Disproportionality and Disaster:
Hurricane Katrina and the Mississippi
River-Gulf Outlet n
William R. Freudenburg, University of California, Santa Barbara
Robert Gramling, University of Louisiana, Lafayette
Shirley Laska, University of New Orleans
Kai T. Erikson, Yale University
Objectives. Although many observers have interpreted Hurricane Katrina’s damage
to New Orleans as a case of nature striking humans, we draw on the sociological
concept of the growth machine to show that much of the damage resulted instead
from what humans had done to nature—in the name but not the reality of ‘‘economic development.’’ Methods. We triangulate findings from multiple qualitative
techniques, including first-hand fieldwork, interviews, and analyses of historical
records. We focus on a particularly telling illustration: the Mississippi River-Gulf
Outlet, a transportation canal. Results. Although the canal was widely predicted to
deliver prosperity, it mainly created environmental damage, destroying wetlands
that had formerly protected New Orleans from hurricanes. Despite enthusiastic
predictions about its economic importance—plus millions of dollars in ongoing
federal investments—the ‘‘outlet’’ was used by only a dozen of the ships for which it
was designed during the entire last year before Katrina hit. Conclusions. This was
clearly not a case of an ‘‘enduring conflict’’ between the environment and the
economy; it was a case where economic benefits to a tiny number of beneficiaries
created profound costs to the environment, and to humans in turn. Claims about
supposed ‘‘economic benefits’’ from environmentally harmful projects need to be
examined more closely in other contexts, as well.
Decades ago, Molotch (1970) noted that more than oil had escaped
during the disaster of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill—‘‘a bit of truth about
power’’ had escaped as well. In the wake of that spill, he argued that acn
Direct correspondence to William R. Freudenburg, Dehlsen Professor of Environment
and Society, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4160. Several author meetings and some of the first-hand fieldwork were made possible by support from the American
Sociological Association, the MacArthur, Russell Sage, Ford, Rockefeller, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, the Social Science Research Council Task Force on Katrina, and the
Dehlsen Professorship of the University of California, Santa Barbara, which we gratefully
acknowledge. All views and conclusions reported in this article, however, are ours alone. This
is a revised version of an article originally prepared for the 2007 Annual Meeting, American
Sociological Association, New York.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 90, Number 3, September 2009
r 2009 by the Southwestern Social Science Association
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cidents could provide important opportunities for insights that might
be more deeply hidden under other circumstances. In the same spirit, Hurricane Katrina may have revealed more than just the inadequacies of levees
around New Orleans—the storm may also have opened opportunities for
insights into relationships between humans and the biophysical world.
To date, the most influential analyses of environment-society relationships—ranging from classic works by Catton (1980), Schnaiberg (1980),
and O’Connor (1988) to more recent analyses by York, Rosa, and Dietz
(2003)—have tended to treat environmental harm as being proportionate to
overall levels of economic prosperity. In recent decades, such beliefs began
to be challenged by macro-level thinking on ‘‘ecological modernization’’ (e.g.,
Spaargaren and Mol, 1992) and by work on what proponents call ‘‘environmental Kuznets curves,’’ ‘‘postmaterialism,’’ and the ‘‘environmental
state,’’ but evidence to support such challenges has been mixed, at best (for
reviews, see Fisher and Freudenburg, 2004; Brechin and Kempton, 1997;
Buttel, 2000; York, Rosa, and Dietz, 2003). Still more recently, however, a
more fine-grained approach has argued that much or most environmental
damage actually results from a surprisingly small fraction of all economic
activity. In contrast with macro-level approaches, this newer work on disproportionality has begun to receive clear empirical support, in contexts that
range from U.S. toxic emissions and automobiles, to sources of urban runoff
into midwestern lakes, to demands for water in the western United States
(Berry, 2008; Bishop and Stedman, 1996; Freudenburg, 2005; Nowak,
Bowen, and Cabot, 2006).
Perhaps the clearest expression of the disproportionality perspective to
date has been the ‘‘double diversion’’ hypothesis, involving a pair of expectations. The first is that, rather than providing an overall benefit to
‘‘capitalism,’’ profits from environmental rights and resources will generally
be diverted to a few disproportionately damaging activities. This disproportionality (the ‘‘first diversion’’) is expected to be made possible in part
because of the ‘‘second diversion,’’ or the diversion of attention, involving
the widespread but generally unchallenged expectation that such environmentally harmful activities will be ‘‘necessary’’ for jobs and the economy, or
for capitalism (Freudenburg, 2005, 2006). Work on disproportionality thus
shares a good deal of compatibility with the ‘‘growth machine’’ perspective—the expectation that local governments will promote land-use intensification, bringing profits to land-based local elites, often through the claim
but usually not the reality of better job prospects for local workers—turning
a city into what Molotch (1976, 1999) has called a ‘‘growth machine’’ (see
also Logan and Molotch, 1987).
The growth machine perspective has generated a good deal of research—
and criticism. In a review that dealt with New Orleans, for example, Lauria
(1999) criticized its focus on land-based elites, arguing that ‘‘what is important here is not the economic activities, but rather the control over the
consensus-seeking/ideological discourse’’ (1999:138). Other authors fault
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growth machine work for placing too much emphasis on local political
actors, offering sharply different views of what Gandy (2002:8) called ‘‘the
crucial role of capital in the shaping of urban space.’’ In particular, a number
of important and more recent analyses have seen local governments as being
situated in what Desfor and Keil (2004:212) have described as ‘‘a field of
tension among the state, the global economy, and civil society.’’ From
critics’ perspectives—far from being a process that can be appropriately
understood as involving interactions between local government actors and
land-based elites—urban development needs to be seen as ‘‘a globally induced but locally contingent process’’ (Desfor and Keil, 2004:212–13; see
also Kirby, 1993; Magnusson, 1996; but see also Freudenburg, 2005, 2006;
O’Neill, 2006; Reisner, 1993; Swyngedouw, 2004; Worster, 1985).
In the following pages, we consider Katrina and disproportionality in light
of such critiques, doing so in three main sections. In the first, we briefly
review the common belief that the drowning of New Orleans by Hurricane
Katrina mainly provides evidence about the city’s physical location or ‘‘site.’’
In the second, we present an alternative interpretation, drawing more directly
from growth machine/disproportionality perspectives, interpreting the misery of New Orleans not just in terms of the physical location of the city, but
also in light of what human political-economic systems, local and nonlocal,
had previously done to that site. In the third and final section, we consider
implications for future research, both in New Orleans and elsewhere.
Horrors and Hurricanes
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Louisiana Gulf Coast on
August 29, 2005, it created the most expensive disaster of all time, and one
of America’s deadliest. It killed some 1,500 people in Louisiana alone, with
more than 700 others still being listed as ‘‘missing’’ more than two years
later (Independent Levee Investigation Team, 2006b). Early reports focused
on the uniqueness of New Orleans—a city with a long history and perhaps
the most distinctive cuisine in the United States—and concluded that the
city’s suffering was equally unique, due to its location along a low stretch of
the U.S. coast that often gets hit by hurricanes (see, e.g., Grunwald, 2005;
Knabb, Rhome, and Brown, 2005). When the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had previously identified disasters that seemed to
be waiting to happen, after all, a hurricane striking New Orleans had been
one of the very top possibilities (Laska, 2004). In some senses, then, perhaps
early observers could be forgiven for concluding that disaster was simply no
longer ‘‘waiting to happen’’—it happened.
Both before Katrina and since then, moreover, well-respected academics
have put forth similar arguments. Perhaps the best-known analysis of New
Orleans is Lewis’s (2003) historical geography, New Orleans: The Making of
an Urban Landscape. This is no hatchet job; in the first edition, Lewis noted
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that he had become ‘‘too fond of New Orleans to be very dispassionate,’’
saying that he considered this to be an exceptional, ‘‘successful’’ city, beloved
by its residents and praised by its visitors. In the aftermath of Katrina,
however, Lewis’s thoughtful analysis was perhaps most often remembered
for a one-sentence summary that seemed to encapsulate, concisely, what so
many Americans were thinking at the time: New Orleans may have been an
‘‘inevitable city,’’ but it was in an ‘‘impossible location’’ (Lewis, 2003:xi, 9).
In a distinction that would be taken up by others in Katrina’s aftermath,
Lewis saw New Orleans as providing a classic illustration of the differences
between ‘‘site’’ and ‘‘situation’’:
Site is the actual real estate which the city occupies, and the site for New
Orleans is wretched. Situation is what we commonly mean when we speak
of a place with respect to neighboring places. New Orleans’ situation is its
location near the mouth of the Mississippi, and the fact that a million
people work and make a living on this evil site only exemplifies the excellence of the situation. There is no contradiction. If a city’s situation is
good enough, its site will be altered to make do. (Lewis, 2003:19–20)
Just two days after Katrina, Kelman posted a similar interpretation on the
web, suggesting that much of the hurricane’s damage was due to the city’s
site or physical location. He argued that the suffering of thousands of New
Orleanians, stranded in the Superdome without water, sanitation, or federal
help, provided ‘‘an apt metaphor for New Orleans’ environmental history’’:
The sodden city has long placed itself in harm’s way, relying on uncertain
artifice to protect it from unpredictable environs. New Orleans is utterly
dependent for its survival on engineered landscapes and the willful suspension of disbelief that technology has allowed its citizens to sustain. . . .
New Orleans’ dysfunctional relationship with its environment may make it
the nation’s most improbable metropolis. It is flood prone. It is cursed with
a fertile disease environment. It is located along a well-worn pathway that
tropical storms travel. . . . From this perspective, New Orleans has earned
all the scorn being heaped upon it—the city is a misguided urban project, a
fool’s errand, a disaster waiting to happen. . . . New Orleans has a nearperfect situation and an almost unimaginably bad site. It’s because of the
former that people have worked endlessly to overcome the hazards of the
latter. (Kelman, 2005)
As suggested above, however, other authors challenge the sharp distinction
between ‘‘site’’ and ‘‘situation,’’ and others challenge sharp distinctions between ‘‘environment’’ and ‘‘society’’ more broadly. Authors such as Castree
(1995) and Smith (1996), for example, treat ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘society’’ as what
Swyngedouw (2004:11) calls ‘‘fundamentally combined historically geographical production processes,’’ and others go further. Harvey (1996),
notably, insists that there is nothing particularly ‘‘unnatural’’ about urban
regions such as New York, while Lewontin (1997:137) argues that ‘‘the
environment’’ as such ‘‘does not exist,’’ and Swyngedouw (2004:11)
Disproportionality and Disaster
501
concludes that ‘‘there is no such thing as an unsustainable city in general,
but rather there are a series of urban and environmental processes that
negatively affect some social groups while benefiting others.’’
As will be seen in the following pages—and as suggested in Molotch’s
original article (1976)—the New Orleans growth machine clearly did ‘‘negatively affect some social groups while benefiting others.’’ In the wake of
Katrina, however, many observers raised questions precisely about the
‘‘sustainability’’ of a sea-level location in a hurricane-prone region, and only
a complex argument could hold that ‘‘environmental’’ factors such as Hurricane Katrina’s winds and waters ‘‘did not exist.’’ Instead, we find it more
sensible to treat ‘‘environmental’’ and ‘‘social’’ factors as ‘‘fundamentally
combined’’ (Swyngedouw, 2004:11), or as displaying ‘‘conjoint constitution’’ or ‘‘mutual contingency’’ (Freudenburg, Frickel, and Gramling,
1995), offering what Gandy (2002:12) called ‘‘a more productive interaction between insights derived from the social and ecological sciences.’’ From
this perspective, even if the destructive force of hurricanes may be increasing,
exacerbated by human-induced global warming, hurricanes of today still
resemble the ones that have struck the coast since before homo sapiens
appeared on earth—and even if New Orleans is a city built by humans,
while its location was built by nature, the city’s vulnerability may well be
best understood as involving an interaction of both ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘social’’
factors. In light of the broader literature, in short, we see it as worthwhile to
consider not just what an ‘‘almost unimaginably bad’’ expanse of nature did
to the people who were trying to make a living there, but also to ask what
people did to nature in that region—with what consequences for themselves
and their fellow residents.
Growth Machine Damage to Environmental Defenses
In some ways, the story of Katrina seems well-known. It was a powerful
storm—the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane on record, and the
strongest ever documented in the Gulf of Mexico, at least at the time.
(Hurricane Rita would break both records just four weeks later.) Katrina
roared ashore just after 6:00 A.M. on August 29, 2005, with sustained winds
of 125 mph, creating a significant natural disaster for southeastern Louisiana
and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The Mississippi coast, in particular, was
battered by the hurricane’s powerful right hook, where the storm’s counterclockwise rotation created especially serious damage, destroying 68,729
houses in the state (Ripley, 2006). For New Orleans itself, however, the
telling story was a different one.
In the first few hours after Katrina made landfall, mass media reports—
largely from reporters in the relatively high and dry hotels of the French
Quarter—suggested that New Orleans had dodged the storm’s right hook
and thus the major flooding that had been feared. These reports, however,
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were wrong by the time they were issued. Even before the eye of the hurricane passed New Orleans at roughly 9:00 A.M., floodwalls that had been
built along several of the city’s canals by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
had already begun to fail. Over the next several days, the organizational
responses by the Federal Emergency Management Agency would fail even
more severely. Less well-known, meanwhile—but no less relevant for work
on environment-society relationships—are other ways in which the same
Army Corps of Engineers had already begun to shape the region before the
building of the floodwalls.
The Un-Natural Disaster
A useful starting point involves a widely known fact that has nevertheless
escaped notice in most analyses to date. The most important failures came in
three canals—those known locally as the London Avenue, 17th Street, and
Industrial Canals—that all had floodwalls of roughly equal elevations. All
three connect to ‘‘Lake’’ Pontchartrain, the brackish water body to the north
of New Orleans that connects to the Gulf of Mexico (see Figure 1). From
the start, the Corps claimed that the flooding came from Lake Pontchartrain
(see, e.g., Vartabedian and Pae, 2005), meaning that water depths should
have been roughly equal across the three canals. In reality, however, water
never rose within five to eight feet of the tops of the walls of two canals—
those along London Avenue and 17th Street. On the third—the Industrial
Canal—water surged well over the top. Unless the laws of fluid mechanics
were temporarily repealed on August 29, that simply could not have happened if the explanations from the Corps of Engineers had been correct.
The two photos in Figure 2 show the story. One—taken by Nathan
Bassiouni as he helped in the citizen rescue effort that came to be called the
‘‘Cajun Flotilla’’—shows the 17th Street floodwall failure the day after
the storm. As can be seen, some water was still flowing into the city, but the
water was virtually even with the bottom of the concrete portion of the wall,
making it about eight feet below the top of the wall. Even the ‘‘bathtub
ring’’ from the muddy flooding of the day before was not much higher. The
other photo, taken several weeks later by one of the authors, shows the gash
on the ‘‘back’’ side of the Industrial Canal wall, facing what was once
the densely populated lower Ninth Ward. As several hydrologists have confirmed, this gash was clearly carved by water that poured over the top of the
wall. Near the top of this photo once stood the gash-weakened portion of
the wall that failed catastrophically, blowing more than 170 feet into the
neighborhood.
To understand why the water should have risen so much higher in the
Industrial Canal than in the other two canals, it is helpful to start significantly earlier and consider another comparison: each hurricane is to some
degree unique, but Katrina was by no means the first major hurricane to
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503
FIGURE 1
Flooded Portions of New Orleans and Vicinity
NOTE: Flooded portions of New Orleans and vicinity after Katrina (darker colors),
showing locations of MRGO and major breached canals. The longest of the three
canals (on the right) is the Industrial Canal, where floodwaters were six to eight
feet deeper than in the other two. MRGO, at the lower right, connects to the Gulf of
Mexico. Note that all three canals connect directly into Lake Pontchartrain and
thus should have had comparable water levels. Photograph courtesy of SPOT at
the University of California, Santa Barbara, r CNES 2005, distributed by Terra
Images USA, LLC and SPOT IMAGE.
deliver a relatively direct hit to New Orleans. In particular, Hurricanes Betsy
and Camille, in 1965 and 1969, respectively, came within a few miles of
Katrina’s track, and by a number of measures, both the earlier storms should
have created about as much damage to the city as Katrina.
In simple terms, wind speeds are often used as a way of measuring hurricane strength, but people are most likely to be killed by a hurricane’s water,
not its wind. Given that the deadliest flooding is usually driven by a hurricane’s leading ‘‘right hook,’’ Betsy’s track, just to the west of the city, was
especially ominous. In practice, both Camille and Betsy created some
flooding, with Betsy, in particular, killing 76 Louisiana residents and flooding about 20 percent of New Orleans. Betsy also inspired what the Army
Corps of Engineers called ‘‘The Hurricane Protection Program’’—the
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FIGURE 2
Evidence of Different Water Depths in 17th Street and Industrial Canals
NOTE: Top photo, taken by Nathan Bassiouni on the day after Katrina, shows
failure in 17th Street Canal floodwall. Note that water barely reaches the bottom
of the concrete portion of the wall, about eight feet below top, and that even water
stains from day before are significantly below top of wall. Bottom photo, taken by
William Freudenburg several weeks later, shows gash on back (populated) side of
Industrial Canal floodwall, carved by water that came over the top of the wall. The
gash was deeper behind the parts of the wall that once stood near the top of the
photo, which were driven more than 170 feet into what had formerly been a
densely populated urban neighborhood.
Disproportionality and Disaster
505
building of the very levees and floodwalls that failed to protect the city from
Katrina, even though they were significantly higher and stronger than those
that were present in the 1960s. Despite the improved if still fallible hurricane protection, however, Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city, killing
roughly 20 times as many people as Betsy. In short, something besides the
building of floodwalls must have happened between 1965 and 2005—and
according to environmental scientists, perhaps the most important such
changes involved a substantial loss of wetlands.
As recently as 1960, Louisiana still had the vast majority of the wetlands that
had greeted the earliest French explorers. During the four decades between
Betsy and Katrina, however, Louisiana would lose more of its wetlands than
had disappeared in the previous four centuries—roughly 1,700 square miles, or
just over 1 million of its 4 million acres. For context, that is an area nearly as
large as Delaware. In recent years, land has been disappearing at the rate of one
football field every 30 to 45 seconds, two to three square miles every month,
and 30 square miles—a Manhattan Island or more—every year (U.S. Geological Survey, 2005). By the time Katrina hit, the once-thick band of wetlands
was in tatters—and after Katrina hit, so was New Orleans.
Those losses, moreover, were not simply due to ‘‘nature.’’ They had to do
with a range of causes, including oil and gas extraction and the building of
upstream dams and levees, but to the southeast of New Orleans—the direction from which Katrina’s deadliest storm surges attacked the city—the
key factor was more specific. This is the location of a canal that was supposed to deliver prosperity to New Orleans, but that in fact appears to have
delivered disaster.
MRGO and Gone?
When Hurricane Betsy slammed ashore in 1965—becoming ‘‘BillionDollar Betsy,’’ or the first storm in the United States to create more than a
billion dollars in property damage—many residents of New Orleans and
adjacent St. Bernard Parish were incensed. They blamed the flooding on a
then-new navigation canal known as the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or
MRGO—pronounced almost universally as ‘‘Mister Go,’’ but at least since
the time of Betsy also known locally as ‘‘the hurricane highway’’ (Brown,
2006; see also Day, 2005).
Although few people outside of the region had heard of MRGO before
Katrina struck, it had been controversial in the region ever since it was first
proposed. It was a ‘‘tidewater’’ or sea-level canal, stretching from the heart of
New Orleans down to the Gulf of Mexico—a giant ditch, some 75 miles
long, that simply parallels the last 120 miles of the Mississippi River.
Despite the controversy, examination of historical federal documents,
newspaper files, and other records makes it clear that this was not a case
where national-level interests decided to build a project, despite local
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opposition, nor ‘‘a globally induced but locally contingent process’’ (Desfor
and Keil, 2004:212–13)—and neither were local governments caught ‘‘in
a field of tension among the state, the global economy, and civil society’’
(Desfor and Keil, 2004:212). This, instead, came much closer to classic
growth machine dynamics (Molotch, 1976, 1999). As spelled out in greater
detail in a forthcoming, book-length treatment (Freudenburg et al., 2009),
local elites led the way, enlisting support from local and then state-level
officials, working higher-level political systems for years, ultimately bringing
in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds.
One illustration of the cozy relationships between local elites and politicians involves the Board of Commissioners for the Port of New Orleans,
locally known as the ‘‘Dock Board.’’ It was established in 1896, under
Louisiana Act 70, which even specified that the commissioners must be
‘‘predominantly identified with the commerce or business interest of the
port of New Orleans.’’ For years, the Dock Board dreamed of a canal that
would make New Orleans a seaport—not just a ‘‘river town,’’ more than
100 miles from the Gulf. In the 1920s, work on the Panama Canal led to
new technologies that offered the first real potential for realizing that dream.
The hunt for federal funding was slowed by the Great Depression and by the
fact that the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers initially found ‘‘no
necessity for another deep-water outlet from the Mississippi River and
no justification for acquisition of the Industrial Canal and lock at New
Orleans’’ (U.S. House of Representatives, 1936, as quoted in U.S. House of
Representatives, 1951:19). During World War II, however, local boosters
changed their sales pitch, arguing that the entire nation might suffer if an
enemy were somehow to ‘‘close’’ the mouth of the river. For the most part,
local mass media simply cheered them on; the New Orleans Item, for
example, editorialized that ‘‘the port’s life-line should not depend entirely
upon a crooked, fog-covered, silt-bearing, temperamental river channel,
which might otherwise restrain or restrict the growth of the port of New
Orleans like a Chinese girl’s foot’’ (New Orleans Item, 1943:21, as quoted in
Azcona, 2006:91–92).
In April and May 1943, Congress responded favorably. First the U.S.
Senate Commerce Committee and then the House Committee on Rivers
and Harbors directed the Corps of Engineers to study ‘‘the advisability and
cost of providing an emergency outlet from the Mississippi River in the
interest of national defense and general commerce.’’ The Army was engaged
in World War II at the time, but after the war, in May 1948, the Chief of
Engineers for the Army did finally endorse the idea of a new canal, stretching from New Orleans down to the Gulf of Mexico. The Chief of Engineers
was limited in his enthusiasm, but the governor of Louisiana was not; he
proudly proclaimed that the project would be of ‘‘inestimable benefit’’ to the
state and nation.
Still, under the law, the Corps of Engineers actually needed to ‘‘estimate’’
the benefits and compare them against the costs of the new project. In 1951,
Disproportionality and Disaster
507
the Corps presented a modestly positive benefit-cost analysis (BCA) to
Congress. The Director of the Bureau of the Budget was even less enthusiastic, noting that the project could not be justified in terms of ‘‘direct
monetary benefits from the outlet channel to the Gulf.’’ Still, he decided
there could be enough ‘‘advantages of convenience and efficiency’’ from
combining MRGO with a harbor improvement project in New Orleans that
he would have ‘‘no objection’’ to the project, ‘‘with the understanding,
however, that no appropriation for construction of the project will be sought
until such time as the budgetary situation clearly makes possible the initiation of such improvements.’’
Had the Director of the Bureau of the Budget been more careful, he might
have indicated that ‘‘no appropriation for construction’’ would be sought by
his office. Local boosters, on the other hand, had been seeking funds for more
than a quarter of a century by then, and they were under no such constraint.
With support from Louisiana’s congressional delegation, they finally won
full authorization for the canal in the 1956 ‘‘River and Harbors Act’’—but
without the improvements to the harbor that had swayed the Director of the
Budget. Although the common pattern was for ‘‘authorized’’ projects to wait
for years before receiving actual federal funding, the Dock Board itself soon
used $200,000, advanced from the New Orleans Levee Board, to initiate
construction with a literal bang, using 180 sticks of dynamite to create what
the New Orleans Times Picayune would call a ‘‘helpful explosion for world
trade.’’ The ‘‘explosion’’ was a trivially small fraction of the project’s overall
cost, which ultimately ran to $580 million (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,
2007), but it was a clever public relations gimmick—part of the effort to
convince the world that the new canal would be incredibly busy, a wet
version of an urban freeway at rush hour. After still more lobbying and then
years of construction, an interim canal was dredged to half the final width in
1963, when a ship called Del Sud took the first trip along the full length of
the channel. The canal was officially completed to its full design width in
1968 (Brown, 2006; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2001).
Hurricane Betsy—and the first depictions of MRGO as the ‘‘hurricane
highway’’—came between these two dates, in 1965. The Corps disagreed
with its critics at that time, and it still does. The Corps also argues that the
canal played only a minor role in Katrina’s damage, being responsible for
having increased the height of the storm surge by a fraction of a foot at most
(U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2006a). On the other hand, many citizens
of the region, along with a number of independent technical analyses, point
to important environmental problems that are left out of the evaluation by
the Corps (see, e.g., Independent Levee Investigation Team, 2006a, 2006b;
Van Heerden and Bryan, 2006; Bea, 2006). We find the independent
analyses to be more credible.
Even before MRGO was opened, critics argued that, being nearly as
straight as a gun barrel, and with no fresh-water flow to keep out saltwater,
the ‘‘Outlet’’ would serve instead as an ‘‘inlet,’’ allowing salt water to kill
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salt-sensitive plants in the wetlands that historically protected New Orleans
from hurricanes. Wetlands are important shock absorbers for hurricane
storm surges, which are slowed and weakened by friction. A widely quoted
estimate that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ironically produced in 1963
(U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1963), as MRGO was being excavated,
holds that a band of coastal wetlands 2.7 miles wide will lower a storm surge
by one foot. Later calculations indicate that cypress trees, which are strong
and well-rooted, can greatly increase the friction, reducing storm surges
nearly three times as effectively (van Heerden, 2006; Robinson and NewtonSmall, 2006).
Unfortunately, the wetlands to the southeast of New Orleans, and the
cypress swamps in particular, were devastated by MRGO. The fragile wetland soils removed by the Corps during the original excavation proved to be
only the beginning—the start of ever-worsening wetlands losses. Concerns
had been raised not just by local opponents—including the Louisiana
Wildlife and Fisheries Commission (1957)—but also by the U.S. Secretary
of the Interior, who wrote the Secretary of the Army in 1957, explaining
that the dredging could destroy the estuaries that formed the backbone of
local shrimp, oyster, and fishing industries, as well as degrading the marshes.
In April 1958, the St. Bernard Parish Police Jury went further, reversing an
earlier statement of support for the project (Brown, 2006). As noted by
a later article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: ‘‘The parish’s fears were
dismissed by channel-backers, including The Times-Picayune, which stated
in a later editorial that saltwater intrusion into freshwater marshes was ‘not
to be feared’’’ (Brown, 2006).
Unfortunately, the environmental concerns proved to be largely on-target,
while the channel’s boosters were almost completely wrong. The initial
excavation removed more dirt than the Panama Canal, but that merely
started a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle. Salinity began to rise almost as soon
as the Del Sud made the first trip in 1963. At Shell Beach, about half-way up
the ‘‘outlet,’’ salinity more than tripled, rising from an average of 3.5 parts
per thousand (PPT) in 1959–1961 to 12 PPT in 1962–1964 (Kerlin, 1979;
Caffey and Leblanc, 2002). By the end of the century, the Corps of
Engineers itself (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1999) concluded that more
than 11,000 acres of fresh or intermediate marshes and cypress swamps had
turned into brackish or partially salty marshes, spelling death for cypress and
other plants that could not survive the salt. Just as critics feared, moreover,
when the plants died, marshes began to disappear. With plants no longer
holding the soil, surrounding wetlands would slump into the channel—after
which the Corps would dredge the channel yet again, letting in still more
salt water, which would destroy still more plant life.
Historically, New Orleans was protected from hurricanes by two lines of
defense—an outer ring of natural defenses, provided by wetlands, and a
narrower ring of anthropogenic protection from levees and floodwalls. As
noted earlier, the floodwalls protecting New Orleans from Katrina were
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significantly higher and stronger than those that had protected the city from
the earlier ravages of Hurricanes Betsy and Camille, but the outer layer of
defenses—having been exposed to environmentally devastating changes in
the name of economic development—were no longer able to provide the
protection they once offered. All in all, depending on the estimate being
used, MRGO has helped destroy 20,000–65,000 acres of wetlands—up to
100 of the 500 square miles of previously healthy wetlands in the very
direction from which hurricane damage to New Orleans could be most
severe, namely, the southeast (Carter and Stern, 2006; Lake Pontchartrain
Basin Foundation, 2005). Although cypress tress can live from 500–700
years under ‘‘natural’’ conditions, resisting even hurricane-force winds,
thousands of acres of formally healthy cypress trees have now been replaced
by what many locals call ‘‘ghost swamps,’’ where only a few dead tree trunks
are left, standing in mute testimony to the cypress-killing power of salt.
‘‘Economic Survival,’’ Real and Imagined
In the aftermath of Katrina, one criticism was that the federal government
had not provided enough money to build needed flood protection projects.
At least that charge, however, seems misdirected: Louisiana actually received
far more money for Corps civil works projects from 2000–2005 than any
other state—about $1.9 billion—well ahead of $1.4 billion for second-place
California, which has a coastline three times as long and a population more
than seven times larger. Unfortunately, most of that ‘‘investment’’ went into
MRGO and other so-called economic development projects. Former Louisiana Senator Breaux, for example, told the Washington Post: ‘‘We thought
all the projects were important—not just levees.’’ Although ‘‘hindsight’’
might have suggested different priorities, he said, ‘‘navigation projects were
critical to our economic survival’’ (Grunwald, 2005).
The senator may well have believed that claim—and so may social scientists who choose to characterize projects such as MRGO as having been
built to support ‘‘economic prosperity’’ or ‘‘capitalism.’’ Still, the disproportionality/growth machine literature argues that stated intentions need to
be measured against actual performance—the extent to which environmentally destructive projects actually do contribute to economic development.
In practice, like other mega-projects considered by Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius, and
Rothengatter (2003), MRGO cost more but delivered less than expected.
Actual ship traffic never matched the official forecasts—to say nothing of
the even more enthusiastic claims by local boosters—and despite everincreasing expenditures for dredging, the shipping traffic subsequently
dropped. According to figures compiled by Camillo (2008), during 2004,
the last full fiscal year before Katrina, U.S. taxpayers spent an additional
$19.1 million in dredging MRGO once more—all so the channel could be
used for only about a dozen round trips by ships that actually needed the
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dredging (13 ships in one direction, 10 in the other). That amounts to more
than $1.5 million per round trip, mainly for ships being scrapped or carrying low-value products such as frozen chickens. For comparison purposes,
MRGO carried less than half of a single percent of southern Louisiana’s
water-borne cargo in 2004, while the ‘‘crooked, fog-covered, silt-bearing,
temperamental’’ Mississippi River carried more than 250 times as much
freight (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2006b; see also Freudenburg et al.,
2008a, 2008b, 2009).
Discussion: The Real Looting?
In many senses, New Orleans and southern Louisiana are unique, and
Katrina was unique by definition: no other disaster has created such expensive damage. In a broader sense, however, only further research can reveal
whether the drowning of New Orleans—or the failure to examine the economic as well as environmental costs of pork-barrel projects—was really as
‘‘unique’’ as Cajun cooking or New Orleans jazz. Any temptations to see
New Orleans as a ‘‘unique case,’’ in short, are in fact testable hypotheses—
and they need to be tested. Based on the available evidence, it appears that—
like the proverbial canary in the coal mine—New Orleans might provide
useful early warnings for other cities where the vulnerabilities are less pronounced but are no less real.
Ever since the dissertation research of Gilbert White (1945), studies have
shown that, as the United States spends more on ‘‘flood protection’’ projects
such as levees, flood damage costs continue to climb—even after controlling
for inflation. Two key reasons are often identified. First, so-called flood
protection projects often worsen actual flooding—by eliminating flood-absorbing wetlands, for example, reducing the floodplains across which high
waters can spread, or preventing Mississippi River silt from rebuilding
Louisiana wetlands. Second, the same projects often lead to misplaced confidence, with real estate speculators rushing to build new projects in areas
that are theoretically ‘‘protected’’ by levees but actually vulnerable to floods.
That pattern has now been shown to hold for more than half a century—
and the costs of Katrina, now widely estimated to be well over $100 billion,
guarantee that the same pattern will extend into the 21st century, as well.
Still, after all these years, perhaps the time has come not just to notice this
pattern, but to analyze it. It is at least remarkable—worthy of being remarked on—that justifications for environmentally and economically damaging projects would almost always be put forth in terms of asserted benefits
for ‘‘jobs,’’ for ‘‘the economy,’’ and, more broadly, for nearly everyone except
the growth machine’s primary beneficiaries. The pattern is particularly
noteworthy in the many cases, such as this one, where claimed benefits for
‘‘the broader economy’’ prove to be effectively imaginary.
Disproportionality and Disaster
511
In Katrina’s immediate aftermath, there was considerable concern about
‘‘looting’’—much of which, it is now clear, involved food, water, medicines,
and other desperately needed supplies. Still, some looting did involve expensive luxuries such as plasma-screen televisions—which may or may not
have seen much use in a city where some neighborhoods would not see the
restoration of electricity for months or even years. Yet perhaps the most
serious looting of all was done not by poor blacks, but by rich whites—by
the privileged few who extracted vast sums from the U.S. Treasury, over a
period of decades, through so-called development schemes that were not so
much a response to the devastation of Katrina as one significant cause of it.
As in the case of the Santa Barbara oil spill, to paraphrase Molotch, what
came through the faulty floodwalls of New Orleans was not merely a vast
quantity of contaminated floodwaters. It was evidence about what can happen
when power, privilege, and pollution come together. The evidence shows that,
at least in New Orleans, decisions that had long been described by local
boosters as being ‘‘about’’ the region’s prosperity proved instead to have aided
the prosperity of remarkably few economic actors—more or less on par with a
string of bank robberies. Instead, they did grave damage to the region’s natural
environment—as well as serious economic harm, and still more grave damage
to many innocent bystanders—in ways that came back to haunt us all.
In short, even if the environmental and human costs created by MRGO
are calculated as having no value whatever—indeed, even if MRGO could
be argued to have had nothing to do with the death and destruction in New
Orleans—MRGO could qualify as having contributed to ‘‘capitalism’’ or to
‘‘economic development’’ only under extremely creative definitions of the
terms. Perhaps the most concise such definition of economic development
was offered informally, years ago, by MacNair (1999): ‘‘A set of policies and
practices designed to take money from the bottom 95% of the population
and redistribute it to the top 5%.’’
For the future, we need to be less quick to accept proponents’ claims, or
for that matter a priori theoretical expectations, that environmentally damaging projects will be ‘‘good for the economy.’’ Rather than being accepted
without question, such claims need to be treated as testable hypotheses. In
the process, all of us who seek to understand social dynamics need to do a
much better job of understanding just how such a ‘‘remarkable’’ political
achievement could be pulled off so routinely. We owe it to our fields of
study, we owe it to the memory of those who lost their lives in the wake of
Katrina, and we owe it to the honor of those who fought successfully for
their survival, as well.
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