@article{thompson_hackett_bunds_2022, title={Evaluating Water Delinquency Fees and Financial Assistance Programs Through an Equity Lens}, volume={114}, ISSN={["1551-8833"]}, DOI={10.1002/awwa.1977}, abstractNote={In 2019, the water utility of Durham, N.C., participated in the National League of Cities’ initiative, Cities Addressing Fines and Fees Equitably.}, number={8}, journal={JOURNAL AWWA}, author={Thompson, Austin and Hackett, Heidi and Bunds, Kyle}, year={2022}, month={Oct}, pages={26–35} }
 @article{thompson_2022, title={Katrina: A History, 1915-2015}, volume={62}, ISSN={["1549-6929"]}, DOI={10.1353/sgo.2022.0029}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz Austin Thompson Katrina: A History, 1915–2015. Andy Horowitz. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. pp. x and 296, figs., notes, and index. $35.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780674971714). When Hurricane Katrina passed through New Orleans, LA on August 29th, 2005, the city’s levee system failed. Water surged into New Orleans and the surrounding parishes, leaving vast private and public properties, such as individual homes, public housing, public schools, and public healthcare, damaged or destroyed. In some cases, this damage was used as the basis for envisioning a new New Orleans: one that tore down the social safety net of the old New Orleans and instituted new ideals, like mixed-income housing, charter schools, and public-private partnerships for healthcare. In other cases, this damage was the basis for reinstituting the status quo. Despite the profound impact of Katrina on New Orleans, the history of flood disaster neither begins nor ends with the 2005 storm; instead, Katrina illustrates how “disasters are less discrete events than they are contingent processes” (3). Each disaster prompts a series of decisions that implicate vulnerability and the next disaster’s outcomes. In Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, Andy Horowitz chronicles the impact of federal, state, and local policy on inequitable disaster impacts, response, and rebuilding efforts in New Orleans, LA. The book asks three questions in the context of Katrina and New Orleans: “Why did people live in such dangerous places? What made the places dangerous? And, how could this happen in the United States?” (6). To do this, the book begins ninety years before the storm hits and concludes ten years after, illustrating that the impacts of Katrina were determined long before the storm formed or made landfall, and the decisions made after Katrina determine the impacts of the next storm. The author is a history professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, where his research focuses on disasters and societal causes and consequences. His dissertation work served as the basis for Katrina: A History, 1915–2015. The book provides a well-researched and chronicled history of policy, people, and infrastructure in New Orleans and is a useful work for the fields of disaster studies, history, public policy, sociology, geography, and political economy. By detailing the intersection of infrastructure and structural inequality in New Orleans, Horowitz illustrates that there is nothing “natural” about a natural disaster. Instead, disasters are the culmination [End Page 287] of a long history of highly intentional policies that distribute vulnerabilities unequally. To achieve this, Horowitz does not just focus on the immediate effects of Katrina, such as who did and did not flood and how the media portrayed white people versus African American people, but rather the long-term, policy-driven effects, such as eligibility for FEMA relief funds and access to health care and housing. In this way, the book is deeply rooted in theories of environmental justice and urban political ecology, suggesting that vulnerability in New Orleans is predicated on political, social, and economic factors, and an unequal distribution of power and harm. To organize what is a long and interconnected history, the book is divided into three parts: 1915–1965, 1965–2005, and 2005–2015, marked by Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Despite citing the beginning of the history as 1915, the infrastructural history of Louisiana dates back to 1849, when the federal government transferred 10,000,000 acres of wetlands to the state of Louisiana to drain them, using the revenue from the land sale for flood control. This led to the creation of levee districts, land owned by the state that held vast oil reserves. Fast forward to 1927 and Louisiana begins to reap the benefits of this oil, often at the hands of Leander Perez, a representative primarily concerned with his own self-interest, masked as states’ rights. This, combined with the New Deal-era infrastructure projects that channelized the Mississippi, encouraged developing lower-lying areas of the city, and funding dredging of canals for oil extraction moved land from public to private realms and deregulated control in the process. Despite seemingly unconnected actions, together, flood control, oil extraction, and...}, number={3}, journal={SOUTHEASTERN GEOGRAPHER}, author={Thompson, Austin}, year={2022}, pages={287–289} }