About the book
Most of the other Katrina books coming out are narratives of the storm and its aftermath. Our book has that, of course, but we felt that you cannot really understand Katrina’s impact on August 29 and afterward without looking at what happened months, years, sometimes centuries before that to set the stage.
We tell the whole story of New Orleans’ flirtation with disaster and the heroic, doomed struggle to protect it and its people.
The book starts with a giant hurricane hitting the future site of New Orleans around 900 AD (an event documented by scientists), obliterating Indian settlements. It recounts the city’s founding in a spot below sea level in a swamp, and how repeated bouts with storm and river flooding shaped a unique American city famed for its good-time fatalism. The book tells how the levee system — an ambitious brainchild of the Great Society era — was built, and how it failed. It traces the invention of modern emergency management in the 1927 Mississippi River flood, and its decline under Bush.
The book is also about the great scientific race to defeat the danger: the emerging understanding of hurricanes and storm surges (players include Ben Franklin and Isaac Cline of Galveston flood fame). The book recounts the dogged attempts by a small group of scientists and emergency managers to avert the city’s fate. Our storm narrative aims to show how all the stupid mistakes of the past 300 years — most of them made in the past generation — came home to roost during the week of August 29, 2005.
The book explores the debate over global warming and hurricanes. Bottom line: more big storms are on the way, and there may be no upper limit to their power.
via author John McQuaid’s Amazon Author Blog