Two natural disasters, roughly a century apart, devastate a pair of American port cities.
One quickly regained its position as a center of global commerce. The other became a cautionary tale on how not to manage a disaster.
UNC Greensboro sociology professor Steve Kroll-Smith examines how market forces, class, and race combined to produce two different outcomes in “Recovering Inequality: Hurricane Katrina, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, and the Aftermath of Disaster.”
The book, due in July, is his second on Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005. The first, 2015’s “Left to Chance: Hurricane Katrina and the Story of Two New Orleans Neighborhoods,” was co-written with University of New Orleans sociology professors Vern Baxter and Pam Jenkins.
“Before we finished that first book, I had started to look at the San Francisco earthquake,” he says. “These were two iconic cities, and I thought a comparison might be worth the effort.”
San Francisco, Dr. Kroll-Smith says, “recovered miraculously” following the earthquake, which killed 3,000 people and resulted in fires that torched large swaths of the city.
“San Francisco at that time was the most powerful banking center in the West,” he says. “It was also the main port of call for trade between the U.S. and Asia. So the Roosevelt administration made it a top priority to get the city back up and running.”
New Orleans, while generating a good deal of tourism revenue, isn’t a major financial center, Kroll-Smith says. “New Orleans is not the port city it used to be, and in some ways it was viewed as market expendable.”
The city is predominantly African American, and Kroll-Smith believes that race and socioeconomics were factors in the slow response from federal authorities after Katrina.
An estimated 1,800 people died because of the storm, including more than 1,500 in Louisiana.
