Katrina: Unlearned Lessons

Hurricane Katrina,which struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005, created the costliest disaster in U.S. history, and one of the deadliest. After two years and dozens of post-mortem analyses, it makes sense to ask if we've learned anything from the experience. Sadly, our institutions seem to have had difficulty learning and applying the key lessons even when those lessons are driven home with hurricane force.

Many media reports have discussed Katrina, first, as an example of what nature can do to people, and second, as being about the uniqueness of New Orleans just as distinctive as Mardi Gras parades and Creole cuisine. To be fair, this isn't one of those cases where the mass media have been misquoting academics. Instead, they may have been reporting a common academic perspective a bit too accurately. The respected geographer Peirce Lewis, for example, famously proclaimed New Orleans to be an inevitable city in an impossible location, and noted historian Ari Kelman of the University of California, Davis, was working in the finest traditions of geography when he described New Orleans as having an excellent situation (high capacity to compete with other cities) but a physical location that is wretched. New Orleans, he decreed, has a near-perfect situation and an almost unimaginably bad site.

Such views make it tempting to see the lessons of Katrina as being about what nature did to humans. But while New Orleans may have been the first major American city to be ravaged by natural hazards during the 21st century, it will not be the last. Vulnerability also characterizes places as different from the physical setting of New Orleans as humans can imagine witness the tornado that recently flattened Greensburg, Kansas, or for that matter the millions of people living in California earthquake country.