The remnants of Hurricane Ida reached the New York City area on Wednesday, battering the region with record rainfall that flooded streets, subways, and basements. New York and New Jersey declared states of emergency, and officials in the Northeast had reported more than two dozen deaths as of Thursday afternoon. Ida, which made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday, tied for the fifth-strongest hurricane in US history and has been blamed for deaths across seven states. The toll is likely to rise as surveys of the damage continue.<\/p>\n
Ida is one of a slew of summer disasters \u2014 among them deadly heat waves and catastrophic fires \u2014 reminding Americans that the climate crisis is already here. \u201cWe face some really challenging questions in Louisiana and across the United States,\u201d Andy Horowitz, a Tulane University historian who wrote Katrina: A History, 1915-2015<\/em>, told Vox on Monday, the day after the storm swept through his home city of New Orleans. \u201cI think that should, basically, scare the shit out of us.\u201d<\/p>\n Coastal communities urgently need to shore up infrastructure, from levees to sea walls to subway systems, and some will need to consider the much more drastic step of relocation, Horowitz said. In a time of worsening storms and sea-level rise, these conversations can\u2019t be restricted to the Gulf Coast. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about Staten Island as well,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about the New Jersey coast. We\u2019re talking about basically anyone who can drive to the water.\u201d<\/p>\n The history of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, Horowitz said, can help us understand America\u2019s possible future \u2014 both its vulnerabilities and its path to recovery. He said the policy responses, from lifesaving investments in infrastructure to ambitious climate policies that could eventually stabilize global temperatures, should be sweeping and swift. <\/p>\n In the age of climate change, a livable future will depend not only on physical infrastructure but on social support systems and a disaster recovery process that is democratic and relentlessly focused on equity, experts told Vox. In the view of Khalil Shahyd, a Louisiana native and a senior policy adviser for equity and environment at the Natural Resources Defense Council, this process should prioritize people over property. <\/p>\n Human choices have created a baseline of vulnerability<\/p>\n Two days before Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana, Horowitz taught a class called \u201cThe Climate Crisis.\u201d Over video chat from his home in New Orleans, he asked his students to close their eyes and think about what the climate crisis meant to them.<\/p>\n The exercise was supposed to be theoretical, but Horowitz found himself thinking about how his shirt was wet with sweat: He had spent the morning moving pieces of patio furniture so Hurricane Ida wouldn\u2019t turn them into projectiles. He also thought about what he would be doing that afternoon: picking up his two young children, evacuating the city, and driving to a rental apartment in Birmingham, Alabama.<\/p>\n The Gulf Coast of the US is vulnerable to deadly hurricanes like Katrina and Ida for a host of reasons, many of them man-made, as my colleagues Umair Irfan and Benji Jones reported this week. Ocean and air temperatures are rising because humans are burning fossil fuels, and rising temperatures can infuse storms with more energy and water vapor. The state\u2019s oil and gas industry has contributed to a boom in low-lying waterfront construction, even as rising seas wash away parts of Louisiana\u2019s coastline. Communities of color are often on the front lines.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s nothing natural or inevitable about those vulnerabilities,\u201d Horowitz told Vox. Hurricanes should draw our attention to human choices, he said: our decisions about where to build, which communities can settle on high ground or behind levees, who should control shared resources such as power grids. (Louisiana\u2019s private electricity provider, Entergy, suffered \u201ccatastrophic transmission damage\u201d during Hurricane Ida that left a million people without power during a heat advisory; the company\u2019s backup gas power plant, which was rammed through a local approval process with help from paid actors, did not come to the rescue.)<\/p>\n As Shahyd watched the news last week that Hurricane Ida would strike New Orleans, he had flashbacks to watching from afar as Hurricane Katrina approached the city. \u201cYou just get this dread,\u201d he said from Washington, DC. \u201cAm I going to have to watch my city drown again?\u201d <\/p>\n Most of Shahyd\u2019s family evacuated for Hurricane Ida, but one of his uncles stayed behind in a Morgan City mobile home, and one of his brothers stayed in Metairie because of another ongoing disaster \u2014 the Covid-19 pandemic. The brother quarantined at home because he worried that his son, who is 12 and vaccinated for Covid-19, had a breakthrough infection. \u201cIt could not have been worse timing for them,\u201d Shahyd told me. \u201cMy brother was saying that he had never seen that much rain before in his life.\u201d<\/p>\n National disasters like Covid-19 and Hurricane Ida are \u201ccompounding crises,\u201d said Allison Plyer, chief demographer at the Louisiana nonprofit The Data Center. \u201cThis is compounding trauma.\u201d The difficulties are both psychological and practical: For many, 2021 has been another year of financial instability, Plyer added.<\/p>\n Disasters are especially catastrophic when they\u2019re mapped onto poverty and inequality, as was true for both Katrina and Ida. \u201cThe most important thing to being resilient in a disaster is some savings in the bank, so you can put gas in your car and maybe pay for a hotel room,\u201d Plyer said. But one out of every five households in New Orleans does not have access to a vehicle, she added, making evacuation extremely difficult.<\/p>\n New Orleans was an unequal place before Hurricane Katrina. But more than a decade after the hurricane, the problem had worsened. Twenty-six percent of New Orleans households \u2014 and more than a third of Black households \u2014 had zero net worth, according to a 2016 report by the nonprofit Prosperity Now. The same report showed that the unemployment rate for Black households was three times the rate for white households. More than 31 percent of Black households earned below the poverty line \u2014 six times the rate for white households.<\/p>\n Worsening inequity results in large part from nationwide policy choices, Plyer pointed out. \u201cWhat drives inequity is federal policies, not local policies,\u201d she said. \u201cThat acceleration of inequity, post-Katrina, was within a national context of accelerating inequity.\u201d<\/p>\n In a majority-Black city like New Orleans, inequity is closely linked to structural racism, Shahyd said. \u201cThe persistence, the maintenance, and the sustaining of poverty is the most egregious impact of racism,\u201d with the exception of police killings, he said. \u201cThere\u2019s no better representation of that fact than the city of New Orleans \u2014 a city that is so celebrated, a city that is so loved, a city that produces so much value, economically, spiritually, culturally. It\u2019s dependent on the impoverishment of a great many of its people.\u201d<\/p>\n