Deconstructing “Reconstruction”: Finding Opportunity in Disaster A Senior Thesis in Peace Studies Matt Cohen-Price Goucher College May, 2010 Updated January, 2011
Apr 08, 2015
Deconstructing “Reconstruction”: Finding Opportunity in Disaster
A Senior Thesis in Peace Studies
Matt Cohen-Price
Goucher College
May, 2010
Updated January, 2011
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Table of Contents
Part I: Introduction
7 Chapter 1: Suffering & Opportunity
Part II: Background
16 Chapter 2: The Disaster of Everyday Life
27 Chapter 3: Structural Violence in Catastrophic Disasters
Part III: Finding Justice
39 Chapter 4: Just Relief—Suggestions for Immediate-Term Disaster Response
56 Chapter 5: Just Reconstruction—Suggestions for Long-Term Disaster Response
Part IV: Case Studies
75 Chapter 6: Bridging the Gap—An Application of Theory to Reality
78 Chapter 7: The City that Care Forgot: New Orleans, Louisiana
100 Chapter 8: Anywhere, USA: Greensburg, Kansas
Part V: Conclusion
116 Chapter 9: “I Wouldn’t Start From Here”
Part VI: Appendix
125 List of Opportunity Objectives
127 List of Interviews
129 References
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To all those who fight every day against the plague of structural violence without ever having the
language to describe it.
This project would never have been possible without the open hearts and flexible schedules of the thirty-four residents of New Orleans and Greensburg
who offered me their stories; the generosity of the Goucher Peace Studies Program; the remarkable guidance of my thesis director Dr. Jennifer Bess; the
continued support of my committee, Ailish Hopper-Meisner and Dr. Rory Turner; and the close reading of my mother, Barbara Cohen, and my friends,
Scott Davis and Rachel Kriegsman. Thank you.
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Chapter 1: Suffering & Opportunity “That night, purely from the tornado itself, we were stripped of everything that really doesn’t matter. We lost our homes, we lost our stuff, we lost our clothes, we lost everything, and personally I lost a grandfather. [It was] an extremely painful process, absolutely horrific. But from that [came] this wonderful sensation...suddenly, you seem to gain everything. And it just doesn’t make sense. But nothing really does. As a youth, I lost everything; I hesitate, [but] I’m actually grateful that it happened.” Taylor Schmidt Greensburg, Kansas
This is a study of opportunity.
We live in a world full of beauty and rife with disaster. The beauty is everywhere: in
compassion and cooperation, in ingenuity and in human resilience against all odds. Disaster,
unfortunately, can be found everywhere too. Earthquakes, floods, and outbreaks of disease level
cities, destroy a season’s worth of crops, or create entire populations of refugees. These disasters
capture our attention and pull our heartstrings; when they hit close to home, of course, they do
much more than that. In an instant, they destroy lives, tear apart families, and obliterate
livelihoods and ways of life. These disasters, from the myth of the Great Flood to the atom
bomb, seem to hold an innate, accepted place in both the lore and reality of humankind’s
relationship with nature, and in humankind’s incessant arguments with other members of
humankind.
But there also exist quieter disasters like famine, poverty, and homelessness. These
insidious societal wrongs cause the same kind of pain and suffering wrought by conspicuous
disasters, yet go generally unnoticed by most of modern civilization. Many scholars argue that
these quiet disasters are actually worse, that they not only cause significantly more physical,
emotional, and social damage, but are actually harder to cure; they have much data on which to
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rest their case.1
As a developed, modern society, we make sense of conspicuous disasters in a complex,
but fairly well defined manner. We label them emergencies, both with our language (we speak
with urgency about the need for relief) and politically (our leaders issue official Declarations of
Emergency). Fire departments, emergency medical services, and police respond to varying
degrees, working together under incident management systems defined in codebooks on the city,
state, and national level. Bigger players like the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA), the National Guard, and the Red Cross may get involved. The news media reports and
replays over and over again the most vivid images they can find, striking chords of sympathy
with those around the country (and perhaps around the world). This in turn drives a cycle of
donations and clothing drives, food drives, and blood drives. Response is focused on immediate
needs: food, water, shelter, and medical care. After a time, organized response tapers off, as each
disaster in turn fades out of public memory.
In the words of Rebecca Solnit, “everyday life [has become a social disaster”
(2009:3), but as our norm, this broken social environment is all we know. The damage done is
nearly impossible to measure because we have little with which to compare it.
In the developing world, response to obvious disasters is more chaotic—an amalgamation
of international rescuers battle language, culture, and resource barriers to work together to
provide care and relief. More often than not, a western entity funded by western governments or
western donations takes charge, and a familiar story unfolds. Always, the same news media
replay similar graphic images, generating the same sympathetic response and corresponding
donations. Always, response is focused on immediate needs. And always, the disaster eventually
disappears from the headlines, funds dry up, and relief workers return home.
Response methodologies for these disasters are clear and readily agreed upon, but they 1 See Galtung 1969, Wisner et al. 2004, Solnit 2009, Farmer 2005.
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are not holistic and leave much to be desired. Political expediency and financial limitations
dictate that band-aid-type solutions that target obvious needs for a limited time are frequently all
that can be managed; they do little more than triage problems and address only what is most
immediate and vital. These methodologies work to get an affected population back on its limping
feet, but do little more; they make no attempts to change the pre-disaster status quo.
Those who respond to the quiet disasters of everyday life must utilize a different
approach. Because societal failures such as gross economic inequality, our inability to combat
climate change, and rampant homelessness are not labeled “emergencies” by society, the media,
or political leaders, these individuals must constantly fight for the funds and the attention needed
to wage their battles. Nonprofits, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
cooperatives, religious groups, social movements, and governments (to an extent) are some of
the primary agents of these responses. Their methods are many: nonviolent resistance, free lunch
programs, investigative journalism, intentional communities, academic research and publication,
and direct action are just a few examples.
Response strategies used to mitigate these disasters are not only more varied but almost
universally not as effective or far-reaching as their practitioners would like: the flaws buried in
the foundation of our society, much like cracks in the foundation of an old building, are
extremely difficult to repair. Not only are they interwoven, they run deep enough that the
building might need to be dismantled before they can be truly fixed. In quiet disasters, too,
political and economic realities force short-term, relief-type solutions that only attend to the
symptoms are frequently all that can be managed; addressing the root cause is simply out of the
question.
Fighting to mitigate the impacts of both forms of disaster are meritorious and crucial acts.
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After all, where would we be without fire fighters or the World Food Program? But mitigation is
not enough. A new response methodology for responding to conspicuous disasters could
simultaneously address everyday problems much closer to their roots.
Problematic Truths
Three problematic truths that serve as the basis for this research:
1. Society, at all levels, is plagued by various structural limiters which restrict agency, access to
resources, and social capital in certain communities. In other words, inequalities of power
(lack of agency), unequal access to basic resources like food and medical care, and hindered
abilities to generate strong social networks (lack of social capital), are maintained by the
social, economic, and political systems in which we live. These mechanisms can be
considered structural because they have no obvious actor; they are built into society.
Structural limiters restrict the capacities of individuals in communities, as well as the
communities themselves. While this concept has many names, the framework adopted here is
that of structural violence as defined by Norwegian sociologist and peace researcher Johan
Galtung (1969).
2. Catastrophic conspicuous disasters, due in part to human development and human-caused
climate change, are becoming more frequent and causing more damage than ever before.
3. Structural violence increases the vulnerability of certain populations to disasters, which in
turn perpetuates suffering and structural violence.
The issues at play here—catastrophic disasters, unequal structural limitations, and
vulnerability—are intimately connected to one another. So too are the related concepts of social
cohesion and climate change. Many scholars, however, fail to draw connections between these
topics, and all speak in the vastly different languages of their own fields. In order to draw these
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disparate threads together, concepts from these fields must be introduced, links between them
must be established, and a set of terms must be agreed upon.
Those who seek to remedy structural violence face three major stumbling blocks. First, it
has become insidious: buried so deep, it is nearly invisible, so much so that for many it can
appear to be the sole paradigm in which society can operate. Second, it is extremely pervasive:
structural violence can be understood as a complex web of distinct but fundamentally interrelated
problems, making it nearly impossible to fix.2
When this deep-rooted weed of inequality perennially flowers, however, the flaws of this
structure become much more tractable. Conspicuous disasters produce retorts to all three hurdles
of structural violence (See Figure 1.1). First, disasters torture us with extreme images of how we
live which we ordinarily choose not to see: inequalities more stratified than usual, poverty more
blatant, suffering more obvious. In short, as the ground shakes or flood waters rise or a tornado
touches down, structural violence is brought into very visible relief. Second, the damage done by
many disasters can be as pervasive as the inequalities that already exist within the affected
community: thorough damage requires thorough repair that can, if so directed, address many of
the systems in the structural violence web. Third, as the social fabric tears, the construct of
normal life disappears, mandating immediate change and opening the door for more permanent
shifts. Galtung continues his hypothesis, stating that while social structures “may not very often
Third, intricately connected to economic
structures, the inertia of structural violence is hard to overcome. Galtung postulates that “a type
of violence built into the social structure should exhibit a certain stability” (1969: 173): as long
as the structure remains, so too will the violence.
2 An easy example: how can the United States repair its urban public education system without fundamentally
addressing not only teacher salaries, school infrastructure, and classroom best practices, but neighborhood crime, unhealthy diets, bad parenting, and the causes behind a historically unprecedented rise in Attention Deficit Disorder and other learning disabilities?
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be changed…quickly,” they “may perhaps sometimes be changed overnight” (1969: 173). Solnit
tells us that disaster events do force that overnight shift: “disaster throws us into the temporary
utopia of a transformed human nature and society, one that is bolder, freer, less attached and
divided than in ordinary times, not blank, but not tied down” (2009: 20).
An earthquake may collapse a building's roof, but it also exposes the weeds that have
attacked its foundation for years. To focus on the weeds without addressing the roof, and perhaps
the survivors trapped under it, would clearly be wrong. But to see and attend only to the roof is a
tragedy of missed opportunity. Indeed, every incidence of disaster is a chance to look deeply and
critically at the structures we have built for ourselves, to question the way things are and to alter
that status quo powerfully and quickly. This study will investigate structural violence and the
opportunities disasters present to explore the possibility of a disaster management paradigm that
uncovers, explores, and challenges structural violence in partnership with affected communities.
Figure 1.1: Structural violence in disasters
Normally, structural violence is hard to fix because it is:
During and after disaster events, however:
Insidious, invisible → Structural violence is revealed, visible
Pervasive (interrelated systems) → Pervasive damage mandates multi-system repair
An inert social structure → “The old order no longer exists” (Solnit 2009: 16)
= Structural violence far more tractable during and after disaster events than in everyday life.
In Chapter Two, structural limiters, both nationally (within the United States) and
globally, will be examined through the lens of structural violence. Chapter Three will enumerate
definitions and classifications for natural hazards and disaster events, review research
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documenting the human contribution to their increasing frequency and severity, and consider the
concept of human vulnerability and how structural violence creates vulnerable populations. In
Chapter Four, we return to disasters to reveal and explore the opportunities they present in their
earliest stages. In Chapter Five, suggestions are made for how to best utilize the longer term
opportunities of disaster response. I coin the terms “just relief” and “just reconstruction” to refer
respectively to short-term and long-term disaster response that is community-driven, efficient,
and actively challenges structural violence and injustice. Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight apply
these concepts to two cities recently affected by catastrophic disasters, detailing opportunities
embraced and missed, lessons learned, and the beauty of human resilience.
Two Stories
This study would not be complete without an application of the concepts to historical
situations. Two disaster events have been studied in order to analyze the possibilities and
potential hurdles of the suggestions at hand. Both case studies involve recent natural hazards
affecting American cities. The decision to remain contained within the United States was
conscious and two-fold. First, the shared political system increases grounds for comparison
between the two case studies. Second, the author believes that the United States satisfies the
ideal conditions for this study: rife with structural violence, the need for structural change is
clear, yet the nation is wealthy enough that, with a change in priorities, the economy could
sustain a substantially more holistic vision of preparedness and disaster management.
New Orleans, Louisiana, on the Gulf of Mexico, was the largest of many communities
devastated by hurricane Katrina in August 2005. This mid-size city located at the mouth of the
Mississippi river has been a crucial American trading outpost for well over a century. Known
both as the soul of America and the Big Easy, among other nicknames, New Orleans is an
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African American cultural center, the home of Jazz music, and the progenitor of a culture of
tolerance and nonchalance. Many neighborhoods sit well below sea level. As Katrina hit the city,
the storm surge it pushed overtopped an inadequate levee system, outmatched antiquated pumps,
and caused six major floodwall breaches. After sustaining the wind and water damage from the
hurricane itself, parts of the city flooded and remained under water for weeks. New Orleans,
once a bustling home of 485,000, after a mandatory evacuation and the death of some 1,400
people, was left with only 75,000 residents (Wallace, Roberts, and Todd 2005: Figure 11). Local,
state, and federal government agencies were caught off guard and were ill-prepared to deal with
what followed.
Failures of relief such as the desertion of prisoners in flood risk areas, negligently slow
hospital evacuation, and the abandonment of at-risk citizens on freeway overpasses with no
shade or water were followed by failures of reconstruction. Five years after the storm, the city
remains roiled in ongoing accusations of corruption; it continues to face major challenges in
infrastructure repair, and has yet to completely restore flood protection measures to pre-storm
status, let alone fix its systemic deficiencies. As neighborhood groups and homeowners all push
in different directions, New Orleans is at long last in the final stages of enacting a comprehensive
master plan. This story will be told in Chapter Seven.
Greensburg, Kansas is a rural community 100 miles west of Wichita. At its peak,
Greensburg's 3,000 residents' primary occupations were agriculture, maintaining natural gas
compression stations, and small industry. In recent decades the town went the way of many rural
American communities—no longer a home of much opportunity, Greensburg began to lose jobs
and population; in 2007, the town had 1,500 residents and, according to superintendent Darin
Headrick, Greensburg’s “biggest export was [its] youth” (Headrick 2010). On May 4th of that
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year a one-and-a-half mile wide tornado destroyed ninety-five percent of Greensburg's
residences and all but one municipal building. In an unusual success story, the devastated town
has enacted a comprehensive master plan and redefined itself as a place of environmental
stewardship and the country's largest experiment in sustainable building practices. While the
current population is only 900, residents and outsiders continue to make significant investments
in business and infrastructure, and the county is currently in the process of recruiting the first
factories it has seen in decades (Wetmore 2010). As research for this analysis nears completion,
Greensburg's citizens will celebrate the third anniversary of the disaster that gave them the
opportunity to rebuild. This story will be told in Chapter Eight.
While many comparisons between these two case studies can be drawn, each such
attempt must be taken with a grain of salt. These two disasters varied significantly in nature (for
example, would-be tornado victims protect themselves in storm shelters in their communities, so
when the damage is done and people emerge from their shelters, the community itself remains
mostly whole, in close physical contact) and scope (Hurricane Katrina severely affected
hundreds of miles of coastline and required emergency response contributions from numerous
states). Additionally, the two cities in question vary tremendously in essentially every measurable
demographic specific, including population size, race, and primary economic engines. Despite
their differences, much can be learned from telling these two stories side-by-side. This work does
not insinuate that Greensburg has succeeded where New Orleans has failed: the failures and
successes, as well as the challenges these communities still face, will all be addressed in turn.
Through this analysis, lessons can hopefully be learned that apply to preparing for and
responding to all future disasters.
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Chapter 2: The Disaster of Everyday Life “The world … should not be the way it is. It does not take a theological degree or a lot of sophistication or years of graduate study to learn that. It takes only some years of living. If it is not self-evident, it can never be demonstrated. Juan Luis Segundo, a Jesuit from Uruguay, warns us that unless we agree that the world should not be the way it is...there is no point of contact, because the world that is satisfying to us is the same world that is utterly devastating to them.” Robert Brown 1993: 44
“Why do people die of AIDS?” and “why did he die of AIDS?” are two very different
questions. When considering almost any individual case, direct mechanisms can typically be
found: maybe he had many sexual partners, believed condoms were not worth the investment, or
shared dirty needles with other drug users. Or, perhaps, if no obvious causes are visible, he was
just unlucky. But if the broader question is asked, we come upon very different answers. Per
population, nine times more Sub-Saharan Africans are living with HIV than North Americans
(UNAIDS 2009). Within the United States, eighteen out of every 10,000 whites suffer from the
disease, a fraction of the 115 victims of the disease per 10,000 blacks; in fact, a greater number
of African Americans than whites have been diagnosed, even though United States citizens are
six times as likely to be white.3
The world is not how it should be; that is a central premise of this work. Pick the past or
the present and look around: the ground on which we stand is rife with suffering that is unequally
distributed. Because of unique structural processes that increase their vulnerability to the disease,
African-Americans, as well as Sub-Saharan Africans, are more likely to contract HIV.
Abstinence-only education, lack of access to inexpensive sexual protection measures, and
infrequency of regular medical checkups that could lead to early diagnosis are a few examples.
Do blacks, as a race, make poor decisions more often than other
ethnicities? Or is there something else going on?
3 http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/basic.htm and US Census
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Similar stories could be told about education, employment, nutrition, and access to shelter. Fault
for the homelessness of one woman can all-too-easily be assigned to her poor work ethic or drug
addiction; blame for a twelve-year-old's morbid obesity can be ascribed to poor parenting. Yet
this allotment of responsibility fails to examine the complex hidden structural processes that
affect entire communities; it is at best incomplete and at worst completely false.
Both individual choice and the social environment in which those choices are made affect
potential outcomes. The relationship between the system in which an actor operates and that
actor's decisions, however, is less obvious than the direct relationship between those choices and
their consequences. Yes, had the obese child's parents paid closer attention to his diet and
exchanged his video games for more time outside, childhood obesity could probably have been
avoided. But both the child and parents are acting within structures that may make those choices
difficult or impossible: when physical education programs have been cut from school budgets
and playgrounds paved over, or when neighborhoods are too unsafe to spend much time outside,
getting exercise is difficult; when the only access to food within walking distance for a car-less
family is fast food, diets tend to be unhealthy. Moreover, due to limited employment
opportunities, the parents (or single parent) may not be able to spend much time at home
monitoring their child's actions. So, while different decisions might have prevented childhood
obesity, the set of possible choices is severely limited by the surroundings.4
Long-time medical doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer, writing about medicine in
Haiti, tells us that “the problem, in this view, is with the world, even though it may be manifest
in the patient” (2005: 153). In this light, suffering can be understood as having multiple levels,
each harder to discern than the previous. Individual suffering lies at the surface, visible and all
4 This argument is supported by at least sixteen nutritional research studies which find that growing up in poorer
neighborhoods increases the likelihood of childhood obesity (Black and Macinko 2008).
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around us but personal: every individual’s suffering is different. Digging below the surface
reveals more than enough linkages and correlations between individuals suffering similar fates
that it is clear that responsibility for those fates do not lie completely with the individual.
Underneath that, it will be shown that each set of correlations can be understood as different
nodes in a matrix of categorical injustice in which certain communities are denied access to the
tools and resources which make success possible, then blamed for their failures to succeed (see
Figure 2.1).5
Figure 2.1: Three Tiers of Suffering
That underlying matrix can be understood as structural violence.
Understanding the “Realization Gap”: Structural Violence
Johan Galtung, Norwegian sociologist and one of the founders of the discipline of Peace
Studies, parsed the concept of violence in 1969 in an attempt to define peace. If peace is to be
described as the absence of violence, how can the definition of violence be broadened to make
this description true?6
5 This three-tiered analysis of suffering is similar to the three-tiered “progression to vulnerability” described by
Wisner, Blaikie, Cannon, and Davis (2004, 51). In their Pressure and Release (PAR) model, they characterize vulnerability as a product of unsafe conditions (level 1) created by dynamic pressures (level 2) which are the result of root causes (level 3).
Violence the way it is traditionally defined—as somatic incapacitation and
6 Defining peace by its opposite (negative peace) is not ideal; Galtung reminds us that “it is a clear case of obscurum per obscurius” (1969, 167). However, Galtung argues that definitions any more specific tend to be
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deprivation—is not nearly encompassing enough: a lack of physical violence only would not
imply peace, as repressive regimes that deny political and social freedoms or strictly enforced
caste systems that restrict economic agency should not be considered peaceful. Galtung suggests
that violence can be described more broadly as “the cause of the difference between the potential
and the actual, between what could have been and what is” (1969: 168). Anything, then, that
holds an individual or a group of individuals back from achieving what is possible, which he
describes as “potential realizations,” can be considered violent (1969: 168). Galtung makes no
attempt to define “realizations” or create a comprehensive sum or realization index; similarly, no
effort will be made here. It suffices to say that almost any indicator could be utilized, from the
specific (life expectancy, infant mortality, education received) to the broad (as in happiness
indexes7
This definition of violence is abstract and broad, yet fitting. Examples illustrate its
accuracy. Consider the potential realization of academic learning: a child on a path towards
learning all that he can is vulnerable to many forms of violence. As a victim of bullying, he could
associate school with social and physical suffering and stop attending class. As a victim of
tracking, he could be held back from studying creative writing due to poor scores in math. At a
school without learning disability programs, his Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
(ADHD) behavior could be interpreted as a lack of respect for the classroom, and he could
receive punishment instead of diagnosis and treatment. Walking home from school, he could be
shot or stabbed, accidentally be pricked by or purposefully use a dirty hypodermic needle, or
arrested and jailed for something he did or did not do. These are all forms of violence.
or the United Nation's Human Development Index).
culturally-driven and therefore not holistic enough to apply globally.
7 See especially the rising popularity of “Gross National Happiness,” coined as a superior indicator of national success than Gross National Product by the King of Bhutan in the 1970s. See 18 December 2004 Economist article, “The Pursuit of Happiness.”
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Figure 2.2: Forming a Typology of Violence Is violence
intentional? Is it positive or negative?
What affects does violence have?
Does a subject (actor) exist?
Does an object (victim) exist?
Is violence manifest?
Yes - Intended
Positive – reward-based
Physical Yes – Personal, Direct
Yes – someone or thing is hurt
Yes – manifest, observable
No - Accidental
Negative – punishment
Psychological No – Structural (truncated)
No – no obvious victim (truncated)
No – latent, quiet
Source: Modified from Galtung 1969, 173.
To further define this now-broad term, Galtung details a typology of violence based on
six identifiable characteristics; that typology is summarized in Figure 2.2. One of his distinctions,
between violence that is personal and violence that is structural, is especially salient to this study.
The kind of violence that is codified into the commonly accepted definition of the word, he
argues, has both a subject (perpetrator) and object (victim): e.g. bullying, stabbing, or shooting.
Other types of violence, however, are missing either a subject or an object; they are “truncated”
(1969: 170). This work focuses on situations of violence with an obvious victim or victims where
no apparent perpetrator can be found. In short, the sentence that describes this form of violence
omits a subject: “he killed her” becomes “___ killed her,” or “she has been killed.” Galtung
refers to this type of realization-limiter as structural violence:
We shall refer to the type of violence where there is an actor that commits the violence as personal or direct, and to violence where there is no such actor as structural or indirect. In both cases individuals may be killed or mutilated, hit or hurt in both senses of these words, and manipulated by the means of stick or carrot strategies. But whereas in the first case these consequences can be traced back to concrete persons as actors, in the second case this is no longer meaningful. There may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances. (1969: 170-171, emphasis in original)
He continues:
The important point here is that if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable,
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then violence is committed, regardless of whether there is a clear subject-action-object relation, as during a siege yesterday or no such clear relation, as in the way world economic relations are organized today. (ibid. 171)
What forms of violence, then, can be considered structural? Many inputs affect potential
realizations: innovations in medical technology provide us with cures for disease and the ability
to stay healthier longer; the weather (such as a bad snowstorm) may affect our mobility (we may
get snowed in). Yet our actual realizations tend to lie somewhat below what is possible. Galtung
provides, “if a person died from tuberculosis in the eighteenth century it would be hard to
conceive of this as violence since it might have been quite unavoidable, but if he dies from it
today, despite all the medical resources in the world, then violence is present” (1969: 168). When
life expectancy should be eighty years, but is reduced due to carcinogens, acid rain, or low air
quality, violence is present. In the case of the snowstorm, if wealthier neighborhoods are plowed
first while the poorest neighborhoods are saved for last, re-enabling the access of certain
communities but not others to employment (they can return to work) and grocery stores (they can
purchase food), violence is present. Figure 2.3 illustrates how structural violence can affect
difference between the potential and the actual.
Structural violence is a powerful tool: once the concept is grasped, it can easily be applied
on macro- and micro-scales by academics and non-academics alike. It can be considered
objectively, as Galtung has done, or subjectively: we can all examine our own daily interactions
with those around us, the place we occupy in society, and the violence we are victim to and
perpetuate in our everyday life. Many scholars and activist organizations have considered social
problems from this perspective, although most do not label their analysis as structural violence or
mention Galtung's name. The United States anti-racism movement is one example: without
talking about structural violence in name, advocates claim that it is more difficult for racial
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minorities than whites to function in society; over 100 studies published in the last decade
document this (Drexler 2007).8
8 See
Most importantly, the framework of structural violence gives us a
way of understanding the complexity and interrelatedness of the many problems and inequalities
faced by human societies today. Through this lens, we find injustices to be pervasive, insidious,
and inert, making them especially difficult to address.
http://www.antiracistalliance.com/, especially http://www.antiracistalliance.com/consequences.html.
Figure 2.3: When does structural violence exist?
Source: Galtung 1969
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The Everywhere Disaster
Inequality is everywhere – it is pervasive. In the decade preceding the turn of the 21st
century, over 270 million people were killed around the world by political violence, and 70
million perished due to avoidable famines and droughts (Wisner et al. 2004: 4). Today, over one
billion people, a sixth of the world's population, do not have enough to eat (UNFAO 2009). In
recent years, economic inequality is increasing: the poorest fifth of humanity, all of whom live
on less than $1 a day, control a smaller share of the world's wealth than they did in 2004
(UNDESA 2007). Within the United States, while poverty is not as extreme, inequality is just as
far-reaching. Thirty percent of Americans are low-income, and thirteen percent live in poverty.9
Twenty percent of Americans do not finish high school, and the Hispanic population has an
especially low non-completion rate: only fifty-two percent graduate.10 Seventeen million US
households, in which nearly a quarter of American children live, were food insecure at some
point during 2008.11 Similarly noteworthy statistics could be given for disease, healthcare,
housing, and political agency, but as Jesuit Priest Jon Sobrino writes, “Statistics no longer
frighten us” (qtd. In Farmer 2005: 8).12
Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of
Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen (one of
many authors who discuss structural violence without naming it as such) describes these
conditions as “unfreedoms”:
9 “Low Income” is considered to be 200% of the Federal Poverty line or lower; in 2008, a single individual under
the age of 65 would fall into this category with an income of less than $22,402. Individuals “living in poverty” refers to those making less than the federal poverty line. A single individual under 65 fell into this category in 2008 with an income of less than $11,201 (Bread for the World 2009). It should be noted, however, that the United States federal poverty line is considered quite conservative, and many above the poverty line still struggle to get by every day. (Bread for the World 2009)
10 http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-24.pdf 11 “Food insecurity is defined as a condition of uncertain availability of or inability to acquire safe, nutritious food
in socially acceptable ways. Broadly speaking, this corresponds to the condition of hunger or the risk of having hunger” (Bread for the World 2009).
12 See UNDESA 2007 for many of these statistics and trends.
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public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states. Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers—perhaps even the majority—of people. Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms … robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger, or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses, or the opportunity to be adequately clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities. (1999: 3-4)
The point is, drastic inequalities—in suffering; access to resources; political, economic, and
social freedoms; and other arenas—do indeed exist everywhere.
Structural violence is especially pervasive because it contributes to a number of factors
that are themselves structurally violent: negative feedback loops make those who suffer from
structural violence more prone to it, reinforcing and increasing inequality. First, Farmer tells us
that structural violence affects agency, the ability to claim and exert power, by weakening
victims' stance in society and by occupying them with the day-to-day chore of survival. The
inability to claim agency, in turn, increases susceptibility to additional facets of structural
violence (Farmer 2005: 40). Second, structural violence affects what sociologist Robert Putnam
calls social capital: victims of intense suffering are less able to build and keep strong social
relationships which provide protective measures from other acts of personal and structural
violence (2000). Moreover, because structural violence acts along social “axes,” such as gender,
race, poverty, rural living, immigrant status, or sexual orientation, it tends to affect entire
communities (Farmer 2005: 42). When entire communities are left with little social capital, those
strong relationships that are able to exist may supply emotional support but may not provide
social network benefits found in more successful communities such as financial support,
assistance finding jobs, and creation of community-wide agency, exactly what these communities
need most (Putnam 2000: 289).13
13 A powerful anecdote that reflects the difficulty of creating and maintaining social capital in poor communities
affected by structural violence can be found in Paul Farmer's story of Acephie (2004, 31-35).
Again, just as structural violence tends to inhibit the generation
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of social capital, low social capital is itself a form of violence, in turn lowering potential
realizations and preventing communities from gaining access to necessary resources such as
healthcare and quality education.
The Quiet Disaster
Structural violence is not only pervasive, but insidious. Because it is so difficult to see,
coming to terms with its existence and extent is not easy; as long as it can be questioned,
disagreement will hamper attempts to combat it. The major evidence of its subtlety has been
discussed on earlier pages: as we have seen, problems based in a debilitating lack of access to
resources that affect entire communities appear to be personal and individual, so that “social
processes and events come to be translated into personal stress and disease … [and] become
embodied as individual experience” (Farmer 2005: 30). As long as these issues are viewed as
individual, what solutions are presented will forever be band-aid solutions which treat the
symptoms, not the root causes, of inequality.
Why is structural violence so hidden? Although Farmer proclaims that “people living in
poverty are [the] experts on structural violence and human rights,” and that those looking to
combat suffering must “elicit [their] experiences and views” (144, 146), for two reasons the poor
are rarely heard from. First, the oppressed are “conditioned” to be silent: their occupation with
survival generally keeps them too busy to speak out, and when they do they are often condemned
to further violence (26). Second, when the oppressed do communicate their condition, they are
persistently not listened to: “the poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also less likely
to have their suffering noticed. … A wall between the rich and the poor is being built, so that
poverty does not annoy the powerful” (50).14
14 Such walls come in many forms, including physical (such as gated communities, Israeli border fences, and the
US Military ‘Green Zone’ in Iraq [see Klein 2007]), social/cultural (news media reporting choices, culture-wide
Those in power find that they benefit from such
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oppression, so rarely speak out about it, while the victims have been not only bound but gagged
by extreme suffering. As silence continues, so does the status quo.
The Inert Disaster
The final reason that structural violence is so hard to remedy is its inertia. Inequalities
have become so intertwined with everyday life that they would be difficult to overturn without
changing, at least to some extent, the basic tenets on which society functions. All too often,
injustices are legitimized, called inevitable; constantly in the background, it is easy to assume
that they are the natural way of life. Must it be that the state of homelessness exists, that we
allow people to live with neither shelter nor security for their bodies and possessions? Should
healthcare for the sick and nourishing food for the destitute be resources that some can afford,
and others cannot? The compassionate must question the assumed naturalness of these
inequalities, but challenging the structure is not so easy when the strength of social relationships
is in decline across the board, distrust of those with whom we are not familiar is at record highs,
and willingness to experience and participate in society as citizens – with the responsibility to
witness injustice and the power to make change – is at its nadir.15
Farmer argues that the system
we have built mandates inequality to the point of sanctioning human rights violations (2005:
219). Yet the structures we have created have become so deep and complex that they seem
impossible to significantly change. If human power created them, however, human ingenuity can
surely repair them; in the aftermath of disaster, this can truly be done.
definitions of ‘outsiders’), and personal/mental (individual emotional and logical choices to not see, witness, or act against inequality).
15 For a complete analysis of trust and social participation in the United States, see Putnam 2000. Social Capital, trust, and relationships, see Putnam 2000 pgs 25, 98, 108, and 141. For participation in society as a politically aware 'citizen,' see Putnam 2000 pgs 97, 107, and 114 as well as Solnit 2009 pgs 9, 18, and 306.
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Chapter 3: Structural Violence in Catastrophic Disasters “We are entering an era where sudden and slow disaster will become far more powerful and far more common. … In late 2007 the humanitarian organization Oxfam reported, ‘Climatic disasters are increasing as temperatures climb and rainfall intensifies … yet even extreme weather need not bring disasters; it is poverty and powerlessness that make people vulnerable.’” Rebecca Solnit 2009, 307
In the days after Hurricane Katrina, eight feet of water flooded the New Orleans
neighborhood of Holly Grove. At the time of the flooding, most residents had evacuated, some under
their own power, many flown or driven at the hands of FEMA and the city government to various
cities and towns around the country. Ms. Reynaud16
16 “Ms. Reynaud” is an alias; as this story was recounted by director of the Trinity Christian Community
organization Kevin Brown, not the resident herself, permission to use her real name was never obtained.
, an eighty year old woman who had lived in the
neighborhood for forty years, was flown to Houston. The house she owned was destroyed by
floodwaters, and she had no insurance to help her rebuild. Nor did she have significant savings or a
steady income to which she could return. Ms. Reynaud was lucky: the Trinity Christian Community,
a long-standing community organization in Holly Grove, helped her rebuild her house. Then a
member of the organization drove to Texas to pick her up and bring her home. But many others were
not so lucky: forty percent of the neighborhood has not returned to New Orleans, and probably never
will (Brown 2010). Five years after the water receded, Holly Grove is still marked with potholed,
quiet streets and dotted with the shells of gutted houses on which a definitive water line is still
visible. Ten minutes away, in the neighborhood of Lakeview, most residents have moved back. Even
though Lakeview suffered more flood damage than Holly Grove, many streets have been repaved,
insurance monies collected, and homes rebuilt. Why the difference? Was it negligence on the part of
Ms. Reynaud to not purchase flood insurance? Can the overwhelmingly poor residents of Holly
Grove be faulted for not preparing, returning, and rebuilding?
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Before these questions can be answered, disasters themselves must be addressed. What is a
disaster? When do they occur? Why? Only then can we turn to the notion of vulnerability. What
makes certain populations vulnerable to disasters? Vulnerability can be understood as structural
violence applied to disasters; where structural violence as discussed in the previous chapter refers to
everyday life, we find here that the same inequalities of access and resources define who is most at
risk when disasters occur.
What Makes a “Disaster”?
Catastrophic disasters are increasing. Since the turn of this century alone, our news cycles
have been overrun with images from the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City;
the 2004 tsunami which wiped out much of Thailand and Indonesia; hurricanes Katrina, Rita,
Gustav, and Ike, which have affected the United States and Central America to varying degrees;
earthquakes in Iran, China, India, and Pakistan; and most recently the 2009 tsunami in American
Samoa and 2010 earthquakes that shook Haiti and Chile. Many others, large and small, generally
go unnoticed except by certain scholars and those emotionally or physically tied to the affected
region or people. Be they natural, such as earthquakes; human-caused, such as famine or war; or
dubious combinations of both, such as flooding below hydro-electric dams or behind levees, it
seems that there are more property-, livelihood-, and life-destroying disasters today than ever
before (Solnit 2009: 22, 307; Ripley 2008: xiv, 43; Wisner et al. 2004: 62-64). Why? To answer
this question, we must define “disaster.”
The scope of existing disaster studies vary significantly. Some (Solnit 2009, Ripley 2008)
look specifically at rapid-onset events of various magnitudes; studying the actions of individuals
and groups in crisis, their “disasters” are qualified not by cause, quantity affected, or damage
done, but by the entrance of an affected population into a crisis mode with its own norms and
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rules. Much can be learned from these studies. Studies of development and reconstruction
(O'Dempsey 2009, Klein 2007) address events of significant devastation, those that cause
enough damage to require significant investment to repair economic systems and vital
infrastructure. To those in the traditional emergency response field, a “multiple casualty incident”
is any event that places excessive demands on emergency medical services, requires emergency
crews to alter their response plans to adequately provide emergency care, or is simply too large
to provide adequate care (Mistovich & Karren 2008). Belgium's Centre for Research on the
Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) maintains its own set of criteria for its disaster database,
which contains over 14,500 disasters from 1900 to present.17
The terminology most closely followed here comes from a group of British scholars who
have jointly authored two editions of the esteemed text about disasters and vulnerability, At Risk.
Wisner, Blaikie, Cannon, and Davis differentiate between disasters and what they name hazard
events. A hazard event, natural in origin, does damage to a distinct place (or places) at a specific
time: earthquakes, storms, mudslides, tornadoes, volcano eruptions, tsunamis, and hurricanes are
all hazard events. Where hazards refer to physical places, disasters refer to people: disasters
(more specifically, disaster events) occur when a “significant number of vulnerable people
experience a hazard and suffer severe damage and/or disruption of their livelihood system in
such a way that recovery is unlikely without external aid” (Wisner et al. 2004: 49-50).
The database contains natural and
technological disasters that span a huge range in scope, from train wrecks to international
famines (Guha-Sapir et al. 2004: 16, 21).
17 CRED’s EM-DAT database utilizes possibly one of the most specific, yet broad set of criteria. To be listed in the
EM-DAT, an event must fulfill at least one of the following: - 10 or more people killed, - 100 or more people affected, - a state of emergency declared by affected party, or - a call for international assistance by affected party See footnote 18. (Guha-Sapir et al. 2004: 16)
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This dichotomy is an important one. By splitting the commonly accepted but ill-defined
term “natural disaster” into its component parts, the very distinct causes and effects of each half
can be isolated. The authors look only at large natural hazards which, but for a few mentions of
climate change, they set aside as such: natural. The disasters themselves, however, have human
causes: they occur because we allow ourselves, or at least certain segments of our population, to
live vulnerably, unprotected and unprepared for natural hazards. In this light, earthquakes do not
kill people, or even disrupt their lives; they simply shake the ground. Unreinforced masonry
buildings, forgotten seismic retrofitting, and proximity to fault lines do indeed kill. Moreover,
housing discrimination and other forms of inequality dictate which communities receive the
brunt of the damage. These are the true causes of disaster. In the words of Rebecca Solnit, “no
disaster is truly natural” (2009: 35).
In this work, Wisner et al.'s definitions of “hazard events” and “disasters” are accepted
with three modifications (see Figure 3.1). First, Wisner et al. focus solely on natural hazard
events, leaving technological hazards—those events immediately traceable to human causes—to
other authors. Although many of the disasters cited throughout this work are caused by natural
hazards, the concepts considered here apply as well to their technological counterparts such as
oil spills, bombings, or nuclear accidents. After all, these hazards also affect people in terms of
their vulnerabilities and provide opportunity for structural rebirth. Moreover, this modification
guarantees the inclusion of hazards that may be part-natural, part-technological, such as Italy’s
Vaiont Dam flood: In 1963, landslides into the catchment area of the dam caused waters to
overtop the dam. The landslides, natural hazard events, could never have caused flooding to the
same scope had the dam not existed. The resulting flood, then, was a hazard of a dually natural
(hazardous landslide) and technological (hazardous dam construction) nature. Over 3,000 people
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died in the disaster that followed (Nelson 2009).
Second, even natural hazard events can no longer simply be assumed to be natural.
Debarati Guha-Sapir, David Hargitt, and Philippe Hoyois of the Centre for Research on the
Epidemiology of Disasters tell us, “Global climate change will increase the number of extreme
events, creating more frequent and intensified natural hazard [events.] A growing body of
evidence point[s] to the effect of human behaviour on the global natural environment” (2004: 13-
14). This applies not only to hazards most commonly associated with global warming: some
scientists are currently considering linkages between earthquakes and human activity such as
pumping from underground oil reservoirs and aquifers and deep waste disposal (ibid.: 23).
Climate change is not only beginning to produce more supposedly natural hazards; it may
indirectly lead to a rise of technological and natural-technological hazards as well: as climate
patterns shift famine, water shortage, and resource wars become ever more likely.
Third, disasters must not only directly affect people. They must have a serious impact on
infrastructure such as damaging transit or plumbing systems, creating new long-term limits of
Figure 3.1: Defining Disasters: Variations on Wisner et al.
Hazard Events Disasters (Disaster Events)
Wisner, et al. “'Hazard' refers to the natural events that may affect different places...at different times.... The hazard has varying degrees of intensity and severity.”*
“A disaster occurs when a significant number of vulnerable people experience a hazard and suffer severe damage and/or disruption of their livelihood system in such a way that recovery is unlikely without external aid”*
Modifications + Technological (i.e. of human origin) and joint natural-technological hazards + Understanding that even “natural” hazard events may have root human causes, such as human-induced climate change
+ Damage to infrastructure that requires serious investments to repair
*Wisner et al. 2004: 49-50
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access to clean drinking water, or rendering a school system inoperable. Indeed, the systems
most easily repaired after disasters are those that sustain the greatest damage, as funds are set
aside for replacing broken infrastructure, not tearing down what still functions.
Disasters: More Opportunity than Ever Before
Let us turn, with an understanding of the terms, to numbers. Wisner et al. state, “there is a
general consensus in research on disasters that the number of natural hazard events (earthquakes,
eruptions, floods, or cyclones) has not increased in recent decades” (2004: 62). CRED comes to
the same conclusion: the likelihood that an increasing trend in natural hazard occurrence exists is
small (Guha-Sapir et al. 2004: 53). Yes, climate change may have recently started to increase the
number of natural hazard events, and likely will in the near future: Guha-Sapir et al. and Wisner
et al. both review bodies of research pointing to such an increase, and climate scientists often
note increased extreme climate-based hazards as a major risk of climate change (Guha-Sapir et
al. 2004: 13, 23, 53; Wisner et al. 2004: 62, 86 [note 15]; Speth 2004: 59; Munich Re 2006: 7).
This trend, however, is not yet clear.
If natural hazard events have remained relatively constant throughout recent history,
catastrophic disasters have increased substantially.18
18 Statistics vary by author, as definitions as well as classifications (“what constitutes a 'large' disaster?”) vary.
Guha-Sapir list classification systems of a number of organizations with stakes in disaster response and recovery, including insurance companies and the IMF (2004: 22). They put forth their own typology: Number of deaths Affected population Economic Damage Small ≤ 5 ≤ 1,500 ≤ US$8 million Medium 5 < x < 50 1,500 < x < 150,000 US$8 mil < x < US$200 mil Large ≥ 50 ≥ 150,000 ≥ US$200 million More, Guha-Sapir et al. warn us that disaster statistics are patchy at best and easily misleading due to the nature of information collection: no organization has attempted to assume the impossible role of standardized data collection for all disasters, and those agencies—governments, nonprofit relief agencies, insurance companies, and international governing bodies—which do publish such information are varied in their collection and reporting methods (15). Additionally, the apparent increase of disasters, especially small ones, may be padded by the development of more standard and more frequent reporting (20-21).
The increase in number and severity of
disasters over the course of the twentieth century is so significant it cannot be explained by
inconsistencies, an increase in reporting, or improved reporting methods: Guha-Sapir et al. note
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that disasters caused an average of US$67 billion per year in damage between 1994 and 2003,
fourteen times more than half a century earlier (2004: 13). They find that more than 255 million
people worldwide were affected by over 350 disaster events in 2003, up 180% from the 90
million affected a century ago (2004: 13, 53).19
Technological hazard events have become more likely over the last century as human
innovation has produced ever more powerful tools. Author Ulrich Beck argues that the developed
world is becoming a “risk society” distinguished by unprepared-for technological risks at every
crossroads (qtd in Wisner et al. 2004: 16). In possibly the oldest well-documented large disaster
to be caused by a technological hazard event, a ship carrying large quantities of fuel oil on its
deck and 3,000 tons of explosives in the holds below collided with another ship and exploded in
the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1917. The blast, and the tidal wave, fires, and acid rain that
followed destroyed 1,600 buildings and damaged 12,000, and killed 1,500 residents and injured
9,000 (Solnit 2009: 73-75).
. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine,
cites a more extreme 430% increase in natural disasters since 1975 (2007: 539). Wisner et al.,
citing publications by German insurer Munich Re, also finds an increasing trend in disaster
frequency and damage (Wisner et al. 2004: 62-64; Munich Re 1999: 40-41). Solnit, as well as
journalist Amanda Ripley, also cite similar trends (Ripley 2008: xiv; Solnit 2009: 22).
20
19 The authors note that the 60% increase in reported disaster events alone is not significant enough to determine
the existence of a trend, due to increased reporting and better tracking of disasters. However, “a 180% increase in victims is a definite trend and one that is likely to continue into the future.” (Guha-Sapir et al. 2004: 53).
Other major technological hazards-turned-disasters include the
explosions of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine and the Bhopal, India chemical
plant, as well as oil spills and the dumping of nuclear and other hazardous wastes (Wisner et al.
2004: 38-39). The dropping of atomic bombs over Japan during World War II, as well as
20 The explosion at Halifax was documented by psychologist and priest Samuel Prince. After the explosion, his church housed the newly homeless and served thousands of meals to survivors. Prince later went on to receive a doctorate in the then new field of sociology; his 1920 dissertation, Catastrophe and Social Change, was the first published study of human behavior in disasters (Solnit 2009, 79, Ripley 2008, vi-xi and 138).
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countless other military actions which have upset the lives and livelihoods of civilian
populations, could be considered technological disasters as well. We tend to be scared of the
wrong things (Ripley 2008: 31, 33, 50), but we treat even those technological hazards we do
recognize with a “high degree of ambivalence,” failing to prepare or prevent them (Wisner et al.
2004: 17). We have the technology and wherewithal to lower the likelihood (and likely severity)
of technological hazards; after all, we created them in the first place. However, at present it
appears that the mitigation of damage caused by technological and natural hazards seems to be
on no one's to-do list.
The Missing Piece: Vulnerability
Disaster events have increased and become more severe while hazard events remain
relatively constant because of where and how humans live. That “where” and “how” can be
expressed in terms of vulnerability, which Wisner et al. define as “the characteristics of a person
or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and
recover from the impact of a natural hazard” (2004: 11). There are two primary ways in which an
exponential increase in human population is partly responsible for increased vulnerability.
Simply, higher population density by definition puts more people at risk: more people residing
near a coastline, on a fault line, or in a tornado zone means more potential victims when a hazard
event occurs.21
21 Guha-Sapir et al. report that “1 in 25 people worldwide was affected by natural disasters” in 2003. It is important
to note that that statistic (from [255 million affected] / [6.4 billion population]) is only a small increase from 1900, when approximately 1 in 18 people was affected ([90 million affected] / [1.7 billion population]). Nonetheless, nearly three times as many people were affected in 2003 than a century earlier. (Guha-Sapir 13, 53; population statistics from Munich Re 1999: 71)
More complexly, the population increase has pushed people beyond safer areas to
settle in more dangerous locations: those lucky enough to live on the actual or figurative “high
ground” remain less vulnerable to potential hazards, while newcomers or those less lucky inherit
higher risk (See Figure 3.2) (Wisner et al. 2004: 62-69; Guha Sapir 2004: 27; Ripley 2008: xiv).
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A related issue, urbanization, has also increased vulnerability to natural hazard events. At
the turn of the century, half the world's population lived in cities, and that number is expected to
increase. Unplanned urban growth that creates housing or employment near potential hazard sites
is significantly responsible for disaster severity (Wisner et al. 2004: 70-71; Guha Sapir 2004;
Ripley 2008: xiv). The continued destruction of natural barriers, in great part due to the actions
of urban populations, has also fundamentally increased human vulnerability to hazards:
wetlands, swamps, and mangroves all protect coastal areas from coastal storms, while coral reefs
buffer against tsunamis. Unfortunately, we persist in filling wetlands for development and
destroying mangrove and reef ecosystems with pollution and overfishing (Wisner et al. 2004: 81,
Chapter 7; Tibbets 2006).
Vulnerability as Structural Violence
An understanding of the average increase in vulnerability, however, does not tell the
whole story. It is clear that vulnerability, like structural violence, functions along Farmer's axes
of oppression: gender, race, class, and immigrant status, to name a few (2005: 42-45). South
African writer Hein Marais opines, “Shelve the abiding fiction that disasters do not
discriminate—that they flatten everything in their path with 'democratic' disregard. Plagues zero
in on the dispossessed, on those forced to build their lives in the path of danger” (qtd. in Klein
Figure 3.2: Vulnerability increases with growth
Model A Model B
As cities expand, they may grow closer to hazards original settlers had attempted to avoid. In Model A, an unstable cliff remains some distance from a city center. But has that city expands, some residents may be compelled to live nearer to the hazard, as in Model B.
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2007: 513). Indeed, Wisner et al. state that:
Most people are vulnerable because they have inadequate livelihoods, which are not resilient in the face of shocks, and they are often poor. They are poor because they suffer specific relations of exploitation, unequal bargaining and discrimination within the political economy, and there may also be historical reasons why their homes and sources of livelihood are located in resource-poor areas. (2004: 56)
Returning, then, to Figure 3.2, it is the poorest and weakest who tend to be relegated to the most
hazardous areas of any community. In other words, although Wisner et al. never use the term
“structural violence,” vulnerability to natural hazards can be understood as structural violence
functioning in an atypical environment defined by the existence or imminent existence of a
hazard. It is those two ingredients—a natural or technological hazard affecting a vulnerable
population—which create disaster events.
Recall from Galtung's typology that violence can be either latent or manifest (see Figure
2.2). Vulnerability is a latent form of structural violence that only manifests itself in hazard
situations. However, specific categories of suffering that contribute to latent vulnerability may be
manifest in everyday life as well. For example, let us consider two categories of suffering that
contributed to vulnerability when an earthquake struck Guatemala City in 1976:
• Housing: One journalist reported after the quake that “in this well-known fault zone the
houses of the rich have been built to costly anti-earthquake specifications. Most of the
poorest housing, on the other hand, is in the ravines or gorges which are highly
susceptible to landslides” (qtd. in Wisner et al. 2004: 280). While many aspects of
housing inequality are consistently manifest, low prevalence of earthquake retrofitting,
poor quality and shallow building foundations, and risky housing locations (i.e., at the
bottom of a ravine or under a cliff; see Figure 3.2) do not much affect everyday life.
Those who live in such conditions, however, are more vulnerable to earthquakes: these
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inequalities become manifest when earthquakes strike. Thus these conditions can be
considered latent forms of structural violence.
• Political Visibility: The earthquake killed 22,000 people, mostly indigenous Mayans
living in the rural highlands outside the Guatemala City and urban squatters living in
housing situations like those described above; within the city alone, 90,000 were made
homeless. Both of these communities—rural indigenous groups and poor squatters—were
especially vulnerable because they were politically invisible; with little representation or
political power to speak of, it was “exceedingly difficult … to obtain post-disaster
assistance from the government” (Wisner et al. 2004: 279). However, these populations
had been victims of this political invisibility long before the earthquake, consistently
denied access to government services in the past. Therefore, political invisibility was a
manifest form of structural violence in everyday life before the hazard event, and simply
found new forms of manifestation (in terms of vulnerability) during and after the quake.
The two pillars of structural violence, categories of suffering (such as housing and political
visibility) and the axes upon which suffering operates (such as race and class), interact in a
complex manner with hazard events to produce disasters. The result of this interaction is yet
another perpetuation of the difference between Galtung's potential and actual realizations:
individuals and communities are kept from achieving full potential in preparation for hazards
events as well as during and after them; the resulting disaster reinforces and extends that
realization gap, creating a downward cycle. A deep analysis of that relationship can be found in
Wisner et al.'s “Pressure and Release” and “Access” models (2004). For this work, however, the
process described in Figure 3.3 will suffice.
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Figure 3.3: A Genealogy of Disasters: Hazards, Violence, and Vulnerability
Disasters present opportunities for change; these opportunities will be explored in the
remaining chapters. But in order to utilize them, the chronic, dull suffering of everyday life as
well as the acute, conspicuous suffering of disasters must be understood. This suffering is not
equal: while hazard events may be great equalizers, disasters do not level the playing field; on
the contrary, they give the underdogs an even steeper hill to climb. The frequency of disasters is
higher today than ever before, which means this opportunity is not going away. The frequency of
weather-related disasters has increased four-fold over the last two decades (Solnit 2009: 22), but
it is not just the storms we need to fight: after all, “policy, unlike the weather, is subject to human
control” (Farmer 2005: 16). It is in part due to the visibility and intensity of inequalities in
disasters that momentum for change can be generated. Attempting to correct manifestations of
vulnerability may provide a remedy for some amount of disaster-borne suffering, but the real
solution lies in combating structural violence itself, at once targeting its day-to-day
manifestations and its latent contributions to vulnerability, making disasters more infrequent and
less severe while lessening the inequalities of access that plague disenfranchised communities
every day.
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Chapter 4: Just Relief—Suggestions for Immediate-Term Disaster Response “After two days of horror, when we had slept on the street and hobnobbed with aristocracy and riff-raff, when we had nothing to eat but bread of the soldiers and the cheese of some kind neighbor, a little Miss Dainty and I, with our hats sadly askew, with cinders and coal dust begriming our hair and eyes and face, traveled at dusk through the burning ruins and melancholy devastation…. On the way a quietly dressed man approached us. 'May I walk with you?' he begged. 'It's lonesome walking alone.' We smiled and nodded and took him in as if we had known him all our lives.… And that is the sweetness and the gladness of the earthquake and the fire. Not of bravery, nor of strength, nor of a new city, but of a new inclusiveness[: taking] joy in the other fellow.” Pauline Jacobson San Francisco, California After the 1906 earthquake22
American disaster sociologist and World War II veteran Charles Fritz recalled in 1961 his
surprise when he arrived for active duty in England in 1943. He expected to find the British
citizenry, already having lived through five years of war, resentful and unhappy. However, “those
expectations proved totally false. Instead, what one found was a nation of gloriously happy
people, enjoying life to the fullest, exhibiting a sense of gaiety and love of life that was truly
remarkable” (1996: 3-4). Disasters are indeed times of profound misery; they cause immense
damage to infrastructure, relationships, and human life. However, repeated studies, including
Fritz's, show that disasters are not only pathological: they are for many people convivial
moments of togetherness remembered later with nostalgia, not pain (Solnit 2009: 6; Fritz 1996:
19). The lively, welcoming, and accepting nature of disaster communities is founded in a
cohesiveness deeply tied to what sociologists James Coleman (1988) and Robert Putnam (2000)
call social capital. However, as the disaster passes, so too does the disaster community: that
easygoing openness fades as society reverts back to the norm. With that passing goes an
22 This quotation from an article published on April 29th, 1906 in the San Francisco weekly the Bulletin by
Jacobson, who was a staff writer for the paper. The article originally appeared eleven days after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake under the title, “How it Feels to be a Refugee and Have Nothing in the World, by Pauline Jacobson, Who is One of Them.” It was republished in Barker's Three Fearful Days, a compilation of first person accounts of the quake. 1998: 283-284.
Cohen-Price 40
opportunity, usually missed, to generate social capital, build community, and reduce
vulnerability. With the right planning, a methodology for disaster relief could be created that not
only addresses the immediate needs of victims and sets the stage for community-directed
reconstruction but produces social capital and challenges many of the less tangible (and more
basic) impacts of structural violence.
Figure 4.1: Haas et al.'s Four Waves of Disaster Response
Adapted from Haas et al., 1977 cited in Wisner et al., 2004: 356
In 1977, Haas et al. created a model of the disaster recovery process. They mapped four
overlapping waves of activity, each experienced by the affected community in time. The first
wave, disaster “response,” is occupied with immediate actions such as search and rescue and
triage. The second, “relief,” is spent meeting the medical and health needs of survivors, such as
setting up clinics and shelters. Third, in the “reconstruction” phase, “medium-term” efforts are
made to return the affected community to a functional level. Finally, “longer-term economic and
social 'recovery,'” a years-long process, takes over (see Figure 4.1) (cited in Wisner et al. 2004:
356). The absolute linearity of this model has been debunked by many more recent studies
(Wisner et al. 2004: 357); however, the model remains useful, if but to make clear that after
disasters, affected communities—like individuals experiencing loss—do encounter emotionally
Cohen-Price 41
and socially distinct stages of recovery, each with its own particular pains and opportunities.
The overlapping wave concept is adopted in this study, but rather than looking at four
waves or phases, a simpler and hopefully more accurate separation of recovery into just two
phases is presented. The first phase, which we will call disaster relief, is marked by the
immediacy of health and safety needs, the temporary loss of control of the dominant economic
and social systems (some of which were discussed in Chapter Two), and a lack of coordination
between multifaceted and multileveled responders. The second, which I will call reconstruction,
is defined by a partial to complete return of dominant social and economic systems (i.e. goods
and services are sold rather than bartered or given); a combination, monopolization, or
hierarchical coordination of response efforts; and the undertaking of less immediate response
needs.23
If structural violence exists wherever what is is restrained from reaching what could be,
we can find it in disaster everywhere we look. In that same reality, though, we also find countless
23 This dichotomy is founded in the works of other authors. Haas et al. (1977, cited in Wisner et al. 2004: 356)
would likely note that relief as defined here contains their waves of response and relief, while my reconstruction phase contains their reconstruction and recovery waves. Ripley's analysis (2008) of individual actions, fear, heroic decisions, and groupthink fit squarely into the first phase, while the “risk-reduction objectives” defined by Wisner et al. (2004: 330), if not achieved before a disaster, would be fought for in the later phase, during reconstruction. Additionally, this dichotomy reflects Fritz's (1996) and Solnit's (2009) division between the disaster epoch and normative conditions in social and economic systems function.
Figure 4.2: Stages of Just Disaster Response
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ways to challenge that disparity. The opportunities to do so in the earliest stages of disaster
response begin in mental processes and in basic social interactions: these opportunities will be
discussed here, and successful employment of them will be considered just relief. The following
chapter will address opportunities that arise in the later stages of recovery and focus on physical
structures and more complex social interactions; working to engage such opportunities can be
considered just reconstruction (See Figure 4.2).
“Paradise in Hell”: Challenging the Inertia of Structural Violence
Samuel Henry Prince, whose 1920 dissertation is considered to be the first published
work in the field of disaster science, wrote that during a disaster “life becomes like molten metal.
… Old customs crumble, and instability rules” (qtd. in Ripley 2008: ix). Indeed, a primary
component of a disaster event – regardless of its size – is that the social norms and mores in the
affected community are shed, as if they were an exoskeleton shaken off by the turbulence of the
disaster. The result is rarely (and almost never on a large scale) confusion, riots, looting, or chaos
(Fritz 1996; Solnit 2009: 30)24
Many intertwined utopian threads can be traced through the post-disaster epoch. The
concept of the stranger tends to disappear, and with it go many differences and disagreements
(Fritz 1996: 31; Ripley 2008: 111; Solnit 2009: 188). Victims of disasters are instantly recruited
as first wave of responders; most of the time, they step up and do an excellent job (Solnit 2009:
. Instead, Solnit writes, a “paradise now arises in hell” in which
citizens step up to take care of each other, contribute to the common good, and consider
humanity and compassion more important than socioeconomics or old rivalries: “in the
suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another
way” (2009: 7; see also Wisner et al. 2004: 109).
24 The media’s insistence on showing us more lawlessness than acts of kindness will be discussed later in the
chapter.
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302, 311). The system to which society defaults is one known to disaster scholars and responders
as “mutual aid,” in which individuals look after and care for each other, without question of
economics or entitlement (Solnit 2009: 86). Moreover, many go far beyond reasonable
expectations, putting their own lives at risk to help others. Roger Olian, a witness of the January,
1982 crash of Boeing flight 737 into the Potomac River, jumped into the freezing water in
attempt to help the surviving passengers. He said later, “people who treat each other so badly in
everyday life can do tremendous things for each other in the worst of times” (qtd. in Ripley
2008: 196). Eventually, a helicopter plucked five passengers out of the water. Although Olian
never reached the victims, one survivor reported that Olian's determined rescue effort kept him
alive until the helicopter arrived (193).
In disaster, heroic acts like Olian's occur often, and creative and remarkably successful if
not death-defying contributions from normal citizens appear everywhere. In short, people on the
ground do what is necessary without thinking and are surprised afterwards to look back and
realize just how much they accomplished. On September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist
attacks in New York City, writer and musician Tobin Mueller began handing out coffee and
donuts next to a mobile ambulance dispatch unit near the Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. The donut
stand soon turned into a makeshift drop point for donations; after the Harbor Police discovered
they had useful supplies, boats heading towards Ground Zero started dropping by regularly.
Three days later, Mueller found himself running a warehouse on the piers with a staff of 200
volunteers, organizing and distributing supplies for rescue workers, running a makeshift free deli,
and requisitioning free hotel rooms for the “new homeless,” New Yorkers whose homes were
destroyed by or inaccessible because of the collapse of the towers (Mueller 2001). “It was so
much fun to participate in,” he said, “I forgot to sleep” (ibid.). Mueller and his 200 volunteers
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may have stood out in terms of visibility, but his experience is not an exception: Solnit (2009)
and Ripley (2008) recount numerous stories from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to the 2005
destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, of citizens with little training and no guidance
stepping up to donate, share, volunteer, lead, rescue, or take care of someone they have never
met, even though Putnam reports that these are the very actions that have been declining in the
United States over the last century (2000).
Each one of these pro-social acts challenges the inertia of structural violence. The
problems to be solved during the disaster relief phase are no smaller, simpler, or clearer than the
everyday inequalities discussed in Chapter Two. They are, however, interpreted as more
immediate. Ripley, who calls citizen-responders to disasters “superheroes with learning
disabilities” (2008: xviii), notes that it is the “blinders on [their] brain[s]” (ibid.: 21) that allows
them to compute the immediacy but not the apparent impossibility of the tasks ahead of them,
and pushes them to act towards the greater good. Although the purpose of people like Mueller is
simply to lend a hand, their actions also build agency: those who participate in relief work
discover that they do indeed have the power to address even the biggest and most complex
problems. Mueller's actions, then, like the actions of many others in other times and places, were
acts of just disaster relief that helped individuals and communities reach closer to their potential
and set the stage for challenging the tangible effects of structural violence.
The “new social environment” in which such acts are so frequent (Wisner 2004: 109)
dissipates once “outside forces or authorities intervene … to superimpose external controls”
(Fritz 1996: 21). Yet this imposition is precisely what consistently occurs. On September 16th,
2001, Mueller's supply warehouse was taken over by FEMA and Mueller and his volunteers were
told to go home (Mueller 2001). Three weeks after the attacks, the city parks department shut
Cohen-Price 45
down a vigil in Union Square (Solnit 2009: 203).
Solnit notes that some scholars call the clinching
of control of the disaster relief process by a
politically and economically powerful minority
“elite panic” (37). At best, those who claim power
do so because they believe that a hierarchical,
controlled central response will better serve
victims than a grassroots, bottom-up effort; this “ivory tower engagement” with affected
communities is thoroughly debunked by Farmer (2005: 224, see also 153). At worst, elite panic
is an attempt by those who held power in the old, pre-disaster system to regain the control the
disaster has taken away from them. Sociologist and scholar of natural hazards Kathleen Tierney
says, “Elites fear disruption of the social order; it challenges their legitimacy” (qtd. in Solnit
2009: 152). Solnit finds that “government fails as though it had been overthrown and civil
society succeeds as though it has revolted: the task of government, usually described as
'reestablishing order,' is to take back the city and the power to govern it” (2009: 152-153). In
either case, bureaucracies inadequately prepared to handle the “multiplying societal demands” of
disaster recovery overtake emergent groups of citizen-responders, often squelching the very
energy that could be used to generate positive agency-generating and relationship-building
cycles, in turn increasing the actual realizations of all those affected (Drury & Olson 1998 cited
in Solnit 2009: 152).
Although institutional disaster responders tend to overlook or mis-perform certain
important aspects of response work, they do at least have positive contributions to make. At a
minimum, it is these organizations that have the greatest access to the funds, equipment, and
Opportunity Objective #1: Provide
effective relief while building a social
momentum of action by creating
coordinated partnerships with
grassroots responders already on the
ground, asking them for sustained
help, and arming them with the right
tools to provide it.
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logistical expertise crucial to effective relief. While grassroots response is fundamental, the
ability to mobilize large amounts of funds and resources is without a doubt an important asset.
Moreover, some top-down coordination is necessary to make sure resources are assigned
efficiently across the scope of the affected area and to be sure that efforts are not duplicated:
without an understanding of the entire disaster situation, needs cannot be accurately assessed and
prioritized (Mistovich & Karren 2008, O'Dempsey 2009). The key, then, is a partnership that
arms citizen responders already on the ground with the necessary tools and enlists their help in a
coordinated relief effort that serves the immediate needs of the community while exchanging
societal inertia for momentum (Opportunity Objective #1).
Social Capital: Challenging the Pervasiveness of Structural Violence
Wisner et al. note that five types of capital play roles in livelihood and vulnerability of
individuals and groups: human capital (skills, knowledge, energy), social capital (networks,
groups), physical capital (infrastructure, technology), financial capital (savings, credit), and
natural capital (natural resources) (2004: 96). All five affect and are affected by disaster. Indeed,
we have just seen that although hierarchical disaster relief fails if practiced alone, the physical,
financial, and human capital of institutional disaster responders is crucial to quality relief
efforts.25
Social capital plays an especially interesting role in disaster response work. According to
Putnam in Bowling Alone, the definitive text on the subject, social capital is simply the value that
exists in social networks (2000: 19). Communities are worth more than just the human, physical,
and financial capital they contain; the ability to share and build those types of capital through
relationships of trust makes communities positive-sum. As discussed in Chapter Two, social
25 For a greater analysis of the importance of human capital in disaster response (in the form of building knowledge
and expertise about logistical organization and response methodologies), see O'Dempsey 2009.
Cohen-Price 47
capital is a remarkably powerful tool to challenge structural violence: strong social networks
through which information and resources are shared, and consensus and solidarity are built,
allow for unified action of suffering communities against their plight. Social capital is an
especially potent remedy for vulnerability: Putnam (2000: 289), Wisner et al (2004: 117), Ripley
(2008: 134), and O'Dempsey (2009: 83) agree that generating strong social networks is the key
to building resiliency. While building social capital is never easy, the previous pages have
already documented the unique opportunity disasters present for such community-building. The
“community of sufferers,” unique to the disaster epoch, is an instant social network which
rapidly spawns new relationships and serves as a coping mechanism for the pain and loss victims
experience (Fritz 1996: 28; see also Wisner et al. 2005: 113). More, opportunities for
volunteerism and trust building—two tools that further build social capital—are manifold in the
days and weeks after disaster.
Volunteerism is both an indicator of existing social capital and a generator of it. Indeed,
Putnam reports not only that “our readiness to help others [is] a central measure of social capital
(2000: 116), but that “people who have received help are themselves more likely to help others,
so simple acts of kindness have a ripple effect. In short, giving, volunteering, and joining are
mutually reinforcing and habit forming” (ibid.: 122). More specifically, the altruism that builds
social capital involves partnership: “doing with” instead of “doing for” (ibid.: 116-117). Or, in
the words of Paul Farmer, while “social justice” breaks down barriers, “charity” simply builds
them higher (2005: 153).
As an indicator of social capital, volunteerism is founded on connection to others and
therefore tends to remain within communities defined by race, class, and geographic location:
more accepting communities come with higher rates of informal and formal “doing with”-type
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altruism. Yet disasters tend to expand the reach of community: Fritz's community of sufferers
“does not necessarily correspond to any preexisting geographical or social limits,” as it “often
involves many people who have had little or no previous history of interaction” (1996: 29).
Therefore, new connections with and new empathy for a more diverse community produced by
disasters allow for acts of good-will to occur across social lines, especially in communities where
those lines originally carried much weight. In this way, acts of volunteering build relationships,
adding social capital to weak (and perhaps weakened by disaster) social networks.
Moreover, disasters can create entirely new channels for “doing with.” While hazards do
tend to affect the poor and less powerful most and wealthiest and most powerful least (see
Chapter Three), on the individual level some suffering is random: while the manager of a factory
may be less likely to be injured in an industrial accident than his employees, there is no guarantee
he will not be. Wherever suffering is to some extent arbitrary lies the chance to reverse the
typical volunteer typology: the poor man may rescue the rich; the prisoner may rescue the jailer.
Simply being given the opportunity to help empowers and builds agency in those who tend to
suffer most in everyday life (Farmer 2005: 153).
Trust also plays an especially important role in social capital creation. Putnam cleaves
trust into two distinct types: thick trust, a deep trust between individuals with whom personal
relationships have been built; and thin trust, a generalized, shallower trust that “rests implicitly
on some background of shared social networks and expectations of reciprocity” (2000: 136).
While thick trust is valuable for the individual's wellbeing, thin trust is most important for the
community, as it weaves a strong “social fabric” by “extend[ing] the radius of trust beyond the
roster of people whom we can know personally” (ibid.: 136). Trust reduces the “transaction
costs” of everyday life so much that a correlation has been found between more trustful
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communities and longer life expectancy (ibid.: 135). However, thin trust in the twenty-first
century is continually harder to come by (ibid.: 140).
In many recent disasters, the media has chosen to emphasize lawlessness and chaos over
orderly, cooperative relief work. The reality is usually far less unruly and therefore less
newsworthy (Solnit 2009: 122, 127). Instead, many opportunities for trust-building present
themselves after disaster. First, “generalized reciprocity,” Putnam states, “is bolstered by dense
networks of social exchange” (2000: 136); opportunities for such exchange proliferate as
victims, in absence of structure, resort to barter and gift economies. Second, those affected find
themselves in solidarity with each other, perhaps for the first time in generations (Fritz 1996;
Solnit 2009); the shared purpose of survival and regeneration implies a newfound layer of thin
trust, as individuals realize they are working with, not against, those around them. Third, Putnam
notes that social capital is most easily built in opposition to something else (2000: 361). When
government-funded response fails to mobilize the available energy of citizen responders or does
not satisfy the immediate needs of a suffering community, the cohesive response of the
community simultaneously against the government and for themselves presents a remarkable
opportunity to exchange political trust for new thin social trust.26
The pervasiveness of structural violence makes it nearly impossible to fix. In order to
combat its many interconnected inequalities, the agency and coordination required to wage a
long battle on multiple fronts must also be ubiquitous. Disasters give communities a rare chance
to build social capital, the core ingredient needed to generate that agency and coordination.
Every opportunity to strengthen social networks, especially in communities most affected by
Even when institutional
response does not fail, “the disaster” remains an opponent worthy of newfound community
cohesion.
26 For an elaboration of the difference between social trust and political trust, see Putnam 2000: 137 and 142.
Cohen-Price 50
structural violence in day-to-day life,
must be capitalized upon
(Opportunity Objective #2). Without
altruism, thin trust, and a strong but
inclusive community identity,
structural violence is indeed an
impossible foe.
An Open Window: Challenging the Insidiousness of Structural Violence
Disasters build more than momentum and social capital. Both the clear differences
between post-disaster communities and their normal, day-to-day counterparts and the
conspicuousness of disasters' unequal impacts make the realities of structural violence obvious.
Clearly, as problems must be acknowledged before they can be addressed, this exposure can be a
powerful tool of change. In the United States, the mainstream political world has failed to
address the economic inequalities of everyday life in the United States since the 1960s (Tumulty
2007). This streak of silence was not broken until recently, when son of a millworker, Senator,
and nominee for Vice President John Edwards spoke in 2004 of two very different Americas:
refrains such as “One America does the work while another America reaps the reward” quickly
gave him the reputation of being the populist candidate (ibid.).27
If structural violence is rarely understood or discussed in a holistic and honest manner,
The media, too, has consistently
failed to report on the depth and breadth of domestic inequality. Finally, because those who
suffer most are conditioned for silence (Farmer 2005: 26; see Chapter Two), structural violence
is generally hidden from view.
27 Fittingly, Edwards launched his 2004 campaign in New Orleans, a city ravaged by years of hurricanes and
glaring economic inequalities only one year before the destruction caused by Katrina (Tumulty 2007).
Opportunity Objective #2: In order to build the
agency and cohesion necessary to combat
structural violence and vulnerability, capitalize on
every opportunity to build social capital by
fostering and maintaining the community
connection, “doing with” altruism, and thin trust
generated by disasters and the relief phase of
disaster response.
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Solnit tells us that disasters make “visible who had
abundance and who was destitute” (2009: 293). After
the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, widespread
hunger quickly became a major issue. However, “it's
not as though hunger did not exist in San Francisco
before April 18, though it was less visible and less
widespread; the city was in 1906 a many-tiered society with enormous opulence at the top and
grim destitution at the bottom” (ibid.: 28). Urban planner George Nez, who consulted on two
international recovery efforts following devastating earthquakes, says that during all stages of
response work, “everyone tends to blame the disaster for this or that problem. However,
gradually you come to realize that ninety percent of the problems you encounter were present
before the disaster event, waiting to be tackled” (1974, cited in Wisner et al. 2004: 363). While
Nez expresses this sentiment as a criticism, it can also be understood as an opportunity: we must
appreciate that many of the injustices experienced during and after a disaster event were not
caused by the disaster so much as manifested by it (Opportunity Objective #3); in this light,
every disaster is a chance to build a holistic agenda for social change that addresses latent
problems difficult or impossible to see in everyday life.
Vulnerability as a Tool
Perhaps the most significant manifestation of a normally latent issue in disaster is the
evolution of vulnerability into suffering. Where vulnerability has been discussed in Chapter
Three, and Chapters Seven and Eight will recount the suffering of two particular disaster-plagued
American communities, the complexities of suffering will receive little theoretical attention
Opportunity Objective #3: In
order to build a holistic agenda for
social change, interpret and
publicize newfound problems and
inequalities not as new issues
created by disaster but as latent,
preexisting issues manifested by it.
Cohen-Price 52
here.28
Disaster preparedness is not a virtue or
resource that a community simply does or does
not possess; it is a skill, crucial for mitigating vulnerability, which must be fostered and practiced
so it is not forgotten. Two days before Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States, the 125
residents of Grand Bayou, Louisiana, a fishing community on the Gulf of Mexico only accessible
by water, evacuated to safety. They did so, as they had done numerous times before, in a convoy
of fishing boats stocked with provisions. They had never been told to evacuate; the community
made the decision themselves—in fact, the evacuation order for the city of New Orleans,
seventy-five miles away, had yet to be given (Ripley 2008: 134-136). The key to Grand Bayou's
success was its tradition and practice of preparedness. This longstanding tradition was so strong,
Ripley states, that evacuations had become a regular enough occurrence that the children of the
town had learned to love them: “You're going out on a big ol' boat ride with all your friends,”
stated one teenager (qtd. in ibid.: 135). That tradition of preparedness (for them embodied as
frequent group evacuations), is inherently tied to social capital. Ripley informs us, “Groups
perform as well during a disaster as they performed before it. … What [the citizens of Grand
Bayou] had were long traditions, close relationships, and a culture of self-sufficiency. … The
connections between the people who lived there were strong” (ibid.: 134-135). The practice of
preparedness builds social capital and a sense of thin trust, and the new, ever-strengthening
What is pertinent, however, is the
opportunity offered by vulnerability-caused
suffering to call attention to vulnerability itself,
not just suffering.
28 See Wisner et al. 2004 for a very detailed theoretical analysis of vulnerability and suffering, both broadly and
applied to specific hazard types, with case studies from around the world.
Opportunity Objective #4: Capitalize on
the shared experience of vulnerability
across a disaster-affected community to
legitimize and institutionalize disaster
preparedness practices that will, over
time, build social capital and reduce
vulnerability.
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bonds between community members in turn allow for ever-stronger readiness traditions. A
community practicing disaster preparedness, then, is participating in a positive cycle that
increases resiliency of the group and reduces vulnerability to hazard events: Practicing
preparedness both increases readiness for disaster and builds social capital, further increasing
readiness for disaster (Opportunity Objective #4).
How do we foster preparedness where it does not already exist? Because vulnerability is
such a latent concept, it is hard to generate the momentum to fight it in everyday life. However,
when communities find themselves victims of disasters caused by hazards they were not
prepared for, an opportunity presents itself to institutionalize a dedication to preparedness while
the memory of suffering is still strong. Ripley's account of the story of Rick Rescorla, head of
security for Morgan Stanley's World Trade Center office, serves as evidence (2008: 203-210). In
1990, the Vietnam veteran sent a letter to the Port Authority, which owned and managed the
Trade Center, regarding the possibility of a truck-bomb terrorist attack on the towers and
requested additional security in the subterranean parking garage. His request was never heeded.
In 1993, when Ramzi Yousef set off 1,500 pounds of explosives in the parking lot seventy floors
below the Morgan Stanley offices, executives finally began to listen to Rescorla: although the
bombing did not topple the tower or kill any Morgan Stanley employees, it did make manifest
just how vulnerable their “village nestled in the clouds” was (2008: 205). Rescorla employed the
attack as the validation he needed to make changes at the bank. He started running company-
wide fire drills from which no one was exempted and established a system of rotating fire
marshals, employees responsible for the evacuation of their section of the office. More
significantly, he claimed responsibility for his community, directing them to listen to his
instructions, not those of the Port Authority, in the event of a real emergency. When airliners
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struck the Trade Center towers in 2001, Morgan Stanley employees knew where the stairwells
were; they knew to take the stairs down do the ground, not up to the roof; and when Rescorla
gave the order to evacuate even though the Port Authority told all employees to stay put, they
listened.
Rescorla was not a mayor or governor, and the Morgan Stanley offices are definitively
not a community defined by structural violence. Yet Rescorla’s success using an attempted
bombing to convince his employer that fire drills took precedence over executive meetings and
billion-dollar deals should serve as an example to community leaders: Rescorla did not miss the
opportunity to use the 1993 bombing to convince his community of the realities of vulnerability
and the necessity for its mitigation in the context of normal life. The military mnemonic device
Rescorla lived by is one that all communities should take to heart: “Prior Proper Planning and
Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance” (ibid.: 206).29
For his entire career, Rescorla had had the insight needed to make the bank less
vulnerable. But that insight was only part of the equation. Fighting vulnerability requires the
presence of three distinct values:
(1) Tools (knowledge, experience, resources, best practices, etc) to decrease vulnerability
(2) A community-wide appreciation of vulnerability
(3) A willingness to dedicate time and resources to fighting vulnerability
Many tools already exist. But a willingness to utilize them—and develop more of them—hinges
entirely on whether communities appreciate and prioritize their own vulnerabilities.
29 After ushering Morgan Stanley employees out of the World Trade Center complex, Rescorla returned to Tower 2
to assist in the general evacuation. He and four of his deputies were killed when the towers collapsed. Not counting Rescorla and his team, only eight employees (out of 2,687 at the WTC offices) died that day (Ripley 2008 [ii]).
Cohen-Price 55
Back to the Basics
If suffering is the manifestation of vulnerability, two options exist to combat it.
Symptom-addressing solutions such as temporary medical clinics or the distribution of water
bottles address the suffering only, while cause-addressing solutions like recruiting volunteers to
assist in future evacuations or training airline passengers for crash landings while they wait for
their flights30
It is of course crucial never to forget the immediate needs of disaster victims: a disaster
relief methodology that does not feed, clothe, house, or attend to the medical needs of affected
communities fails to achieve its most basic goals. Just relief efforts achieve these goals without
forgetting that the earliest stages of disaster are those where the most change can be made.
Remember Prince's words—“Life becomes like molten metal. … Old customs crumble, and
instability rules” (qtd. in Ripley 2008: ix): with disaster, the traditions and norms of a stagnant,
difficult to mobilize society become relative and malleable. If agency and social capital can be
generated while providing tangible relief to victims, communities can become stronger and more
resilient than they ever were. Furthermore, agency and social capital generated early in disaster
response can be channeled into the reconstruction process that will follow.
address vulnerability itself, the reason why disasters cause suffering. Just as giving
quality care to a cancer patient may require prescribing both pain-killers and chemotherapy,
holistic disaster relief must both address the immediate needs of victims while imparting
valuable lessons about vulnerability and the importance of preparedness for the next hazard
event.
30 In the 1990s, a proposal was made to the British government to place aircraft cabin simulators in airport
terminals, so passengers could practice opening emergency exits and using oxygen masks. The concept was dismissed. See Ripley 2008: 213.
Cohen-Price 56
Chapter 5: Just Reconstruction—Suggestions for Long-Term Disaster Response “I talked to a very large national disaster company. … I asked them, ‘what's your recovery plan?’ They would go into a state and talk to the governor and the governor's staff and tell them about the programs that can be utilized and educate them on what’s going on. I asked, ‘what else would you do?’ And they would do nothing! So I said, ‘it won't work.’ That intervention never trickles down to the local level. You’ve got to educate the officials and talk to them, sure. But you’ve got to insert yourself in the trenches at the local level, and working with the city and county folks, with the private sector folks, everybody, and work them through the process. That’s the only way recovery will happen.” Chuck Banks Greensburg, Kansas January, 201031
The English word emergency evolved from the Latin ēmergo, to bring forth, which is also
the derivation of the word emerge. Indeed, in the emergency disaster, victims emerge as
responders, social cohesion emerges out of shared suffering, and the latent truths of deeply unjust
realities emerge from underneath the shroud of normalcy. However, the Latin that describes one
common sentiment of longer-term disaster response work—mainly, reconstruction and economic
recovery—tells a wholly different story. Tabula rasa—“clean slate”: disasters are chances to
wipe away what existed and build anew. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans developer Joseph
Canizaro said, “I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have
some very big opportunities” (qtd. in Klein 2007: 4). Certainly, disasters are chances for
reinvention, but are they clean slates, carte blanche opportunities to completely start over, design
and build anew? The affected communities will change, but the slate will never be clean: social
relationships that are thick (close, strong) and thin (generalized), cultural connections to people
and physical places, and some understanding of community identity will remain. If they do not,
the fault must be assigned to people like Canizaro, not the disaster itself. Solnit reminds us that
“disaster throws us into … [a time] that is bolder, freer, less attached and divided than ordinary 31 Chuck Banks is the principal of risk reduction and disaster response consulting firm Chuck Banks Associates, and previously directed the Rural Development branch of the Kansas USDA, a major actor in the coordinated response effort to the May 2007 EF5 tornado that decimated Greensburg, Kansas. Banks 2010.
Cohen-Price 57
times[:] not blank, but not tied down” (2009: 20). Klein tells us, “most people who survive a
devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can
and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places
that formed them” (2007: 10). There is opportunity for change, but that change must be founded
in the priorities, visions, and identity of the community. Disaster may alter that identity, but it
will not destroy it, nor transform it beyond recognition.
We have looked in detail at social capital and its importance to disaster recovery; we turn
now to the role of its more tangible counterpart, physical capital: the things that play important
roles in our existence. Destroyed physical capital is a substantial roadblock in the recovery
process, as a community cannot sustain itself—or even be much of a community—without roads,
factories or farms, and schools. Rebuilding such physical capital is the biggest burden of
recovery work; it is also an opportunity for rebirth. What gets destroyed must get rebuilt, and in
that reconstruction comes many questions: what is built? Where and how? What materials and
what labor will be used? Who will be asked to contribute ideas? What will be prioritized in the
planning process? From the simple, such as designing all new buildings compatible with
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) code, to the complex, such as redesigning city-wide
systems such as the electric grid or public transportation networks, difficult choices will have to
be made. The answers to these powerful questions draw a fine line between total erasure of
community and its redefinition and rebirth.
Many mechanisms exist with which to rebuild physical capital after disaster. Three
different reconstruction methodologies are mapped in Figure 5.1. Each has its own structural
consequences for access to resources, suffering, and vulnerability, and therefore they each in turn
have a different effect on structural violence. The first fails to recognize or capitalize on the
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opportunity physically destructive disasters present:
1. When no great opportunity is recognized by those coordinating reconstruction efforts, or
when the coordination of such efforts is distributed among multiple non-cooperative
entities, reconstruction will occur haphazardly. In such situations, large-scale planning
may occur little or not at all, and the impacts of reconstruction on structural violence may
be mixed: some projects may operate with the community in mind, while others worsen
inequalities. The maxim that by not choosing, one does indeed make a choice is reflected
here: whatever outcomes haphazard reconstruction causes, an opportunity was missed to
make major infrastructural change.
The second two methodologies both recognize, in very different ways, the opportunity
reconstruction presents to make significant changes to infrastructural design and city planning:
2. When the inherent potential in reconstruction for the drastic alteration of systems is
exploited by those in power, power-fortifying reconstruction takes place. Plans will be
drawn, but quietly, with little or no input from the community. Decisions will be made
that consolidate power and increase profit potential of a select few, not serve the
community. The result is less participation and less equality: more structural violence.
3. When those who have the best interests of the community at heart seek community input,
invest in community-wide and project-based planning that takes into account a
community-driven vision for the future, and build systems in such a way to benefit the
entire community—especially those who are weakest, most poorly represented, and most
vulnerable—the result is very different. This practice is called just reconstruction.
Power-fortifying reconstruction makes inequality more pervasive and permanent than it was
beforehand. Moreover, an understanding of the cyclical and actor-less nature of structural
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violence indicates that haphazard reconstruction will also tend to increase inequality, as the poor
and most vulnerable will be paid the least attention. If just reconstruction is practiced, though,
physical capital can be rebuilt to new standards which prioritize health, equality, and the
mitigation of vulnerability, in turn reducing structural violence. Just reconstruction can never
fully happen without just relief, as it is reliant on the momentum, cohesion, and trust just relief
fosters within the affected community.
Figure 5.1: Reconstruction Opportunities
Structural “Adjustment”
While disaster response, like fire fighting and policing, has traditionally been a public
responsibility, the last thirty years have witnessed an encroachment of the private sphere into the
field. Klein's The Shock Doctrine (2007) investigates that privatization process. Klein finds that
the post-disaster epoch is anything but a “time-out for cutthroat capitalism, when we all pull
together and the state switches into a higher gear” to provide relief and support to its citizens
(ibid.: 516). On the contrary, a number of recent disasters have seen increased involvement by
corporations, many looking to profit more than to help. Recently, an important threshold has
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been crossed: as the frequency and intensity of disasters have increased (see Chapter Three), so
too has demand for disaster response specialists; hazard and disaster events are now frequent
enough to create a consistent niche market in which companies' entire business plans can be
founded on response work (Klein 2007: 16). Klein, who sees no indication that the number of
disaster events will decrease in the near future, suspects that the involvement of profit-based
private enterprise in disaster relief will only grow in the coming years.
Klein traces the roots did corporate involvement in disaster recovery to conservative
economist Milton Friedman and his lifelong work promoting a return to a purer capitalism (2007:
60). Friedman advocated for a three-part agenda, discreetly called “structural adjustment,” to
radically redesign the economic structure of any nation who would adopt it through deregulation,
expropriation of public assets, and massive cutbacks in social services (ibid.: 68, 206). Friedman
and his ideology hold a pivotal place in the genealogy of the modern economic neoliberalism
that Klein alleges is responsible for the privatization of many government services, including
disaster response.
More significant than Friedman's vision, though, was his means for achieving that vision:
he believed that such sweeping change required economic “shock treatment”: rapid policy
changes that would not work if introduced slowly (Klein 2007: 175). Since the 1980s, this
methodology has evolved significantly. In 1985, economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited to Bolivia,
to help combat the 20,000% annual hyperinflation that was decimating the country’s livelihoods
(Greenwald 1989). Although Sachs was a very different economist than Friedman, he did adopt
Friedman's belief in policy jolts as the most effective way to make economic change: “I don’t
believe we should move in small steps,” he said in regards to American debt forgiveness for
Latin American nations (qtd. in Greenwald 1989). Sachs went on to help a newly elected
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government pass a radical economic reform bill that affected every facet of the Bolivian
economy (Klein 2007: 181), and while the result of his work in Bolivia is the topic of much
debate, his success in imparting rapid, intensive change was noted by many. The conclusion: an
agreement that crisis—in this case, hyperinflation—is a prerequisite for achieving otherwise
politically infeasible radical change (ibid.: 195). From economic crises, realizing that other
shocks such as war, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters served the same end was just a small
leap (ibid.: 211). The final evolution occurred only recently. Klein states:
[Until] the late nineties … disasters and crises had been harnessed to push through radical privatization plans after the fact, but the institutions that had the power … to respond to cataclysmic events—the military,…the Red Cross, the UN, emergency “first responders”—had been some of the last bastions of public control. Now … the crisis-exploiting methods that had been honed over the previous three decades would be used to leverage the privatization of the infrastructure of disaster creation and disaster response. Friedman's crisis theory was going postmodern. (ibid.: 364)
Neoliberal structural adjustment resulted in the development of a body of corporations that move
from disaster event to disaster event to participate in reconstruction efforts. In what Klein calls
the “disaster capitalism complex,” these private entities exploit the “democracy free zone” of the
post-disaster epoch to promote power-fortifying reconstruction that not only has immediate
impacts on the affected community but increases the market share of for-profit response, so when
the next disaster occurs, corporations can go even further (ibid.: 14, 175).
Same Opportunity, Different Vision
Why is an understanding of structural adjustment and other forms of power-fortifying
reconstruction important to this analysis of just reconstruction? It goes deeper than their joint
appreciation for the opportunity disasters present for change. Much more importantly, the
champions of both methodologies use the same rhetoric. Friedman himself observed that crisis is
needed to escape the “tyranny of the status quo”:
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Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. (qtd. in Klein 2007: 174)
Outside of the context of Friedman's (and his students') dedicated work to foster economic crises
throughout Latin America in order to claim power or sell off government industries to his
political cohorts, these words could appear in the concluding remarks of this work. And indeed
similar words are written there, for both parties see opportunity in the profound malleability of
communities affected by disaster. Adherents of just reconstruction, though, focus on quite
different aspects of that malleability (see Figure 5.2), and do not believe that the slate is ever
clean. While disaster may result in social turmoil, communities and cultures simply do not
Figure 5.2: The Different Aspects of Malleable Communities
What happens: Opportunity for Power-Fortifying Reconstruction:
Opportunity for Just Reconstruction:
Communities in shock
Maintaining chaos builds divisiveness, denying the community access to the power needed to fight reconstruction efforts.
Trust can be built, possibly for the first time, between groups across lines of race and class, increasing cohesion and agency.
Suffering individuals
Individuals are so focused on their own survival, they will not protest or even notice back-door political deals.
Individuals, resilient enough to survive, are ready to chip in to rebuild their own community.
Government stretched thin
Leaders can be convinced to hand power and responsibility for reconstruction and day-to-day administration of historically public functions to private entities.
Citizens rising up to coordinate and participate in their own relief can claim agency and advocate for continued involvement in city planning and administration, both during reconstruction and after a return to post-recovery life.
Power structures weakened
Power is readily claimed. Power is readily distributed and decentralized.
Adapted from Klein 2007; Solnit 2009.
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disappear. In short, where students of Friedman see a
potentially profitable “democracy free zone,” the just
reconstruction angle finds a democracy-rich zone full
of citizens ready to claim responsibility for their own
vulnerability.
Although they are not simple tasks, the first
two steps towards adopting a methodology of just
reconstruction are, in this light, quite clear. First, the
opportunity to make pro-social change with
reconstruction must be recognized by public response
agencies, community groups, and advocacy
organizations (Opportunity Objective #5). Second,
those groups must reclaim the radically optimistic
language usurped by the disaster capitalism complex to again represent the opportunity to build
networks, enhance community, and combat, not reinforce, structural violence (Opportunity
Objective #6).
It must be noted that, despite the reach of the disaster capitalism complex, the
involvement of private businesses in reconstruction—like the involvement of government in
relief work—is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, just as institutional disaster responders bring
necessary tools to disaster relief efforts, corporations are uniquely capable of filling certain
positive roles in the reconstruction process. The private sector tends to be more practiced in
making effective rapid decisions, working efficiently, and running complex logistical operations
than government agencies or not-for-profit organizations. Moreover, there exist private sector
Opportunity Objective #5:
Recognize the opportunity
inherent in reconstruction work to
rethink, redesign, and rebuild
physical capital in ways that
challenge structural violence and
build social capital, without falling
victim to the tabula rasa
interpretation of disaster events.
Opportunity Objective #6:
Reclaim the radically optimistic
language usurped by pro-
privatization entrepreneurs; use it
to describe justice-seeking, not
power-centralizing reconstruction.
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institutions that genuinely seek to build community,
increase resilience, and utilize the input of residents
and other local stakeholders.
While Klein sustains an overwhelmingly
negative perspective on corporate participation in
disaster response, she does mention the work of one
private firm contracted to create a “catastrophic
hurricane disaster plan” for southern Louisiana
(2007: 517). The exhaustive plan, designed with the
input of 270 experts, “spared no expense” and offered many constructive solutions. The
company, Innovative Emergency Management, completed the plan in 2004, one year before
Katrina; the federal government never implemented it (ibid.: 517; Fournier & Bridis 2005).
Ripley recounts a successful 2007 tsunami evacuation drill in northern California, which
occurred in one of the only company towns remaining in the United States. The company, a
construction firm named Danco, owned every property in the town; they sponsored the drill in
partnership with a local meteorologist (2008: 221). It makes sense: after all, where would Danco
be if their community of employees and the businesses that have emerged to support them were
wiped out by a tsunami? It is in Danco’s best interest—and indeed in the best interest of all
corporations—to support and protect their employees and their consumers. Where companies are
recognized for their good deeds, their popularity as employers and vendors will rise. Where they
allow their community to suffer, on the other hand, they will at a minimum damage their
reputation and could potentially lose their market or their workforce.
Along with government entities and individual residents, the private sector is a useful, if
Opportunity Objective #7: Maintain
and increase constructive private-
sector involvement in
reconstruction, while improving the
government contracting process and
increasing oversight over
contractors to guarantee that
supporting affected communities as
effectively as possible is the primary
objective of all participants in
reconstruction.
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not necessary, partner in post-disaster reconstruction work; indeed, the most efficient
reconstruction effort will emerge from all three arenas simultaneously. Companies who want to
participate in reconstruction efforts, however, must be carefully screened and monitored to
ensure that the drive for profit does not overshadow the purpose of just reconstruction: to
redesign and rebuild physical capital to institutionalize equal access and reduce vulnerability and
structural violence (Opportunity Objective #7).
Planning and Community Input
As we have seen in Chapter Two, structural violence is pervasive – it is deeply rooted in
many aspects of society. The negative cycles that its multifaceted presence promotes makes it
especially difficult to combat. Fighting this pervasiveness requires both careful planning and
constant consideration of community input. Indeed, Wisner et al. consistently argue that “there is
no substitute for painstaking work with the survivors as co-designers and co-directors of the
recovery process” (2004: 270). Post-disaster community-driven planning is key to reducing
structural violence because it creates two distinct contributions to a positive cycle of social
change. First, contributing to the planning process arms communities with the tools they need to
challenge structural violence: being given the opportunity to take ownership over aspects of
rebuilding their own community increases power and trust and gives residents the tools and
traditions they need to claim agency in other aspects of both rebuilding and day-to-day
governance once the reconstruction period is over (Putnam 2000). Second, the final product,
infrastructure truly built to fulfill the needs of the community, directly reverses structural
violence, thus increasing the community's social and financial capital (and therefore their ability
to combat other aspects of structural violence) in the long run.32
32 “It is surely plausible that design innovations like mixed-use zoning, pedestrian-friendly street grids, and more
space for public use should enhance social capital” (Putnam 2000: 408).
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Consider the example of an infrastructural inequality of urban public transportation. Say
that a bus line that serves the poorest neighborhood in a city stops running before midnight due
to purported safety concerns. The lack of late bus service has both direct and indirect
implications for the neighborhood. First, residents' lack of access to legitimate employment
limits financial and social capital and pushes more residents to turn to illegitimate employment
opportunities in the community, increasing the likelihood of gun violence and decreasing trust.
Incidentally, the increased violence justifies the decision of the bus operator to deny service, thus
repeating the cycle over from the beginning.33
Holistic, visionary planning with the input of community members and stakeholders,
then, is crucial to just reconstruction (Opportunity Objective #8). It is not, however, easy.
Planning takes time, and many residents and business owners are averse to waiting to see how
their houses, stores, factories, or offices will fit into a larger plan. Klein tells us that victims want
to rebuild and repair their lives as soon as possible in order to “reaffirm their relatedness to the
places that form them” (2007: 10). Yet that energy and dedication to community must be checked
by a willingness to take time to make forward-thinking, community-minded decisions.
The resulting decrease in social capital prevents
the community from effectively mobilizing in opposition to that decision. After a disaster,
concurrent installation of lights along the bus route as the road is rebuilt could quell the bus
operator’s safety concerns. Potentially even better, a rail-based public transportation service with
more safety measures for transit employees and riders could be extended into the community.
This tangible change reduces at least one structural inequality. More significantly, if community
members agitate for change or actively involve themselves in the new system’s planning process,
they also claim some of the agency that had been systemically taken from them.
33 It is important to note that the legitimacy of the bus operator's initial observation that violence in the
neighborhood may put its employees at risk is almost completely irrelevant, as the cycle the decision produces eventually does make the neighborhood unsafe, justifying the original claim.
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Additionally, challenges exist to collecting
input from a community of victims. Where the
immediate needs of disaster relief have not been met,
seeking community input is both difficult (people will
pay little attention to questions about visionary futures
when they have not yet tracked down their missing child or parent) and unethical (devoting
extensive labor and energy to gathering information while needs of medicine, shelter, and hunger
have not been met due to a lack of resources can only be described as misplaced priorities). Klein
recounts the words of a peace activist in Baghdad after the American bombing and invasion: “No
one here cares about privatization … what they care about is surviving” (Michael Birmingham
qtd. in Klein 2007: 412). Farmer relays a Haitian phrase of similar sentiment: Pa gen lapé nan tét
si pa gen lapé nan vant: “there can be no peace of mind if there is no peace in the belly” (2005:
228): victims must be safe, fed, and housed before the community can begin to build consensus
about rebuilding for the future. Where evacuation occurs, the process of distributing and then
retrieving people is also critical to collecting community input: where populations are scattered
haphazardly in surrounding regions or left to their own means to return, even finding community
members can prove difficult. It is noted again, then, that just reconstruction, especially planning
and the gathering of community input, relies heavily on the success of just relief.
Re-visioning and Rebuilding in Partnership
With good planning and after considering community input, infrastructure central to the
everyday functionality of society must be rapidly rebuilt in order to open the door to returning
community members and to new residential, commercial, or industrial developments. Some
infrastructure, as we will see in Chapters Seven and Eight, must be rebuilt or replaced before it is
Opportunity Objective #8: Invest
time and energy into holistic and
visionary community and urban
planning, seeking input from the
community and other
stakeholders at every turn.
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safe for residents to return: it would have been a
major epidemiological hazard, for example, to
allow residents of the Lower Ninth Ward of New
Orleans to move back after Katrina to a
neighborhood with no running water or plumbing
(Sylvain-Leer 2010). Access to electricity and
fuel, as well as communications equipment such
as functional cellular towers and shipping channels along which rebuilding materials can be
moved, are all crucial to the return of families and businesses. Other types of infrastructure may
not be fundamental to the physical return of individuals, even though they are the cornerstones of
community, indispensable for the return to everyday life. Public transportation systems have
already been referred to in this chapter; schools, hospitals, and parks, as well as business districts
or main streets, can be added to that list. Schools are especially important: without a functional
K-12 educational system, even one housed in temporary structures, family groups will simply
not return home (Headrick 2010).
These structures must not only be rebuilt – they must also be re-visioned. Structural
violence is founded on complex interactions of many facets of society, including unequal access
to infrastructural resources such as good healthcare or safe drinking water and unequal
distribution of infrastructural health risks (and eyesores) such as dumps, factories, and power
plants (See Chapter Two). In day-to-day life, these systems are extremely basic to the
functioning of society, yet they are not functional for everyone: they are accessible and useful
only to certain groups. These systems must be reformed, yet their economic and social
importance as well as their complexity makes them difficult to change outside of the context of a
Opportunity Objective #9: Re-vision
infrastructure design to remedy
structural violence, and then rebuild
infrastructure to new standards as
efficiently and rapidly as possible
while assisting (physically, logistically,
and financially) in the reconstruction
of private homes and businesses.
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disaster. The damage to these systems caused by disasters, however, creates an opportunity:
where infrastructure is destroyed, it must be repaired, and insurance money, resources from the
nonprofit sector, and state and federal emergency funds are made available to do so. Funding
gaps are inevitable, especially for projects that alter or expand on what was: available resources
rarely cover all the costs of an infrastructural project, and insurance money and federal funds
such as those from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are designed to refund only a
portion of the value of what did exist. Nonetheless, the opportunity to use available funds to
create a better and more equal infrastructural foundation on which the affected community can
rebuild physical and social capital is key to just reconstruction (Opportunity Objective #9).
Chapters Seven and Eight will delve into the issues of funding and infrastructure reconstruction
at much greater depth.
Hazard Mitigation
In Chapter Four, the opportunity to use disasters and their manifestations of vulnerability
to alter mindsets and convince community members and leaders that risk mitigation is an
extremely important investment was discussed. Here, the result of that mindset change is
considered: where the greater appreciation for human vulnerability that comes with disaster is
utilized to generate momentum for mitigation work, some amount of reconstruction resources
can be dedicated to the physical reduction of vulnerability. Wisner et al. remind us that physical
vulnerability to hazard events is just one aspect of the greater concept of vulnerability (2004:
339). Yet it is nonetheless an important part: true reduction of risk requires changes to social
structure as well as physical environment. Many tangible changes can be made in the aftermath
of disaster that can contribute to the mitigation of communities' vulnerability to hazard events
(Opportunity Objective #10).
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Various changes in construction methods for
new buildings and infrastructure can be effective in
mitigating risk (Opportunity Objective #10a). In
flood areas, for example, houses as well as road and
railways can be elevated to reduce damage of
potential floodwaters. Damaged or undamaged
masonry buildings in earthquake regions can be
reinforced to protect from future quakes, and
structures destroyed by earthquakes can be rebuilt
with vibration-resistant materials. One promising recent development in vulnerability-reducing
building methods is Insulated Concrete Form (ICF). ICF, interlocking modular foam blocks that
can be stacked then filled with concrete to construct the walls of a residential or commercial
building, are not only significantly more energy-efficient but can withstand far more wind, fire,
and moisture damage than can a wood-frame house, protecting them from many different natural
and technological hazards (ICFA n.d.). While building choices, especially those that increase
building cost, may not be easy for homeowners and builders to make, changes to building codes
and tax credit programs can mandate, recommend, or incentivize building to higher standards of
risk mitigation.
If governments are to make such changes, it is especially important that they address the
unequal distribution of vulnerability: the poor tend to be the most vulnerable to hazard events, as
well as the least able to afford individual acts of mitigation such as those mentioned here.
Therefore, in the words of Farmer, “our commitments, our loyalties, must be primarily to the
poor and vulnerable” (2005: 229, emphasis in original): policy changes should support those
Opportunity Objective #10:
Rebuild to mitigate vulnerability to
future hazards by (a) sponsoring
programs for home-, business-, and
landowners; (b) considering the
impact of development and global
warming on hazard strength and
frequency; and (c) fostering the
regrowth of natural barriers that
protect coastal areas from water-
borne hazards.
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most at risk in becoming less vulnerable to future hazards.
In some situations, overall vulnerability has been increased due to human activity, and
can therefore be reduced systemically by reversing the risk-producing processes (Opportunity
Objective #10b & c). This is especially (but not only) true for tsunamis and coastal storms like
cyclones and hurricanes, in which natural coastal ecosystems play a key role in protecting
residents of coastal areas. One international environmental conservation agency specifically
addresses the importance of conservation to reduce vulnerability to natural hazards:
The Indian Ocean tsunami highlighted both the vulnerability of poor people to natural disasters as well as the role resilient ecosystems can play in protecting human lives and livelihoods and mitigating the impacts of extreme events. There is evidence that in some places, intact coastal ecosystems and natural barriers such as mangroves and other coastal forests, coral reefs, sand dunes, sea grass belts and mature shelterbelt plantations played a crucial role in saving human lives by breaking the devastating impact of the incoming waves and acting as the first line of defense. Where coastal ecosystems and natural barriers had been degraded or converted to other land uses, the damage was far greater. (IUCN 2008)
As settlement increases near coastal areas (Wisner et al. 2004: 247) and as development and
global warming cause the destruction of those natural barriers (Tibbets 2006; Speth 2004),
populations become ever more vulnerable to these water-borne hazards. Moreover, as mentioned
in Chapter Three, scientists are currently investigating the relationship between global warming,
resource extrication, and development with natural hazard events less typically associated with
human impact such as earthquakes (Guha-Sapir et al. 2004: 23). The mitigation of coastal
vulnerability to natural hazards must include fostering the re-growth of these natural barriers to
protect the growing coastal settlements nearby. Bioremediation programs, however, are
extremely expensive and labor-intensive (Tibbets 2006). General hazard mitigation proves to be
even more problematic, as it requires restricting or managing potentially profitable development
and, on a larger scale, global warming, two agendas for which there is little support in the
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developed world (Speth 2004).
Laboring Together
In this chapter alone, six objectives have already been outlined which can, if completed,
lead to a just reconstruction process that best serves communities affected by disaster. Each one
considers process as well as results, and directly or indirectly mandates both financial expense
and human labor be directed towards specific goals that will reduce vulnerability and increase
equality. In short, for reconstruction to be truly just, as much diligence must be paid to the means
as to the end. The final opportunity objective, then, addresses another aspect of the means of
reconstruction: who actually performs the tasks of reconstruction?
Locals should participate in every stage of the reconstruction process (Opportunity
Objective #11). Members of the affected community should be more than just the “co-designers
and co-directors” of reconstruction (Wisner et al. 2004: 270): wherever possible they should be
the agents of their own recovery. Wisner et al. report that participation in reconstruction can
reinforce the agency of groups traditionally relatively powerless, such as women (2004: 365),
and Klein notes that locals would see a job in
the reconstruction effort “not only as a job but
as part of healing and re-empowering their
communities” (2007: 521).
Indeed, in or out of the context of
disaster, participation in positive community
projects builds social capital that can be
beneficial later on (Putnam 2000). However,
businesses contracted to rebuild have a history
Opportunity Objective #11: Private
sector for-profit reconstruction ventures
should seek to employ local workers at
living wages, and not-for-profit
participation in reconstruction should
utilize local volunteers and encourage
sweat equity wherever possible; such
local involvement will simultaneously
generate physical, financial, and social
capital in affected communities.
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of restricting who they hire, at times importing labor from outside the affected community. This
not only denies many residents meaningful and gainful employment but actually increases post-
disaster unemployment rates by upping the number of workers in an already job-poor
environment (Klein 2007: 521). In the not-for-profit reconstruction sector, an important
distinction can be drawn between those organizations that “do with” and those that “do for”
(Putnam 2000: 116): organizations like Habitat for Humanity, for example, do with by requiring
that families dedicate hundreds of hours of “sweat equity” into their future homes (Habitat for
Humanity 2010). Organizations that “do for” not only do not improve the situation: their
“misguided efforts to help” have a tendency to exacerbate the problem, as they remedy
symptoms but “mask the source of [the poor’s] suffering” (Falconer 2010: 69). Blind
participation in reconstruction, then, can be dangerous, and individuals, non-profit organizations,
and for-profit firms must seek their own obsolescence as they work, looking forward to the day
their job is no longer necessary.
Seeking Holistic Recovery
Studies exist that specifically address “holistic” approaches to reconstruction; (Monday et
al. 2001 and Wisner & Adams 2003 cited in Wisner et al. 2004: 354). Experience tells us that
such methodologies are not easy (ibid.: 355-256). There are many challenges to capitalizing on
the opportunities presented by disaster and achieving the eleven objectives outlined in this and
the previous chapter. Compromises must always be struck: should responders fill immediate
needs or take time to plan? Address the needs of individuals or those of the community? Seek
consensus or move forward without total agreement? There are no obvious answers, except
perhaps that flexibility is paramount and that no two disasters (or disaster communities) are so
alike that the successes of one can be blindly applied to others. On paper these objectives make
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for a stronger, more equal, and less vulnerable society. They must now be applied to the chaos of
real disasters and their respectful relief and reconstruction efforts. We turn then to two case
studies of American communities recently devastated by disaster, each striking its own motley
path through the complexities of recovery.
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Chapter 6: Bridging the Gap—An Application of Theory to Reality “To subject to scrutiny the mechanisms which render life painful, even untenable, is not to neutralize them; to bring to light contradictions is not to resolve them.” Pierre Bourdieu Quoted in Farmer 2005: 224 “Analysis means bringing out the truth, no matter how clumsy or embarrassing or inexpedient. It means documenting, as Neier recently put it, 'who did what to whom, and when?' Strategy asks a different question: What is to be done?” Paul Farmer 2005: 230
While there are clearly wrong ways to provide disaster relief and run reconstruction
programs, there is no singular correct method. The goals of just relief and just reconstruction,
much like Galtung's definitions of peace and violence (1969), are specific enough to exclude
actions that squelch positive contributions of emergent individuals and groups and fail to capture
the opportunities presented to challenge and fix social wrongs, but broad enough that every
individual and group participating in disaster response can find their own way of practicing
them—and indeed they must, as the aftermath of disaster leaves no time for micromanagement.
Do the concepts investigated here find a home in the chaos of actual disaster response?
Answering this question is the final goal of this work. There is no timeline, no one expected
series of events that occurs in the response effort to every disaster. Moreover, it may perhaps be
incorrect to even name the numerous actions that occur after a disaster as one singular response
“effort”: in reality we find many people moving simultaneously but individually towards similar
goals, whose work overlaps and conjoins at some points but not at others. Response is a
multifaceted, chaotic reality on which it is difficult to impose structure. What, then, do just relief
and just reconstruction really look like?
Over the last six months, I have explored the disaster response processes of two
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American cities recently devastated by natural hazard events. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck
Florida and then the Southern Coast of the United States, causing damage in Louisiana,
Mississippi, and parts of Alabama. The decimation of New Orleans was particularly severe due
to the flooding that followed. Two years later, a tornado warning was issued for twenty counties
in Kansas. The storm system caused damage in a number of those counties, and one tornado it
produced, 1.5 miles wide and the first in US history strong enough to warrant an EF5 rating on
the newly minted Enhanced Fujita scale, decimated the town of Greensburg.
I have studied the successes and failures of disaster response in the most populous and
densely damaged city affected by each of these hazards—New Orleans, Louisiana, and
Greensburg, Kansas—culminating in a series of on-site interviews conducted in January, 2010.34
The thoughts and experiences of those I interviewed have been relayed here to the best of
my ability, augmented by texts and films which retell many other first-person accounts. In the
From January 5th to January 12th, I conducted nineteen interviews in New Orleans with twenty-
five individuals, including city officials, leaders of neighborhood recovery groups, local
academics, and an insurance adjuster. From January 13th to January 21st, I conducted eleven
interviews in Greensburg with thirteen members of that small community, ranging from the
Mayor and ex-Mayor to the County Historian, employees of a nonprofit organization, and one
member of my own generation, a college student who had been attending high school in
Greensburg at the time of the tornado. The interviews, recorded using a hand-held digital voice
recorder, were transcribed by various Goucher College students hired by the Peace Studies
Program.
34 Three interviews were conducted earlier. In December 2008, I spoke via telephone with Laurel Ryan, a program
specialist for FEMA. In October 2009, I met with Howard County Fire Chief Charlie Sharpe at his offices in Columbia, Maryland. In December 2009, I spent an afternoon discussing disaster relief with Jim Stevenson, a Mass Care Manger with the American Red Cross, in Marin, California.
Cohen-Price 77
next two chapters, the reader will find only infrequent citations referring to published materials.
Where interview subjects are quoted directly or information from a specific interview is utilized,
the name of the interviewee can be found in text. Where multiple interviewees, multiple
published works, or a combination of both agree on factual information, I have deemed that
information common knowledge and omitted a citation.
The purpose of the next two chapters is not to retell the entire story of either disaster, nor
to address every facet of emergency response. My goal is simply to use the oral histories I have
gathered to begin to investigate the intricacies of disaster response. I am indebted to those who
shared their time and memories with me, as well as to the Goucher Peace Studies Program,
which funded both my travel and the transcription process: I would never have been able to
complete this project without them. Thank you.
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Chapter 7: The City that Care Forgot One cubic meter of water weighs approximately one ton.
The story of New Orleans' most recent engagement with disaster has been told and retold
many times. In August of 2005, a tropical storm named Katrina moved northwest from the
Atlantic Ocean towards the Louisiana coastline. After roughing up Miami and other parts of
Coastal Florida, Katrina was upgraded to a Category 3 hurricane on Friday, August 26th. The next
day, as Katrina continued to move directly towards New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin issued a
voluntary evacuation order and many residents with vehicles began to leave the city. Sunday,
August 28th, the National Hurricane Center upgraded Katrina to a Category 5 storm, and Nagin
issued a mandatory evacuation of the city. On Monday, Katrina, downgraded to a Category 3,
made landfall just east of New Orleans.
City officials, including Chief Administrative Officer Dr. Brenda Hatfield, thought the
city had gotten lucky, narrowly avoiding disaster for the umpteenth time: “Right after the
hurricane, we came out and surveyed the city. We had a great deal of wind damage; there was
flooding in some spots, but very little.” As the day progressed, however, the levees and
floodwalls that protected New Orleans began to fail: the Industrial Canal, a shipping channel
which separated the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East from the rest of the city, as well as
two drainage canals on the northwest side of the city, the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals,
breached. Additionally, dozens of levees protecting the outermost edges of the city were
overtopped by storm surges of up to twelve feet. Hatfield's deputy continued, “It wasn't until
after someone said the levies broke and everyone looked at each other because we understood
what that meant. … That's when it [became] a whole different ballgame.”
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All told, 80% of the city was underwater by the end of the day (FEMA 2005). That water,
mixed with sewage and other pollutants, sat for days or weeks before it was totally pumped out
of the city. Little more explanation of the hazard itself will be attempted here, although such in-
depth accounts can be found in other texts.35
New Orleans meets Katrina
Instead, seeking accounts of just relief and just
reconstruction or attempts at their implementation, we turn to how individuals—some in official
capacities, others responsible to no one but themselves—responded to the disaster that followed.
I investigate four aspects of the recovery process: the importance (1) of access to resources and
(2) of good, grounded leadership, (3) the limitations of local government to respond, and (4) the
difficulties of community-directed reconstruction planning in a place as diverse and damaged as
New Orleans.
“New Orleans was a sick city before the storm,” says high school history professor,
author, and head of the Louisiana Historical Society Howard Hunter. Indeed, New Orleans has a
long history of both distrust and vulnerability. Its racial history is complex, with conflict dating
back to the settlement of the French and continuing through the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil
War. Like other southern cities, racial tension can be high. But, due to its European and
Caribbean roots, the city tends to segregate itself less than others, at least in terms of cultural
participation. According to Hunter, “what's hardwired in[to this] city is a distrust of the other: a
distrust of Americans [by the French Creoles], American distrust of Creole, distrust of Irish and
German, and then the Italians. …[However,] people in New Orleans have always been able to
get along pretty well.” So racial stresses and the structural violence of race-based inequality,
although unusually latent much of the time due in part to participation in shared cultural
phenomena, always existed. 35 See McQuaid & Schleifstein 2006, Horne 2006, and Brinkley 2006 for such accounts.
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Figure 7.1: Severity of New Orleans Flooding
Flood Depth from Hurricane Katrina
Image from NOCSF 2007: 27
Huge economic disparities existed within city lines. The thriving economy that revolved
first around buying, selling, and shipping cotton and sugar and later around a bustling seaport
complex that employed tens of thousands of workers became a computerized container port in
the 1980s, still a crucial trading hub but no longer a large employer. A city built for 650,000 by
2005 had less than 500,000 residents, more than a quarter of whom were poor. Kevin Brown,
born and raised in Holly Grove and the executive director of the Trinity Christian Community,
that neighborhood's longstanding neighborhood association, speaks to the structural violence of a
shrinking economy. The shortage of jobs, added to a history of racial tension and a majority
black population that elects black leaders, caused significant inequalities of access to resources
and services based on economic class differences to emerge: “when you've got African
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Americans in power and yet the conditions [of inequality] haven't changed, it then ceases to be a
racism thing and becomes a class thing.” Described as racism, classism, neither, or both, high
unemployment and substantial inequalities of wealth across and within neighborhoods are two
indicators of structural violence in a city plagued with the disease.
Hunter further explains that New Orleans is bound heavily in neighborhood identities
that, when combined with strong race- and class-based lines, can create a “kind of tribalism,”
especially in crisis. And New Orleans has no shortage of traditions that foster that tribalism, from
neighborhood-based festivals to regular hurricane warnings and evacuations. When Katrina
began to bear down on New Orleans, then, the city was an amalgamation of tightly-knit
communities with a fair amount of distrust of city government (after years of corruption) and of
each other. In the words of Putnam, New Orleans had a surplus of thick trust, but very little thin
trust.
The city was also particularly vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. The expansion of
the early 20th century had pushed residents off of the higher ground near the banks of the
Mississippi to lower elevation areas closer to Lake Pontchartrain and further east, towards Lake
Borgne and the Gulf of Mexico. The drying and paving over of wetlands pushed soils down even
further, resulting in a city shaped like a bowl floating in a bathtub full of water – its walls, an
aging network of levees and floodwalls, kept the city dry even though much of the land sat well
below sea-level (Tibbets 2006). Many studies (and one recent federal court decision36
36 See the 19 November, 2009 US District Court ruling, in which the United States Army Corps of Engineers was
found liable for flood damage in the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish due to the Corps’ failure to maintain the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet canal (Robertson 2009).
) delve
deeply into the levee and pump failures and the negligence those failures implied; these studies
also will not be discussed here. It is in this complex context that New Orleans prepared for,
evacuated from, and responded to the Katrina disaster event.
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Connecting to Resources
If New Orleans is shaped like a bowl, Broadmoor is the bottom of that bowl. The
neighborhood of about 7,500 people is in the geographic center of the crescent-shaped upriver
section of New Orleans, nestled between Claiborne Avenue and Earhart Boulevard (see Figure
7.1). According to Jonathan Graboyes, a post-Katrina New Orleans transplant and the first full-
time employee of the Broadmoor Development Corporation, the neighborhood is also
demographically representative of the city as a whole, in terms of race and poverty. Broadmoor
flooded to the tune of six to eight feet, and every house in the neighborhood had to be gutted.
Since the storm, however, the neighborhood has rebounded stunningly, with little help from the
city, state, or federal government. Broadmoor is noted by government officials and activists alike
as the success story of community-generated recovery: in a word, just reconstruction. How did
Broadmoor manage this feat?
It is clear that a principle need in disaster response is the rapid deployment of resources to
locations where they are needed most. While prepared responders and rebuilders armed with the
right tools and adequate funding sources are not by definition participating in just relief or
reconstruction (they can use their tools and money for a variety of positive or negative ends),
access to such resources is crucial if any justice is to be found in recovery. On Sunday, August
28th, the day before most of the flooding occurred, FEMA Director Michael Brown told his
subordinates, “if you feel like you need to [do something], go ahead and do it. I'll figure out
some way to justify it. Tell Congress or whoever else it is that wants to yell at me. Just let them
yell at me. Don't worry about it—in fact, I don't want any of these processes in our way” (qtd. in
McQuaid & Schleifstein 2006: 180-182). Yet somewhere down the line, this message failed to
reach the right people. Access to the funding, expertise, and permission to take necessary actions
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was hard to come by, for neighborhood leaders and city leadership alike. Broadmoor was no
exception, and received little to no help from the government; but, unlike most other
neighborhoods, they rapidly charted their own course.
Figure 7.2: “Shrinking the Footprint”
The circle in the southwest corner of the map encapsulates the Broadmoor neighborhood. Image from Wallace, Roberts & Todd 2006: Figure 30
After the hurricane, Mayor Nagin contracted the city planning firm Wallace, Roberts, &
Todd to author the Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) plan—the city’s first attempt to create a
holistic methodology for redevelopment. The Urban Land Institute (ULI) was tasked by the firm
to develop the land use chapter of BNOB. ULI’s initial recommendations, released in November
2005, included “shrinking the footprint” of the city in response to low expectations of population
and job growth, as well as the extreme vulnerability of the lowest-lying neighborhoods. ULI
argued that the city not immediately rebuild certain sections of the city and eventually convert
some of the lowest terrain to green space that would act as a natural storm drain (Russell 2006;
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Carr 2005) (See Figure 7.2).
The Broadmoor Improvement Association, which has in some form existed since the 1920s,
was catapulted into action by the seeming dismissal of the entire neighborhood by the city
government. The appearance that the Urban Land Institute wanted to turn their home into wetlands
ignited neighborhood residents. Graboyes says that,
People woke up early January 2006 and saw … [that] Broadmoor is a green dot and going to be demolished … and become a drainage park for the rest of the city. … That Green Dot recommendation was ultimately the fuel of the fire for the community to come together, organize and start to consider … what [we] need to do to insure that this community does come back.
Although the plan was never adopted (see footnote 39), the controversy provided the trigger
event that the community needed to rally together, and the long pedigree of the Improvement
Association and its director, Latoya Cantrell, gave the group the legitimacy to lead that rallying
cry. But what was and continues to be the greatest success of Broadmoor is the human and
financial capital the neighborhood has been able to attract and utilize with little assistance from
the city government.
The Improvement Association, and its post-storm cousin the Broadmoor Development
Corporation, quickly built relationships with a local church, the Annunciation Mission, which
had just refocused its mission to serving the needs of its newly disparate and homeless
community. The combined front began early after the storm to bring volunteer groups from
around the country to gut and later rebuild houses. While the city had hired contractors to gut
flooded homes throughout the city, Graboyes recounts that the church’s volunteers gutted 40% of
the neighborhood's homes far sooner and more effectively than the contracted businesses would
have. Most significantly, as the city struggled with multiple iterations of unsuccessful and
debatably community-driven recovery plans (discussed in later pages), Broadmoor's early
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successes piqued the attention of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
Graboyes reports that the school sent a delegation to New Orleans to provide the expertise
needed to create a neighborhood recovery plan: “they did not try to push an agenda; they saw the
organic growth of the community to galvanize around the process and [only] provided the
technical expertise for the planning.”
By June 2006, six months before the city completed a master plan that garnered at least
some degree of consensus, Broadmoor had published its own cohesive document to guide the
reconstruction and rebirth of the neighborhood. Four years later, Harvard continues to participate
in urban planning and organizing efforts in the neighborhood, students from countless other
schools travel regularly to Broadmoor to lend their technical knowledge or simply provide labor,
and six full-time AmeriCorps members assist the Improvement Association and Development
Corporation's small staffs.
Broadmoor represents both wonderful success and total failure. As of January, 2010,
approximately 85% of Broadmoor's properties had been rebuilt or were actively under
construction, a number likely rivaled, at least among flooded areas, by only the far wealthier and
homogeneous Lakeview neighborhood. Displaying good leadership and flexibility, select
members of the Broadmoor neighborhood built partnerships with community institutions, sought
input from as many residents as possible, and connected resource-rich assets with individuals and
organizations on the ground willing to work to fulfill the needs of individuals and the wider
community. Unisa Barrie, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority project manager who
works with Broadmoor, speaks highly of the neighborhood's self-organization:
They bring partners to the table. Whatever they don’t have as far as capacity they know how to get … whether it is partnership from universities across the country to bring planners out to the city, or work[ing] with folks within the city to help them build that capacity. It is because of … their willingness to work with folk other than just within that
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neighborhood, in my opinion, that has [made] them the model…. [They] work with people within the neighborhood, while also looking outside for … best practices.
On January 6th, 2010, the day I visited Broadmoor, students were attending their first day of
classes at the neighborhood's newly completed elementary school. Word of the neighborhood's
success has spread beyond New Orleans: on top of receiving much media recognition,
Broadmoor was visited by leaders of communities in Iowa looking to use their model of
community-generated (and community-generating) recovery after the 2008 floods. In short,
Broadmoor is a prime example of community-minded leaders working in the aftermath of
disaster to find and deploy resources that facilitate effective and just recovery. The gains they
have made have directly combated pre-existing and disaster-created iterations of structural
violence, by drawing focus to issues of safety, building relationships between neighborhood
residents, and recruiting funds for a new school and, in the future, a new and expanded library.
Yet Broadmoor is also an example of a neighborhood all but abandoned by government.
The resources freed by FEMA Director Michael Brown's directive to do what had to be done
regardless of rules or restrictions, if there were any, never trickled down to the Broadmoor
Improvement Association. Like other neighborhoods throughout the city, Broadmoor received
little help—resources, funds, or expertise—from government officials and not until long after the
storm did the city government reach out to partner with the Improvement Association or the
Development Corporation. Moreover, there has been no indication that the city has sought to
replicate Broadmoor's model, even though doing so would be in the city's best interest, as
Broadmoor's work has if anything shifted financial and organizational burdens away from the
government. Did Broadmoor work because residents were convinced that the city no longer
wanted them? Can the do-it-yourself spirit that continues to define the Improvement Association
and their constant stream of volunteers be fostered alongside government assistance and affective
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city-wide planning, or only in opposition to perceived abandonment by the powers that be?
These questions remain to be answered. It is clear, however, that the ability to locate, recruit, and
distribute physical and financial assets in the best interest of affected communities is a much-
needed skill, one that should be able to be fostered in the contexts of vulnerability mitigation and
disaster events, and facilitated by the government by making public resources easily understood
and readily accessible.
“And when it is done, the people will say we did it ourselves”
The Holly Grove neighborhood lies just west of Mid-City, on the edge of Orleans Parish.
The entire neighborhood sits at or below sea level, which means that as the storm surge that
preceded Katrina raised the water level in Lake Pontchartrain and the city's numerous drainage
canals, the entire community was put at risk. Like in Broadmoor, every building in the
neighborhood flooded; the worst received eight feet of water (see Figure 7.1). Also like
Broadmoor, Holly Grove has a historic and respected community development organization that
stepped in to facilitate recovery after the storm. In 1998, when Kevin Brown took the position of
Executive Director of the Trinity Christian Community (TCC), he replaced the only other
director the organization has ever had: his father. Brown, against orders from the National Guard,
returned to Holly Grove before the waters had receded. He immediately started planning the
recovery of his neighborhood, and the TCC (which had for decades worked with families in the
neighborhood) immediately became a fundamental part of the neighborhood's recovery. In fact,
according to Brown, since Katrina the TCC remains the only institutional actor of any
significance in Holly Grove:
We’ve done our own housing. … We put our own street signs up all over neighborhood. We took the signs off the neutral grounds and cut them up and repainted them with volunteers and pasted them up all over the place … so that insurance adjusters could find their way around and contractors could find their way around. As a result our
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neighborhood came back faster than many other neighborhoods…. We built new homes; we rehabbed old homes. We brought thousands and thousands of volunteers in. The very first thing we did was … distribute relief supplies. We made our own showers, they were cold showers granted, but we made our own showers so that the volunteer teams could come stay in [the TCC] building.… They slept in the cold; there was no power; they took cold showers downstairs [and] had their meals underneath the tent; we had to go get ice very day to keep the food cold [and] we cooked on propane stoves. We did whatever it took to bring back this neighborhood.
Trinity Christian Community began its effort to serve its community's post-disaster needs the
moment Brown snuck back into the city to evaluate the damage. Its staff continues to this day to
address housing reconstruction and legal advocacy issues, run after-school programs and
leadership development summer camps, and bring seventy AmeriCorps members to work in the
city every year. The TCC is leading the fight to rebuild Holly Grove both physically and
culturally. The organization makes just reconstruction a reality, performing tasks necessary for
the rebirth of the community (many of which fall well within the traditional purview of the
government) in partnership with its residents and ex-residents.
Holly Grove is lucky to have Kevin Brown. He acts as a strong leader and facilitator of
community empowerment and activism, and splits his time between running his organization and
“fly[ing] all over the country begging for money. Trying to make hay while the sun shines, you
know?” As a former psychotherapist, Brown understands what crisis does to individuals and
communities. As a long-time organizer and child of the neighborhood, he understands what crisis
meant for Holly Grove. “People come in from the outside and call us backwards,” he says, but
the neighborhood “trust[s] us on a level that they wouldn't trust somebody coming in from the
outside.” This trust is important, and how leaders use that trust plays significantly into the
success of just response work. Where members of the community are occupied with looking for
part-time employment in the city they were evacuated to, sorting through moldy closets in search
of family memories, or the simple act of surviving wherever they are, responsibility for the
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community is automatically turned over to whoever will take it. Thus it is crucial that
neighborhood leaders claim that responsibility with integrity.
The TCC has continued to offer the services it always has, but since the storm it has
grown immensely. Now, the TCC and two organizations it has incubated since Katrina (a
Community Development Corporation and a Neighborhood Association) have instituted a block
captain program to keep track of and get input from residents, started an education committee
that continues to advocate for the reconstruction of the neighborhood's school, and continues to
work to increase commerce and decrease crime in the neighborhood. What is happening in Holly
Grove is truly an emergence of many leaders and dispersion of agency, but it would not have
been nearly so successful without Kevin Brown. When we spoke, Brown paraphrased for me the
last line of the Tao Te Ching's seventeenth chapter, which considers the qualities of a good
leader: “and when it is over, the people will say 'we did it ourselves.'”
In Brown's words, although Holly Grove residents were victims of a structural violent
reconstruction process, they found ways to rebuild themselves: “the city failed my neighborhood.
And it continues to fail my neighborhood, both actively and passively. Despite that fact, we have
formed our own kind of shadow government and are making this neighborhood work.” All
governments, even shadow governments, require leaders. Agencies attempting to govern with no
official status especially need strong leaders who can garner respect and accomplish tasks with
little to no resources. In Broadmoor, Graboyes says that “[local] leadership is key. … Having
people from the community leading the process is how it stays credible.” Brown himself notes
that “every successful neighborhood that came back had a neighborhood champion.” Michael
Robinson, an organizer with Jericho Road Housing Services in the Central City neighborhood,
agrees: “If you look at neighborhoods that have a decent amount of leadership, they were able to
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get some things done. If you don’t have … quality leadership, I don’t care how much money you
throw at the situation. It’s not getting done.” Indeed, especially when resources are hard to track
down and rapid decisions must be made in the best interest of a community too busy surviving to
freely give input, strong and empathetic leadership is key to understanding community needs,
helping generate a vision for the future, and making hard choices around reconstruction, all
necessary to combat structural violence and effectively seek justice. This is true on all levels,
from the neighborhood to upper echelons of the federal government.
The Pariah's Story
Many New Orleans community leaders, residents, and authors place a very heavy portion
of blame for disaster preparedness and response failures on Mayor Nagin and the city
government. Much of this criticism is warranted. But the city faced its own set of debilitating
challenges that deserve investigation as well. In Katrina's aftermath, local officials often had
their hands tied by bureaucratic realities that made it impossible to serve their citizenry. What
stood in their way? Is it possible to make changes to government to enable them to better act in
times of crises?
The vast majority of a city government's income comes from locally levied taxes. New
Orleans, like most American cities, could not afford to maintain much of a surplus even before
the storm: its twenty million dollar a month payroll was essentially financed month-to-month
(Hauser 2005). “The city didn't really have any money,” the city's Deputy Chief Administrative
Officer Cynthia Sylvain-Lear put simply. The mayor's ability to govern, then, was decimated
after the hurricane both by the evacuation and diaspora of most of his workforce, and the
disappearance of his tax base. Retired Marine Corps Colonel Jerry Sneed, the Director of the
city's Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness, said that because of their
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inability to collect taxes on transactions that were no longer occurring, “the longer we wait[ed] to
get our citizens back, the harder it [was] to get the community back up and running.” Especially
hard-hit were the restaurant, retail, and tourist sectors, the mainstays of local tax generation.
Days after the storm, as political leaders saw the need for government services expand
before their eyes, the city of New Orleans laid off half its 6,000 employees because it could no
longer afford them. This catch-22 was made worse by one provision of the Stafford Act, the
federal law that governs disaster management: the law stipulates that federal assistance funds can
only be used for emergency-related overtime pay, not regular salaries (Hauser 2005). Without the
income to afford even baseline salaries, the city was forced to slim down. With half their usual
staff, the city simply did not have the resources to make the infrastructural repairs necessary to
open New Orleans for business once again. Their inability to allow taxable markets to reopen in
the city, however, denied them the income needed to make the repairs, creating a self-reinforcing
cycle that prolonged the recovery process.
The resources the city did find were dedicated to projects crucial to the functioning of
government but not highly prioritized by neighborhood groups or individuals rebuilding, giving
the city the appearance that they were doing little. Sylvain-Lear notes that “The [City] Council
approved us moving money from wherever we could find it to get started with [rebuilding our]
criminal justice [infrastructure]. … People … said, 'well, why'd you start with [those]
building[s]?' [But] you've got to be able to have jury trials,” especially if fraudulent contractors
are ever to be to be held accountable. The city's first priority, along with making emergency
repairs to breached floodwalls, reinforcing eroded levees, and pumping water out of flooded
areas, was public safety, a cost-intensive endeavor that demanded most of the city's focus.
Additionally, the city’s tools of governance were completely destroyed. Sylvain-Lear
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explains the difficulties the city government had responding in a city with no running water,
electricity, or fuel:
A few days [after the storm] we were back in the Hyatt [Hotel, across the street from City Hall]. And so, no heat, no water, no much of anything, we turned the ballrooms into offices. Military was in there, disaster groups were in there. How they stood up all of the computers, I had no idea, but they did it within days. So a lot of the craziness we’re talking about now, [people] had to remember what had to happen in a short period of time. … We had to buy three hundred portolets [portable toilets], because you have to think about the criticals!
City employees worked tirelessly to restore city services and their own infrastructure as quickly
and efficiently as possible. As of January 2010, the city is still operating with only two thirds of
its pre-Katrina staff, and the list of incomplete or yet-to-be-tackled civic and infrastructural
reconstruction projects remains long. Yet many city buildings have been completed. Was the city
wrong to prioritize the reconstruction of the criminal justice system? Should Nagin have
allocated more early funds towards projects that directly aided community recovery, or was he
right to dedicate substantial resources towards the restoration of government functionality? These
are questions that remain unanswered.
The government's ability to practice just reconstruction by improving city infrastructure
was heavily constrained by restrictive FEMA funding regulations and the city's own insurance
woes. According to the Chief Administrative Office, while the city normally completed $50
million of capital projects each year, early estimates assigned a $400 million price tag to post-
disaster reconstruction of city buildings alone. While some of the necessary funds would come
from insurance payouts, it would have been financially impossible for the city to fully insure all
their buildings. Sylvain-Lear says, “When you do insurance on 300 buildings, you do a
reasonable level of risk. You don’t do full insurance on all 300 buildings. Well, we were
penalized for that.” More significantly, the city was especially immobilized by the way their
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insurer handled their claims. Each insured building was processed as an individual claim, with
rewards locked into the reconstruction or replacement of that property. The city, then, received
insurance funds that partially funded a percentage of every insured building but left each
potential project with a major funding gap, instead of funding the total reconstruction of a
percentage of buildings, which would have allowed the city to start rebuilding their most
important facilities sooner.
The second major source of capital funding for infrastructure projects, FEMA grants, had
many conditions of their own. One stipulation actually punished the city for using the destruction
as an opportunity to improve infrastructure. Chief Administrative Officer Dr. Brenda Hatfield,
Sylvain-Lear, and Sneed were all interviewed simultaneously. An excerpt from that conversation
explains this regulation and the city's dilemma:
Sylvain-Lear: FEMA allows us to do upgrades based on codes and standards. What FEMA will call an improved project, though, is … if we put in too many bells and whistles that didn’t exist before. [If that is the case,] FEMA will, instead of replacing the square footages … cap the amount of money that we could receive…. So we’re very careful in some of the upgrades or even the expansions that we do because we don’t have any [extra] money on the side. If they cap [their contribution], where do we find the money to add to it?
Cohen-Price: So … you can make it a little bit better, but if you make it too much better the FEMA money is gone?
Sylvain-Leer: That's right. They limit the amount of money you get. Right now if I had a fire station and I build another fire station [just like the old one] … whatever the new cost of the fire station [FEMA] will bill. Whatever that is. But if I had a fire station and I want a new fire station and it’s 20,000 more square feet than the other one, then they’ll say, “well, on paper we estimate that that is only going to cost you 2.5 million.” If I hadn’t improved it and it cost 3 million, they would pay the 3 [million]. But if I say I’m going to improve it, they cap it at 2.5 [million], if it’s really at 3 [million] it’s on me. So we are careful.
Sneed: One way to look at it is if the city owns twenty dump trucks and you lost all twenty dump trucks, FEMA gives you, not new dump trucks, [but] twenty old dump trucks even though you only have enough people to drive three of the dump trucks. So [we can't] get three new dump trucks, which we really need; FEMA would say no we need to give you twenty old ones. … [For example,] we were in the process of getting a
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new [shortwave emergency services] radio system [before the storm]. We lost radios out the gazoo. Well [FEMA] wanted to replace them with the old, antiquated radios that our police, fire, EMS used [previously]. They wanted to replace a system that we were getting rid of, but had not gotten rid of it completely. … [We] finally convinced FEMA why would you go backwards? Move forward to the new radio system. So we finally won that one.
Hatfield: The fire engines! There were older ones, and they were looking for used, old fire engines because they did not want to give us—
Sneed: Because [FEMA told us that we] could not buy the new ones!
Hatfield: The same with buses.
Sylvain-Lear: Ambulances, same way.
Hatfield: I mean, crazy rules! There’s a whole need to restructure this whole federal emergency management administration system. And the Stafford Act itself.
So the city, too, like residents and community groups, was denied easy access to resources that
would have allowed them to act flexibly and rapidly in the face of immense structural problems
caused by (and uncovered by) Katrina. This is, in a phrase, one more form of structural violence:
the greater federal disaster relief structure in which cities act has limitations that profoundly
affect the city’s ability to take care of its citizens. To echo Dr. Hatfield, changes must be made to
this system to give local leaders the freedom—and the money—they need to effectively respond
and rebuild. However, in light of New Orleans' history of government corruption, it is clear why
the federal government may be averse to making such changes.
Community-Driven Visions and Diversity: Oil and Water?
In January, 2010, the city's new master plan received final approval from the Planning
Commission and headed to the City Council. Approved with revisions in August 2010, the
master plan is a first in a city that historically “doesn't believe in planning,” according to
Professor of Environmental Planning and Hazard Mitigation at the University of New Orleans
Dr. Erthea Nance (Eggler 2010 [i, ii]). While it is the city’s first plan, it was not the first attempt.
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A master plan had been in the works since the early 1990s, says Executive Director of the City
Planning Commission Yolanda Rodriguez. She explains that a decade after starting the master
plan process, the document remained incomplete, unfocused, and not a priority:
Prior to Katrina we had a series of thirteen elements that the master plan was divided into. The city's approach at that time was to look at them as mini-studies. … Right after Katrina, one of the things that the commissioners did was that they looked at the master plan in progress and said at this pace, we're never going to finish. … We were looking at a land use plan that was done in 1999.
The new plan, one visionary, cohesive document as opposed to overlapping “mini-studies,” is
married to a Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance that carries the force of law; in other words, if
the plan is approved, the city will have the legal muscle needed to keep development in line with
the document. This guiding statement, however, comes five years into a not particularly cohesive
or well-guided recovery effort. What took so long? Does the plan truly represent the needs and
visions of New Orleans residents?
After Katrina, New Orleans went through four distinct attempts at planning a cohesive
recovery effort before it stumbled upon one that most could agree upon, although it too was met
with criticism.37
37 The Master Plan is not a Recovery Plan. For a description of each plan and links to the original recovery
planning documents, visit
The first plan was published before the end of 2005 at the behest of Mayor
Nagin by a group of experts christened the Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) Commission. As
discussed on previous pages, the most controversial aspect of the BNOB plan—and perhaps the
single biggest controversy of post-Katrina planning—came out of the Land Use Subcommittee,
which worked with the Urban Land Institute (ULI) to create a new land use vision for the city.
ULI called for a prioritization of reconstruction efforts in areas less heavily damaged by
flooding, essentially shrinking the city's footprint to areas more easy to repair and less vulnerable
http://www.nolaplans.com/. The plan not discussed here is the FEMA ESF-14 plan, published with little fanfare one year after Katrina and, although holistic, received little attention.
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to future storms, at least until more residents moved back.38
ULI’s initial recommendations including delaying infrastructure investment and even a
potential moratorium on private building permits in neighborhoods of the lowest elevation:
Broadmoor, St. Roch, much of New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the Lower Ninth Ward. Some of
these neighborhoods, after further study, would be converted into green space that would serve
simultaneously as parkland and a natural storm drain (Carr 2005, Russell 2006). Although the
BNOB authors eventually scaled back their recommendations (the final draft included much
greyer wording and allows any landowner to rebuild on their land if they see fit), the damage had
already been done.
39
The Urban Land Institute … came up with a plan that basically put green dots in areas that were between eight and fifteen feet below sea level. … They made the mistake of not really explaining what those green dots meant. When there’s confusion, people assume the worst because of how much mistrust we have already. So, the green dots were Broadmoor, the Lower Ninth Ward, and New Orleans East, and so, the residents saw these green dots in their neighborhood and were like, “What … is going on? Why are you going to turn my neighborhood into a park?”
The interpretation that the Mayor wanted to turn some of the poorest and
blackest neighborhoods into drainage basins quickly spread distrust of the plan. Nathan
Rothstein, a young activist who moved to New Orleans soon after Katrina, explains the anger
that arose:
38 In months after the storm, only approximately 75,000 of the 485,000 pre-Katrina residents had returned to New
Orleans (Wallace, Roberts, and Todd 2006: Figure 11). Estimates place the immediate disaster-related loss of residents at 300,000 and jobs at 160,000 (Carr 2005).
39 After opposition from residents and the Mayor, such recommendations were scaled back severely before the final draft of BNOB was released in early 2006 (Donze 2005). Figure 7.2, from that final draft, was accompanied with the text:
We have identified a number of areas, shown by dashed circles, within which there is potential for future parkland. The circles are large to indicate that we have not identified properties; those will be determined with citizen involvement in a process described later. The new parks should perform many functions: they provide recreation and open space, they cool the land, they produce oxygen, and they act as part of the city-wide storm water protection and management system. (Wallace, Roberts & Todd 2006: 9)
It must be noted that due to controversy about the BNOB plan, including allegations that New Orleans residents were asked for far too little input, it was never implemented. The plan was later supplanted by the Unified New Orleans Plan. See Carr 2005, Dozne 2005, and Russell 2006. See also http://www.nola.com/katrina/pdf/112905_Urban_Land_plan.pdf and http://www.nolaplans.com/timeline/ .
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Neither the smaller footprint nor the urban drainage plan sat well with city residents or the New
Orleans diaspora still scattered around the country. Also damaging to BNOB, as well as the plan
that followed, known as the Lambert plan, was the perception of planners and imported
consulting experts as outsiders. Indeed, the Urban Land Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based
firm (Wallace Roberts & Todd, LLC, the primary author of the BNOB plan, is based in
Philadelphia) and Paul Lambert, the namesake of the Lambert Plan, runs a consultancy in Miami.
Those designing new visions for the city, in Kevin Brown's words, “call[ed] us backwards”
because they did not understand New Orleans.
The Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), published in 2007, succeeded where previous
plans had not by correcting the expert-outsider perception, seeking community input, and
creating a vision that at least a majority of New Orleanians could support. UNOP would later go
on to play a key role in the development of the new Master Plan. Graboyes mentions remarkable
applications of technology used to test concepts and gather ideas from the diaspora:
The Community Congresses that they did in four different cities with displaced New Orleans folks: America Speaks is the group that they contracted to do it. … So it’s all technology, everyone’s got their own little voting device and they put stuff up on the projector and people speak and talk about it and you get instant polling results from the people talking about it across three or four cities about how they felt, everything was simultaneously linked up: really cool stuff.
Yet many neighborhood groups and activists took issue with the process. Low turnout was
reported at the community congresses held around the country for residents who had not been
able to return home (Russell 2006). Rothstein describes similar meetings held in the city:
It was supposed to be a real neighborhood driven plan. The first meeting [in] July 2006 … was supposed to be open to the public but they did it in a room that could only hold 200 people and 500 people showed up, there were too many people there. So, from the beginning the process was flawed. … Citizens vote[d] on which planner they wanted … [but] the organizers of the plan didn’t really count votes, they were about 2 months late in actually picking the planner…. [So] the citizen input really had no basis.
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Despite the controversy, UNOP was completed sixteen months after the floodwaters receded.
Both Graboyes, case manager for the Broadmoor Development Corporation, and Brown,
Executive Director of the Trinity Christian Community in Holly Grove, note that more organized
neighborhoods had by then already abandoned the city planning process, developed their own
plans, and started building. Brown comments, “While they were planning, we were rebuilding.”
Says Graboyes, “so the plan comes up but meanwhile Broadmoor is a year into implementation
… and we’re [already] rolling really with this sort of cavalier go it ourselves mentality because
Broadmoor had already been counted out.” With capable neighborhoods already invested in their
own recovery processes, the legitimacy of UNOP was always uncertain at best.
As significant as arriving late to the scene, UNOP did not always genuinely seek the
input of potential community partners. Rothstein notes that once “the plan was set…every week
planners would meet with neighborhood groups.” Brown tells of his experience with those
planners:
The city hired their quote-unquote experts. In our case it was a man named Luke, who was an architect. We said to Luke, “We have done our own planning charrette. We can show you exactly what we want in our neighborhood.” Luke said, “Shut up. Leave it to the experts.” Now what Luke should have said … [was] “Oh My God, that’s great! Let’s sit down together and talk about it.” Now that’s the [kind of] planning that went on.
Such interactions rapidly debilitate just disaster response work: it makes little sense for two
individuals, both trying to rebuild the same city, to fight against each other instead of partner
with each other to promote recovery. Humility, then, and constantly remembering that successful
recovery is far more important than which plan or leader gets the credit for it, is the key to using
disaster response work to find justice. Brown ended our interview by telling me:
So we had a city planning process. Big freaking deal. Who are your leaders? What have they done? How can we have this wealth? How can we empower these neighborhoods? What can we do to make the neighborhoods feel like they own their own neighborhood? We [in Holly Grove] don’t even own our own neighborhood. We can’t open up our own
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school, we can’t get our senior center back up and running, we can’t put up our own bus stop. Empower the neighborhoods. There’s a great group of people back here that are doing great stuff. Help them do it. … There are some real heroes in this city…. They're in the neighborhoods; they're the guys who made things happen. They're amazing people who have done it with very little ego, just a love for the people.
Much like this work would be incomplete without an application to real response scenarios, post-
disaster planning will never work unless it is truly done in the context of (and therefore in
partnership with) the communities it is trying to rebuild.
Lessons from New Orleans
The windy road of disaster response and reconstruction in New Orleans has been rife
with obstacles and mirages, false senses of simplicity or hopes of quick recovery. The four topics
investigated here—access to resources, local leadership, the political reality in which local
governments operate, and difficulties with collecting community input—are only a few of the
many intricacies of New Orleans’ complicated path to recovery. Nearly five years later, as many
streets in New Orleans remain potholed, and flood lines and search and rescue markings are still
visible on the outside of houses across the city, it is clear that work in New Orleans will not be
complete for quite some time. Much like Katrina made blatantly visible many of New Orleans'
latent problems, the first half-decade of New Orleans' recovery has uncovered many truths about
disaster response work. Just as the city's stakeholders had and still have a profound opportunity
to address those newly-manifested afflictions, so too does the disaster response community have
a remarkable chance to learn from the success and failures of the New Orleans recovery process.
The utilization of both opportunities—making changes in New Orleans and to the greater
disaster relief and reconstruction agenda, would be amazing steps forward for justice.
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Chapter 8: Anywhere, USA “It’s not uncommon for tornadoes in the Midwest to tear up a small rural town, and you usually get back a few metal buildings and some basic stuff, and that’s as far as it goes. But it didn’t happen here that way. … A tornado just came through … and it did 3.7 million dollars worth of improvement.” Bob Wetmore Executive Director Kiowa County Chamber of Commerce Kiowa County Economic Development Corporation
Three months after Katrina, Chris Rose, the New Orleans journalist and author known by
many as the city's unofficial Poet Laureate, lamented the slow pace of reconstruction efforts in
his city: “This is not just Anywhere USA we're talking about. This is New Orleans” (Rose 2007:
98). One and a half years later, a disaster of similar proportion struck a town that was, to nearly
everyone in the country except its residents, Anywhere, USA. Greensburg, a community of 1,500
one hundred miles west of Wichita in southwestern Kansas, was struck by the largest tornado
ever to directly hit an American town on May 4th, 2007 (Greensburg 2008). The tornado reached
Greensburg at 9:45 in the evening, then quickly moved north, following Main Street through the
city. Most residents emerged from tornado shelters and basements to find their community
completely in ruin: ninety-five percent of the town's structures, over 1,000 homes and
businesses, and all but one municipal building were destroyed. Ten Greensburg residents, as well
as two residents from surrounding towns, were killed. Bob Dixson, elected Mayor in 2008,
recalls that after the wind stopped howling,
I stood up in my basement and turned 360 degrees and all I saw was rubble. There was no roof, no walls, nothing left of my house. The first thing you think is, “Am I the only one left?” Because it looked like a bomb went off. Meteorologists who’ve researched this say [that it was] like that, because the energy in this storm was like a nuclear bomb.
Residents that were able climbed out of the wreckage of their pulverized homes and worked their
way up to Route 54, the four-lane highway that ran through the town. Ambulances rushed to
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Greensburg from nearby towns to care for victims, while Police and Fire Departments began
search and rescue efforts. The Red Cross opened shelters in the school gymnasiums to the west
and east of Greensburg, and a three day mandatory evacuation was ordered as state and local
officials worked to plug gas leaks, find bodies, and assess damage.
Figure 8.1: Greensburg, Immediately after Tornado
Image from http://christophermattix.wordpress.com/
After coming to terms with the damage, the community has since embarked on a mission
never attempted on this great a scale in an American city: to rebuild their entire town as
environmentally sustainably as possible. Yet despite this achievement, essentially no significant
scholarship exists about Greensburg and its recovery. Besides for a cable television show
broadcast on the channel Planet Green, which more than one town leader derided as “pure
Hollywood,” there are only a few articles in American and European newspapers and magazines,
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each printing a similar short story.
Although everyone recounts a slightly different version, the story of Greensburg's
remarkably organized and effective response to this disaster is best told by its citizens. While
adrenaline and stress have blurred their memories and details occasionally do not agree, their
descriptions of the physical, social, and emotional processes of disaster relief and reconstruction
are remarkably similar and overwhelmingly positive. This chapter investigates here some of the
intricacies of Greensburg's recovery.
Front Porch People
Like most rural towns, Greensburg has withered over the last few decades. The
historically biggest employment sectors, agriculture and booster stations that re-compress natural
gas traveling through pipelines across the plains, have both been revolutionized by technological
innovations that resulted in the layoffs of hundreds of employees. Ed Shoenberger, County
Historian and the keeper of town's cemetery, tells of the town's history:
I think the [population] high was around 3,000. That was pre-1900. [But] Oklahoma opened up, the land of milk and honey, so people just left and population got down to about 300 around the turn of the [twentieth] century. As people found out that Oklahoma was not much better than what they left they started coming back…. And then they put [in] these [natural gas] compressor stations … and so that was a drawing to get people back. When [my wife and I] came here in 1972 the population was about 2,100 and there was no place to rent, there was no place to buy. … As time went by, probably maybe the early '80s, they started … digitizing … [the compressor stations]. And so a lot of people had to leave. And I think before the tornado the population was about 1,500. The main occupation was farming or farm-related. And the gas plants they were secondary.… There’s a lot of corporate farmers around here…. Most of the local managers, they’re conscientious and they're good farmers. But the trend is to go bigger.
The connection between the modernization of farm technology and centralization of agriculture
was noted by Daniel Wallach, the founder of a nonprofit organization created to assist in
environmentally sustainable reconstruction after the storm:
To be cost effective for a farmer, they have to own 2,000 acres of land. How many houses
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in a community can you have when each farm has 2,000 acres? Not very many. … You know a combine? They're huge machines now; they’re $300,000 machines. You better have a lot to farm in order to justify spending $300,000 on a tractor.
As Greensburg hemorrhaged jobs, youth lost interest in staying in town. City Administrator
Steve Hewitt, among others, noted that before the tornado “our biggest export was youth.” But
employment is only part of the puzzle; the community's communitas was withering also.
Although rural America is known for its strong networks of relationships, cohesion is declining
in small towns as well, and Greensburg was no exception. Says Dixson:
There’s a real lost sense in this country of community. … We have to become front-porch people again. We gotta get out of our backyards and away from our TV and we gotta get out on our front porch to where we talk to the people walking down the street, and we get to know our neighbors. Then we can overcome a lot of our problems.
Although not all are willing to define pre-tornado Greensburg as a “dying” community,
consensus on its once-imminent decline is clear.
Structural violence as discussed in most scholarship applies to race- and class-based
inequalities; topics such as access to medical care, racial profiling by police, or test-based
schooling fall under its traditional purview. However, if we return to Galtung's original definition
of the term, that of a difference between actual and potential realizations caused by a difficult- or
impossible-to-define perpetrator, we find that structural violence has a much wider scope (see
Chapter Two). In this light, Greensburg, like the rest of rural America, has been a profound
victim of structural violence for decades. In the words of Bob Wetmore, Executive Director of
the Kiowa County Chamber of Commerce and the Kiowa County Economic Development
Corporation, “every small rural town in America has been hit by an EF5 tornado—they just don't
realize it.” The residents of Greensburg, like those of nearly every other Anytown, USA, have
been victims of Solnit's “disaster of everyday life” (2009: 3) for twenty years.
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The characteristics of Greensburg that defined its demise are similar to those facing many
inner-cities around the country and oppressed communities around the world. The town has been
hit hard by a trifecta of structural violence: a lack of employment opportunities to generate
economic success, a lack of social capital to build and maintain networks that connect people to
opportunities, and a lack of economic resources—on the part of individuals and the local
government—that disable the community's ability to generate those social and economic
opportunities from scratch. Those interviewed seem to agree that employment is the basis of
Greensburg's problems: the dearth of jobs lowered the ability of the town to collect taxes and
therefore improve infrastructure, and the out-migration of families, especially youth, to towns
and cities with more varied avenues to economic and cultural prosperity, have created the social
void that debilitates the town's ability to retain or generate jobs and social capital. Although the
problems faced by communities more typically understood as victims of structural violence tend
to have more complex roots (e.g. failures of education and criminal justice, as well as jobs) and
the damage may be more extreme (residents of Greensburg are not dying of AIDS or multi-drug-
resistant tuberculosis, as are the those written about by Farmer [2005]), the cycle is the same.
Understood as structural violence, then, the distinct issues which plagued Greensburg
before the tornado appear as nodes of the same matrix that threatens rural life around the country.
The removal of social and economic capital-generating tools, including but not limited to the
modernization of industry mentioned by Shoenberger and the changes in agriculture alluded to
by Wallach, is the driving force behind the community's decline, In short, says Shoenberger,
Greensburg was literally and figuratively “just a typical Western Kansas town that was hit hard
by Walmart”:
When [my wife and I] came in 1972, every building on Main Street had a viable business. You could buy whatever you needed in Greensburg. And when they opened that Walmart
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[thirty miles away] in Pratt … it was very noticeable. … And then when they automated those gas plants that just, you know, was like somebody popping your balloon; that really hurt.
The exodus of jobs spurred the downward cycle so typical of structural violence. Superintendent
Darin Headrick reports that since 1990, Greensburg had been losing a couple of families with
school-aged children every year, weakening the institution that is the “focal point” of “smaller,
rural communities.” Main Street was losing the shops and restaurants that supported the
previously thriving community and its youth, and as stores closed, residents looking for groceries
or furniture or hardware had to drive farther or settle for less, creating another incentive to leave.
If Greensburg, and its unique rural culture that has long defined the United States, was to
survive, it needed to become socially and economically sustainable. It is through this lens that
disaster recovery work in Greensburg must be understood.
Slow down and Plan
Like many towns and cities around the country, Greensburg followed no master plan
before 2007. The town, in fact, had completed a plan decades earlier that had never much been
followed and long since been forgotten. Hewitt says, “When I showed up here in 2006, the
comprehensive master plan was [from] back in 1981. And it was on a shelf—I accidentally found
it—no one knew it existed. … It was outdated. It had no reference to where the community was
going.” According to Hewitt, the city had been developing haphazardly over the years, if it had
developed at all:
Small towns get stagnant; they got what they got and they're done. Some will say, we were so good that the school never … had a bond issue in the hundred years of the town. Is that a proud thing? Are you proud of that? Because to me, when you do a bond issue, it shows you’re progressive and you’re willing to pay for a better environment, a better community, a better infrastructure: you’re willing to pay for growth. [But] we never really did a new school.
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After the tornado, then, community leaders recognized the opportunity to reverse stagnation and
replace many aspects of the town's aging infrastructure. Hewitt, as well as councilman-turned-
mayor John Janssen and Dixson, the current mayor, all spoke to this opportunity.40
Without [a master plan], you’re arbitrarily just trying to shoot from the hip, we knew that. So right after the storm, I knew instantly that we had to have some detailed planning. All these neat ideas that people had! And I had a meeting with [Council President] John Janssen and [Mayor] Lonnie McCollum and myself out on the courthouse parking lot, that’s kinda where everything was staged at, the disaster relief area. And I told both of them, they both told me the same thing, it was the same thing that came out of everybody’s mouth: everything we didn’t like and everything we wanted to do, we could do now.
They all
recognized as well the need to redevelop in an organized fashion. Hewitt continues:
Town leaders were aware, then, that to reverse Greensburg's shrinking trend, the city needed to
not only rebuild but focus rebuilding to a central vision, one that would attract business and
retain youth.
Developing that vision immediately after the tornado proved difficult for two reasons.
First, reports Janssen, “there was nobody here to make consensus with”: with residents scattered
around the county and state, getting consistent yet rapid community feedback was difficult.
Second, some town residents thought poorly of taking time to plan. In fact, as is typical of
victims of catastrophic disasters, it is likely that they did not think much at all (Ripley 2008).
Janssen explains that for many residents the need to return to the comfort of home was blinding.
This was true on an individual level:
Basically … people were in shock; they were not making good choices. There was a lot of money handed to contractors who said “I can get you back in a house in six weeks.” And … when they got it half done [they] left with the check. So it was people not making good choices and it wasn’t because they were stupid it was because they literally were in shock. … The tornado was on a Friday and on that Tuesday there were people already in
40 When the tornado hit, Lonnie McCollum was mayor of Greensburg, and John Janssen was the President of the
City Council. Within one month of the tornado, the aging McCollum resigned, and Janssen became Mayor. Almost one year later, on April 1st, 2008, Bob Dixson beat Janssen in the first mayoral election after the storm.
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Miles, Kansas ordering modular homes. … And now they're unhappy, some of them, because they took them from the list [of homes] that hadn’t been sold and it didn’t have this that they really kinda wanted, it didn't have that that they really kinda wanted, but [at least] they had a house. (Janssen)
It was also true on a community level:
You know the initial pressure in this town was to put it right back just as it was. I told them I thought that was a really wonderful idea, but are you sure you want plywood for all the windows on Main street? Because it was just gonna continue to implode if you build it back just the way it was before. You got nothing here to make it go. You gotta do something different if you’re gonna make it grow. (Janssen)
In such a rush to come home, some residents agitated against the planning processes on which
Hewitt, McCollum, and Janssen began to embark. In fact, some of the forcefulness which with
the leaders motivated people to think ahead eventually cost Janssen his job: “[Steve Hewitt and
I] played good cop-bad cop and did a pretty good job of it, [and] I figured it was a short-term
deal because we made too many hard decisions.” Indeed, building consensus in a diasporatic
community of struggling survivors proved to be no easy or popular task, and Janssen lost he
reelection bid on April 1st, 2008.
Oops! I Guess that Settles It
Before the tornado, Daniel Wallach and his wife moved to Kiowa County from
California. He spoke to me about creating the “collective will of the community” that was
needed to rebuild Greensburg the right way:
In order to motivate people to overcome the inertia or the fear or the risk of change you’ve gotta make it either so uncomfortable that they don’t want to stay where they are or inspire them to move beyond where they are. I prefer the school of inspiration, and I think it is how we’re wired and that if you honor people’s intelligence and tap into their hearts they will choose the right thing—what’s best for them and what’s best for the whole.
It is safe to say, however, that an inspirational building of will is not what started Greensburg
down its unusual recovery path. Although rebuilding sustainably, or “putting the 'green' back in
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Greensburg,” eventually became a rallying cry for town residents, the course first plotted was
much less calculated—and founded in substantially less community input—than many perceive.
In fact, the commitment to rebuild sustainably was rushed and autocratic, based on a few leaders'
visions of how Greensburg could remain viable and reverse its own decline. Building the
collective will of the community was the next step. Hewitt recalls:
I remember us talking about smart growth and smart decisions. I don’t know if we necessarily used the word sustainable, but I know we were talking about sustainable decisions. And not in the word of green rather, but the word of making sure that everything we do connects and works together, and the community gets involved. The connectivity of how this entire community is going to come back has got to be mapped out in a much more detailed, sustainable way. … I remember me and Lonnie [McCollum] and the superintendent, [and the] county commissioner [all met,] and the Governor came down. It was probably a week into the storm. … [The Governor] asked me, “Steve, can you line out, what’s the first thing you're gonna do?” And I started telling her … and she said, “you guys are talking about building green.” … And I said, hey, we’re just going to build as smart as we can build. And if that’s green then that’s green.
At this point, memories differ. Hewitt claims that soon after that conversation, Governor
Kathleen Sebelius announced at a press conference the town's commitment to “building green.”
Janssen reports that McCollum, who was at that point still the mayor, made the announcement.
Either way, all parties were caught off-guard by the leap of faith. Hewitt recalled his surprise at
the press conference: “And then you go okay, whoa, you need to figure out exactly what she just
said and what did that mean?” Says Janssen, “[That] kinda locked us into it, because then
everyone wanted to know, 'well what are you going to do?' And we started the process from
there.”
Daniel Wallach played a fundamental role in the building of that collective will. In
Janssen's words, “he really did the backward consensus,” getting hesitant residents on board with
the advantages of green building, individually and as a community. Wallach and his wife wrote a
concept paper about the potential for a sustainable rebirth of Greensburg, and handed it to
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Janssen, Hewitt, and McCollum a few days after the storm. At community meetings about the
recovery process and informally with individuals and families, Wallach began talking about what
Greensburg could look like and listening for the visions of neighbors:
We went around talking to people and said “what are your concerns?” [We] tapped into what would motivate them, and what motivated them was keeping future generations in the community, was the community not dying. … So it was about listening, doing a lot of listening initially, what are their unique desires, challenges, opportunities and then help craft a vision…. You’ve gotta give people pictures, we think in pictures, you gotta give people pictures of what is possible. And that is a lot of what I did early on, was paint pictures for people. You … can talk about the problems and the challenges and you build the hope and the inspiration by showing [people] what’s possible.
He found that the residents of Greensburg were motivated by “keeping future generations in the
community [and] the community not dying”: in a word, people wanted their community to be
sustainable. In the words of Bob Wetmore, Executive Director of the Kiowa County Chamber of
Commerce and the Kiowa County Economic Development Corporation, “This decision will be
for the future, for our children and grandchildren. That’s the cool thing. They made a decision
here that’s for 100 years from now. For tomorrow.”
The image of a flourishing twenty-first century Greensburg was promulgated by Wallach,
McCullum, Hewitt, Janssen, and later Dixson, among others, to achieve buy-in for the
commitment to environmental sustainability from the rest of the community. Wallach founded
Greensburg Greentown, a nonprofit organization tasked with connecting homeowners and
builders with environmentally and economically efficient products, expert resources, and
educational programs. It was not easy: Wallach recalls McCollum, when he was still mayor,
proclaiming, “The Golden Goose is crapping eggs here, and they don't even see it!” The
leadership, though, did successfully convince many residents that environmentally sustainable
planning would lead to an economically and socially sustainable town. And, for a number of
reasons, it already has:
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• First, going green brought attention and money to Greensburg and kept it there, a
priceless asset in a world where, according to Chuck Banks, “disasters have a very short
attention span.” Although more funding sources were made available and accessible to
both the residents and government of Greensburg than of New Orleans, they still faced
similar funding gaps: insurance payouts and government assistance together by statute
does not cover the entire cost of reconstruction.41
• Second, non-profit organizations, companies, and government agencies whose missions
involve environmental sustainability paid special attention to Greensburg. In the words of
Dixson, “we're a living laboratory.” Wallach reports that in 2008, toilet manufacturer
Caroma USA donated 400 dual-flush low-flow toilets to the town, giving rebuilding
residents one less item to purchase and helping them to save money on utilities. The 400
toilets save Greensburg an aggregate of more than two million gallons of water a year.
Furthermore, such donations create a positive cycle of environmentalism and economic
sustainability, as conservation becomes an advertising tool that brings additional attention
and resources to the town. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a
So the environmental sustainability
concept recruited and maintained the attention of the media and donations from
corporations looking to bolster their public image long after the tornado. Wallach
explains that “this was one of my primary lines early on, [saying that] if people are able
to buy into this concept in [our] community, it will bring resources to the community that
otherwise wouldn't have be coming in.”
41 Greensburg Superintendent Headrick explains that federal assistance would cover a maximum of 85% of what
insurance does not cover, leaving a potentially sizeable funding gap, especially on large municipal projects. One early estimate for the school's reconstruction looked like this (FEMA 2007: 72): 2-Story School Campus: $24,000,000 Insurance Proceeds: ($16,075,000) FEMA Public Assistance: ($3,275,000) Funding Gap: $4,650,000
Cohen-Price 111
division of the United States Department of Energy, trained residents in numerous
energy- and money-saving building and living techniques, and connected them with other
environmentally sustainable resources. These are only two of numerous examples.
• Third, green building saves money: although many environmentally innovative building
solutions cost more to install, they tend to pay themselves back in lower electricity,
heating, and water bills later. In Janssen's words, “They need to understand that if I put in
a better grade of window, that in three years time it will pay for the window and then
after that it’s going in my pocket. And that was the way we did the [NREL] lessons.” This
is true for tank-less water heaters, better insulation, low-flow water heads, and dual-flush
toilets, among others. Insulated Concrete Form (ICF), a replacement for insulated wood-
framed outer walls, has been especially popular in Greensburg (see page 70). The blocks
cost more per square foot, but save enough energy that smaller, cheaper heating and
cooling devices and lower monthly energy costs quickly make up the up-front difference
(ICFA n.d.).
• Fourth, environmental sustainability can also be a vulnerability reducer, protecting
communities from future tornadoes, storms, and floods. In Greensburg, the most
prominent example of this is ICF block buildings, which can withstand winds over one
hundred miles per hour, far more than wood-frame homes, and are more fire- and
moisture- resistant (ICFA n.d.).
Putting the “green” back in Greensburg, then, was at first much more about saving money than it
ever was about environmentalism. Wallach notes, “Human beings are motivated by self interest;
there’s no way around it. But self-interest can be very altruistic, and everything needs to be
tailored to that.” But it is clear that these actions contribute both to economic and environmental
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sustainability. In this way, Greensburg's environmentally conscious choices have combated
structural violence simply by reversing the town's pre-tornado dying trend. Headrick notes that
“it's [not] fair to evaluate the recovery of the community even yet,” but the town is already
getting younger and livelier, according to Wetmore, and as the hospital, school, Main Street
streetscape (which includes a not-for-profit strip mall and business incubator), all huge boons for
families and businesses alike, have been recently completed.42
Figure 8.2: Greensburg, January 2010
Author’s Photograph
Sustainability of a Different Variety
While there has been some conflict about environmentally sustainably building, a large
42 The hospital, which expects to receive a LEED certification by the United States Green Building Council, was
completed in February, 2010. The school, which unifies Kindergarten through twelfth grades in one building, expects a LEED Platinum certification, has opened for the 2010-2011 school year. The strip mall, officially the Kiowa County United building, had already rented out all nine retail spaces in the building when I interviewed Bob Wetmore in January, 2010, and was nearing completion. It has since opened. The business incubator, completed April 26th, 2009, has already been certified LEED Platinum. See http://www.greensburgreentown.org, the US Green Building Council's project list (http://www.usgbc.org/LEED/Project/RegisteredProjectList.aspx) and Anderson 2009. See also http://greensburg.buildinggreen.com/.
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number of residents support it both with words and actions. The Greensburg city council passed
a resolution requiring that all municipal buildings be designed to achieve the United States Green
Building Council's LEED Platinum certification, and a number of private companies have
invested heavily in environmental sustainability, including a LEED bank, car dealership, and
John Deere retailer.43
Perhaps more significantly, though, the dubious early support for change based
specifically on the expected economic savings or potential to revive the community that building
sustainably offered seems to be giving way to a more holistic environmentalism. Wallach notes,
“when you see a poll in an election where seventy percent vote for something, that’s a landslide,
[and] I’d say we’re somewhere between sixty and seventy percent in favor of the green
initiative,” and Hewitt and Dixson both describe many of their citizens as supportive not just for
the financial savings. How does “going green” become the modus operandi of a conservative
Midwestern American town?
Some residents have rebuilt without thought to green building methods or
products, and others who had little interest in what Hewitt calls “a new chapter in Greensburg's
history” have moved away. However, Hewitt estimates that about 250 houses have been built
since the tornado, and even though there is no mandate that residents do so, Wallach reports that
one hundred of them are forty-two percent more energy efficient than code requires, a
substantially greater percentage than he or NREL had hoped for.
Environmentalism became polemic decades ago, according to Wallach, when the
43 As of January, 2011, four buildings in Greensburg have already received LEED certifications: the John
Deere/BTI dealership (Platinum), the Business Incubator (Platinum), the county maintenance facility (Silver), and the 5.4.7 Arts Center (Platinum). Nine additional buildings, some complete and some still under construction, are registered LEED projects awaiting certification. These include the City Hall, school, and hospital, a bank, and the town’s only car dealership. See the US Green Building Council's project list for further information (http://www.usgbc.org/LEED/Project/RegisteredProjectList.aspx). The town’s recently rebuilt Best Western hotel, the only Best Western in the United States with a wind turbine, will apply for EnergyStar certification in 2011 (http://www.greensburggreentown.org/home/2010/12/8/the-best-best-western-in-the-us.html). See also http://greensburg.buildinggreen.com/.
Cohen-Price 114
Environmental Protection Agency started regulating emissions and “red-staters didn't want to be
told what to do.” Although taking care to not jeopardize the existence of the resources on which
we rely seems fairly straight forward, notions of sustainability have remained restricted, at least
in the United States, to the liberal democratic camp. It is no surprise, then, that when he and the
political leadership of Greensburg started looking for buy-in for the focus on sustainable
building, many people balked. Wetmore opines, “You'd expect this model to be in Massachusetts,
or Sonoma [California], or San Diego, but you wouldn't expect to see it in the middle of the
heartland.” Nor did many residents, at first: Wallach recalls, “I can’t tell you how many times,
when talking to people initially, [asking] 'what do you think of this idea?' and [hearing them]
respond … 'I’m not a tree hugger.'” Two and a half years later, however, a number of community
members remarked to me, in formal interviews and informal conversations, that the consensus of
the town is that “Green is not a red versus blue issue.”
This transition, if unexpected, was logical according to Dixson: “Us being rural people
and conservationists from square one it just made sense to go this way.” The roots of Greensburg
are agricultural, notes Janssen, and “in agriculture it’s all about sustainability.” In a part of the
country where soils are bad and wells all eventually yield water too high in nitrates to be potable,
issues of sustainability and environmentalism have always carried weight, even if not in so many
words.44
44 Janssen speaks of Western Kansas' fragile, sandy soil; Hewitt, in discussing Greensburg's plan to build a water
treatment plan, relates that the increasing nitrate content in well water is simply “part of history with Greensburg” that has forced the city to consistently dig new wells.
Additionally, conservation and sustainability make sense for the Midwestern value of
self-sufficiency. Notes Wallach, “Building smarter, using their wits to overcome these
challenges, not importing oil, not importing coal--that really appealed to [Greensburg's
residents'] sensibilities.” The new environmentalism of Greensburg is not the idealistic, ethics-
based environmentalism of environmental and animal rights. In fact, while Greensburg residents
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often use the words “stewardship,” “conservation,” and “sustainability,” as well as the broad and
poorly-defined “green,” I never once heard the term “environmentalist,” associated by many as
defining that more polemic idealistic bent. In reality, then, the new environmentalism of
Greensburg is really the old, pragmatic environmentalism of taking care of mine and ours so
crops can be harvested and water can be drawn after we are gone.
Nineteen-year-old Greensburg resident Taylor Schmidt says, “We have a chance today to
make tomorrow better.” Most Greensburg residents would agree with his words. To some, that
chance is one of financial sustainability, making life less expensive and therefore a little easier to
live. To Wetmore, it is an opportunity to light a match under economic stakeholders, bring
industry back to Greensburg, and foster ingenuity: “I don't have to worry about people down here
not thinking out of the box,” he says, “Because there is no box. The box blew away.” To Hewitt,
it is a chance to create a whole new foundation on which Greensburg can expand, from roads and
plumbing to a guiding master plan and a remarkably sound advertising tool to recruit residents
and businesses: “If you're a city manager … this is where you want to be.” To Wallach, it's about
reaching across political and ideological boundaries to foster agency: “You have everything you
need to be whole again. I can't fix you but I can go along with you for the ride.” For many,
perhaps almost all, it is about creating a town worth passing on to the next generation. To me,
Schmidt's words indicate an opportunity to challenge some of the same injustices that plague the
poor and oppressed, although I doubt many in Greensburg share that notion with me. This is the
beauty of the Greensburg vision.
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Chapter 9: “I Wouldn't Start From Here” “Now we are out of time … there is nothing left to do but act.” Amanda Ripley, 2008: 138 “There are no innocent bystanders in this.” Chris Rose 2007: 93
This is a story of opportunity.
The world is a mess, full of drastic physical, economic, and social structures that deny
many communities not only equal access to important social services like education and medical
attention but basic needs of survival. The many systems responsible for these injustices are
complex and interwoven into a deeply-rooted matrix of inequality that pervades society. These
systems, many of which are age-old, socially accepted, and maintained by no obvious
perpetrator, can be understood as structurally violent, perpetuating a feedback loop in which the
already oppressed find themselves most vulnerable to continued oppression.
Where, then, is the opportunity?
Ed Burns, the Baltimore cop-turned-schoolteacher who co-authored The Corner and the
television show The Wire, recounts a parable about a couple from the city driving through the
countryside, attempting to reach their destination. They get lost in a maze of back roads, and
every turn they make seems to take them further in the wrong direction. Finally, they see a
farmer on the side of the road, and stop to ask for directions. The man pauses and thinks for a
minute before responding. The couple had gone so far in the wrong direction that he says, “If I
were going there, I wouldn't start from here.”45
45 Burns lectured at Goucher College on April 12, 2010, as a part of Goucher’s 2010 City Forum. This story was
retold in that lecture.
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Burns was talking about public education in Baltimore, but his words apply to all systems
in fundamental need of repair. The problems with healthcare, public transportation, and many
other systems that fail to provide for the needs of the communities they supposedly serve run so
deep that the most effective change possible is often starting completely anew. Yet, despite their
failures, society relies heavily on these systems, which are often entrenched in social, economic,
and political relationships: they cannot simply be dismantled or put on hold for months or years
while they are redesigned and reconstructed. After all, a failing healthcare system serves at least
some needs of some people, more than no healthcare system at all. How, then, do we not “start
from here”? How do we make fundamental change to these devastating systems without joining
the ranks of the perpetrators of violence by denying resources to those in need?
Because disasters cause uncontrollable damage—or, at least, damage that we failed to
control—they present many profound opportunities to affect real change without causing any
more suffering than has already been caused. Moreover, an anti-structural violence agenda—in
other words, an agenda of social justice (see Galtung 1969: 183)—can lead to more effective
relief that efficiently provides remedies for disaster-borne suffering while simultaneously
addressing the long-term roots of oppression in a uniquely malleable environment. Like the
tornado that brought Dorothy to Oz, disasters force us to not “start from here.” The question then
becomes, will we sweep the covers back over the now-visible flaws, disregard the opportunity
for change, and follow the same path that got us lost in the first place? Or can we utilize disasters
to push society in new, better directions?
In Chapters Four and Five, eleven opportunity objectives have been presented – tangible
ways to usher affected communities down new paths founded in equality and peace. Using
disasters to combat structural violence consciously and directly is the ideal option, as a social
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justice motivation will by definition prioritize serving those most in need over all else. However,
such an agenda will not be readily accepted by the governmental agencies and private
corporations currently most significantly responsible for disaster management and reconstruction
work.
Paul Farmer, in discussing outbreaks of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Russian
prisons, notes that “the [public] health angle on human rights may prove more pragmatic than
approaching the problem as one of penal reform alone” (2005: 236). In other words, although he
contextualizes many of the same societal failures discussed here as structural violence and
violations of human rights, he argues that such contexts may not be the most useful for actually
convincing others to make change. This insight has profound implications for seekers of justice
in disaster response efforts: although combating structural violence is the end goal, it may not
always be the best perspective in which to frame the battle. In Farmer’s words, the language of
structural violence is not particularly pragmatic.
How, then, can these eleven opportunity objectives be best implemented? How can those
who do speak in the language of social justice and structural violence convince those who do not
that such objectives are worth pursuing? Such a translation is not as difficult as one might
imagine. Although there may exist many others, nine concrete actions are presented here which
achieve the eleven objectives, yet do so indirectly, without the vocabulary of structural violence
or social justice. All nine steps can be taken by various actors already involved in disaster
management and response work, and have the potential to save lives and money and return
affected communities to economic viability and independence as soon as possible, making
disaster recovery work more financially feasible and politically expedient.
Two of these actions would nonetheless require major priority shifts within the
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institutions performing them, as appreciating their utility requires a much more long-term,
longitudinal vision of value and success than most corporations and national governments appear
to embrace:
1. National governments, private companies, and other major participants in development
and the large scale production and use of the earth’s resources can reverse risk-producing
processes so as to mitigate climate change and dangerous urban settlement and migration
patterns. (Achieving Opportunity Objective #10)
2. Building social capital and thin trust, and making disaster awareness and preparedness
part of culture, can give communities more agency and cohesion and make them less
vulnerable to disaster. This responsibility falls not just to neighborhood groups seeking to
protect their own communities and governments looking to lessen the effects of disasters
on their citizens; it is the obligation of all social and political players whose actions affect
social capital, trust, and social interaction, especially private industries involved in
vulnerability-increasing behavior.46
The next seven actions can be proven useful to the actors who might take them without such a
significant priority shift. Most can occur within their existing framework of goals; in other
words, they can save lives and money right now.
(Achieving Opportunity Objective #4)
3. Local community stakeholders and government at all levels can limit the likelihood of
emotional and physical trauma and lessen the monetary damage disasters can impart by
performing vulnerability assessments and doing hazard mitigation work. (Achieving
Opportunity Objectives #4 and #10)
46 See footnote 27 for one example of private industry’s responsibility for disaster preparedness. See Putnam 2000
for a detailed look at the many players responsible for the maintenance of social capital and thin trust in society.
Cohen-Price 120
4. Local governments, neighborhood groups, and urban planners can sponsor visionary,
community-driven planning that will prepare communities to take steps towards
thoughtfully-considered and healthy futures, in or out of the context of disaster.
(Achieving Opportunity Objective #8)
5. Not-for-profit institutions, grassroots organizations, and local leaders can use the instant
social barrier-removal and cohesion of disaster communities to build social capital for the
future, in order to reclaim agency in the reconstruction process and long after. (Achieving
Opportunity Objective #2)
6. All parties, through recognizing that the structural failures that appear in disaster are
manifestations of existing problems, not newly created ones, can discover the opportunity
that reconstruction presents to challenge those problems. Those who seek to rebuild in
partnership with affected communities can refuse to allow those who wish to accumulate
power to usurp the language of rebirth (Opportunity Objectives #3, #5, and #6).
7. Local government can invest in the redesign and improvement of infrastructure to more
efficiently provide services to its citizens instead of rebuilding back only what was; state
and federal government can enable such investment by changing emergency funding
regulations. (Achieving Opportunity Objective #9).
8. Government institutions can reform their contracting and oversight procedures in order to
employ only those private responders and rebuilders who prioritize community-driven
response programs and effective relief and reconstruction over profit margins and
securing the next contract. (Achieving Opportunity Objective #7)
9. Institutional disaster responders, both public and private, can seek and cherish instead of
deny all types of local input in relief and reconstruction, from search and rescue activities
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and reconstruction labor to participation in planning and the prioritization of different
aspects of the recovery process, in order to provide the most efficient, successful, and
effective response possible. (Achieving Opportunity Objective #1 and #11)
The expression of such social justice-oriented opportunities in the language of economy,
efficiency, and the traditional goals of disaster management highlights how changes to disaster
relief and reconstruction methodologies can be found mutually beneficial to all parties, including
Figure 9.1: The Genealogy of Structural Violence, with Disasters as an Escape
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institutional disaster responders, advocates of just relief and reconstruction, and the communities
both groups are trying to serve.47
The most fundamental lesson to be drawn from the experience of disaster responders in
New Orleans and Greensburg is how crucial good leadership is not only for seeking justice but
simply for not allowing the situation to get any worse. Those interviewed for this project point to
two distinct traits crucial for such good leadership: first, leaders must demonstrate a deep
understanding of the affected community and its needs; second, leaders must strike a balance
between perhaps thick-headed conviction and the open ears of partnership and community-
driven action.
If traditional institutional responders and those specifically
seeking justice, act concurrently in accordance with a set of guidelines such as those presented
here, they can together provide effective response and capture the opportunity disaster presents
to break the cycle of structural violence and vulnerability and build a healthier community (see
Figure 9.1). Put simply, in disaster, the best way to protect the oppressed from suffering in the
short and long term is to provide good and just disaster response.
The stories of Latoya Cantrell and Kevin Brown in their respective neighborhoods in
New Orleans confirm the utility of the first trait. Remarkably successful response and
reconstruction work occurred in Broadmoor and Holly Grove because those leading the
respective neighborhood responses—Cantrell and Brown—had lived and worked in their
communities for years. They were both, if not actively trusted by many of their neighbors, at a
minimum known to be long-time residents who took active roles in their neighborhoods. And,
because of their experience working for social justice before Katrina, they were familiar with the
neighborhood, its residents, their resources, and their needs.
47 In this light, then, just relief and just reconstruction are what Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch calls “head
fakes,” in which a greater action is performed or greater knowledge gained than the explicitly stated intent (Pausch 2007).
Cohen-Price 123
In Greensburg, the work of Mayor John Janssen and City Administrator Steve Hewitt
demonstrates the importance of the second trait. Striking a balance between steadfast decision-
making in the face of anger and discontent and reaching out for input from community members
is not easy. Despite difficulties, the two did a remarkable job guiding Greensburg to a master
plan, then enforcing it, simultaneously seeking the opinions and visions of Greensburg’s
residents while not allowing the needs and wants of individuals to detract from the consideration
of the needs of the community.
When residents, due to disaster, have been evacuated or are unreachable, otherwise
occupied with survival, or too traumatized to constructively contribute to community planning
processes, the ability of leaders to know what is best for their community and make decisions in
the absence of input is crucial. Although leaders are faced with the same—possibly more
intense—emotional and physical coping needs, they are often granted the freedom to make broad
executive decisions. Whether or not they are forgiven for claiming power and making errors
depends on how the recovered community judges the leader’s actions and the eventual success of
response efforts. The ability of some leaders to know and act on what is best for the survival and
improvement of their community is a topic for further research; certainly, some voices are lost in
their success. However, it is clear that leaders of small communities, such as towns like
Greensburg and urban neighborhoods like Broadmoor and Holly Grove, have a distinct
advantage in the recovery process, as they have fewer differences to reconcile and visions to
synthesize. Partnership between those in leadership roles and grassroots agents of relief and
recovery remains key to finding justice after disaster, and possibilities for such dwindle as the
scope increases. This too is a topic for further research.
This paper must not be understood as a justification to delay the challenge of structural
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violence until disaster strikes. It must be noted that the complexities of the problems at hand
should not be excuses to not start now, in everyday life. As issues of structural violence become
more embedded into the status quo, they only become more difficult to solve. The downward
cycle of structural violence is simply an indication that we need to start fighting it right now. The
longer we wait, the harder it will be. More, Latoya Cantrell, Kevin Brown, and Paul Farmer
(2005) show us those who fight structural violence every day are the most prepared to fight it in
disaster.
While we work every day to challenge structural violence, we must, in solidarity with
those most vulnerable to hazards, specifically prepare to act quickly and competently for justice
in the aftermath of disaster events. The holistic and community-driven approaches discussed here
are just some of a watershed of many possible pragmatic disaster management methods that
challenge oppression and build social capital. It is options such as these that allow us to take
substantive steps towards breaking the cycle of structural violence and building stronger,
healthier communities. While waiting for a disaster to bring problems into relief and make them
simpler to solve is clearly wrong, not examining and implementing such options in preparation
for and after disaster would be no less a crime.
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Appendix A: List of Eleven Opportunity Objectives The opportunity objectives outlined throughout Chapters Four and Five have been reprinted here for ease of reference.
1. Provide effective relief while building a social momentum of action by creating
coordinated partnerships with grassroots responders already on the ground, asking them
for sustained help, and arming them with the right tools to provide it. (p. 45)
2. In order to build the agency and cohesion necessary to combat structural violence and
vulnerability, capitalize on every opportunity to build social capital by fostering and
maintaining the community connection, “doing with” altruism, and thin trust generated
by disasters and the relief phase of disaster response. (p. 49)
3. In order to build a holistic agenda for social change, interpret and publicize newfound
problems and inequalities not as new issues created by disaster but as latent, preexisting
issues manifested by it. (p. 51)
4. Capitalize on the shared experience of vulnerability across a disaster-affected community
to legitimize and institutionalize disaster preparedness practices that will, over time, build
social capital and reduce vulnerability. (p. 52)
5. Recognize the opportunity inherent in reconstruction work to rethink, redesign, and
rebuild physical capital in ways that challenge structural violence and build social capital,
without falling victim to the tabula rasa interpretation of disaster events. (p. 63)
6. Reclaim the radically optimistic language usurped by pro-privatization entrepreneurs; use
it to describe justice-seeking, not power-centralizing reconstruction. (p. 63)
7. Maintain and increase constructive private-sector involvement in reconstruction, while
improving the government contracting process and increasing oversight over contractors
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to guarantee that supporting affected communities as effectively as possible is the
primary objective of all participants in reconstruction. (p. 64)
8. Invest time and energy into holistic and visionary community and urban planning,
seeking input from the community and other stakeholders at every turn. (p. 67)
9. Re-vision infrastructure design to remedy structural violence, and then rebuild
infrastructure to new standards as efficiently and rapidly as possible while assisting
(physically, logistically, and financially) in the reconstruction of private homes and
businesses. (p. 68)
10. Rebuild to mitigate vulnerability to future hazards by (a) sponsoring programs for home-,
business-, and landowners; (b) considering the impact of development and global
warming on hazard strength and frequency; and (c) fostering the regrowth of natural
barriers that protect coastal areas from water-borne hazards. (p. 70)
11. Private sector for-profit reconstruction ventures should seek to employ local workers at
living wages, and not-for-profit participation in reconstruction should utilize local
volunteers and encourage sweat equity wherever possible; such local involvement will
simultaneously generate physical, financial, and social capital in affected communities.
(p. 72)
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Appendix B: Interviews Conducted by Author48
General
Charles Sharpe Battalion Chief, Howard County (Maryland) Fire and Rescue Services
26-Oct-09
Jim Stevenson Mass Care Manager, American Red Cross 29-Dec-09 New Orleans
Earl Carr Public Insurance Adjuster, Carr & Associates 5-Jan-10 Adacia Taranto* Intake/Crisis Social Worker, Lurline Mental Health Center 5-Jan-10 Ruth Terry-Sipos* Coordinator, Hospital/Homebound Services, St. Tammany
Parish School District 5-Jan-10
Nathan Rothstein Journalist, Volunteer, Political Activist 6-Jan-10 Jonathan Graboyes Director of Housing Recovery, Broadmoor Development
Corporation 6-Jan-10
Dr. Brenda Hatfield* Chief Administrative Officer, City of New Orleans 6-Jan-10 Cynthia Sylvain-Lear* Deputy Chief Administrative Officer, City of New Orleans 6-Jan-10 Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed (Ret)*
Director, Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, City of New Orleans
6-Jan-10
Robert Fogarty Executive Director, Evacuteer.org 6-Jan-10 Patricia Gay Executive Director, Preservation Resource Center of New
Orleans 7-Jan-10
Daniela Rivero Executive Director, Rebuilding Together New Orleans 7-Jan-10 Holly Heine Director of Operations & Communications, Jericho Road
Episcopal Housing Initiative 8-Jan-10
Anna Hrybyk* Program Manager, Louisiana Bucket Brigade 8-Jan-10 Eric Parrie* Louisiana Bucket Brigade, New Teachers Project 8-Jan-10 Earthea Nance Assistant Professor of Environmental Planning and Hazard
Mitigation, Department of Planning and Urban Studies, University of New Orleans
8-Jan-10
Shirley Laska Founder, Center for Hazards, Assessment, Response, and Technology (CHART), University of New Orleans
10-Jan-10
M. Harrison Boyd Executive Assistant to the Mayor, Technology & Recovery Program Delivery (Community Development Office)
11-Jan-10
Unisa Barrie Project Manager, New Orleans Redevelopment Authority 11-Jan-10 Yolanda Rodriguez Executive Director, New Orleans City Planning
Commission 11-Jan-10
48 Asterisks denote group interviews
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Michael Robinson* Neighborhood Coordinator, Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative
11-Jan-10
Rachel Glicksman* Assistant Neighborhood Organizer, Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative
11-Jan-10
Kevin Brown Executive Director, Trinity Christian Community 12-Jan-10 Chris Rose Journalist, Author 12-Jan-10 Howard Hunter President, Louisiana Historical Society 12-Jan-10 Greensburg
Bob Dixson Mayor, City of Greensburg (April 2008 - present) 14-Jan-10 Chuck Banks Principal, Chuck Banks Associates (previous Director,
Kansas USDA Rural Development) 14-Jan-10
Matt Deighton Resident 15-Jan-10 Daniel Wallach Executive Director, Greensburg Greentown 15-Jan-10 Taylor Schmidt Resident 17-Jan-10 Darin Headrick Superintendent, Greensburg School District (#422) 18-Jan-10 Bob Wetmore Executive Director, Kiowa County Chamber of Commerce
& Kiowa County Development Corporation 19-Jan-10
Ed Schoenberger Kiowa County Historian 19-Jan-10 John Janssen Mayor, City of Greensburg (May 2007 - April 2008) 19-Jan-10 Steve Hewitt City Administrator, City of Greensburg 20-Jan-10 Mitzi Hesser Kiowa County Health Department 20-Jan-10
Cohen-Price 129
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