(Karen OĠNeill - Human Ecology) Flood plains are known to be hazardous, and yet the system of land use in the United States encourages people to build there. Critics have argued that federal programs should require local planning boards to prohibit building on the most vulnerable lands, in exchange for federal flood programs, but these proposals have not been enacted.
The lack of coordination between local land use planning and federal flood control decisions has helped produce settlement patterns along the lower Mississippi River that make poor African-Americans and whites vulnerable. The federal government's improved levee system in the late nineteenth century allowed cropping to be expanded onto drained swampland in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Landowners established sharecropping and tenancy on these lands, displacing the risk of flooding onto the largely African-American workforce. As the federal levee system intensified control over small and medium floods, the potential for a devastating flood in New Orleans, near the end of the river, increased. A system that had begun as a means for boosting the region's agriculture and shipping therefore became increasingly devoted to protecting population centers. Here again, federal levees provided an opportunity for low-lying lands to be reclaimed for building. Flooding in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina was indeed heaviest in the low-lying lands that had been settled in the last century.
Flooding damages along this river system have not been concentrated solely on poor African-American and white communities. Even so, pre-Katrina studies of vulnerable populations by the University of New Orleans indicated that poor African-American residents of New Orleans were overly optimistic about their ability to weather out a storm within the city limits and that many would be unable to evacuate because they did not own cars. The system of loose coupling between federal, state, and local governments may be especially harmful to populations that are poorly served by local governments and that lack independent means for gathering information about risks and for mobilizing in emergencies.
