The long road back: signal noise in the post-Katrina context.

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The long road back: signal noise in the post-Katrina context.

On August 29, 2005, the nation watched as Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, inflicting more than $100 billion of property damage across broad swaths of Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama and ultimately claiming more than 1,600 lives (Franklin 2006; McMillan 2006). In the wake of this catastrophic destruction, hopeful signs of community resilience appeared. Within days of the storm, many residents along the Mississippi Gulf Coast had come home and begun to rebuild. Soon after floodwaters had receded from devastated St. Bernard Parish, district officials announced they would reopen a school by November 14 and pledged to serve any child who returned to the community. In New Orleans East, members of the Vietnamese American community organized to gut, clean, and restore their homes and businesses, despite being told by city officials that it was unlikely they would be allowed to rebuild. Impressive as these and other efforts were, however, one cannot help but ask why, despite the community resilience visible in some areas, the overall pace of recovery has been so desperately slow.

At the present writing--eighteen months after the storm--entire communities and neighborhoods still feel like ghost towns. If not for the advancing mold growing inside wrecked homes, many neighborhoods would look as though the hurricane passed through only a week earlier. This situation is certainly the case in poor, pre-dominantly African American communities, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, but entire blocks in posh neighborhoods such as Lakeview and previously vibrant middle-income communities such as Gentilly also remain largely untouched.

To many observers, the slow pace of recovery needs no other explanation than common sense, considering that the scale of destruction was so immense. In New Orleans alone, nearly two hundred thousand homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Along the Mississippi Gulf Coast another seventy thousand homes were destroyed. (1) Yet when we consider the scale of devastation and the subsequent recovery from other previous disasters--such as the Chicago fire of 1871, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the bombing raids on Germany and Japan during World War II--we find reason to expect recovery as the rule (Hirshleifer 1987). (2)

That federal aid for reconstruction has been inadequate or slow to arrive provides another possible explanation. But the commitment of $110 billion by the federal government--including $7.5 billion through the Louisiana Road Home Program (U.S. White House 2006), payments of more than $23 billion from the subsidized National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) (Eaton 2006; Marron 2006), and the subsidies offered under the Gulf Opportunity Zone and other tax credits--and a long history of successful postdisaster recovery in the absence of large-scale government assistance again suggest that further explanation for the slow recovery is required (Pelling 2003; Vale and Campanella 2005).

Thomas Schelling has attributed the halting pace of recovery to a massive problem of collective action. Without assurances that others will return, people are reluctant to take on the disproportionate risks of returning, for fear that they might end up as the only residents on a block of wrecked, abandoned houses (quoted in Gosselin 2005). Given how scattered many former Gulf Coast residents are now, it may be difficult for them to convey to one another a credible commitment to the rebuilding process. (3) Yet civil and commercial society offers strategies for overcoming this signaling problem. Thus, the mystery remains as to why such signaling processes have not fostered a more robust response.

Common to each of the standard explanations--the immense scale of the devastation, the lack of government resources, and problems of collective action--is the implied ...

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