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This epilogue discusses the death of civil defense proclaimed by President George H. W. Bush and then by President Bill Clinton, followed by its resurrection in 2001. The current Homeland Security provisions are compared to previous civil defense measures. The emergence of a large grassroots resistance movement against the Patriot Act is described.

Chapter Two summarizes the multiple attempts to create a city rebuilding plan and the federal rebuilding policies and programs that influenced how New Orleans and its neighborhoods would rebuild. It discusses key problems in both the design and delivery of federal recovery aid and the challenges faced by the Louisiana and New Orleans governments in developing the capacity to implement rebuilding projects and programs. It concludes that, although New Orleans secured significant federal recovery funding and increased its capacity to deploy these funds, major flaws existed in how federal funds could be used and accessed, and in the city’s ability to manage recovery projects and programs. Without an actionable recovery plan and long delays in deploying rebuilding assistance, residents, businesses and other property owners faced considerable uncertainty about the city’s future. Under these circumstances, grassroots neighborhood initiatives took on greater importance in rebuilding New Orleans.

The concluding chapter presents findings and learning from the rebuilding experience across the six New Orleans neighborhoods. It argues that grassroots organizations had a fourfold contribution to rebuilding New Orleans: repopulation, creating more complete neighborhoods, economic development and building civic capacity. It critically examines the strengths and gaps in recovery efforts for each of these four areas. A second discussion presents a framework for undertaking grassroots rebuilding in cities like New Orleans, in which capacity is largely based on volunteer organizations rather than on staff-based community organizations. A third section considers the connections between individual, neighborhood- and city-scale rebuilding, emphasizing the collective nature of rebuilding, the potential to leverage grassroots initiatives and using complete neighborhoods as a principle to guide rebuilding decisions. Finally, several proposals are made to address shortcomings in federal disaster recovery policies.

Chapter 3 focuses on the period immediately following 9/11 and Katrina: the phase of recovery led by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). It identifies the framing strategies used to typify the two disasters, define the victims, assign responsibility for the traumatic conditions (diagnostic framing), and identify remedies and solutions (prognostic framing). The chapter analyses the highly divergent framing of the disasters and their victims in New York and New Orleans—the former framed as heroes of a global tragedy and the latter as victims of a “natural” disaster—and explores the policy implications and consequences of these framing strategies. Major effects of this reorganization included the privatization and devolution of emergency management policy and the creation of new regulations that sharply restricted aid itself. Despite the “positive” versus “negative” valence of the framing of New York and New Orleans following these two tragedies, both localities suffered comparable difficulties in accessing federal aid.

This chapter describes the chaos in the aftermath of Katrina. On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, 238 lives were lost, businesses employing tens of thousands were obliterated, and more than 216,000 individuals and families lost their homes. Bureaucratic systems failed Mississippians in their hour of need. Katrina also revealed that the nation’s lead disaster agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was underfunded, understaffed, and suffered from serious mismanagement.

This chapter discusses how the recovery and rebuilding effort in the aftermath of Katrina was mired in red tape. No one in Mississippi advocated for reduced or limited federal involvement in the Katrina recovery. The need was just too great, and state and private resources were just too limited. Federal dollars administered through FEMA eventually covered the lion’s share of more than $3 billion in costs associated with debris removal and rebuilding schools, public buildings, parks, and other infrastructure lost in the storm. However, delay and uncertainty dogged the federal programs, and were the main enemies confronted by local leaders who were responsible for getting these long-term recovery projects moving.

Hurricane Katrina inundated southern Louisiana and Gulf Coast Mississippi with devastating storm surges and flooding, resulting in death, displacement, and untold destruction. Survivors felt let down by the federal government’s ineptitude at emergency management and by their insurance companies. The only counterpoint to the pervasive experience of abandonment was the unending efforts made by people of faith and other voluntary groups. As helpful as outside volunteers proved, the disaster also led to new imaginative efforts at community building and overcoming poverty, distrust, corruption, and racial injustice in which religious leaders from inside the community took leading roles.

Communities tend to learn things the hard way, reacting in the wake of disasters rather than in anticipation of them. Virtually all existing infrastructure was designed to withstand the extremes that we have experienced in the past. Historically, scientists could not project the impacts of climate change with much precision, so our existing design choices and plans for infrastructure have largely ignored the risks posed by those impacts. This chapter identifies strategies that communities and individuals can adopt now to strengthen their building practices to endure new extremes driven by a changing climate. Among other things, it analyzes how improving building codes and standards and insisting on wiser land-use policies, especially in the absence of a “no more” moment, can serve as a bulwark against the destruction that climate-fueled disasters bring.

Even for the largest economy in the world, ever-larger climate bailouts are not a responsible solution to confronting present and future climate impacts. Governments everywhere, including in the United States, will have to raise unprecedented amounts of money to cope with the impacts of climate change. This chapter examines how communities can raise the money needed, and how can they do so while keeping the financial strain as low as possible. It highlights some traditional solutions, such as taxes, borrowing, and buying reinsurance, alongside newer ideas, such as setting up special reserve funds, using value capture, raising funds from carbon taxes and cap-and-trade mechanisms, and issuing green and catastrophe bonds.

This chapter describes the evolution of the superpowers’ civil defense programs from the mid-1970s until the end of the Cold War. In the mid-1970s, the contrast between the USSR’s extensive civil defense effort and its moribund U.S. counterpart led to considerable anxiety that the Kremlin might see civil defense as a usable source of strategic advantage. Rebuffed in their efforts to convince the USSR to negotiate limits on its civil defense program, the Carter administration decided to revive U.S. civil defense on the basis of a strategic evacuation concept dubbed “Crisis Relocation Planning,” which the Reagan administration also pursued. Simultaneously, civil defense for nuclear war and peacetime emergency management were combined into a single agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Ironically, not only did Soviet leaders not perceive their civil defense program as a useable source of advantage, they grew increasingly sceptical of its utility throughout this period. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster accelerated this process and led to the reinvention of Soviet civil defense as a peacetime emergency management organization.