To live or die in New Orleans

This development, facilitated by federal policy,
served to diminish the coastal wetlands that
furnished New Orleans with crucial buffers against
storm surges and hurricane winds.
In short, Katrina’s ruination exposed such
phenomena as the systematic disenfranchisement
of New Orleans’ poor and African American
citizens, the destruction of urban social services,
and the neglect of municipal infrastructure. These
phenomena, each a product of an eviscerated
public sector‘s lack of capacity for responding to
social need and social suffering, were components
of a chronic urban disaster. To the extent that
disasters are represented and understood only as
punctual events interrupting urban regimes of
stability and order: however, the possibility of
comprehending such a chronic disaster is excluded;
the exceptional disaster, that is, displaces the
chronic disaster that we usually regard to be hardly
disastrous, if we regard it at all.