flooded New Orleans,’” she wrote, “would be like saying an iceberg killed more than 1,500 on the Titanic. Katrina, like the iceberg, exposed human arrogance and human mistakes.”

When I e-mailed Rosenthal for comment, she wrote back saying that she was about to go in front of the New Orleans Design Commission to lobby for a plaque. Levees.org has designed, fabricated, and placed several such plaques at the locations of levee breaches around the city. This one was to be placed on the levee at the Lower Ninth Ward, where it was breached during Katrina. The pitch for the plaque read, in part, “Nearly ten years after the catastrophic breach of the Industrial Canal’s east side, there is nothing at the breach site to commemorate the breach event. The failure of the canal wall decimated a historic primarily African-American neighborhood of homeowners yet there is nothing to show for that beyond a repaired floodwall and empty lots. The flood survivors deserve better.”

In addition to the plaques, the lobbying, the signage, and the bumper stickers, Levees.org organizes the bike tours, the ones that provoke Campanella’s disdain. Rosenthal is also writing a book. Its title: “Don’t Call It Katrina.” I asked her why she has been so focussed on this issue of semantics and, by extension, blame.

“It is because in the aftermath of Katrina, America was told a fairy tale about a monster storm, a city below the sea and corrupt local officials,” she wrote back. “I saw suffering in the weeks after the Flood. Then a few months later, that fairy tale took flight and I watched as those who suffered were actually blamed for their misfortune. I couldn’t bear to watch this and I made it my life’s work to separate the facts from the fiction.”

The City Council approved the plaque.

On May 4th, while Sandy Rosenthal was preparing to pitch her plaque in New Orleans, Ted Steinberg was accepting an award at the New York Society Library for his book “Gotham Unbound.” In the book, he makes the case that one of the most ecologically vulnerable cities in America—the ones most prone to destruction from hurricanes and floods—is New York. This argument doesn’t seem controversial in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy—perhaps Exhibit A in my case for the linkage between New York and New Orleans—but Steinberg pointed out that he had been working on the book since Rudolph Giuliani was mayor.

Steinberg’s acceptance speech referenced the famous retaining wall built around the foundation of the World Trade Center, which was, in effect, a levee. When it came time to build the 9/11 memorial, a retaining wall had to be built around this retaining wall. I found this image redolent of an ascendant theme in ecological thought: that the distinction between what is nature and what is not has blurred beyond recognition.

This is an argument advanced by Timothy Morton, an English professor at Rice and the author of “Hyperobjects,” “The Ecological Thought,” and a collection of his correspondence with Björk. His work jumps between Romanticism, fad diets, philosophy, and ecology, and is pervaded by a breathless intensity, like an academic version of the genre jumbling of Bill Simmons. “Hyperobjects” makes the case that there are some phenomena that defy our attempts to categorize them as natural or not. I asked Morton about the importance some people in New Orleans placed on Katrina being understood as something other than a natural disaster.

He seemed to find significance in giving a nonhuman thing like a hurricane a name. “‘Katrina’ gets it right, in that nonhumans can be agents and do stuff,” he said. “But it also implies something invading our social space from the outside—and, as I’ve just argued, this isn’t the case. The fact that there is this semantic difficulty and that we’re having this conversation shows to me that we have definitely crossed a Rubicon: humans can no longer ignore nonhumans, they end up haunting the words we use and interrupting everyday talk.”

The caller, in other words, is in the house. The retaining wall needs a retaining wall.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the phrase “We are all New Yorkers now” appeared, uttered across America and, at least, certain parts of the world.

Back in 2001, the question about the country’s newly warm feelings toward New York seemed to be how long will it last? Not very long, Phillip Lopate speculated, comparing the experience to “getting licked by a large, forgetful St. Bernard dog.”

Now, in hindsight, it is clear that the country’s empathy with New York contained a darker kernel—a kind of victim envy, in which populations of small cities and small towns convinced themselves that they were under imminent threat of terrorist attack. One result of this are the local police forces that have come to resemble military units, complete with hand-me-downs from the Department of Homeland Security.

Katrina provoked an enormous outpouring of support and volunteerism that persists to this day. To take a totally random example, I recall reports of Stephon Marbury, not known as the most warm and fuzzy of professional athletes, breaking down in tears upon seeing the footage of stranded, soaked African-Americans, and writing a check for half a million dollars. But for all the good feelings toward New Orleans, and the concrete gestures of solidarity, I do not think that there was identification; America was not saying, “We are all New Orleanians now.”

And yet that statement is much closer to the truth, for America and for the world, than “We are all New Yorkers now.” What happened to New Orleanians on August 29, 2005, is much more likely to happen to most Americans than what happened to New Yorkers on September 11, 2001.

Some friends who live across town called me in a panic the other day. Their security system was going off, and they were out of town. The siren was wailing. The neighbors were complaining. They needed me to drive to their house, break in, and turn off the alarm. I went into “Mission: Impossible” mode—it involved keys, ladders, a drop and roll through a window onto a bed, yanking at and then cutting wires, all done to the accompaniment of a shrieking alarm system. What I ended up accomplishing was setting off a second alarm. The bright side of this experience, besides my gesture of neighborly goodwill, and the comedy of hearing someone a thousand miles away try and remember where they left the scissors, was that I finally got to go to Community Book Center, an African-American bookstore a couple of blocks away.

The place was open but empty, except for the proprietor. Her name was Vera, and she was in the midst of a reorganization. Vera received me coolly.

I presented some books that I wanted to donate. There was incense, clothing racks, art on the walls. “We’re going through an evolution,” Vera said, “because of the way things are going with books.” I told her that in return for my donation I would like her to give me a book, any book. We walked to the sparse shelves.

“You like to cook?” she asked.

I do. But I am not that fond of the sorts of foods for which New Orleans is famous, unless you include its burgeoning Vietnamese scene. Nevertheless, I nodded, and she reached for a spiral-bound volume with a red cover, on which was superimposed an African-American man in a white captain’s hat and a white shirt, handling a skillet full of what looked like crawfish étouffée. “Chez Helene Cookbook,” it said, and beneath it, “House of Good Food Cookbook.” Beneath that, in tiny print, “Austin Leslie.”

“He was the chef at Jacque-Imo’s,” she said. “There was a sit-com based on him, ‘Frank’s Place.’ He had a place called Chez Helene.”

“Had?”

“He passed away after Katrina.”

“As in, he died during Katrina?”

“After. But, you know, it was probably the stress of it all.” She put her hand to her chest when she said “stress.”

I looked at the book, and the smiling guy with the captain’s hat. Suddenly it was an emotional moment for me. Something in Vera’s voice. The understatement of “probably the stress.” The way she brought her hand toward her clavicle when she said it.

Maybe part of what I heard in Vera’s voice was a certain fatigue that comes with having to explain things, to relay facts, that in your world are enormous and widely known, yet outside your world remain, somehow, not widely known, invisible.

This is how these tragedies play out—the human dimension is so powerful. It comes and hits you like a body blow. It makes the discussion of semantics, the political jockeying, the ecological philosophy, seem absurd, or at least beside the point. That I mention it at all is because I couldn’t help but note, after I had said my goodbyes and left with my cookbook, that this little storm of emotion within me had been a catharsis of sorts, it had cleared the air for me. The story had functioned like a drug. Which is what these personal stories are. And this is going to be the challenge for all those people sitting around whiteboards contemplating Katrina’s tenth anniversary: how to speak to the tragedy of Austin Leslie, and thousands and thousands of others, each as powerful as a hurricane when you look at it closely, and like a hurricane capable of blowing everything else away.