The Attacking Ocean (32 page)

Poverty Point may have been vulnerable to river floods, sea level shifts, and climate change, but its people could disperse into villages and resettle elsewhere. Today, millions of people live on the low-lying coastal plains of the Lower Mississippi region, where warming temperatures, rising sea levels, and a projected higher frequency of extreme weather events pose serious threats to much larger, far more vulnerable populations. When Katrina came ashore on the Gulf Coast in 2005, Americans received a harsh lesson in the frightening vulnerability of densely populated cities lurking behind flood defenses.

Hurricane Katrina was only a Category 1 Atlantic hurricane as it crossed southern Florida.
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It strengthened dramatically in the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall in southeastern Louisiana as a Category 3 on August 29, with sustained winds of 195 kilometers an hour. The storm lost hurricane strength only about 240 kilometers inland, near Meridian, Mississippi. Between 200 and 250 millimeters of rain fell in Louisiana as the hurricane swept inland. The sea surge was far more damaging than the wind and rain. The height was at least eight meters, inundating the parishes surrounding Lake Pontchartrain. When combined with levee breaches, the damage was catastrophic, with significant loss of life, quite apart from the devastation of coastal wetlands.

By August 31, 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater, in places 4.6 meters deep. A citywide evacuation order came into effect, at first voluntary, then mandatory, the first such evacuation in the city’s history, despite the ever-present threat of flood. By the time the hurricane came ashore, over a million people had fled New Orleans and its immediate
suburbs. Nevertheless, over a hundred thousand remained, especially the elderly and poor. An estimated twenty thousand took refuge at the Louisiana Superdome, officially designated as a “place of last resort,” and designed to withstand very strong winds indeed. Flooding stranded many residents, many of them on rooftops or trapped in attics. There were bodies floating in the eastern streets; water was undrinkable; power outages were widespread.

The official death toll was nearly fifteen hundred people. As search-and-rescue operations intensified, looting and violence became epidemic through much of the city. Residents simply took food and other essentials from unstaffed grocery stories; armed robberies were commonplace. The authorities imposed a curfew, and then declared a state of emergency as sixty-five hundred National Guardsmen arrived to help restore order.

With flooding and chaos in the city, evacuation seemed a logical strategy. For years, coastal evacuation policies had assumed that most people could afford to leave their houses when ordered to do so and would be able to evacuate in their vehicles. The evacuees would seek shelter with relatives or stay in hotels or motels at higher elevations inland. Katrina proved the planners wrong. More than a quarter of New Orleans residents had no access to an automobile. They lived from one pay period to the next and had no surplus funds for evacuation or other emergencies. This was why many residents sought refuge at the Superdome and convention center. Hurricanes come ashore in this area relatively rarely, which means that generational memories fade quickly. Many people, who had forgotten the experience of Hurricanes Betsy (1965) and Camille (1969), preferred to stay and ride out the storm. Those who stayed were predominantly less educated, poor, and earning lower incomes. These were the people most affected by the disaster.

Most evacuees stayed within three hundred kilometers of New Orleans, but others dispersed all over the country, as far as California, Chicago, and New York. Orleans Parish had a population of 455,188 before the hurricane, and only 343,829 afterward, a drop of 24.5 percent.
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The hardest-hit parish, St. Bernard near Lake Pontchartrain, lost 45.6 percent of its people to out-migration. Over 250,000 Katrina
migrants went to Houston. How many have returned is a matter of debate, for reliable statistics are hard to develop or come by. Many have chosen to relocate permanently.

One cannot entirely blame them, given the controversy and factionalism surrounding the recovery effort. One reformist faction wanted to use the storm as an excuse to remake New Orleans in a more efficient, modern form, including a replacement for the old public school system. Such a restoration would have required enormous sums of money from outside. New Orleans lacks a Coca-Cola or other large corporation to help pay the bill. Congress and the Bush administration did spend large sums on the city, but unfortunately they rejected proposals for a large-scale buyout of inundated housing as a basis for redeveloping the entire city. Instead, Washington gave billions in grants to individual homeowners, who wanted to return, and also for such projects as building schools, libraries, and water treatment plants. This was all fine and good, but the money was distributed inefficiently, much of it after very long delays. A patchwork of redevelopment made it nearly impossible for the poverty-stricken city government to provide basic services such as garbage collection, fire protection, and policing in a systematic manner.

All of these delays and often mistaken decisions tended to reinforce a widespread impression that no one outside the city cared about a poor, largely black population. There was even a sense among black community members that neither the Bush administration nor white New Orleans wanted blacks to return. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in the
New York Review of Books
, an ancient fear of black insurrection tended to resurface, accompanied by a longing for the city to be reborn as “another Charleston or Savannah, smaller, neater, safer, whiter, and relieved of the obligation to try to be a significant modern multicultural city.”
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This was, of course, merely a feeling and something that never even slightly surfaced as city policy.

Racial undercurrents of all kinds were at the heart of the toxic politics of rebuilding that emerged just as soon as the floodwaters receded. A Republican real estate developer assigned to the design of a comprehensive rebuilding program by the mayor, Ray Nagin, suggested that some of the most devastated, poorest, and lowest-lying areas of the city
not be rebuilt immediately. Black outrage reached a fever pitch. Many out-migrants felt they were being deliberately excluded from their homes. The chasm between black and white widened even further. This debacle killed the mayor’s plan and meant that there was no blueprint at all. As recently as 2010, fifty thousand houses were still empty, more than a quarter of the available housing in the city. The current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, is moving cautiously. He is willing to tear the derelict houses down as part of a new policy that proclaims that every neighborhood will be rebuilt and that one cannot simply wait for displaced residents to return.

Meanwhile, the long-term consequences of the disaster continue. The city is much smaller, so population-based federal funds for housing, health care, and infrastructure are much reduced. Old political districts will be redrawn, resulting inevitably in less black representation at both the state and federal levels and a loss of political power. The permanent displacement of many poorer inhabitants has increased the percentage of educated, high-income residents. The redevelopment of low-income housing is glacially slow, causing some to question whether the recovery effort is equitable. By 2010, about 54 percent of the evacuees had returned to their pre-Katrina addresses. There are powerful reasons to stay away: the lack of affordable housing and a shortage of rental properties. Much recovery funding went to homeowners, who are in a minority among poorer citizens. With little money, few job opportunities, and a shortage of affordable housing, many refugees left permanently.

THE PLIGHT OF the Mississippi delta confirms that we have few options when confronted by extreme weather events made ever more dangerous by rising seas. Armoring cities and coasts with levees and seawalls is, at best, a costly gamble, even if twenty-first-century construction and technology provides ever more secure barriers. Even adopting building codes that allow for surging hurricanes and permit people to take shelter in their homes is an expensive hedge against catastrophic destruction. The only other option is carefully managed relocation at short notice. Katrina and other major storms teach us that the density of population in large twenty-first-century cities is such that our ability to relocate displaced
residents either temporarily or permanently is severely limited. Inevitably, situations arise where those who can, leave and those who cannot, stay, fueling already festering economic and social inequities within and between segments of society. The resulting economic and political tensions within communities, between source and host communities, and, in the case of Bangladesh, between nations, do not augur well for a warmer future of higher sea levels and a great incidence of storm surges nurtured by extreme weather events.

14
“Here the Tide Is Ruled, by the Wind, the Moon and Us”

October 11, 1634: “At six o’clock at night the Lord God began to fulminate with wind and rain from the east, at seven he turned the wind to the southwest and let it blow so strongly that hardly any man could walk or stand … The Lord God [sent] thunder, rain, hail, lightning and such a powerful wind that the Earth’s foundation was shaken.”
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Peter Sax of Koldenbüttel in Schleswig-Holstein was in no doubt of the cause. Divine wrath in the form of a great sea surge descended on the Strand islands off northern Germany 272 years after the Grote Mandrenke—or so people still believed at the time.

Once again, the attack was unrelenting. The people of Strand had rebuilt most of their dikes after the earlier disaster, but their troubles were not over. The Thirty Years’ War brought fighting to the islands, which resulted in the neglect and inevitable weakening of coastal defenses. In 1625, huge ice floes damaged many dikes; several powerful sea surges further weakened the inadequately maintained defenses, so much so that some of them even gave way during summer gales. Then, on October 11, 1634, a strong tempest backed to the southwest, then northwest, coinciding with unusually high tides, violent winds, and destructive swells. A Dutch hydraulic engineer, Jan Leeghwater, was carrying out land reclamation locally and left an account of “a great storm and bad weather.” His son woke him up in the middle of the night as menacing waves attacked the top of the nearby dike. They fled to a manor house on higher ground, where thirty-eight people had taken refuge. Raging water from a nearby tidal canal undermined the foundations and the house fell apart. Leeghwater and his son barely escaped with their lives. Riding along the shore some days later he saw “many different dead beasts, beams of houses, smashed wagons … many a human body who had drowned … Great sea ships were standing on the dike.”
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The great surge became known as the second Grote Mandrenke or the Burchardi flood.

Figure 14.1
Destruction wrought by the Burchardi flood, ca. 1634. Victims cling to the roofs of their houses. Author collection.

Contemporary accounts speak of a storm surge that brought water levels on the mainland to about four meters above mean high tide. Hundreds of dwellings collapsed or were washed away. Unattended hearths caused many other abandoned cottages to burn down. As many as forty-four dike breaks on Strand damaged twenty-one churches and destroyed thirteen hundred homes and thirty mills. “Wasted are the Lord’s houses,” wrote the preacher of Gaikebüll on Nordstrand.
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Nor were there preachers to serve them. Saltwater ruined most of the new harvest. Fifty thousand head of livestock perished. Estimates of human
casualties range between eight thousand and fifteen thousand, at least six thousand people on Strand itself, out of an estimated population of eighty-five hundred. The actual number was probably much higher. Apart from the locals, many migrant workers from elsewhere had been working the land. Their numbers were never recorded.

The long-term consequences were severe, especially on Strand, where many hectares lay below sea level and failed to drain quickly. High tides further widened dike breaches. What had once been a large island was now several much smaller ones. The surviving arable land had to be abandoned because of the unrelenting sea. Thousands of hectares could no longer be used for agriculture. Even where reclamation was possible, recovery was slow, partly because many farmers defied their ruler, Duke Frederick III, and moved to higher ground or to the mainland. Nevertheless, some thirteen thousand hectares lay behind restored dikes on Pellworm Island by 1637. Nearby Nordstrand was another matter. The remaining farmers stubbornly stayed on higher ground and failed to restore their dikes, despite several orders by the duke. Local laws declared that those who did not secure their land against the sea forfeited their right to own it. In the end, the duke expropriated land from the locals and attracted settlers from elsewhere with a charter that promised land and other privileges to people willing to invest in dikes. The incentives effectively gave the newcomers authority over local justice and policing, a remarkable innovation at the time. Several Dutch entrepreneurs like Quirinus Indervelden used Netherlands money to create a new polder in 1654, using expert workers from Brabant Province. Other polders followed in 1657 and 1663. So enduring was the Dutch legacy that a local preacher continued to deliver his sermons in that language until 1870. Today Pellworm and Nordstrand have about nine thousand hectares of reclaimed land. Such was the power of the Burchardi storm surge that it created a tidal channel between the islands that has reached a depth of nearly thirty meters over the past four centuries. (For locations, see figure 5.1.)