A List
9/19/05

NEW ORLEANS' FLOOD HISTORY ADDRESSED IN SLU TALK

CANTON - Nicole Youngman, a sociologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, will give a talk at St. Lawrence University on "Hurricane Katrina and History of Flood Mitigation Efforts in New Orleans" on Thursday, September 29, at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Hepburn Hall. The event is open to the public, free of charge.

The catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina on the New Orleans area was not merely the result of a few isolated failures in its flood-control system. Rather, it was the culmination of a series of urban development decisions that reach back for decades, if not centuries. It is especially significant that the flood-control failures during and after the hurricane made landfall did not occur along the lake or river levees, but rather along some of the metropolitan area's largest artificial waterways.

According to Youngman, "The flood-control system in New Orleans proved to be an unsustainable Faustian bargain: trading short-term protection driven by the desire for economic growth for an inevitable, nearly complete inundation of the city and its surrounding parishes. As has become clear after Katrina, the largest losses from this bargain were bound to fall upon those with the least power to affect the political and economic processes of urban development."

For more information, contact the First-Year Program office, at 315-229-5909.

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