Defining Hurricane Katrina as a natural disaster has been rejected in multiple ways. One striking rejection of that definition is demonstrated by the role played by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) in the damaging storm surge that drowned the City of New Orleans. The engineered waterway was an act against Nature rather than an act of Nature. This presentation will consider: 1) how this waterway came to be—the “growth machine,” 2) the “Peter Principle” of construction momentum that led to the creation of a transportation technology ahead of a societal understanding of its negative implications and their mitigation, and 3) the refusal to take heed of the impending catastrophe when confronted with evidence from highly qualified scientists. Prospects for future ‘control’ of technology with coastal restoration will be considered in light of this history.
Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow
When houses are flattened, towns submerged, and people stranded without electricity or even food, we attribute the suffering to “natural disasters” or “acts of God.” But what if they’re neither? What if we, as a society, are bringing these catastrophes on ourselves? That’s the provocative theory of Catastrophe in the Making, the first book to recognize Hurricane Katrina not as a “perfect storm,” but a tragedy of our own making—and one that could become commonplace.
The Katrina Bookshelf
Hurricane Katrina was the most telling disaster in our national experience, revealing so much about the nature of disasters in general, about the social world we live in, and about ourselves. The Katrina Bookshelf is the result of a national effort to bring experts together in a collaborative program of research on the human costs of the disaster. Supported by the Ford, Gates, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage Foundations and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, the Katrina Bookshelf is the most comprehensive social science coverage of a disaster to be found anywhere in the literature.
NHRC 2025 Plenary Workshop Presentation by Shirley Laska
Echoes of Katrina, Blue Roofs and Recovery in Southwest Louisiana
Hurricane Katrina introduced to the world a clear measure of its destruction – views of blue tarps spread over miles of damaged roofs. Fifteen years later, Hannah Friedrich, a doctoral student in Geography at the University of Arizona, set out to use satellite imagery to map blue roofs on hurricane-affected homes in Southwest Louisiana after hurricanes Laura and Delta struck in 2020. Hannah’s commitment to the topic of differential disaster recovery for low-income residents versus affluent households is culminating in a dissertation that documents variation in housing recovery through the appearance and disappearance of blue roofs across different neighborhoods in Lake Charles, LA.