THE
CITY OF NEW ORLEANS
When
Hurricane Katrina battered down the levees that protected our
most fabled big city last September, many of us familiar with
America’s “can-do” traditions figured it would
be a matter of weeks, maybe even days, before the Crescent City
was at least on the mend again.
Over
five months later, this is not the case, and it is still not clear
when it ever will be. The waters that left an estimated 1,300
of New Orleans’ people dead and the vast majority of the
city homeless have receded, but no plan to rebuild is in place.
Most of the city is still, by all accounts, an eerie, devastated
ghost town, littered with dead trees and overturned cars, still
coated with the toxic, liquid stew that spilled out of a polluted
Lake Ponchartrain. To be sure, the problem facing us is immensely
complex, and any solution must undo years of feckless development,
and build a consensus out of myriad different viewpoints. Yet
the defining image of the disaster in New Orleans remains that
of a single steam shovel, methodically dumping one scoop of earth
at a time into a gaping levee breech.
There
is plenty of blame to go around for this, encompassing officials
at every level, and in both parties. The abject failure to properly
anticipate or react to the hurricane in the first place has now
been matched by Mayor Ray Nagin’s silly announcement that
New Orleans will always be “a chocolate city,” and
the Bush administration’s empty pledges of money in lieu
of any discernible action. The city’s plight was not even
mentioned in the president’s 2006 State of the Union address.
And we might ask what it says for Michael Chertoff’s Department
of Homeland Security that one of our most vital—and most
obviously vulnerable—ports can be snuffed out overnight,
without eliciting any kind of planned response. Nor are the rest
of us off the hook. If no recovery effort in living memory has
been so shamefully botched, it is also impossible to think of
any that has been regarded with such general indifference.
Before
Katrina, the sudden, catastrophic annihilation of a whole city
seemed confined to the past, or at least to the scenarios devised
by the usual legions of Armageddon-thumpers, and nuke-porn cineastes.
That this has proven not to be so would seem to make the contemplation
of those past calamities all the more relevant.
No
city, not even New Orleans, has ever sustained as much damage
from a single hurricane as Galveston, Texas, did on September
8, 1900. This was before we started giving cute people’s
names to hurricanes, but the storm that began to come ashore that
morning would never be forgotten. By the dawn of the twentieth
century, Galveston was the busiest port in Texas, a gracious,
leafy town that served as a portal to both the South and the West.
Some 1,200 ships a year plied its harbor, transporting $300 million
in cargo; including 70 percent of the country’s cotton exports,
and 25 million tons of wheat and corn bound for Europe. Unfortunately,
Galveston was built on an oversized sandbar, where no point of
land stood as much as nine feet above sea level. When a vast storm
blew in from the Gulf of Mexico at speeds that may have exceeded
120 mile-per-hour, it was all but defenseless. In twenty-four
hours time, wind and water had killed an estimated 6,000 people
in the town, and destroyed over 3,600 buildings. The grieving
survivors were left to cope with a vast, noxious chaos.
Much
as in New Orleans, reporters from major media outlets rushed to
Galveston to repeat or invent lurid, racist rumors of depredation,
when in fact—just as in New Orleans—the city’s
surviving inhabitants generally reacted to the disaster with admirable
courage and restraint. And just as in New Orleans, Galveston’s
residents faced immense problems with little coordinated assistance
from outside. In 1900, the federal government didn’t “do”
relief. Private individuals and organizations throughout the United
States and Europe rushed aid to the stricken city, but this still
left many basic needs unmet. There was, for instance, no place
available on a sand bar to quickly bury nearly one-sixth of the
town’s population, and the city authorities ordered that
all corpses be burned to stop the spread of disease. Even Clara
Barton, the doughty, septuagenarian founder of the Red Cross and
veteran of countless disasters was appalled and almost overcome
by the smell this produced, remembering “the stench of burning
flesh that permeated every foot of the city. Who could long withstand
it?”
The
received wisdom is that Galveston never really recovered from
the hurricane of 1900, and that the disaster was why nearby ports—beginning
with Houston, just up the bay—soon surpassed it in size
and importance. This was not actually the case, as Herbert Molloy
Mason, Jr., argues in his history of the hurricane, Death
from the Sea. Freighters were plying the harbor again within
a week, but the city fathers of Galveston knew they needed to
further secure their city. When no help for this was forthcoming
from the federal government, the people of Galveston County took
it upon themselves to raise some $1.5 million in municipal bonds
and wrangled another $2 million in state subsidies—money
that went to erect a large seawall and, in an incredible feat
of engineering, raise the entire town by eight to ten feet.
This
grand public works project succeeded. The seawall withstood another,
ferocious hurricane in 1915. Galveston’s population and
prosperity increased, and it remained Texas’ leading port
into the 1920s. The city’s relative decline in later years
was due not to any lack of will on behalf of its people, but because,
as Mason, “a narrow island has only so much space for expansion.”
When Houston was finally able to dredge out a deep ship channel
to the sea, Galveston could not match its larger, inland neighbor—but
then, it was never going to be able to do so indefinitely.
A
more common threat to American cities was that most ancient nemesis
of the town, fire. The terrible Chicago Fire of 1871 struck a
city that was still wood right down to its sidewalks, killing
an estimated 300 people, leaving nearly 75,000 more—or one-quarter
of the population—homeless, and consuming three-and-a-half
square miles of the city, including 3,650 buildings. San Francisco
was a much more modern city in 1906, already full of elegant steel-framed
buildings, but it made little difference once an earthquake of
8.25 magnitude on the Richter scale ripped long rifts in its streets,
and tore apart both its gas and water mains. Over 50 separate
fires sprung up around the city during the next three days, and
the quake and the blaze combined to kill 450 people, and raze
2,831 acres, including 250,000 homes—or 60 percent of all
the housing in the city.
Many
other cities, big and small, suffered losses that were less famous
but nearly as traumatic. Portland, Maine, for instance, used to
burn down once a century, almost like clockwork—at the hands
of the Wabanaki Indians in 1676, the British in 1775, and its
own citizens, celebrating the Fourth of July a tad too vigorously
in 1866. In each case, the town was an almost total loss. Remarkably
insouciant about its combustibility, Portland responded by building
a large match factory in 1870. Portland would endure more oscillations
of all kinds over the years, but finally emerge, thanks to some
smart planning, and federal aid, as that rarest of all American
cities—a hip, arty cultural center, that is also a working
town, its port boasting the largest gross tonnage in the country.
This
resilience was typical in disaster-stricken cities. Chicago barely
paused in its spectacular rise. As Donald Miller writes in his
lively history, City of the Century, The Epic of
Chicago and the Making of America, “more amazing than
the destruction was the fire. The rebuilding began while the ground
was still warm in the burned district, and within a week after
the fire more than five thousand temporary structures had been
erected and two hundred permanent buildings were under construction.”
By the time the city hosted its famous World’s Columbia
Exposition in 1893, “Chicago had the busiest and most modern
downtown in the country, with a dozen and more of the highest
buildings ever constructed.” This was accomplished mostly
by private capital, a large relief fund, and emergency aid from
around the country—although once again a key, public adjustment
was made, in this case stricter building codes.
San
Francisco rebuilt almost as quickly even though, as a more modern
city, it was faced with removing “countless tons”
of stone and brick rubble from its steep hills. This time, a more
activist President Teddy Roosevelt helped coordinate relief efforts,
and officers and troops from the U.S. Army base at the Presidio
helped city authorities set up and administer makeshift tent cities
for the estimated 300,000 people initially left homeless. The
tents were soon replaced by camps of little wooden “cottages,”
some of which were actually carted back to burned-out lots, and
improved upon over the years. A few of these may still be standing
today, though in its downtown districts San Francisco set about
erecting a forest of “fireproof” and earthquake-resistant
buildings. By 1909, according to William Bronson, author of The
Earth Shook, The Sky Burned, “more than half of America’s
steel and concrete buildings stood in San Francisco,” and
“the assessed valuation of the City was half again as much
as it had been before the fire.” By the time San Francisco
held its own, proud, exposition in 1915, it had become once again—as
it would remain to this day—the most physically beautiful
city in America.
Clearly,
the lesson to be gleaned from all these very different cities
that sustained disaster in very different locations and very different
eras, is that recovery depends upon determined local effort, combined
with planning, and/or public funding from one source or another.
Each endeavor must complement, not contend with the other. As
long as New Orleans’ citizens are kept away from their city,
and no plan is initiated for securing its future, it is difficult
to see how it will ever be restored.
