Tulane president: Katrina taught New Orleans not just to rebuild, but to reimagine

By Scott Cowen

During the height of Hurricane Sandy, Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel remarked that the storm was "New Jersey?s Katrina," a phrase that has a double resonance for me. As president of Tulane University for the past 15 years, I was in New Orleans during Katrina and its long aftermath. I?m also a Jersey boy, born and bred in Metuchen, and spent my summers as a youth on Long Beach Island. The images of destruction on the nightly news ? drowned neighborhoods, uprooted trees, personal belongings floating down the street ? activated two sets of memory. For me, as for so many others, this storm really hit home.

After Katrina, I remember that we defined success as, first, survival, and then a quick return to normal, but we soon came to realize there was no "normal." As Gov. Chris Christie recently said, you have to come to terms with "a new normal." The familiar fabric is gone: whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble, landmarks swept away, mud and debris everywhere. So what else did we learn?

One urgent truth: Many major American cities are becoming more like New Orleans. NOLA may be a city built largely and famously below sea level, but New York City is now only two to three feet above that mark and the subway system?s tunnels are below that. A few days after Sandy, MSNBC?s Rachel Maddow stood in front of a map of the United States, pointing out that most of the population centers of our country are perched along the coasts. Given climate change ? rising seas and warmer waters ? we can expect more severe weather, more hurricanes and more floods. We?re all vulnerable. Even Wall Street can drown, as can cultural and physical icons such as the Atlantic City boardwalk. The top priority in the aftermath is to secure the physical safety of our communities. If we don?t, nothing else will matter.

Beyond physical protection, the larger question is what to rebuild, what to transform and what to abandon. Take Staten Island, hard hit by Sandy, there were many deaths and it was one of the last places where help arrived. Do you re-create it or change it? Paved with concrete, Staten Island lacks protection ? wetlands and dunes are a thing of the past and there?s no natural barrier to the force of a superstorm. Do you rebuild Staten Island as it was, or reimagine a transformed borough that is stronger and better than before the hurricane hit? And, farther afield, do you simply not rebuild the most fragile beachfront areas along the Jersey Shore? As with Katrina, Sandy will force decisions that are hard and painful.

Leadership is crucial, and it?s the federal government that needs to step up, at least in the immediate aftermath. Cities and states can?t do it alone. No sense revisiting the political infighting in Louisiana and Washington, D.C., after Katrina, when people suffered unnecessarily.

The point is, Sandy showed us something vastly different: the president, governors and mayors working shoulder-to-shoulder to get response and rescue missions going; National Guard trucks rumbling into Hoboken a day after the storm, rescuing 20,000 people from the second floors of flooded homes; and distribution of food and supplies. No relief effort is perfect, and far too many communities have gone without power for far too long, but the recovery is in motion. When there?s political will and alignment of purpose, there?s a way.

Still, you can?t just move on to the "new normal," sweeping aside the grief and suffering of the aftermath. People need to preserve cultural legacies and personal history. They need the restoration of hope and belief. In New Orleans, the touchstone was Mardi Gras and other celebrations that define our city ? and express communal joy and meaning. In Sandy, I think a powerful locus of meaning is the coast itself: the beaches and the boardwalks, the Ferris wheels and cotton candy, and summer days that live forever.

In the end, it?s communal resolve that ultimately will make the difference. In New Orleans, ordinary citizens have been most responsible for revitalizing this iconic city. These residents displayed unbelievable resilience and fortitude, reimagining New Orleans as a stronger and better city than before Katrina. What New Orleanians demonstrated was truly government by the people. I have no doubt my friends in the Northeast will have the courage to do the same ? not only to rebuild, but to reinvent their communities.

Scott Cowen is president of Tulane University. He and his collaborator, Betsy Seifter, are writing a book on post-Katrina New Orleans as a model for urban revitalization.

MORE HURRICANE SANDY COVERAGE

Source: http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/2012/11/tulane_president_katrina_taugh.html

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