Engineering, social challenges confront New Orleans rebuilders, experts say
Lawrence Bobo
Barton H. "Buzz" Thompson
BY JOHN B. STAFFORD
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, planning for the future of New Orleans has been a divisive process, drawing into its vortex questions of economics, the environment and tradition.
But a panel that convened recently in Braun Hall sought to address a more fundamental question: Should the city be rebuilt or simply abandoned? The discussion was the third of the four-part series, "Assessing Katrina: Ecosystems, Urbanization and the Real Costs of Reclamation," on the impact of the disastrous August 2005 hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast. Titled "Rebuild or Abandon?" the Feb. 20 panel looked at the engineering, urban planning and social challenges facing New Orleans after the storm. Concluding New Orleans should be rebuilt, the panelists urged the city's future architects to repair many often-neglected problems that plagued the city before the hurricane's arrival.
"When we have natural disasters like Katrina, there are two things you hope to do effectively," said panel chair Barton H. "Buzz" Thompson, the Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law and co-director of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. "First, you deal compassionately with the victims—you help them get back on their feet as quickly and effectively as possible. A second thing would be rebuilding a city with the infrastructure like New Orleans and, hopefully, rebuild it in a way that minimizes the potential for another disaster like it. Often these are opposing goals."
Hazardous sitesThe first speaker was Ken Topping, president of the consulting firm Topping Associates International and former planning director for the city of Los Angeles and San Bernardino County. He explained that many cities, including New Orleans, are built in hazardous places for reasons ranging from economics to aesthetics.
"We don't know what we're doing to the environment, but we know what the environment is doing to us," Topping said. "The chances are that as urban growth throughout the world intersects with dangerous places and changes in the environment, we're going to have to think about how we plan our cities with these dynamic changes in mind."
He pointed to three precarious regions of California as examples of urban development in danger zones: Sacramento, which is built on a floodplain; the San Francisco Bay Area, built in part on landfill in an earthquake-prone area; and Laguna Beach, which has unstable hillsides that are heavily populated.
"Many cities are already built in hazardous areas," Topping said. "That's just a fact we need to deal with. We need to reduce natural hazard risks and we need to transform existing cities for greater long-term sustainability."
It is the natural course of cities to be reborn after a disaster, Topping said, a cycle he called the "Phoenix Principle," because devastated cities often rise like the mythological Phoenix that rose from the ashes of a funeral pyre. The key to New Orleans' recovery is effective planning and governmental reform, he said, adding that other urban regions must better prepare for natural disasters.
He also said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) needs an overhaul so that it can improve its response to future catastrophes. "FEMA is now broken and must be rebuilt," Topping noted. "It needs to become flexible, robust and—I personally believe—independent."
Engineering challengesDavid Sykora, an engineer with Exponent-Failure Analysis Associates, addressed the engineering challenges that must be confronted to properly rebuild New Orleans. Sykora suggested that the three canals hardest hit by the hurricane—17th Street, Orleans Avenue and London Avenue—could be protected in the future by installing floodgates to control storm surges. In other areas of the city, he said, floodwalls must be redesigned and rebuilt or substantially retrofitted, and some levees also could be rebuilt, although at the cost of using developable land.
Sykora emphasized the importance of these engineering changes by pointing out the relative frequency of major hurricanes in the area. A Category 4 hurricane, the classification for the second most powerful storm system, occurs in the area about every 23 years, he said, and a Category 5, such as Katrina, happens roughly every 53 years.
"Another way to look at it is that every year there is a 1 or 2 percent chance that a Category 5 hurricane will strike within 75 nautical miles of New Orleans," he said.
National psycheSociology Professor Lawrence Bobo, director of Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, framed the rebuilding of New Orleans as a social issue.
"The searing images of citizens left to fend for themselves were burned into the national psyche," said Bobo, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor. "While there will long be debate over what those images do and should mean, the images themselves bear loud witness to circumstances in America and about the health of our democracy that are wrong and troubling."
Bobo said that blacks, Latinos and other minority groups often fall into "extreme poverty," which he defined as having an income that is "50 percent or below the official poverty line for a particular household size."
Groups living in extreme poverty were segregated in New Orleans and suffered the most from the hurricane, he said. "It really is the conjunction of economic or class-based hardship with the racial segregation of communities that lies behind the searing images of people of color huddled together at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center for four days," he said.
Justice demands rebuilding New Orleans, Bobo said, noting that reconstruction provides an opportunity for social improvement. "The challenge is to build a New Orleans better than what it was—to bring back those cast out, but to do it without the great divides of residential segregation and huge pockets of poverty and despair that overlapped with it," he said.
The alternative, he added, would be to create a New Orleans where the impoverished have "no real prospect of return."
Bobo's remarks encapsulated the pervading sentiment of the panelists—that America must not abandon New Orleans nor rebuild what stood before, but that the new New Orleans must be better engineered, socially and structurally.
The final panel discussion, "Dealing with Disasters," will be held at 7:30 p.m. March 6 in Fairchild Auditorium. For details, visit http://pangea.stanford.edu/outreach/public/Katrina.html.
John B. Stafford is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service.