![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/13/6.jpg\")
\nAt the end of September 2024, western North Carolina and the surrounding states experienced 30 inches of rainfall over two days when an unnamed storm collided with Hurricane Helene over the mountains of Southern Appalachia. The resulting catastrophe laid waste to the entire region. At a time when misinformation, rising authoritarianism, and disasters exacerbated by industrially-produced climate change are creating a feedback loop of escalating crisis, it’s crucial to understand disaster response as an integral part of community defense and strategize about how this can play a part in movements for liberation. In the following reflection, a local anarchist involved in longstanding disaster response efforts in Appalachia recounts the lessons that they have learned over the past six weeks and offers advice about how to prepare for the disasters to come.
\n\nThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that Hurricane Helene poured 40 trillion gallons of water on the region. This caused an estimated 1800 landslides; it damaged over 160 municipal water and sewer systems, at least 6000 miles of roads, more than 1000 bridges and culverts, and an estimated 126,000 homes. There have been over 230 confirmed deaths across six states with many still missing.
\n\nThe entire region was completely cut off from the outside world for a day or more, with all major roads shut down by landslides, collapsed bridges, and downed trees. Water, power, internet and cell service all went down within hours of the hurricane arriving, and remained down for days or, in some areas, weeks. There are still communities that will likely not have electricity for another three months because the roads that the power company would use no longer exist. Six weeks into this disaster, there are still tens of thousands of people who lack access to drinkable water. Not only have thousands of homes been wiped off the map—in many cases, the land they rested on no longer exists. Massive landslides have scoured canyons 30 feet deep, exposing bedrock that has not seen the light of day for tens of thousands of years. The torrential floods moved so much earth and caused so many rivers to change course that scientists have designated the hurricane a “geological event.”
\n\nIn response, a beautiful web of mutual aid networks has emerged, saving countless lives by bringing in essential supplies, providing medical care, setting up neighborhood water distribution centers, solar charging stations, satellite internet hubs, free kitchens, free childcare, and more. Name a need and there are folks out here who have self-organized to meet it. We share these lessons we have learned in hopes of helping others to prepare for similar situations, aiming to increase our capacity to build autonomous infrastructure for the long haul.
\n\n\nThere is no time like the present to get organized.
\n\nOur mutual aid group has been around for almost eight years. Within 72 hours of the floodwaters receding, we had a functioning mutual aid hub and were mobilizing folks to check on missing people and chainsaw crews to cut people out of their homes and open up roads. We were only able to do these things because we had already put in the work in our community to build the trust and relationships that are so vital in times of crisis.
\n\nWhile we are a small group, we have an extensive network of friends and allies that has grown throughout years of smaller-scale mutual aid and organizing efforts. The best way to prepare for a disaster is not to stockpile supplies, but to build trust in your community and nurture a healthy web of relationships. The best way to accomplish this is to start doing mutual aid projects in your community before an acute crisis arises. This will give you practice operating as a group and organizing logistics, and it will also connect you with others you wouldn’t otherwise meet and show them that they can count on you. Because of the work we had already put in, when the crisis hit, people turned to us and spread the word that we are a good group to funnel supplies and money through. You can only build that kind of reputation by putting in the work now.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/13/7.jpg\")
\nOne of the biggest initial challenges we faced was that most means of communication went offline for between 24 hours and several weeks, depending on where you lived. That includes landlines, cell phones, and internet. We can’t stress enough the importance of having multiple back-up options in place to be ready for a situation like this. First of all, make sure you have a place and time established in advance where folks know they can find each other in the event of a disaster. This is probably a good idea even if communications don’t go offline—nothing beats face-to-face communication.
\n\nSatellite internet was invaluable during the first couple of weeks. For some particularly hard-hit communities, it remains the only means of communication six weeks into this disaster. Unfortunately, Starlink, which is owned by the white supremacist Elon Musk, has proven to be the most useful and the easiest to set up in a disaster scenario. We know from past experience that he is eager to suppress social movements that use his companies’ services. There are other companies that provide satellite internet, but it tends to be slower, with significant data limits. These are generally not mobile systems and would be challenging to set up in the middle of a disaster.
\n\nDon’t forget that you will need a source of electricity such as a generator or solar power to make satellite internet work.
\n\nRadios, especially ham radios, are another important means of communication that should be arranged in advance with people who already know how to use them. Our mountainous terrain limits the distance that radios can broadcast, but it would still have been helpful if we had possessed ham radios.
\n\nSupply chain logistics are a huge piece of the puzzle. They will be one of your biggest headaches. In the first couple days of a disaster, you will probably only have access to the supplies you already have on hand in your immediate community. Stores will be closed and gas will not be available.
\n\nSoon, supplies will start pouring in from outside the disaster zone. The problem is that there will be a significant lag time between the announcement of a request for supplies and the time when those supplies arrive. In some cases, too many people will eventually answer the call, or by the time the supplies arrive, the needs on the ground will have changed. Social media can be useful in getting the word out about what supplies are needed, but it greatly exacerbates the lag time, especially as old posts are screenshotted and shared long beyond their relevance. When you make requests on social media, put a date in both the text and the visuals so people will know when the request was made.
\n\nLearn to anticipate what your needs will be a week from now, not tomorrow, because that is when the supplies will arrive. If and when regional support hubs are established, it is generally more efficient to communicate your needs directly to one of these hubs rather than blasting them on social media.
\n\nThat being said, not every disaster is going to receive the kind of national spotlight that Hurricane Helene did. You may well find yourself in a situation where there are not enough donors or supplies.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/13/1.jpg\")
\nWe need more people in our sphere that own or at least know how to operate heavy equipment. The floods destroyed hundreds of miles of roads and countless bridges. Massive piles of debris and tens of thousands of downed trees also blocked the roads, rendering many areas inaccessible. This is not the kind of problem you can solve with shovels and wheel barrows.
\n\nIn many cases, communities that were totally cut off literally bulldozed their way to town; some used excavators to build new bridges out of pieces of the old bridges. It was not the state doing this work, but hillbillies who own heavy equipment who took matters into their own hands long before the state or federal government showed up. The rural activist scene is pretty well prepared to tackle anything involving a chainsaw, given that our network includes more than a few professional arborists and many of us already cut our own firewood. But we were not prepared for scenarios involving debris piles and earthmoving. Even beyond the immediate need of opening access to cut-off communities, heavy equipment such as dump trucks and track hoes remains crucial to the long-term demolition and clean-up work in the months following the storm.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/13/2.jpg\")
\nAt the risk of repeating a cliché, acute crises such as natural disasters really do break the spell of normalcy that so many of us live under. Across western North Carolina, tens of thousands of people have experienced the joy of breaking out of the shell of isolated individualism and diving into the exhilaration and sense of purpose that collective action offers. Suddenly, people see that we are better off when we work in cooperation with each other, and that there are enough resources to meet everyone’s needs when we collaborate rather than compete. Even for radicals, there is a difference between knowing these truths intellectually and living, breathing, and feeling them 24/7.
\n\nTo be clear, we don’t think that mutual aid groups should approach their work with the question “How do we radicalize people?” as the primary objective. Our primary goal should always be to save lives and make sure that people’s basic needs are met. But it is true that in the course of this crisis, thousands of people have gotten a taste of how we could organize society better. Many of them have a real hunger to keep that spirit alive but don’t know where to begin or where to plug in.
\n\nWe should not show up in disasters the way that authoritarian or Christian groups do, looking to prey upon the vulnerable. Rather, we should make sure that there are ways that those who are radicalized by disasters and the experience of responding to them have opportunities to become involved in something lasting.
\n\nReliable information is hard to come by in a disaster. Even when phone and internet access return, rumors run rampant as everyone scrambles to figure out what happened and what kind of help is available or on its way. Many people will be deeply traumatized: when you have suddenly lost everything or your sense of stability has been pulled out from under you, fear and anxiety reign. On top of this, many of those joining in relief efforts will be running on pure adrenaline. None of these states of mind are conducive to clear thinking. It is important to get grounded and spread calm.
\n\nDo not repeat unverified information, especially on social media. If a statement starts with “my best friend’s uncle said…” or “I heard from a reliable source that…”, there is a pretty good chance that it is a rumor and not verified information. The more sensational the rumor, the more tempting it will be to spread it.
\n\nWe can’t count the number of rumors that circulated here. Most of them only served to spread fear. “The military is coming in and shutting down mutual aid hubs and seizing supplies.” “Militias are out hunting FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] workers.” It is best to take note of such rumors and be prepared in the event that they turn out to be true, but in the meantime, to keep on doing what you are doing until you see otherwise with your own to two eyes. The best way to get reliable information is in face-to-face interactions with primary sources.
\n\nAsk questions of people as you are distributing aid. Whenever we did a supply run or a wellness check, we made sure to ask extensive questions, such as:
\n\n“Do you know of people who are still cut off from supplies?”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/13/3.jpg\")
\n Count on it: the far right will hurry to capitalize on any disaster, no matter what the scenario, in order to advance their fascist agenda. Within hours of communications returning, there were racist fake news stories alleging that Black and brown people were looting. Soon, these morphed into absurd claims that FEMA couldn’t help people because they had spent all their money on immigrants, and then into even wilder conspiracy theories suggesting that the government had manufactured the storm to disenfranchise Republican voters and that FEMA was going to seize people’s land for lithium mining. Never mind that there is no lithium to be found in the mountains of western North Carolina.
\n\nOn top of this, many far-right and white nationalist groups made appearances in western North Carolina to provide aid. In most cases, they just showed up with a few supplies and left as soon as they had taken pictures to post on social media. It is worth distinguishing between groups that are part of the organized far right, like Patriot Front and the Proud Boys, who are only showing up to score political points, not to help people, and groups that really are there to provide direct aid but also happen to lean to the right. There should be no tolerance for the former. We feel that people should approach groups in the latter category with caution and evaluate whether it makes sense to work with them on a case-by-case basis. Crises make for strange bedfellows; there were a lot of Trump supporters working alongside anarchists to save lives, clear roads, and deliver supplies.
\n\nThe best solution to countering the influence that the far right can build in disaster scenarios is to be better prepared and better organized. The groups that get the most done, deliver the most supplies, and do the most good are the ones that garner the most respect. It’s as simple as that. A good social media game doesn’t hurt, either. It is vital that we crank out reliable information and inspiring memes and narratives to counter the racist fearmongering that the far-right disinformation machine churns out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/13/4.jpg\")
\nWe need more nuanced ways of thinking about government aid. Anarchists find themselves in a awkward situation in regards to FEMA and other forms of official government assistance. We rightfully criticize the government for its painfully slow and inadequate response to the disaster, but when the government finally shows up with significant resources, we aren’t sure how to engage.
\n\nWe’d suggest that people should approach FEMA and similar organizations with the same cautious curiosity as aid groups that lean to the right but are not actively organizing for fascism. While grassroots mutual aid efforts are a thousand times more flexible and efficient in responding to disasters than the lumbering bureaucracy of the United States government, our access to resources pales in comparison to theirs when it comes to money, machinery, and labor. There is simply no way that we can crowdfund the estimated $17 billion in damages that Helene did. We need to strategically tap into those resources without compromising our principles or weakening our own efforts. Strategies such as helping people to navigate FEMA’s cumbersome aid applications and insurance claims can take pressure off our own fundraising efforts.
\n\nAnother example of how we need a more nuanced approach to engaging with the government concerns the military. The presence of the military drastically changes the atmosphere in a community as soon as they show up. The communal feeling of mutual aid and cooperation can start to dissipate as their chain of command takes over. It is crucial to keep our mutual aid hubs completely separate from the military; do not let them staff or set up shop at our locations under any circumstances. But that does not mean we cannot strategically engage with them to use their free labor (and machinery) to muck out buildings, split firewood, and swing hammers.
\n\nThe majority of military personnel are working-class folks in their late teens or early twenties who were sold a lie by military recruiters, a decision many of them come to regret. It will not hurt if they catch a glimpse of a better way of helping people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/11/13/5.jpg\")
\nDirect financial assistance is a huge need that most disaster relief groups are unable or unwilling to provide. If your group has the ability to raise large amounts of cash, you can be an absolutely invaluable resource in the days and weeks after the disaster. Donated supplies can only do so much.
\n\nIn our case, tens of thousands of people have not only lost their homes, they’ve also lost weeks or months of employment. Bills are coming due and the overwhelming majority of folks are not getting anything close to the kind of assistance they need from FEMA or insurance companies. If you have a mutual aid group, set up a checking account in the group’s name and a few different digital wallets like Paypal and Venmo. Set up a website and social media accounts with clear links on how to donate. Do not wait for a disaster to do these things.
\n\nIf you know that a disaster is on its way, take out a large amount of cash to have on hand. Remember, Venmo and credit cards are not going to work when the power grid and communications are down. We have found that most people are able to set up some sort of digital wallet if they need to, but it is important to have cash on hand for those who can’t.
\n\nIt is also likely that if you are suddenly receiving and sending out large amounts of money in a short time, your account will get frozen or the people you send the money to won’t be able to access it immediately. This is infuriating, but there seems to be nothing that we can do about it—these companies have automated systems that flag accounts and they claim that they can’t override the system when your account is flagged.
\n\nGrassroots disaster relief is no longer the exclusive province of church groups and small bands of autonomous mutual aid groups. The notion has gone mainstream since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when so many people discovered that their neighbors were all they had to count on. At this point, well-organized and well-resourced groups of every stripe are prepared to mobilize quickly—from reactionary right-leaning groups like the Cajun Navy and to networks of volunteer helicopter pilots, not to mention radical groups like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Beyond these specific groups, more people understand how to self-organize now. Within three to five days of the flood waters receding, you couldn’t drive more than ten minutes without running into a do-it-yourself relief hub or water station in someone’s front yard, church, or gas station parking lot. It would not be an overstatement to say that within a week, western North Carolina had the highest concentration of four-wheelers, all-terrain vehicles, and dirt bikes in the world, as people poured in from all over the South and beyond to help with search and rescue and to get supplies out to cut-off communities.
\n\nMost of these hubs were truly grassroots, with no formal organization behind them. This is an overwhelmingly positive development, but it does not come without challenges. The chief problems were redundancy of effort and lack of coordination between relief hubs, road clearing crews, and people doing supply runs, search and rescue, and wellness checks. The sooner you can develop relationships and good communication systems with other hubs, the better, so you won’t have to be constantly reinventing the wheel.
\n\nCreating an intake system for incoming volunteers and arranging for people to coordinate them is a huge piece of the puzzle. We had to turn away many offers of help in the first few weeks because we didn’t have a good system in place for fielding newcomers, especially those from out of town, nor could we guarantee that we could plug them into a project on any given day if they just showed up, despite the fact that there was always a mountain of work to do. Connecting volunteers to communities and individual homes that need medical care, mucking, gutting, and repairs requires an enormous amount of legwork on your part, not to mention building trust between you and the residents. You would do well to have someone in your group that has a deep love of spreadsheets.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/09/02/louisiana-disasters-on-the-horizon-the-colonial-roots-of-climate-crises-and-a-path-toward-resilience", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/09/02/louisiana-disasters-on-the-horizon-the-colonial-roots-of-climate-crises-and-a-path-toward-resilience", "title": " Louisiana: Disasters on the Horizon : The Colonial Roots of Climate Crises—and a Path toward Resilience", "summary": "Drawing on interviews with locals, we explore the colonial roots of the disasters Hurricane Ida has exacerbated—and how to chart a path to resilience.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/header.jpg", "date_published": "2021-09-02T21:59:46Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:51Z", "tags": [ "louisiana", "new orleans", "hurricane", "hurricane ida", "hurricane katrina", "mutual aid", "disaster", "disaster relief" ], "content_html": "Drawing on interviews with local anarchists, we explore the colonial roots of the ongoing catastrophes Hurricane Ida has exacerbated in Louisiana and discuss how communities can create truly resilient infrastructure for all.
\n\nIt has been four days since Hurricane Ida wreaked havoc on New Orleans and the surrounding areas. As hundreds of thousands of people come to grips with how to survive for weeks with vastly reduced access to necessities, many are left asking the same questions they confronted in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in a climate—and a world—that become less stable with each passing day. In south Louisiana, anticipating another disaster like this has been a question of when, not if.
\n\nThe city of New Orleans and the rich multicultural patchwork that comprises its soul are both unique, and they face unique challenges. But as we have seen around the globe over the past few years, extreme weather events and associated social crises caused by climate change are accelerating and intensifying across the map. For those who have not yet felt the brunt of a changing climate, the situation in southeast Louisiana compels us to confront a future of looming disasters.
\n\nThe world we live in has been constructed according to the imperatives of political and economic power, not according to the needs of human beings. We have to implement our own strategies now to prepare for the catastrophes ahead in order build new worlds in the midst of them.
\n\nTo directly support autonomous relief efforts in and around New Orleans, you can donate to New Orleans Mutual Aid Group and Lobelia Commons via Venmo: @NolaMutualAid and @LobeliaCommons.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/1.jpg\")
Power lines blew down all across Southeast Louisiana, but it was the fall of the main transmission towers in New Orleans that knocked out all power to the city.
\nThe vast majority of New Orleans residents are without electricity and expect to remain without it for weeks. So are those in the surrounding areas, many of which Ida hit harder. Many people also lack access to safe tap water and there are reports of growing difficulty accessing bottled water. Trees have fallen across roads and houses; roofs have blown off.
\n\nGasoline is scarce. This makes it difficult for those who did not evacuate before the storm to do so now, even if they have a vehicle. In an interview we conducted on August 31, 2021, “M—,” an anarchist who lived in New Orleans’ South 7th Ward for years and recently moved out of the city to work on regional food autonomy infrastructure, described the situation: “A tank of gas out in New Orleans East is selling for $200-400. It’s being sold in the streets by people carrying weapons.”
\n\nThe government has done little to help. “Preparation seemed minimal,” a New Orleans paramedic who preferred to remain anonymous told us on August 31. “The city provided extremely minimal public sheltering before the storm hit. They’re currently scrambling to provide services to folks and are just now putting shelters together to accommodate folks three days later. The hospitals have been on the edge of collapse with COVID-19 patients and this may have been the breaking point. A lot of people are relying on Emergency Medical Services and the hospital in an attempt to find basic comforts and shelter.”
\n\nOn the other hand, he continued, the “deployment of NOPD [New Orleans Police Department] and the National Guard to storefronts—Walgreens, etc.—seemed to be an extremely high priority.” Less than 24 hours after Ida hit, the police had deployed anti-looting teams.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/2.jpg\")
The roof of a building and a stoplight came down on Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Many residents lost the roofs off their houses as well.
\nFor several interconnected reasons, this part of Louisiana is a series of “natural” disasters waiting to happen. All of these stem from colonization, capitalism, and the hubris of believing that economic forces trump natural forces.
\n\nWhat is now southern Louisiana—the entire area south of Lafayette and Baton Rouge—was formed over the last 7000 years through sediment deposition and river flooding. The Mississippi River carries billions of tons of sediment from the interior of North America, which was deposited at the river’s mouth to form the delta as the Mississippi changed course and meandered over the last few millennia. Spring flooding brought new sediment with it, depositing new land on either side of the riverbanks, creating natural levees. In river deltas, as opposed to river valleys, the river level is typically higher than the surrounding land, with the bank serving as a buffer.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/3.jpg\")
At various points across the last 7000 years, roughly, the Mississippi River has flowed out into the Gulf of Mexico through several different channels, each one creating a different lobe of the delta.
\nThe lower Mississippi River area is one of the most intensely hydrologically engineered regions in the world. Bulbancha—the Choctaw name for the area that is now called New Orleans—was already a multilingual Indigenous hub for trade and other activities before European colonization. Yet due to seasonal flooding, it was not a permanent settlement.
\n\nThe city of New Orleans was created by the French in 1718 as a colonial outpost. They chose this location because there seemed to be enough dry land to build on, it afforded them a six-mile, unobstructed cannon shot downriver at competing colonial powers, and it gave them strategic control over the mouth of the Mississippi—and therefore all interior North American trade. In the 1720s, the colonizers began constructing earthen levees to control the spring floods, which were inconvenient to their aspirations to build a European-style city.
\n\nM— is familiar with the region’s complex history and hydrology as a consequence of his years as an ecological tour guide in the Louisiana swamps. He explained how the same engineering that enables the city to continue to function as a year-round settlement is also responsible for its increased vulnerability to storms like Ida.
\n\n“As you get closer to Lake Pontchartrain, prior to human engineering, that would have been a sea level swamp and marsh. In order to have houses with dry land, you can’t have a saturated marshy soil, so a series of pump systems and canals was installed to ‘drain the swamp.’ Every time they turn on the pumps to keep the streets dry, it continues to suck water out of the soils.” This exacerbates the natural process of soil subsidence, wherein new land formed by flooding—soft and saturated with water—sinks over the years as it slowly compresses to form sedimentary rock. When human-made levees drastically curtailed and then stopped river flooding, the rivers could no longer bring in new sediment. Consequently, there is no longer anything to counteract the tendency to sink.
\n\n“So the ground continues to subside underneath the buildings and the city, creating a bowl effect where you have the levee wall on the Mississippi River. And then on the lake, which is prone to storm surge, you have the Army Corps flood wall. The two main forces of flooding are the Mississippi River, which experiences storm surge that they call backsurge, and Lake Pontchartrain, which is again prone to storm surge coming in through the Mississippi Sound and Lake Borgne.”
\n\nThat’s why about half of the area, which was all at or above sea level in 1718, is now below sea level. The city also frequently experiences minor flooding due to heavy rains and old drainage infrastructure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/4.jpg\")
Generally, as you move from the Mississippi River towards Lake Pontchartrain, the elevation diminishes.
\nFlood control expanded in intensity and geographical reach throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, especially after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. After catastrophic damage, the state initiated the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, which “basically straitjacketed the river,” said M—.
\n\n“The river, prehistorically, is a living thing; it moves, ebbs, floods, and so on. The levees were created to prevent the river from topping its banks ever again. By doing so, they create the most dangerous river possible by ensuring that all of the water that enters the river can no longer leave the river. When the river would overtop its banks and enter its floodplain, it would deposit sediment into the floodplain. Now the sediment builds up on the sides of the levees and the bottom of the channel.”
\n\nAlthough the US Army Corps of Engineers dredges the river to maintain the shipping channel, “not only does all of that water stay in the levee, but there’s actually less channel for the water to take up,” says M—. Even if climate change weren’t making the Mississippi watershed wetter with each passing year—which it is—“the river would get higher every single year just as a result of the sediment being deposited inside of the channel. The only way out of that is to continue building the levees higher and higher.”
\n\nOver the decades following the flood of 1927, the US Army Corps of Engineers built massive projects such as the Bonnet Carre and Morganza Spillways, the Old River Control Structure (ORCS), and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal (MRGO). The sugarcane, shipping, oil, gas, and petrochemical industries couldn’t handle the seasonal ebbs and flows of natural patterns, so those who held political and economic power sought to impose control over one of the most powerful forces on the continent.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/5.jpg\")
If the Old River Control Structure were to fail, the main flow of the Mississippi would suddenly and catastrophically redirect down the Atchafalaya, obliterating Morgan City and leaving New Orleans low and dry.
\nThe Old River Control Structure, which has been described as “America’s Achilles Heel,” is located in between Natchez, Mississippi and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers meet. It was completed in 1963, designed to “prevent the Mississippi River from going where it wants to go,” as M— explained. “Prior to the creation of that spillway,” he said, “the river was slowly going down the Atchafalaya River more and more every year. The Control Structure keeps 30% of the Mississippi’s flow going into the Atchafalaya River and the remaining 70% down the Mississippi River.”
\n\nIf it were to fail—which is a distinct possibility as climate change brings more and more rain to the Upper Midwest—the resulting flood would be unimaginable.
\n\n“In 1973, there was a massive Mississippi River flood that caused all kind of problems upriver from Louisiana. This was the first flood that really challenged the ORCS. The floodwaters formed gyres that started ripping concrete out of the floodgate. It was so damaged that they weren’t able to repair it and they just made another one called the Auxiliary Control Structure. Something like 50 feet of concrete was holding the river where it is, and if it had failed, which it was very close to doing, the Mississippi River would have gone down the Atchafalaya River, causing a catastrophic flood down the Atchafalaya River Basin. Everything from the Mississippi River to Morgan City would have been decimated, and the Mississippi River would have never gone back its current channel. What you would see at New Orleans, had that happened, would have been a riverine estuary, almost no water in the river. It wouldn’t be a shipping channel anymore, and New Orleans as a city would probably cease to function because New Orleans and all the surrounding areas get their water from the Mississippi River.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/6.jpg\")
The Auxiliary Old River Control Structure.
\nAt the same time that the land is sinking and river flooding is becoming a greater risk, Louisiana is also losing land at an unparalleled rate, mostly from the coast, due to a combination of vegetation loss from invasive species, oil and gas industry canals that chop up the coastline and expose more area to the ravages of wave action, intensifying storms, and rising sea levels. The coastal marshes and the swamps—the cypress and tupelo forests that historically insulated the region from the worst effects of hurricanes—have largely been destroyed. “Through centuries of creating canals, logging, and other engineering, the forests were decimated,” said M—.
\n\n“After the entire scandal and Army Corps catastrophe of Katrina, levees were raised, more rigorously tested, and are more likely to succeed now and not be breached,” he continued. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), the poorly designed canal responsible for delivering Katrina’s storm surge directly into New Orleans, “was closed some years ago, which was critical in terms of desalinating the waters that were entering Lake Pontchartrain. That allows the forests in the area to bounce back a little bit.” These advances have led some to mistakenly conclude that the fix worked. Unfortunately, much of this is too little too late, and as explained above, the continual raising of the levees around New Orleans, while essential to protect residents of the city, is only a stopgap.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/7.jpg\")
A natural gas refinery after Ida. The plumes of smoke burning off the stacks are normal, unfortunately.
\nAs much as the residents of New Orleans are in constant danger, those on the periphery and beyond are left even more at the mercy of the elements. The further downriver you go, the worse things get, but upriver isn’t good either: the area of the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, known as “cancer alley,” is home to roughly 200 petrochemical plants and 25 oil and gas refineries, not to mention the highest cancer rates in the country. Most of the communities in this area are primarily occupied by the descendants of enslaved Black people, many of whom work in these industries because there is little other work available, exposing them to high levels of carcinogens.
\n\nIt is chilling to imagine the potential toxic waste disaster that would result from even one petrochemical plant being damaged in a catastrophic storm.
\n\nWith so much hazard and hardship, an outsider might ask why people continue to live in the region.
\n\nFirst, as many born and raised Louisianans will proudly say, because it’s home. The flat, hot swampland that is more water than soil, the rich cuisine and music, and the syncretic mix of cultures over the years—involving more than 30 Indigenous peoples, West African survivors of the slave trade, European colonizers and immigrants, regular exchange with Haiti, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries, and more recent influxes of people from Vietnam, Honduras, and Mexico—have created a place unlike anywhere else on Earth. The unique and vibrant culture sustains the people and the people sustain the culture.
\n\nSecond, for many people, it would be very difficult to leave. “With New Orleans specifically,” said M—, “the people impacted are people who live in tenuous circumstances. The people who can’t leave: people who are housing insecure, who don’t have a car, who maybe have some historic trauma related to Katrina, or may not want to leave.” Ida intensified so rapidly that there wasn’t enough time to take the necessary steps to organize a full mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, which crucially involves arranging transport for those without personal vehicles. Even if there had been, evacuation bus routes were already sorely lacking.
\n\n“The people who suffer are typically the people marginalized and treated as surplus by capitalism: Indigenous peoples, people of color, queer people, and poor, working class people,” M— stated. This is as true now as it was in 2005. “This disaster puts a magnifying glass to pre-existing conditions. People had said this a million times about the pandemic, but the hurricane really does show that. People are now paying attention to electrical power, but there are people in my neighborhood who’ve been without power and water for many years on and off. Once power comes back in the city of New Orleans it may not come back on for everyone. How do we not let the state dictate the terms of return?”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/8.jpg\")
With no power, the French Quarter lies empty of revelers.
\nSince it became a colonial holding, southeast Louisiana has been an area of crucial strategic importance—but, at the same time, of brutal death and exclusion. The French displaced Indigenous people, waged colonial wars against them while pitting different peoples against one another, and enslaved thousands, primarily from the Senegambia region of Africa. Early colonizers, recruited from Europe’s underclass, died of disease in massive numbers. The city flooded constantly and could not be reliably drained, leading to the public sanitation problems that still plague it to this day.
\n\nWhen enslaved Africans were brought over, they too died in massive numbers, many before they reached the auction block. After lackluster attempts at cultivating indigo and tobacco as cash crops, the enslaver class struck it rich with sugarcane in the late 1700s. Enslaved people in the region suffered the worst death rate of any enslaved people in the United States, enduring forced sugarcane harvesting in the brutal Louisiana heat. In 1811, approximately 500 enslaved Africans rose up in the largest slave insurrection in the history of the US, marching towards New Orleans from plantations upriver, killing two white men, and laying waste to the plantations along their path. Backed by Federal troops, the local militia violently repressed the uprising.
\n\nToday, the towns upriver of New Orleans are inhabited by the descendants of the people who worked here as slaves. They labor in the refineries and chemical plants that have outpaced but not entirely replaced the sugar cane plantations. Grain barges and container ships have replaced the Mississippi flatboats that drove the vast majority of interior trade in the 1800s. “Around 60% of all US grain going to export uses the Mississippi River as its main logistical flow,” M— told us. “Should that stop for some reason, that would have enormous consequences not only for the US economy but the world economy.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/9.jpg\")
The Port of New Orleans is pictured here. Just upriver from it is the Port of South Louisiana, the largest tonnage port in the Western Hemisphere, which handles 60% of US grain exports.
\nLouisiana has the highest per capita prison population in the world. Prisoners are still routinely sentenced to hard labor at an institution that seamlessly transitioned from a slave plantation to a prison. The legacy of slavery continues: for many rural parishes in Louisiana, prison is the main industry. In many ways, the state still represents a penal slave colony within the prison system of the United States.
\n\nYellow fever epidemics, first brought to the region by the slave trade, killed 40,000 people here in the 19th century. The same city is now experiencing its fourth wave of COVID-19, pushing an under-resourced medical system to the brink. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people have lost access to electrical power or drinking water in the wake of Hurricane Ida—in the sweltering heat of summer.
\n\nStructurally, little has changed in the region in terms of who suffers and who benefits. The current situation represents a modernized version of centuries-old injustices.
\n\nThe fact that disasters disproportionately impact the most marginalized has already been demonstrated many times over. But this is not simply a matter of needing better state policy. Disasters like this are not just the result of incompetence or a lack of proper technocratic planning; they are the inevitable result of processes that concentrate decision-making power in the hands of the few and reward them for not concerning themselves with the consequences for others. We live in a society of perpetual disasters not so much because life is nasty, brutish, and short outside the comfort zone secured by state power and capitalist technology, but because the priorities driving the development and application of that power and those technologies have very little to do with making life sustainable for most people.
\n\nIn New Orleans—as elsewhere around the world—the profit imperative that guides transnational oil, chemical, and shipping capital dictates what gets protected from worsening storms, how this short-term protection is enacted, and who is excluded from protection. There is little incentive for those who control this capital to look out for the people or culture of New Orleans. Even members of the local wealthy class, who can and do leave well in advance of a storm and who received a disproportionate share of the storm relief funds after Katrina, are at best an afterthought in the cold calculations of multi-billion dollar corporations. The poor don’t even factor in—and the further downriver from New Orleans you go, the more people are left to their own defenses.
\n\nSo—if we can’t count on the systems that administer and distribute power for solutions, what can we do ourselves?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/10.jpg\")
Although the flood wall behind this shot was not in danger of being overtopped, the storm surge brought Lake Pontchartrain crashing up over the concrete embankment and walkway.
\nExtreme weather events, coupled with other forms of crisis, are now so commonplace that they are outstripping the media’s ability to report on them and generating compassion fatigue. Before the damages from one hurricane, flood, or fire can be accounted for, the news cycle has moved on to the next. Meanwhile, life for those affected moves at a snail’s pace as they try to pick up the pieces. For many around the world, it is already impossible to imagine what life might look like without constant crises. Over the years to come, these crises will impact more and more of us.
\n\nIt is a mistake to assume that when ecological crises get “bad enough,” the state will eventually be forced to do something to help. From a capitalist perspective, unevenly distributed risks and consequences have always been essential to the market. In a colonial society like the US, people of all social classes take it for granted that there will be casualties. Any approach that remains within the logic of capitalism will only produce symptomatic solutions, while the problems remain systemic.
\n\nThis means two things for grassroots responses to catastrophic climate change. First, fighting against capitalism and its premises is an essential element of disaster relief. To protect ourselves and each other, we have to fight against the political and economic systems that produce the conditions that make disasters inevitable. Second, as we organize to confront these crises, we must not rely on or reproduce the kind of authoritarian structures that produced these problems in the first place.
\n\nLooking back on the aftermath of Katrina, we can see how both the state and the nonprofit sector often make things worse rather than better. The federal government did next to nothing for the poor of New Orleans while turning the city into a militarized occupation and shamelessly mishandling funds; afterwards, developers used the opportunity to displace people and accelerate gentrification. Many people who lived through the consequences were left with a profound distrust in the state.
\n\nIn hopes of transcending the failures of the state and the nonprofit sector, many people have been experimenting with grassroots models. The pandemic and the climate disasters of recent years have spurred an explosion of mutual aid groups across the US. “Mutual aid,” an anarchist watchword for over a century and a common-sense concept shared by untold millions for much longer, has become a buzzword. The idea is simple: people help each other and everyone benefits. In practice, some people have begun to use this label to describe precisely the sort of charity frameworks and moves for political clout that the framework of mutual aid originally provided an alternative to. The real differences in power and access to resources between people acting toward a similar goal or in similar conditions can create challenges when the goal is to arrive at genuinely horizontal relations.
\n\nM— spoke about how to improve on previous grassroots solidarity efforts. In some cases, “the relationship is so built on dependency that when the activist leaves, the people who are receiving that aid suffer. It’s something that’s been repeated in every disaster zone that I’ve been in.”
\n\n“Instead of doing that, we are asking—how can we use our skills, access to resources, and the infrastructure we’ve been slowly working on in the region in a way that doesn’t make everything depend on us personally, that doesn’t require the role of the activist or any kind of specialization? How can we give up the keys to that kind of access? It’s simultaneously more practical and more in line with our ethic.”
\n\nIn New Orleans, people set up several political mutual aid groups at the beginning of the pandemic or even earlier, including the New Orleans Mutual Aid Group (NOMAG), New Orleans Mutual Aid Society (NOMAS), and Southern Solidarity, all of which are distributing food and other resources. On the first day after the storm, NOMAG distributed hundreds of gallons of free gasoline—a move not without risks under such desperate conditions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/11.jpg\")
With scarce gasoline, New Orleans residents tried to fill up anything they could while it was still possible.
\nAlongside these overtly political organizing efforts, countless acts of solidarity and resistance take place in less visible or recognizable ways. By nature, these are difficult to catalog, but such organic forms of organization are arguably at least as effective and sustainable as many of the more visible, politicized gestures. People are grilling non-stop to feed their neighbors, tarping roofs and fixing houses for each other. Anarchists are engaging in these activities as well as more overtly political frameworks.
\n\nThe Lobelia Commons is working towards creating a network to establish long-term food autonomy in the area, including autonomous supply lines that can get produce and other necessities to neighborhood kitchens in the face of disruptions like Ida.
\n\nSome people are employing more confrontational approaches, as well. In a logical response to the situation, “looting started happening as soon as the winds stopped from Ida,” M— reported. “New Orleans didn’t pop off last year during the uprising that swept the rest of the country. In view of the crisis from COVID-19 and the general state of poverty in New Orleans, this is the first gasp for breath that was possible. There is a lot of pent up energy and direct need that is definitely going to unfold in the future.” While New Orleans is awash in tragic horizontal violence that contributes to a prevalent negative attitude towards anything considered “crime,” it’s important to distinguish between the different forms of activity that are sometimes lumped together under this label. Looting is often a simple and sensible act of survival and redistribution in a society in which massive numbers of poor people are blocked from accessing basic necessities. It is even more justifiable in situations like this one.
\n\nIn this era of disaster, one of the most difficult tasks will be to move beyond continuously reacting to one crisis after another in order to plan more ambitiously for an uncertain future. This already feels overwhelming, and it is not going to get easier. But even in the midst of mayhem, we know that the bonds, skills, and new—or timeless—ways of thinking that emerge when everyday life is disrupted can be lasting and transformative. The powerful cannot dictate the terms of the return to normality; there will be no return to normality, even if we want one. The forecast is uncertainty from here on out.
\n\nWe will have to devise creative ways to survive and thrive in this unpredictable world. We can draw on many past and present examples of people living in resilient ways and accommodating themselves to ever-changing natural patterns. What is now called New Orleans has always been called Bulbancha, “The Land of Many Tongues” in Choctaw, in reference to the number of languages spoken by those crisscrossing this turbulent region, coming and going with the seasonal changes. Indigenous cultures the world over, imperiled by climate change and other colonially-imposed tragedies, suggest some of the ways that we can step away from manufactured disasters towards more holistic relations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/02/12.jpg\")
Bulbancha forever.
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