What will New Orleans look like in the future?
JB: This is Earth and Sky, on what New Orleans might look like in the future.
DB: New Orleans now has between a quarter and a third of the population it had before Katrina. The city will probably remain small for some time. That’s according to John Logan, a sociologist at Brown University. He used NASA and other satellite data of flooded areas – and census data – to project the future demographics of New Orleans. He concluded that New Orleans might lose more than 75 percent of its black population.
John Logan: I think the city itself has the potential to become much more of a tourist economy and an enclave in the high ground areas of the city for those more affluent people – and perhaps to be a new destination for suburban residents who might see the city as more attractive in the future if it has a smaller footprint and a higher income profile. And whether that will play out in that way or in some other way is largely a political question, a question of whose voices are going to be heard.
DB: New Orleans goes to the polls on April 22 to elect a mayor and city council.
John Logan: And it seems very likely that the next crop of people whose job it is to make decisions for the city are going to be elected by a very different constituency than what was, before September, the electorate of New Orleans.
JB: Our thanks today to NASA explore, discover, understand. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth & Sky.
Loss of Life
It’s true that the loss of homes was the greatest among New Orleans’ African-Americans. But recent research suggests that race wasn’t a significant factor in the loss of life. Over 1,300 people died across the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi either during the hurricane or during the evacuation. According to John Mutter, deputy director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, the single most important factor in determining who died was age.
Mutter reported the results of his study at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February. He found that nearly two thirds of those who died were over 60 years old.
In an article by the Times in London, John Mutter was quoted as saying, ?People older than 60 died in numbers about three times greater than their representation in the population. Katrina may be the first natural disaster in history to be so selective for the elderly. When it comes to deaths, this was an age-selective disaster far more than it was race selective.?
Katrina, with a death toll of 1,300 was not the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history. That title belongs to the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas in 1900 and killed over 8,000 people.
Displacement
Still, Hurricane Katrina is considered by some to be the largest natural disaster in U.S. history because of the huge number of people displaced from their homes. Across the entire Gulf region, about 750,000 households are still displaced.
Fewer than half of all New Orleans evacuees living in emergency shelters in Houston in September, 2005 said they intended to move back home. That’s according to a survey by The Washington Post, Harvard University and the Kaiser Family Foundation. That same survey found that 64 percent of the evacuees were renters and 93 percent were African-American. To read the survey, click here.
John Logan says it’s true that past hurricanes have caused massive destruction and forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of americans. “But the difference,” said Logan, “is that in the case of Katrina, we didn’t just get the hurricane damage itself, but there was the almost permanent damage to the city from flooding. And so it’s a whole other disaster than a hurricane. This is a disaster that’s a result of where we put people and how we protected or failed to protect them.”
Logan added that some U.S. cities had been devastated by past disasters, including the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. But Logan noted, “They were much smaller cities to being with. They weren’t metropolises of a million people. So I think of this more in terms of longer term events like the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, which over a period of five years displaced as many people and with equally long term effects. But this is quite unique in the fact that it happened in a day.”
Politics
Elections for mayor and city council are slated for April. But who will be able to vote?
Logan told Earth & Sky, “There are questions about what will be the ability of people who are outside the city or outside the state to cast a ballot. Under what conditions would a valid absentee ballot be counted? And that’s up for discussion at this very moment.” He said under existing laws, there are some high barriers to voting for displaced New Orleanians. For example, they have to have identified themselves as someone who planned to vote in the elections by absentee ballot before the hurricane struck. And they have to prove that they aren’t registered to vote in the places where they are currently living. Logan is skeptical that the New Orleans voting officials will have the ability to verify that this requirement is met for hundreds of thousands of voters.
Logan wondered whether the large African-American population and lower income population of New Orleans that’s currently not there will have a way to express their interest in a city that has a more inclusive plan for the future.
Economic Costs
It’s too early to tell the full cost of Hurricane Katrina to the U.S. economy. Before Katrina, the most costly U.S. hurricane, Andrew, is estimated to have exacted over $25 billion in damage (in 1990 dollars). Some have estimated that Katrina could easily top $100 billion. (For a list of the deadliest and costliest hurricanes in U.S. history, click here.) That would make Katrina not only the costliest hurricane, but the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
Rebuilding
The Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion on February 21, 2006 titled, “Rebuilding After Katrina: Forming the Federal-State-Local Partnership for Southern Louisiana.” Read the transcript here.
Other Katrina related stories:
Radio: Many former New Orleanians will never return
Radio: For children of Katrina, normalcy is key
Radio: New Orleans levees need time, effort, resources
Radio: Poor are most vulnerable to natural disasters
Radio: Wetlands vital to post-Katrina restoration
Thanks to:
John Logan
Professor of Sociology
Brown University
Providence, RI
Additional Teacher Resources
NASA: Data More Powerful than Hurricanes
On the evening news, a graphic tells us that a new hurricane is forming: a little spiral cloud grows over a distant ocean. As days go by, it swells and wobbles towards land. At a distance, inlanders witness its landfall and aftermath. Meanwhile, coastal dwellers have time to get out of the way.
National Geographic: A City’s Faulty Armor: Experts Question Repairs to New Orleans Levees
As residents of New Orleans slowly rebuild their homes and lives after Hurricane Katrina, they are relying on the citys cordon of levees and floodwalls to protect them from the next big storm. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declared almost a year ago that it had restored the barriers to pre-Katrina strength. But leading experts from the U.S. and the Netherlands say the system is riddled with flaws. They say that even a weaker storm than Katrina could breach the levees if it hit this season.
