Putting Katrina in Context

Alabama Nurse, Mar-May 2006 by Allen, Carol Easley

"Natural" disasters in the US cost approximately $20 billion each year, including direct costs to the government, the insurance industry, and private citizens. This does not account for non-material costs to life and health, the environment, and the emotional toll that results from the loss of pets and possessions and family upheavals. From the Johnstown Flood in 1889 to our recent history of earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods of the last several decades, we have moved from neglible or ad hoc federal assistance, to limited assistance (1950s to the early 1980s), to our present policies of abundant disaster assistance (Platt, 1999).

But the history of disaster costs and federal disaster relief tell only part of the story of Hurricane Katrina. It is not helpful or instructive to view Katrina in isolation from other disastrous events either historically or contemporaneously. As we step back from the event itself and consider the broader view, patterns emerge that allow us to trace the underlying human-constructed forces, causes, and decisions that unfortunately are repeated and repeated in our national response to disasters and disaster-preparedness. We come to the conclusion that a complete reconstruction of our understanding of disasters and our responses to them must include a much broader perspective: one that accounts for the historical, cultural, social, economic, political, and other meaning structures that surround this tragedy and its aftermath, in a word, the context.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines context as the "circumstances in which an event occurs, a situation." Context is a Middle English word from the Latin root contextus, which means "coherence" and also "sequence of words." It comes from related Latin roots that mean "to join together, weave, or plait."

The larger context in which we locate our understanding of disaster has an inevitable effect on our perception of reality. The situation can neither be understood in a vacuum, nor resolved in one. Only as we understand and critique the context within which the reality of disasters in America is constructed will we be able to comprehend the true nature of the problem and to define the possibilities for its solution. If we do not consider the comprehensive array of meaning structures that surround the development of disasters, their outcomes, and our response to them, we run the risk of decontextualization, of stripping the problem of the social, political, historical, philosophical, and other settings in which it exists. I would like to suggest three points may help us to place Hurricane Katrina, and for that matter, other "natural" disasters in context.

First, in order to understand the circumstances surrounding Katrina and its aftermath, we must examine the social construction of disasters in our society, in other words, the way in which we as a society comprehend the whole notion of what happened and why. This understanding both limits our ability to see the broader context in which Katrina, or any disaster, is located, and also constrains our opportunities to respond effectively.

A long held view of the origin and meaning underlying disasters of various sorts is what can be called the act of God perspective. According to this construction of reality, disasters are ordained by God in response to human sinfulness, in other words, Divine punishment. From the human perspective then, such calamities are in a sense inevitable, or at least beyond our control. By the end of the 19th century, however, the act of God perspective began to give way to what Ted Steinberg, in his book Acts of God: the Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (2000), calls the normalizing tendencies of late 19th century industrial capitalism. Steinberg argues that in order for business to proceed as usual, it became important that people not spend too much time thinking about the meaning of disasters, especially to the extent that such cogitation distracted them from their work. As cities competed against each other in the economic arena, the normalization of disaster, that is, viewing disaster as a simple fact of life, served to reestablish a city or region that had experienced such an event as a safe haven for business.

By the early 20th century the prevailing public view was that disasters, such as earthquakes, were merely natural phenomena, a detached and morally neutral view that obscured the human role in disasters and rendered effective preparedness impossible. This natural view of disaster, functioned to create the same type of fatalism engendered by the act of God perspective-and thus to an apathetic political approach to such "natural" disasters. This natural perspective means that the nation could never truly learn from the disasters of the past.

The natural view means, for example, that continued development of areas we know are hazardous is rationalized by discounting the disasters of the past, thus fostering ongoing commercial growth. The natural disaster viewpoint drains the occurrence of its meaning and hides the very political implications of the calamities we experience. There is no question that natural forces are the primary reason for most disasters, but an exclusive focus on geophysical causes hides the very real human factors in determining the consequences of disasters and who bears the burden of their devastating effects.