When and why the feds started getting involved in disaster response

Author John M. Barry was among the guests on NBC's Meet the Press this morning. He and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana State University Hurricane Center deputy director Ivor van Heerden were included in a discussion centered around Katrina. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, was on later to discuss John Roberts. The show's transcript is here.

Tim Russert, the program host, says Mr. Barry's 1997 book Rising Tide is applicable to our current situation in the Katrina disaster. According to these folks, it was in the response to massive flooding in 1927 that people started thinking that federal government had a role in disaster response and relief.


Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

From the publisher, via Barnes & Noble (click book cover for more information):

In 1927, the Mississippi River swept across an area roughly equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined, leaving water as deep as thirty feet on the land stretching from Illinois and Missouri south to the Gulf of Mexico. Close to a million people - in a nation of 120 million - were forced out of their homes. Some estimates place the death toll in the thousands. The Red Cross fed nearly 700,000 refugees for months. Rising Tide is the story of this forgotten event, the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known. But it is not simply a tale of disaster. The flood transformed part of the nation and had a major cultural and political impact on the rest. Rising Tide is an American epic about science, race, honor, politics, and society. Rising Tide begins in the nineteenth century, when the first serious attempts to control the river began. The story focuses on engineers James Eads and Andrew Humphreys, who hated each other. Out of the collision of their personalities and their theories came a compromise river policy that would lead to the disaster of the 1927 flood yet would also allow the cultivation of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and create wealth and aristocracy, as well as a whole culture. In the end, the flood had indeed changed the face of America, leading to the most comprehensive legislation the government had ever enacted, touching the entire Mississippi valley from Pennsylvania to Montana. In its aftermath was laid the foundation for the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

John M. Barry's latest book is:


The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History