Federalism and the Construction of Protection from Betsy to Katrina

Chapter 2 builds a historical narrative on how New Orleans’s civic actors influenced policies and politics around emergency management at the federal, state, and local level. This chapter focuses on the ways in which citizen requests have influenced the federal, state, and local governments. This has been done in two ways. First, civic actors urged the federal government to pursue structural solutions by constructing levees and drainage systems around flood-prone areas. Through browsing these documents, we can get a glimpse of how the perception of natural disasters had been constructed prior to Katrina’s landfall. To government officials and residents alike, disasters were considered as infrequent disruptions from which the city of New Orleans had to be protected, and the protection was mainly provided by the federal government’s engineering and insurance programs. The expanding protection instilled residents with an elevated sense of security and justified rebuilding in vulnerable regions. Second, because of the federal protection, the Louisiana and New Orleans governments have developed policies that minimize investment in long-term hazard mitigation for the sake of economic development.