This article explores the origin and implications of the rumor that government authorities intentionally destroyed the levee fronting New Orleans's lower 9th Ward during Hurricane Katrina. The author argues that these rumors should not be dismissed as fanciful conspiracy theories, but must instead be placed in the context of New Orleans's environmental history. That history includes numerous episodes in which commercial elites colluded with elected officials to place the city's poor and working classes in harm's way during urban disasters. As a result, the levee rumors during Hurricane Katrina may be understood as a form of resistance, a way in which displaced residents of the lower 9th Ward tried to shape the discourse about the causes and consequences of the hurricane, insisting that, rather than being understood as a so-called natural disaster, it must be understood as a human-constructed catastrophe.
See various posts at http://getyouracton.com/blog/?m=200508. "Beautiful meteor showers" can be found in the entry, "Evening Update from Camp Casey 1," August 26, 2005. "White supremacist groups" can be found in the entry, "Morning Update from Camp Casey!" August 26, 2005. "Everyone is sitting back and relaxing" can be found in the entry, "Morning Update from Camp Casey!" August 26, 2005. "Tight on gas money" can be found in the entry, "Please help my friend get to Camp Casey!" August 26, 2005. "Buddy and Anne got to take showers in the public campgrounds" can be found in the entry, "Evening Update from Camp Casey 1," August 26, 2005. "Radical Rightwingers" can be found in the entry, "Evening update from Camp Casey," August 27, 2005. For news of Katrina, see "Hurricanes & Update," August 28, 2005.
2.
All quotes can be found in the entry, "Friday Morning Letter to Family and Friends," September 2, 2005, at http://www.getyouracton.com/blog/?p=63 .
3.
The two best sources for information on the day-to-day news of Hurricane Katrina remain contemporary updates, posted throughout the storm and during its aftermath by the New Orleans Times-Picayune on its Web site and the extraordinary coverage of the disaster in the New York Times. The former has been archived at http://www.nola.com/katrina/updates/.Thelatteriseasilyavailableonlineatthepaper'sWebsite:http://www.nytimes.com/. A useful interactive timeline, one of many available, of the disaster can also be found at http://thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline .
4.
An outstanding and easily accessible collection of data on New Orleans's neighborhoods can be found at http://www.gnocdc.org/index.html. For information on the Lower Ninth Ward particularly, see http://www .gnocdc.org/orleans/8/22/snapshot.html.
5.
Given the popular outcry about President Bush's belated visit to the Gulf Coast, it is surprising that photos of him viewing Katrina's devastation from the comfort of Air Force One can still be viewed at http:// www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/images/20050831_p083105pm-0117jas-515h.html. Maureen Dowd mocked the president for lauding Michael Brown in "United States of Shame," New York Times, September 3, 2005. Hastert's glib comment, and his failed effort to walk back that sound bite, appear in "Hastert Tries Damage Control after Remarks Hit a Nerve," Washington Post, September 3, 2005. On September 1, 2005, Nagin appeared live with Garland Robinette on WWL Radio. The relevant part of the interview can be heard at http://www.atypical.net/mm/nagin.mp3.
6.
As late as President Bush's address to the nation from Jackson Square on September 15, 2005, he still clung to the rhetoric of a natural disaster, though commentators had debunked such fictions by then. For the text of that speech, see http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050915-8.html. More than a month after the storm, on October 19, 20005, Secretary Chertoff testified before the House of Representatives Special Committee on Katrina. He, too, still clung to the language of a natural disaster as to a life preserver in trying to keep his department above water. The complete text of his testimony can be found at http://72.14.253.104/ search?q=cache:L_zvd4671LgJ:katrina.house.gov/hearings/10_19_05/chertoff_state101905.DOC+michael+c hertoff+%22natural+disaster%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us&client=safari. Nagin called Katrina a natural disaster in his WWL interview: http://www.atypical.net/mm/nagin.mp3. Steinberg's quotes initially appeared in "Man-Made Mistakes Increase Devastation of `Natural' Disasters," Wall Street Journal, September 2, 2005 and "Where Most See a Weather System, Some See Divine Retribution, Washington Post, September 4, 2005. See also Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xi-68.
7.
Turner's quote appears in Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xvi. See also Anita M. Waters, "Conspiracy Theories as Ethnosociologies: Explanation and Intention in African American Political Culture," Journal of Black Studies 28 (September 1997): 112-25.
8.
President Bush made his gaffe on September 1, 2005, in an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC television's Good Morning America. For the most chilling, but by no means the only, prediction of the disaster following Katrina, see: "Washing Away," New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 23-27, 2002.
9.
The story can be viewed in its entirety at the conspiracy theory Web site prisonplanet.com: http://www. prisonplanet.com/articles/september2005/120905explosivesblew.htm. For the discussion on DailyKos.com, see http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/7/01752/03876.
10.
The first reports of Farrakhan's speech appeared on WCNC, an NBC affiliate in Charlotte, the evening of September 12, 2005. Farrakhan's quote and significant pieces of the speech can be found at http:// www.wcnc.com/news/topstories/stories/091205-ad-wcnc-farrakhan.4fb21767.html. Limbaugh's response, an extended rant about the ways in which African Americans were hurting their own cause, is at http://www.wcnc .com/news/topstories/stories/091205-ad-wcnc-farrakhan.4fb21767.html. For Hannity's race-baiting, see http:// www.newshounds.us/2005/09/21/more_racebaiting_on_hannity_colmes.php.
11.
A complete rough transcript of Daryn Kagan's CNN interview with Spike Lee can be found at http:// transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0510/11/lt.02.html. A portion of Bill Maher's interview with Lee, Tucker Carlson, and Michel Martin can be viewed at http://youtube.com/watch?v=U14iTFQOtJs.
12.
Carlson's rant can be seen at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0510/11/lt.02.html. See also "Rumors Continue to Flood the Blogosphere," Louisiana Weekly, February 20, 2006.
13.
The best and most poignant example of this sort of rave review, tempered by anxiety over the inclusion, meaning, and potential impact of the levee rumors, appeared in the New Orleans Times Picayune: "On the Air," New Orleans Times Picayune, August 16, 2006.
14.
On levee formation, see Charles R. Kolb and Jack R. Van Lopik, "Depositional Environments of the Mississippi River Deltaic Plain," in Martha Lou Shirley, ed., Deltas in Their Geologic Framework (Houston, TX: Houston Geologic Society, 1969), 17; and Roger T. Saucier, Geomorphology and Quaternary Geologic History of the Lower Mississippi Valley (Vicksburg, VA: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station, 1994), 136-41. On the levee, topography, and the French settlement of New Orleans, see Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1-49, 157-96; Tristam Kidder, "Making the City Inevitable: Native Americans and the Geography of New Orleans," in Craig Colten, ed., Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 9-21; and Christopher Morris, "Impenetrable but Easy: The French Transformation of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Founding of New Orleans," in Colten, Transforming New Orleans, 22-44.
15.
On flooding and levee construction early in the city's history, see Donald W. Davis, "Historical Perspective on Crevasses, Levees, and the Mississippi River," in Colten, Transforming New Orleans, 84-106; Benjamin G. Humphreys, Floods and Levees of the Mississippi River (Washington, DC: The Mississippi River Levee Association, 1914), 17-20; and Kelman, a River and Its City, 157-70.
16.
Quote appears in Thomas Low Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, 1821-1861 (New York: Stackpole Sons, n.d.), 129.
17.
See Letters, Petitions, Reports of the City Engineer, and Work Orders for May 12, 14, 1806; March 3, 1807; March 24, 1807; October 30, 1807; December 28, 1812; February 2, 1819; November 15, 1828; and September 30, 1831, in Municipal Papers, Kuntz Collections, MSS 600, Special Collections, Manuscript Division, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.
18.
On Sauve's Crevasse and the lingering impact of the 1849 flood, see Craig Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 26-27; Davis, "Historical Perspectives on Crevasses," 96-97; Kelman, A River and Its City, 162-70; and George E. Waring and George Washington Cable, "History and Present Condition of New Orleans, Louisiana," in Tenth Census, Report on the Social Condition of Cities, XIX, part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 249. The Cable quote appears in George Washington Cable, Creoles of Louisiana (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1884), 271.
19.
The best set of primary sources for understanding the drainage system's growth is Semi-annual Report of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans (various years). See also Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis, 140-92; and Ari Kelman, "`The Cat became the Companion of the Crawfish': The Struggle to Reclaim New Orleans's Wetlands," Historical Geography 32 (Fall 2004): 157-80. The statistic on assessed taxable property can be found in Martin Behrman, New Orleans: A History of Three Great Public Utilities (New Orleans, LA: Brando Print, 1914), 5.
20.
On the unintended consequences of draining the city, see Colten, Unnatural Metropolis, 140-92; and Kelman, "The Cat became the Companion of the Crawfish," 171-80. For rising river heights, see John Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 157-75; and Kelman, A River and Its City, 161-70.
21.
See Colten, Unnatural Metropolis, 154-55.
22.
On the Good Friday storm, the 1927 flood, and the decision to dynamite the levee below the city, see Barry, Rising Tide, 189-257, 340-99; and Kelman, A River and Its City, 157-96.
23.
Ibid., and "public execution" can be found in Kelman, A River and Its City, 183.
24.
After Katrina, 9th Ward resident Mia Adams recalled the impact of Betsy on her community. The interview can be heard at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4826455. See also Colten, Unnatural Metropolis, 154; "Answers: Hurricane Betsy Hit Florida, Smashed New Orleans in 1965," USA Today, October 21, 2003; and "Under the Gun: Schiro Famed, Nagin Blamed for Hurricane Response," New Orleans City Business, August 14, 2006.
25.
The quotes "developers . . . salivating at the `new' New Orleans they will build," "this city is born of hardship, and survives not despite, but because of it," and "there is no place like home and we are not going to watch it being taken from us" all can be found in the entry "Going Home," September 11, 2005, http:// getyouracton.com/blog/?m=200509. "There were no left over sticks of dynamite lying there . . ." and "stand by what I have heard" can be found in the entry "New Orleans to D.C. and back again," September 27, 2005, http:// getyouracton.com/blog/?m=200509.
