Menu
Excerpts
Exhibits
Collections
Originals
Categories
Map
Search
“Natural” Disasters
“Natural” Disasters
“Natural” Disasters
As millions of Americans struggle to recover from this year's devastating hurricanes, we offer up this collection of stories about previous generations' ways of dealing with meteorological calamity.
Explore Exhibit
Scroll to explore
Hurricanes
View Connections
20
Fire
View Connections
17
Flood
View Connections
20
“Natural” Disasters
Flood
Flood
partner
A Largely Forgotten Flood Ignited The Environmental Justice Movement
The Rapid City flood helped define pervasive environmental injustice and catalyze action.
by
Stephen R. Hausmann
Redlined, Now Flooding
Maps of historic housing discrimination show how neighborhoods that suffered redlining in the 1930s face a far higher risk of flooding today.
by
Kriston Capps
,
Christopher Cannon
The Missouri River Flood Hits a Historic Native American Homeland
In the wake of devastating floods, one writer reflects on the importance of place to Great Plains Indians.
by
Ian Frazier
In California, Climate Chaos Looms Over Prisons — and Thousands of Prisoners
How decades-old decisions to build two California prisons in a dry lakebed and a chaotic climate left 8,000 incarcerated people at risk.
by
Susie Cagle
The Long-Lost Tale of an 18th-Century Tsunami, as Told by Trees
Local evidence of the cataclysm has literally washed away over the years. But Oregon’s Douglas firs may have recorded clues deep in their tree rings.
by
Max G. Levy
The Devastating 1889 Johnstown Flood Killed Over 2,000 People in Minutes
When a dam gave way after unprecedented rainfall, it sent a wall of water barreling toward a Pennsylvania town of 30,000 people.
by
Alex Q. Arbuckle
Public Health and the Dead at Johnstown
How do we humanely bury the dead after a disaster?
by
Vicki Daniel
A Devastating Mississippi River Flood That Uprooted America's Faith in Progress
The 1927 disaster exposed a country divided by stereotypes, united by modernity.
by
Susan Scott Parrish
partner
A Flood of Tourism in Johnstown
Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.
by
Matthew Wills
,
Emily Godbey
Goodbye to Good Earth
A Louisiana tribe’s long fight against the American tide.
by
Boyce Upholt
American Bottom
Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains.
by
Walter Johnson
The Dam and the Bomb
On Cormac McCarthy.
by
Walker Mimms
An Object Lesson: What The Restoration of Fats Domino's Piano Means to New Orleans
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, the legend’s showpiece symbolizes the city's resilience.
by
Mary Niall Mitchell
Monuments Upon the Tumultuous Earth
For thousands of years, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids along the Mississippi River.
by
Boyce Upholt
partner
When San Diego Hired a Rainmaker a Century Ago, It Poured
After Charles Hatfield began his work to wring water from the skies, San Diego experienced its wettest period in recorded history.
by
Christopher Klein
partner
A History of U.S. Interference Worsened Pakistan’s Devastating Floods
Development aid targeted for water as an economic and technical matter had environmental and financial consequences.
by
Maira Hayat
Dredging Up the Past
A shoreline expert writes about dredging vessels, Louisiana, neoliberalism, and her lifelong quest to save her hometown from the sea.
by
Megan Milliken Biven
Songs for a South Underwater
After the 1927 Great Flood, Black musicians from the Delta produced an outpour of songs testifying to the destruction. The same is true today.
by
Sergio Lopez
How Humans Sank New Orleans
Engineering put the Crescent City below sea level. Now, its future is at risk.
by
Richard Campanella
A Border Crosses
After a Rio Grande flood shifted a 437-acre strip of land from Mexico to Texas, the area was the site of a long border dispute.
by
Paul A. Kramer
Policy
View Connections
05
Aftermath
View Connections
12