8/26/2006 Community Gumbo

The Hurricane Katrina One-Year Anniversary Episode

Carl Brauner

Carl Brauner weathered Hurricane Katrina inside his State Street Drive New Orleans home. He details his experience wading out of his house, the camaraderie he discovered in the city as he escaped the flooding and made his way downtown, his confrontation with Gretna police on the way out of town, and how Hurricane Katrina has provided him with an opportunity for positive growth despite the personal property losses he suffered. Some of the experiences he relates are similar to other disaster accounts reported by Rebecca Solnit (below). This interview was conducted on 3/12/06. Note: Because the interview was anchored when it was broadcast, and the whole audio was uploaded without anchor comments, continuity may be difficult to understand in two places -- when Brauner crossed the CCC bridge, and when he arrived in Baton Rouge where he saw video of the extent of flooding for the first time.

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit used the authoritarian law enforcement response to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as the context for describing the response to Hurricane Katrina in a September 2005 Harper's Magazine online essay (an update to an essay to appear in the then forthcoming October Harper's). She argued that the typical state response to disasters defies the countervailing natural social tendency toward cooperation and mutual aid. She also draws similarities between carnivals (as in New Orleans' Mardi Gras), revolution, and disasters, as times when the normal social order of things is turned upside down and true social transformation appears momentarily possible. This interview was conducted on 4/15/06, less than a month before New Orleans municipal elections were held.

Related:

People Get Ready -- Disaster, carnival, and revolution

Music tracks played:

Louis Armstrong, "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans," on The Big Ol' Box of New Orleans Music.

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, "What's Going On," from their brand new CD What's Going On.