Life in the Wake of Katrina
Photographs by residents of St. Bernard Parish
Curated by Piper Hanson, Smith College, in association with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and The St. Bernard Citizens for Environmental Quality

St. Bernard Parish, just ten minutes from New Orleans, is the location of the breached levees, major flooding from MRGO (Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal), and the little publicized million-gallon oil spill that contaminated over 1700 homes following Hurricane Katrina. On September 4, 2005, almost a week after Katrina, a half-filled oil tank at the Murphy Oil Refinery in the Parish floated off its foundation spilling oil into the surrounding neighborhood resulting in the largest residential oil spill in U.S. history. Oil seeped into the ground killing anything living, flowed into water pipes turning drinking water to poison, and mixed with mud creating a toxic sludge. St. Bernard Parish became a toxic wasteland, or as the residents called it: another Love Canal.

Life in the Wake of Katrina is a traveling exhibit, also available on the internet, of over 300 images taken by the residents of St. Bernard Parish. Photographs, with accompanying text, educate viewers on the environmental causes of Hurricane Katrina, and serve as a wake-up call that human-induced global warming is occurring with very real consequences. While hurricanes are a natural occurrence, the large-scale aftermath of Katrina could have been reduced. Human activities have increased the surface temperature of the oceans, resulting in larger hurricanes, while wetlands that protect the inland from massive amounts of flooding have been destroyed for housing. Thus, through the words and images, the viewers learn that Katrina was not just a hurricane. It was an oil spill, political corruption, corporate irresponsibility, racial and class tension, immoral treatment of humans, engineering malfunctions, financial scams, and the destruction of the natural environment. Perhaps the most important message of the exhibit is that Hurricane Katrina ultimately led to the annihilation of what our society holds most dear: home and community. Thus, it challenges viewers to re-evaluate their relationships between each other and between what is home, community and the natural world, and it explores how these subjects are defined socially and culturally. In the end, it leaves audiences with the horror of the disaster and the very real fact that it can, and will, happen again unless collective action is taken to change the ignorance causing global warming.