Nine Lives

Dan Baum

2 ideas

1. Ronald Lewis and the Lower Ninth

   Ronald Lewis grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward and saw it flood in Hurricane Betsy in 1965. As an adult he repaired streetcar tracks for the city, joined the neighborhood's parading and Mardi Gras Indian traditions, and turned his backyard into a small museum of that culture, the House of Dance and Feathers. Katrina flooded the same ward forty years later and destroyed his house, so one man's life spans both storms and shows how a working-class Black homeowner put down deep roots in ground the city never adequately protected.

2. Disaster as culmination, not event

   Viewed across forty years, the Katrina catastrophe comes out of slow erosions: the oil bust, white and middle-class flight, the crack epidemic, police corruption, and a shrinking tax base. By 2005 these had already hollowed out the city's capacity to respond. The storm was the moment accumulated weakness became visible all at once, so a disaster's damage is best measured by the decades that preceded it.

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