Eleven Years After Katrina, What Lessons Can We Learn Before the

Next Disaster Strikes?

Author and playwright John Biguenet offers his thoughts on the narrative of destruction
Soon after the levees collapsed and Lake Pontchartrain spilled out over 80 percent of New Orleanswith
thousands still stranded on their rooftops or trapped in their atticsauthor and playwright John Biguenet
penned an essay that would lead to a series of columns on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the New
York Times. Hed evacuated the city before Katrina hit and would return again just weeks later. In the
meantime, however, he watched from afar as his hometown rotted in the catastrophic floodwaters.
For someone whose family has lived in New Orleans since the 18th century, who grew up there speaking
the patois into which locals still fall among themselves, who takes his coffee with chicory and his jambalaya
with cayenne, only one word encompasses my sense of displacement, loss, and homesickness as we made
our way through America this past month, he wrote in September 2005. Exile.
Currently chair of the English Department at Loyola University in New Orleans, Biguenet is the author of
ten books including The Torturers Apprentice, a collection of short stories, and Oyster, a novel set in
Plaquemines Parish in 1957, as well as numerous plays, including his most recent collection, The Rising
Water Trilogy, a direct response to the flood and its aftermath. Upon this 11th anniversary of the levee
breaches, Biguenet reflects on the lingering effects, how the citys creative community battled against the
onslaught of misinformation, and the countrys response to his defense of New Orleans.
You started writing about the devastation in New Orleans for the New York Times in the immediate
aftermath of the levee collapse. How did conditions on the ground affect your reporting process?
When we returned to the city on the day [five weeks later] when martial law was lifted, I kicked open our
swollen front door to find our house uninhabitable and reeking of mold. Our large sofa had floated onto the
staircase, our bookcases at some point had collapsed with our nearly 2,500 books dumped into the fetid flood
in our living room and study, and our kitchen cabinets held pots, bowls, and cups that were still full of the
saltwater that had flooded the city.
Sleeping in a daycare center, I wrote 15 columns for the Times that first month back. With my computer
propped on an 18-inch plastic table while I sat on a 12-inch childs stool, I described life among the ruins of
New Orleans and tried to explain how it could have flooded when Hurricane Katrina had only sideswiped the
city as the storm followed the Mississippi state line north.
But those columns were written in the evenings after my wife, my son and I had spent the day gutting our
house, dragging our refrigerator to the curb as it leaked stinking puddles of food that had liquefied in our
absence, attacking the rank and slimy mold that covered most surfaces, and trying to figure out how we were
going to be able to live in a city nearly completely destroyed. We had been warned to leave our
neighborhood before dark because of the absence of residents and the continued looting of abandoned houses
our section of the city [Lakeview] still had no power, so there were no streetlights or stoplights, just pitch
darkness at night. And since the daycare center didnt have hot water yet, wed end the day taking cold
showers before I wrote my columns and began the search for an open coffee shop with free Wi-Fi to send
what I had written to New York.
In addition to the incompetence of FEMA under the Bush administration, we also faced bottom-line
insurance companies. Our struggles with the nine adjustors who rotated during the year it took to settle our
claim resulted in my wife finally telling one of them, Just give us back our 30 years of premiums, and well
call it even. The adjustor laughed.
But despite FEMA and the insurance company and the cold showers each night, I wrote 15 columns and shot
two videos for the Times by the end of October 2005. A year later just as we moved back into the second
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story of our house while we continued to work on the first floor, I wrote a second series of columns about the
aftermath of the flood.
Given all the chaos in and around New Orleans following the floods, how concerned were you about
the veracity of the information you were presenting?
Writing for the Times, I was of course required to confirm what I had written. So it wasnt mere opinion that
the levees had been undermined rather than overtopped. All one had to do was look at the water line on the
inside walls of a levee to see that the water hadnt come within three feet of the top of it. And if you went to
the canals that had actually breached, you could see that the steel had been bent out from the bottom. So it
wasnt an opinion; there was simply no other explanation. Anybody who knew the city and took a walk on
the top of the levees would have known immediately what had happened. And within months, various
forensic engineering studies confirmed the facts as well as the cause of the levee failures.
The canals were supposed to hold 20 feet of water. I was told the rule of thumb is that, in building a levee,
you need three times that amount of steel plus a margin. So for a 20-foot canal, you need 65 feet of steel. In
some places the [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] didnt have enough money for that, so according to news
reports, they used from four-and-a-half feet of steel in some spots to 16 feet in others, and the rest was just
mud. And they didnt have enough money to test the soil. The soil was alluvial swamp, which is just like
coffee grinds. So when the canals became engorged with water pushed into Lake Pontchartrain by the storm,
the pressureyou can imagine 20 feet down how much water pressure that isjust spit through those coffee
grinds and, when it did, ripped open what steel was there.
By June 2006, when the report by the Corps was finally released, the United States was facing so many
problems, especially the collapse of our efforts in Iraq, that the country had moved on from the flooding of
New Orleans. The Corps of Engineers had spent nine months insisting over and over again that the levees
had been overtopped. When they finally told the truth, nobody was paying attention anymore. Thats why
Americans and even the news media still blame Hurricane Katrina for the flooding. But no one down here
talks about Katrinathey talk about The Federal Flood or the levee collapse.
In the end, the Corps wrapped itself in sovereign immunity and admitted responsibility but not liability.
What role do you believe race played in the countrys reaction to the levee collapse?
My play Shotgun, set four months after the flood, is really about race in New Orleans in the aftermath of our
catastrophe. At first, we were all in so much trouble that old animosities got put aside, including racial
tensions. If the back tire of a car had fallen into a collapsed manhole and the driver had kids in the backseat,
nobody was going to ask what color that family wasthey were just going to help lift the car out of the hole.
But as it became clear that we could expect little help from the government and so would have to rebuild on
our own, old prejudices reemerged. [Mayor Ray Nagin] faced re-election that spring, and on Martin Luther
King Day, he made his Chocolate City speech, in which he alleged that Uptown whites were plotting to
keep black New Orleanians from returning to their homes.
At that point, the poorest New Orleanians, many of whom were black, were living in Houston and Atlanta
and Baton Rouge. With tens of thousands of houses uninhabitable, most jobs gone, and the public schools
closed for the entire year, many homesick citizens were desperate for a leader to represent their interests.
Driving into Houston just before the [New Orleans] mayoral election, I saw a billboard with a photograph of
Nagin and a simple message: Help him bring us home. He won reelection by a few thousand votes.
Playing to long-simmering racial animosity, the mayors speech transformed everything in the cityand
thats what my play is about.
With firsthand experience of how a politician can exploit racial fears, I find it hard not to see much of what is
going on in the country right now as racist at its foundation. To suggest that the Federal government exists
simply to steal your money and give it to people who are too lazy to work is merely a current variation on the
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old conservative argument that your taxes are going to welfare queens. When [Republican House Speaker
Dennis Hastert] argued in 2005 for the bulldozing of New Orleans, it was difficult to believe Congress would
have taken the same position if a majority-white city had suffered a similar manmade disaster.
Did you feel any specific responsibilities as an artist living in New Orleans at the time?
Every writer and photographer and musician and artist in the city put aside personal projects and focused on
getting the message outand trying to contradict the misinformation. Tom Piazza, a friend of mine, wrote
Why New Orleans Matters because there really was a sense that Washington was just going to write off the
city. All of us did whatever we could to keep the story alive.
Also, to be fair, the United States had never lost an entire city before. The area flooded was seven times the
size of the entire island of Manhattan. The scope of it was so vast that one could drive for an hour and see
nothing but devastation. Its very, very hardif theres no existing narrative modelfor a writer to organize
the information he or she is gathering and then for a reader to make sense of those bits and pieces of
information that are coming from various media.
Its much easier for everyone to fall into the hurricane narrative. Its a three-part story. On the first day, the
weather reporter is leaning into the wind saying, Yeah, its really blowing here. The next day, its people
standing on the slab of their house weeping as they say, At least we have our lives to be grateful for. And
the third day, with shovels in hand, theyre digging out and rebuilding. But here on the third day, New
Orleanians were still on their rooftops waiting for the United States to show up. It was the end of the week
before significant American aid began to arrive, nearly four days after the levees had breached, with people
on rooftops or dying of dehydration in their attics that whole time.
So how do you tell a story about something that has never happened before? When I started writing my plays
about the flood and its aftermath, I looked at post-war German writers, Russian writers after Chernobyl,
Japanese writers after the Kobe earthquakefor example, After the Quake by Haruki Murakamiand
studied the ways they addressed the destruction of whole cities. Invariably, they used something deep in their
own mythologies.
Were going to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Orleans in 2018, so were not old
enough to have a substantial mythology. But I thought if I could find something characteristic of the city to
tell the story of what had happened, something that might serve in the same way as a mythology for a bigger,
older culture, I could address what we had lost. And it occurred to me that architecture could be used as a
structuring principle for the plays. Especially because the iconic images of the flood were of people trapped
on rooftops, houses offered a central motif that was expressive of both our climate and our culture. The first
play in my Rising Water trilogy is set in an attic and then, in the second act, on the roof. The second play,
Shotgun, takes place in a shotgun duplex, the most characteristic form of local architecture. And the third
play, Mold, is set in a house enshrouded in mold and on the verge of collapse. In a very real sense,
architecture gave me a narrative structure.
How have readers responded to your analysis of New Orleans and the aftermath of the levee collapse?
Eleven years ago, the responses I received to my columns in the Times expressed profound disappointment
in the federal governments response to the disaster, especially from readers abroad. As a person wrote about
one of my columns, Dont the Americans understand that New Orleans doesnt belong to the United States?
It belongs to the world. International opinion about this country shifted dramatically because of that and, of
course, because of what was happening then in Iraq.
Thanks to my columns, I wound up hosting a number of international journalists when they visited New
Orleans after the flood. Their reaction was summed up by one foreign correspondent who turned to me after
we had driven around the city and, shaking his head, said in disbelief, This is simply not possible. Not in the
United States.

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However, things in our country have changed a great deal in the last decade. In response to my essay in the
New York Times last year on the tenth anniversary of the levee breaches, many Americans were much less
generous: You people chose to live there. Dont come crawling to us for help the next time a hurricane hits.
These sentiments were expressed by those living on the fault line in San Francisco, in the Midwests tornado
alley, in Western areas frequently swept by summer firestorms. Do they think the rest of us are not going to
help them rebuild when the next disaster hits there?
But it takes a community to do that, and theres a very strong sense, in the responses to what Ive written,
particularly in this last year, that its your own damn fault and dont expect any help from us. I think its
just another expression of the enormous anger that is circulating through our country right now. Nobody
wants to be held responsible for his or her neighbors problems, and I think that attitude is very destructive to
a sense of community and, of course, to our nation.
Do you consider yourself a place-based writer?
I just think of myself as a writer. But I know New Orleans and the surrounding environment. At the end of
the introduction to The Rising Water Trilogy, I argue that New Orleans is simply where the future arrived
first. If you dont pay attention to environmental degradation, to climate change, to rising water levels, to
coastal erosion, to endemic poverty, to substandard education, to political corruption, to the substitution of
ideology for intelligence, you get what happened to New Orleans in 2005. I think Hurricane Sandy
confirmed my argument that this was just the first place to experience what the future holds in store for the
country and the world. But that also means if you want to understand whats going to happen in the coming
century in terms of the relationship of the environment to human civilization, this is a place where you can
witness it.
Ill give you a very straightforward example. When I was a child, we were taught there were 100 miles
between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. My children were taught there were 50. Now its 12 miles to
the east. I was giving a talk on the tenth anniversary of the levee collapse last year, and there was an
environmentalist who also spoke that night. He showed projections of what New Orleans will look like in the
year 2100, and its not going to be merely on the coastline, as Biloxi is today. Its going to be an island. It
will be off the coast of the United States if current trends persist. So we are in a laboratory living here in
New Orleans for the intersection of the environment and human life. We can see the future happening.
How does the history of a place like New Orleans affect how you write about it?
There are 14 stories in my collection The Torturers Apprentice, and three of them are ghost stories. The
convention of the ghost story is very useful in showing how the past persists into and sometimes affects the
present. Those who think about New Orleans usually imagine the French Quarter. They imagine buildings
that may be 200 years old and a way of life that precedes even thatincluding the dark history of this place.
For example, right across the street from the Napoleon Housethe old governors mansion that was set
aside for Napoleon as part of a failed plot local Creoles hatched to bring the exiled emperor here to start a
new empireis Masperos slave exchange. Sitting in the Napoleon House, you can still see across the street
barred windows between the first and second floors where slaves had to squat before they were brought
downstairs to be auctioned off. That history is all around us, and if you know the city, the past is still here
but so is the future.

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