MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Along with the trauma and dislocation, Hurricane Katrina has spawned acclaimed documentaries, investigative reports, music and art, as well as a wealth of conspiracy theories and myths. So we thought we would spend some time separating myth from facts about the hurricane and its aftermath. And for that, we've called Andy Horowitz. He's a history professor who has a particular interest in natural disasters, and he's the author of the award-winning "Katrina: A History, 1915-2015." And he's with us now. Professor Horowitz, thank you so much for joining us.
ANDY HOROWITZ: Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: So, 1915, why did you start there?
HOROWITZ: Well, you know, one of the things that people came to believe about Katrina was that the flood had somehow disproportionately sought out New Orleans' most disadvantaged citizens, you know, exclusively poor people or Black people. But my research showed that that wasn't really true. And in fact, the best way of predicting whether a house in New Orleans flooded in 2005 was simply how old it was. And the turning point was right around 1915. Most of the houses built before 1915 in New Orleans did not flood, but most of the houses built afterwards did.
MARTIN: And why?
HOROWITZ: New Orleans is a city in a swamp, and it took major infrastructure projects and major public investment to make it possible to build most of the city, which meant that for the first couple hundred years of its colonial existence, people generally lived on the high ground closest to the Mississippi River, and it wasn't really until the 20th century that people started to move into what had been recently drained swamps.
MARTIN: OK. So let's talk about some of the sort of perceptions that people had adequate warning to evacuate. I mean, could the scope of this disaster have been predicted?
HOROWITZ: The notion that New Orleans could flood, that a major storm could overwhelm New Orleans' levee system, this was a well-known vulnerability and very widely predicted possibility. The city gave people adequate warning, but around a hundred and thirty thousand people remained in the city and did not evacuate. And that hundred and thirty thousand is nearly precisely the number of New Orleanians who didn't have access to a private vehicle. That tells me that it wasn't that people, you know, ignored the warnings or didn't quite have time. It just shows me that they either didn't have the means to go or didn't have anywhere to go.
MARTIN: One of the other issues that emerged is this question of whether there were adequate supplies, whether there was adequate preparation to take care of that many people who were not able to evacuate.
HOROWITZ: Government at every level was manifestly, murderously ill-prepared for this widely predicted possibility. People were left to drown in their own houses. Even people who had made it to emergency shelters designated by the city found them empty, without any help, any food or water. Katrina represented, I think, such a failure so shocking that it made many people question the promise of American citizenship itself.
MARTIN: And that leads to the question of the racial dimensions of this disaster. I know you note in your book when the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the famous civil rights activist, talked about seeing the people who had been evacuated to the convention center or the Superdome and he said, it looks like the hull of a slave ship. But other people dispute that. They say that this was a tri-state disaster. It affected people kind of across the board. What can you tell us about that?
HOROWITZ: Well, it's not an easy question to answer, in part because when people talk about Katrina, they can be referring to different things. They might mean the hurricane. They might mean the levee failures. They might mean the emergency response, or they might mean the suite of policies put in place afterwards in the name of recovery. I mean...
MARTIN: OK. Well, let's start with the number of people who died.
HOROWITZ: Right. So New Orleans in 2005 is a majority Black city. Sixty-seven percent of the people who lived in New Orleans in 2005 were Black, according to the census, and 67% of the people in the official Louisiana death count were Black. And so it's a kind of grim proportionality to the flood. And if you look, just east of New Orleans is St. Bernard Parish. This is a community of around 67,000 people, roughly 93% white people in 2005 - nearly every home in St. Bernard Parish flooded. And their flood victims were 93% white. When you look at the immediate impacts of the flood, there's a sort of terrible way in which - I don't want to use the word fair, but kind of predictable, who drowned.
MARTIN: People drowned according to their percentage of the population, so those numbers matched who lived in those places. But what about the recovery?
HOROWITZ: Nothing that unfolded after the levees broke happened with any kind of natural or inevitable logic because race structures so much of American life, and it structured much of the emergency response and the so-called recovery that followed. So if you look, for example, at the population of New Orleans in 2015, the population of the city was down roughly a hundred thousand people. And the vast majority of those missing, roughly 92,000 people, were Black people. The white population of the city was only down less than 10,000.
MARTIN: And why is that?
HOROWITZ: Well, what that shows you, first of all, is that who returned to the city and who had to stay away was not a product of where the water settled in 2005. It was rather a product of inequalities that existed before the flood and in policies that were put in place afterwards. There were many policies put in place in the name of recovery after the flood that essentially made it easier for white people to return home than Black people. Not to say it was easy for anybody, but the comparison is pretty stark. So, for example, the city of New Orleans closed and demolished all of its public housing developments, even though they were largely unflooded or only minimally damaged.
Similarly, the state's signature recovery program was called the Louisiana Road Home. This was designed almost exclusively to aid homeowners in a city where 51% of people had been renters, and a majority of those renters were Black. So the money went to homeowners to begin with. And then in complicated ways, the formula effectively made homeowners in white neighborhoods eligible for larger grants than homeowners in Black neighborhoods. The fundamental premise of federal disaster policy for many decades has been to restore the status quo, to just get us back to the way we were the day before.
MARTIN: And if the status quo was fundamentally unequal, then that's how it was going to be after the fact.
HOROWITZ: You would be correct to describe this as a goal of simply maintaining and restoring inequality. And in New Orleans after 2005, policymaking didn't just restore pre-existing inequalities, they often magnified them.
MARTIN: That's Andy Horowitz. He's the author of "Katrina: A History, 1915-2015." Professor Horowitz, thanks so much for talking with us.
HOROWITZ: Thanks again for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
