Draining New Orleans: The 300-Year Quest to Dewater the Crescent City

Draining New Orleans: The 300-Year Quest to Dewater the Crescent City

In Draining New Orleans, the first full-length book devoted to “the world’s toughest drainage problem,” renowned geographer Richard Campanella recounts the epic challenges and ingenious efforts to dewater the Crescent City. With forays into geography, public health, engineering, architecture, politics, sociology, race relations, and disaster response, he chronicles the herculean attempts to “reclaim” the city’s swamps and marshes and install subsurface drainage for massive urban expansion. The study begins with a vivid description of a festive event on Mardi Gras weekend 1915, which attracted an entourage of elite New Orleanians to the edge of Bayou Barataria to witness the christening of giant water pumps. President Woodrow Wilson, connected via phoneline from the White House, planned to activate the station with the push of a button, effectively draining the West Bank of New Orleans. What transpired in the years and decades that followed can only be understood by examining the large swath of history dating back two centuries earlier―to the geological formation and indigenous occupation of this delta―and extending through the colonial, antebellum, postbellum, and Progressive eras to modern times. The consequences of dewatering New Orleans proved both triumphant and tragic. The city’s engineering prowess transformed it into a world leader in drainage technology, yet the municipality also fell victim to its own success. Rather than a story about mud and machinery, this is a history of people, power, and the making of place. Campanella emphasizes the role of determined and sometimes unsavory individuals who spearheaded projects to separate water from dirt, creating lucrative opportunities in the process not only for the community but also for themselves. “Geographer Campanella has authored numerous books about New Orleans. . . . This new work is one of his best. . . . Campanella provides a well-documented account of how past public works, public health concerns, race relations, natural disasters, environmentalism, and Louisiana politics influenced drainage choices. His prose is excellent and his arguments well stated.” -- CHOICE “Clearly written, grounded in science, the book aims to understand, epoch by epoch, how the cumulative weight of unforeseeable consequences saved many millions of people while life in the shadow of levees became more hazardous.” -- Journal of American History Richard Campanella is professor of geography and associate dean for research at the Tulane School of Architecture. Recipient of the 2019 Louisiana Writer Award and named Knight in the Order of the Academic Palms by the French government, Campanella has written numerous books and articles about Louisiana history and geography, including Draining New Orleans: The 300-Year Quest to Dewater the Crescent City .