CHAPTER 2 

When the Levee Broke 

Deconstructing a ‘Natural’ Disaster 

In the next two chapters I will be looking at examples that involve how the weaponization of water and corruption of infrastructures through the prioritisation of corporate interest has put threatened the lives of Louisiana residents. Examining Hurricane Katrina, the infrastructural failings that led to the floodings and the inadequate, as well as the traumatic recovery efforts that exacerbated community displacement. I will then switch channels to investigate the impact of toxic water contamination from the chemical waste of industrial plants situated along the Mississippi River and the health implications of this for local communities.  

The COVID-19 pandemic was a tragic reminder of how, through times of widespread crises, we are able to see how embedded discriminatory social and political beliefs and structures invisibly underpin and influence social determinants of health. For Louisiana covid mortality rates display an intersectional relationship with race, “Black Americans accounted for 50% of known COVID-19-related deaths while representing only 32% of the state's population”. The study also found that those who experience higher levels of daily stressors, were more at risk. While thepandemic was a global event of shared collective trauma, for Louisiana the event is located in relation to a much longer history of trauma born from complex and enduring acts of abandonment, racial violence and dispossession.

Hurricane Katrina a Category 5 hurricane, made landfall on August 23rd 2005, followed shortly by Hurricane Rita on September 18th 2005, also a Category 5. The levee system in place at the time, built as a hurricane protection system, was only engineered to withstand a Category 3 storm and shattered under the pressure of the water, plunging the city into the sea. The flooding impacted the whole city. It destroyed homes, businesses, dispersed communities and “shrouded the city in a collective, endemic sense of hopelessness and despair” (Lovell, 2015: 561). The Lower Ninth Ward was the worst affected area, and still to this day, homes and road infrastructures have not been rebuilt. Following the hurricane, it took days for crisis teams to arrive in the area for rescue and recovery. Most people were left without food, water, shelter or hope of being rescued as efforts were painfully slow. The Army Corps of Engineers, the body in charge of maintaining the levee structures, had seen maintenance budgets sliced by 80% in the five years prior to the 2005 (Truett, 2022). The impact of these governance decisions married with the storm was, as Truett argues, what killed more than 2000 people and displaced 1.5 million residents (Truett, 2022).   

There is a question how ‘natural’ the disaster was, given the availability of disaster relief preparations as well as the inadequacy exposed in maintaining the levee infrastructures that could have prevented the flooding. Vincanne Adams writes that the “floods and the displacements that followed could easily have been predicted given the existing structures of inequality and dispossession and the growth industries that governed the fragile relationship between wetlands, canals, levees, and human populations in this Louisiana landscape.” (Adams, 2013: 15). However, rather than being a classed a failure of city engineering or disaster response planning, it continues to be broadly seen as a ‘natural’ disaster, a narrative that deflects blame or responsibility away from the state. The usage of the term depoliticises the impact of this disaster and subsequent prolonged social issues and health implications and is something rhetorically doused in colonial and political nuance. Adams proclaims that “The disaster of Hurricane Katrina didn’t “happen” accidentally; it was produced by the industries that shaped the Gulf region in and around New Orleans in the fifty years prior to the hurricane” (Adams, 2013: 15). She continues that it is “part of the sustained rhetoric of disasters as “natural” phenomena that enables their political causes and consequences to be overlooked.” (Adams, 2013: 15).  

Chronic illness and NCD’s are most commonly associated with bad lifestyle choices, where their occurrence is largely unsuspicious, similarly detracts away from the possibility that these diseases are the result of human-designed influences. That communities are to blame for their own suffering, and the residual belief of “natural” selection so embedded in our understandings of human evolution, informs this structural racism that determines health equity, deducing much of it as something fated rather than accounting for the prejudices that underpin the widespread illness and mortality of many individuals and demographics in which populations are considered ‘marginalised’ or in the neoliberal economy, ‘disposable’.  

The inadequate assistance provided in the immediate aftermath of the crisis solidified an already entrenched mistrust of the state to offer support, and residents felt like this was an intentional act of genocidal proportions. In fact, as Spike Lee captures in his docuseries When the Levees Broke (2006), many residents suspected that the levees had been intentionally destroyed by dynamite by the state, in an attempt to contain the flooding to New Orleans area – this was a known strategy that had been used in the 1965 Hurricane Betsy (When the Levees Broke, 2006). While there is no way of proving this theory, the sentiment of suspicion was one that had pre-ceded Katrina and would continue to manifest in the power dynamics that played out throughout the response and recovery period.  

Adams does a wonderful job of exposing how the recovery efforts did little to ameliorate the impact of the flooding and in-fact merely foregrounded the cosy relationship between corporate interest and government. She examines the role of The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the body in charge of the crisis response, who outsourced their recovery programmes to inexperienced contractors who were overpaid, underequipped and largely unregulated. These contractors exploited the moral benevolence of individuals wanting to assist those in need and employed a system of volunteer recovery relief “by paying low or no wages for the work volunteers contribute under the banner of moral certainty” (Adams, 2013: 11), flushing the money further away from the frontline workers or intended recipients.  Barrios’ ethnographic research supports many of these claims on a local level reporting that it was most common to find that insurance companies would not pay out for recovery costs, and that recovery funding applications to be typically refused (Barrios, 2017). The money set aside to support the rebuild and recovery did not find its way to the people who needed it, rather found channels into the hands of market-driven opportunists who pushed forth plans to gentrify the area, further exacerbating the displacement of those who had lost so much already.   

Naomi Klein terms this “disaster capitalism”, an example of how businesses “were able to profit from human tragedy, turning sorrows into opportunities for capital investment” (Klein, 2008). Adams also speaks to this, when describing the “business of social suffering” (Adams, 2013: 6) where pain and suffering has become a product that can be monetised. Post-Katrina New Orleans is an example of when public-sector interests blur with private business opportunities and success rates are measured through profits rather than by how effective recovery efforts were in helping affected people.

In the months and years following, charities and faith-based groups stepped in to shoulder the burden of state-funded recovery effort. The establishment of health initiatives and community-led programmes are noticeable, and the leaning towards grassroots, collectivist forms of resilience can still be observed today. Common Ground situated in Algiers district provided disaster relief in the Greater New Orleans area following Hurricane Katrina and continues to provide health clinics, shelter and legal advice to residents (Common Ground, 2022).  Reach NOLA (Rapid Evaluation and Action for Community Health in New Orleans), a community-based participatory research and action partnership, similarly established in the wake of Katrina, and works to improve access to quality healthcare specifically supporting mental health or crisis intervention services (RAND, 2007). 

Living with Katrina, poor infrastructure and risk of sickness has become part of the quitodian rhythms of people living in New Orleans and community support has become crucial to many people’s survival both mentally and physically. The abandonment of Louisiana in this event may be directly traced back to the defunding of the levee infrastructures yet, any notion of morally driven disaster recovery disrupts the economic surplus that neoliberal economy thrives on and so in reality the emergence of independent humanitarian projects, merely enables the economies of abandonment to prevail. 

What is clear was that the residents of New Orleans were exponentially let down and that embedded into the levee infrastructures and recovery response administration were deeply divided, socially violent, and economically motivated principles of governance that remain largely unaccountable despite the knowledge that a Category 5 hurricane was likely to hit the area and the resonating impact that this could have on communities, infrastructures and health. At the time of writing, the levees have been rebuilt but, it is rumoured, for economic reasons, the engineering used is still not able to withstand the impact of rising sea levels. As Adams’ proclaims, “Katrina is an ongoing disaster” but also that “It’s not about Katrina”, it is about the precarious relationship the people, the politics and the economy have with water and about the negligent systems that legitimize the risk of destruction despite having enough power and resources to temper it. 

Silent Trauma in the Continuum of Violence 

 This is not the first time such great trauma, displacement and dispossession happened in such a big way on this piece of land. The loss of cultural spaces and identity is entrenched with the colonial narrative and dates back to the violent displacement of the indigenous communities in the 1830s. Displacement, disaster, abandonment, ongoing political and corporate corruption and forms of racial violence are counterproductive to creating spaces or networks that promote safety. Yet in a situation of such prolonged political abandonment community resilience and unity is central for a city that “is forever in a process of becoming”. The future of these spaces is precarious but maintaining spaces that allow stories of dispossession to breathe should be central to recovery for such traumatic events. The real route to healing and recovery is to keep the voices and stories of people who have experienced suffering on this level alive and heard. The personal narrative ethnographies both Adams and Barrios depict, also work to contour the bureaucratic and health challenges that affected individuals and communities face, expose the issues around social determinants of and access to healthcare, and keep voices of suffering active, as a form of resistance but also of solidarity and support for a community that has been continually slighted by a system that fails to serve them. 

Neoliberalism is designed in such a way that it thrives of the silent suffering of the traumatized or sick, and in fact, weaponizes it as part of the capillary flow of power that props up the neoliberal power relations between the empowered and the disempowered creating a mindfully dehumanizing form of structural violence, something I would like to term biopolitical silencing.  

Biopolitical silencing marries notions of biolegitimacy with neoliberal market-driven governance. It is aimed at silencing social and political networks considered a threat or unable to engage in state interests, in order to elevate the power of a dominant political or economic interest. Another example of this may be seen in the policing of many Black Lives Matter protests during the Covid-19 pandemic. The state harnessed fears around threat of contagion in an attempt to dispel the human rights protests following the murder of George Floyd and the racial health inequities that were exposed at the height of the pandemic. The protests were presented as a Covid-19 security risk as they broke the restrictions on movement and gatherings, something that was thought to precipitate a spike in cases. Protesters were presented as immoral, violent dissenters as they did not serve state interests of the time, “rising state repression took the form of direct violence against civilians as governments became more likely to suppress their citizens and crack down on opposition and minority groups, often under the guise of lockdown measures”. In actuality the protests did not correlate with a viral spike in protesting areas.

From a physiological perspective, being in a traumatized or ‘triggered’ state, produces high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. For short periods of time cortisol is relatively harmless and, as a bodily response to a perceived threat, can be helpful as a protection mechanism. However longer-term increased production of cortisol has been linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and obesity (Manenschijn, et al., 2011; McFarlane et al., 2010; Schoorlemmer et al., 2009). Things like displacement, bereavement, food or work insecurities and substance abuse may also contribute to high levels of cortisol thus leading to higher risk of chronic illness. 

Emily Mendenhall draws upon Merrill Singer’s concept of syndemics when examining diabetes as a biosocial condition and her research looks at the psychosocial impact of trauma and traumatic experiences and how they may lead to chronic illnesses like diabetes. The idea that health and social conditions travel together through a population, driven by social and political forces and that “the disease [diabetes] is inherently social and rooted in historical landscapes of oppression and subjugation from colonialism, segregation, and neoliberalism” (Mendenhall et al., 2019: 9-10). She cites diabetes as “an internalization of persistent emotional pain” (Mendenhall et al., 2019: 7) as can be triggered by traumatic temporalities and suffering. Seth Holmes echoes this as he explores embodied suffering, asserting that illnesses are embodied forms of violence, not necessarily the result of ‘natural’ selection (as traditional Darwinian notions of health and death advocate) rather a cumulative effect of trauma in the vacuum of the continuum of violence, that can cause such health disparities, which are seen to fall along “citizenship, ethnicity, and class lines” (Holmes, 2013: 99). I feel this notion of the violent continuum encapsulates the biosocial disturbances so far presented, from the manifestation of it in infrastructural decision-making to the presence of trauma as observable in the body.  

As mentioned previously van der Kolk proposes that, in order to enhance trauma healing capacity and growth, we must create a “visceral feeling of safety” (Van der Kolk, 2015) and so the provision of basic living needs like clean water, food and shelter are crucial to attaining a state of safety. Recognising the importance of this as well as the enabling the voice of the affected community’s social network and kinship ties throughout Katrina recovery was something continually overlooked, and many found that their realities that were often denied or ignored, some felt they were even blamed for their situation, which only compounded trauma, stressors and sickness and the inability to recover of move forward.

These forms of governance continues to bear a haunting resemblance history of slavery in the Southern States of the USA. is a narrative that belongs to many New Orleanians and their ancestors, one that, for many years as also been silenced by the institutional racism embedded in our academic and social curriculums, in our political systems and in-fact shortly after the Katrina disaster, Barack Obama, Senator at the time, remarked “The people of New Orleans weren’t just abandoned during the hurricane. They were abandoned long ago.” (Truett, 2020). The US constitution, as written in the fourteenth amendment in the Equal Protection Clause 1868, cemented a political shift away from racial segregation and the Jim-Crow era and, on paper at least, marked an historical break from the culturally entrenched legacy of slavery. In reality it has just been usurped by more subtle forms of biolegitimacy and racial hierarchies that flow through powerful capillaries of societal structures. On paper, racism does not exist in United States, yet the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans forcefully vibrates throughout Louisiana, and much of the rest of the country.  I hope that this proffers a reminder of the intricacies of the system we remain plugged into, we can all be as much part of the solution as we are the problem.  

Out of Sight: Disappearing Spaces  

Passing through the central Warehouse District a derelict, a huge vacant and unoccupied building appeared. It was the Charity Hospital that had been closed ever since Katrina. Between 1940’s and Katrina, 90% of New Orleans residents had been birthed in the Charity hospital making it a significant part of the city’s social and cultural history. The day the levees broke it closed and has not proved itself economically profitable to be reopened even at a time when the state was experiencing a health and social crises and healthcare was critical. This wasn’t a unique incident, and in-fact many health centres and clinics saw the same fate including the Lindy Boggs hospital as photographed at the top. 

Crescent Care clinics have been the main primary care option for those on Medicaid and continues to serve primarily young, unemployed and LGBTQ communities or those without insurance plans. The University Medical Center New Orleans opened in 2015, a new non-profit primary care facility that claims to take Medicaid patients. However, the reality is that, due to pressures on sustaining funding targets, many primary care facilities are unable to take patients without private insurance plans.  

While recovery efforts that have profited on post-Katrina New Orleans also pushed forth with gentrification of the area, many poorer resident spaces were lost. L Kasimu Harris is a New Orleans-based photographer and writer who has lived and worked in the community and with Dr Cullen Truett on a lecture for APA’s 2022 Annual Meeting entitled “Trauma in Crescent City: The Intersection of Social Determinants and Racial Injustice in New Orleans,”. Harris has attempted to capture the stories and zeitgeist of the years following Katrina, through his words and photography which showcases a selection of work on disappearing black spaces. 

“I almost never came back to New Orleans. Seeing my destroyed city and abandoned people hurt me. Then, I started taking pictures. August 29, 2005 made me a photographer. But this exhibition isn’t about that event. It’s about the life in the days and years afterwards. This is a visual narrative of growth and struggles.  

Since 2005, I’ve wanted to make a monumental statement about the storm, the flood and its equally destructive bureaucracy. Yet, I’ve dismissed Katrina, personally, even as I obsessed over it professionally.  I couldn’t always segregate the personal and the professional. So I brought them together and told my own stories. This is how I’ve dealt with rage, depression, underemployment, unrequited love; this is how I documented my family, explored my city and preserved its culture. Those themes are universal. It’s where I found the good. For me, exploring the intersection of pain and healing is where the journey begins.” 

L. Kasimo Harris

Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges 2018-