Natural Hazards Observer
| November 2006 | Volume XXXI | Number 2 |
Respect for Nature as Cornerstone to
Community Resiliency:
The View from Katrina “Ground Zero”
Less than a year after my article “What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans?” appeared in the November 2004 issue of the Observer (see p. 5-6) as part of the Disasters Waiting to Happen series, Hurricane Katrina struck and played out in a manner that was eerily familiar. And even though the magnitude of the storm could have been greater, it was a category 3 storm when it made landfall in Louisiana, the magnitude of its impact on the populace (which was exacerbated by Hurricane Rita when it struck the southwest Louisiana coast only a month later) far exceeded the impact of any other hurricane in American history.
My predictive article was based on warnings by a number of scientists—a core of 50 Gulf Coast scientists and another 50 collaborators from around the United States—from a variety of disciplines (physical, social, and life sciences) regarding what was likely in store for New Orleans and the Louisiana coast. My own research on hurricane evacuation challenges represented only a small portion of the data that I included.
The shock generated by the accuracy of the predictions made in the article produced a response from readers around the world. In this article, I will discuss my thoughts on two of the most commonly asked questions as well as what can be done to prevent similar questions from arising in the future.
Question 1: How Could Katrina Have Been So Accurately Predicted and Yet Its Impact Not Prevented?
Since the hurricane, I have undertaken an exploratory research effort to understand why the scientists’ warnings went unheeded. Other scientists who issued warnings about the reality of the hurricane threat to New Orleans, including Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, are also doing research on this issue and have published their own speculations. Some of the reasons for the disregarding of the warnings are distrust of scientists, who are seen as self-serving in their catastrophe predictions (positioning for funding to study the threat); competition of the warnings with so many sensationalized media and entertainment visual representations that attention for the real event is difficult to garner; the insularity of scientists that causes them to “speak to the choir” rather than to the public; and a lack of respect by national leaders for local scientists from a marginalized part of our society (Louisiana).
All of these proposed reasons are interesting, worthy of pursuit, and are likely a part of the explanation. However, as a victim of the storm, my interest is also in knowing the answer to the larger, more fundamental question, How does a society such as ours, so bold in its confidence of capacity to manage itself with sophisticated organizations and bureaucracies, so advanced in its science, and so laden with laws, regulations, and processes supposedly created to reduce risk let an event of such magnitude happen?
Question 2: What Is the “Big Picture” of How Katrina Came to Be?
In a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, R.W. Kates et al. describe the “levee effect,” which was first defined by Ian Burton in 1962: each consecutive generation builds higher levees, which provide an aura of greater protection, and behind which more and more human activity occurs until the levee breeches, yet again, and the destruction is all the more devastating. 1 Such is the pattern of community growth throughout the 300-year history of New Orleans.
Compounding this history of false protection in New Orleans is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, constructed in 1965 to connect the Gulf of Mexico to the city so that ships would not have to navigate the challenging and lengthy path of the Mississippi River. Known as MR-GO, the channel is little used (about one ship one way every two and one-half days) and extremely expensive to maintain due to the dredging required ($13 million/year or almost $100,000 per trip for each deep draft ship). Additionally, MR-GO has acted for decades as a conduit of highly saline Gulf water that has systematically killed a large swamp forest, a natural storm barrier, on the Gulf Coast side of New Orleans. During Katrina, the channel funneled the storm surge into the Industrial Canal, which resulted in the breeching of the floodwall that inundated the city on both sides of the canal. Many people caught in this unnaturally forceful surge were killed instantly.
Despite the strong scientific concurrence regarding the massive destructive contributions of MR-GO to the Katrina catastrophe, many members of the business community are advocating that it be redredged and reopened to ship traffic. Similarly, in reference to the repair of the floodwalls and levees, a high-level Louisiana state official declared, more than once, “Man is in a battle with nature; and man will win.” Is the message not getting through or is it just not being heard?
Resilience and Working with Nature
As an environmental/community sociologist first and a disaster specialist second, I focus on the society/environment interface, especially at regional and local levels. I believe that the uncontrollable urge to control nature that most modern cultures demonstrate plays a major role in negative disaster outcomes. As a nation, we must overcome that urge. We should not just accept this cultural flaw as a given and continue to plan nonstructural mitigation and resiliency activities as add-ons.
Two strong proponents of this issue are Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center, and Margaret Davidson, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Services Center. For the last two years, Tierney has ended her summary of the annual hazards workshop with such a warning. And Davidson has ended her presentations at several national events since Katrina with a similar message: the toll such disrespect for nature is taking on the flexible wealth of the nation is such that we are quickly coming to the tipping point where we have to choose between providing the broad social services that underpin our society and paying for natural disaster recovery.
Community resilience has a growing following among academics, practitioners, and community stakeholders as a way to reduce risk to natural hazards. Often times described as multidimensional—personal, social, economic, natural, and physical—the concept of resiliency directs our attention to the preexisting conditions that are necessary to prevent or reduce the severity of disaster impacts. Social scientists agree that an approach to disaster risk reduction that embraces resiliency, especially nonstructural mitigation (as opposed to large physical structures such as levees), definitely has the potential to provide comprehensive and long-lasting protection from disaster-related harm. Such an approach also calls for very close scrutiny of social vulnerability to disasters. This means focusing on the populations that would suffer the most after a disaster because of their income, race, ethnicity, and/or marginality and exploring ways in which their vulnerability may be reduced.
To avoid similar tragedies in the future, we should use the idea of social resiliency of a community to lay the foundation for environmentally sound communities. Among other things, a socially resilient community trusts in leadership, believes that the community will serve the interest of all members, has full participation of members in decision making, and gives as much credence to local knowledge as to scientific knowledge. When setting a course for community resiliency, we must begin with a cornerstone that promotes living with the environment rather than one that continues to try, unsuccessfully, to control it. Resilience capacity should not be wasted on accommodating continued environmental resistance.
That said, New Orleans is severely challenged by shortcomings in social resiliency. Thus, areas of the city will be rebuilt that should not be because they require too much structural protection. And nonstructural mitigation of homes and businesses (e.g., elevation) will not be implemented because the community is only weakly engaged in learning about these safeguards and opportunities for assistance. There is a lot of pressure to return New Orleans to the pre-Katrina normal of control of nature. The attitude is that it can be done, and it can work, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.
How Can You Help?
What these Gulf Coast communities need now is leadership from the disaster researcher and practitioner community. Specifically, they need leadership in the vetting of locational and infrastructure components of proposed individual, institutional, economic, and community plans as to whether their implementation will contribute to natural hazards risk. These communities also need help identifying resilient alternatives. Look at the mess that coastal Louisiana has gotten into because of the failure of the federal government, corporate private sector, state and local communities, and individuals to address the resiliency issue. The environment has been drastically compromised—thousand of miles of wetlands lost since European habitation—and the structural solution to that degradation—levees—has failed, over and over again.
Rebuilding the wetlands and finding ways for communities to function resiliently without relying on massive levees are both daunting and possible goals. Those of us at “ground-zero” for both Katrina and Rita ask for you to join our efforts to make Gulf Coast communities truly safer from natural hazards. Efforts that, once proven successful, can be applied to other similarly challenged regions of the United States.
Shirley Laska (slaska@uno.edu)
Department of Sociology
Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology (CHART)
University of New Orleans
References
Kates, R.W., C.E. Colten, S. Laska, and S.P. Leatherman. 2006. Reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: A research perspective. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 26. doi: 0.1073/pnas.0605726103.