Richard Campanella's "Draining New Orleans"

Richard Campanella is a geographer and associate dean for research at the Tulane School of Architecture. He is the author of fourteen books, including The West Bank of Greater New Orleans and Cityscapes of New Orleans, as well as hundreds of articles on Louisiana history and geography.

Campanella applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Draining New Orleans: The 300-Year Quest to Dewater the Crescent City, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Draining New Orleans tells of a completely zany but all-too-consequential plan proposed in the late 1860s to cut a major navigation canal clear across New Orleans and out to the Gulf of Mexico. Luckily, it was eventually killed, but not before it railroaded engineers into reworking their drainage system for the city, resulting in three highly problematic outfall canals dug in the 1870s—two of which breached catastrophically during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Browsers would get a good idea from page 99 of a recurring theme in the epic 300-year quest to dewater New Orleans. That theme is path dependency, which in the book I describe as “that proclivity to make decisions based not on best practices or enlightened understanding, but on prior investments (‘sunk costs’), however faulty they proved to be.”

Page 99 captures one of many moments that evidence the larger paradox of New Orleans: that the very water-manipulating devices needed to make this city prosper economically would also undermine it geo-physically.

Visit Richard Campanella's website.

--Marshal Zeringue