Among the heroes of Hurricane Harvey have been hundreds of volunteer
boaters, members of the so-called Cajun Navy and other similar groups,
who have patrolled the flooded streets of Houston in their own boats,
pulling stranded families off of roofs and bringing them to shelter.
Along the Gulf Coast, where hurricanes happen every year, the tradition
of citizen boat rescue goes back generations, but a more modern form of
the practice developed last August, during a spate of catastrophic
floods around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when people in danger began
posting messages seeking help on a Cajun Navy Facebook page. A man named
Shawn Boudreaux eventually convinced everyone to start using a
walkie-talkie
app called Zello, which gave the operation some organization and ability to
scale. This week, Boudreaux, who works banquets at fancy New Orleans
hotels, was in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a hundred and fifty miles east
of Houston, helping to prepare local boaters for a wing of Harvey that materialized only after the storm pummelled Texas. He spent much of what
spare time he had on Zello, monitoring the volunteer rescue efforts
across the state line. The Cajun Navy had expanded, and the size of this
spontaneous, self-organizing response, and the sacrifices of the
citizen volunteers, he told me by phone, “was pretty amazing to see.”

Harvey is now ebbing. The sun is out in Houston. And the stories of the
storm are consolidating, much as they did following the floods last year
in Baton Rouge, around the failures of the government’s preparations and
response to the disaster, and the successes of private individuals’
rescue efforts. The news on Thursday morning is of two large explosions
at a chemical plant northeast of Houston. Last year, the Houston
Chronicle published a series of
articles about the vulnerabilities of the city’s chemical industry and the ways
in which the industry’s lobbyists had defeated the Obama
Administration’s regulatory efforts. (One part of the investigation was
titled “An Industry Left to Police Itself.”) Harvey, like other great
Gulf Coast storms of recent years, has also made clear the insufficiency
of the National Flood Insurance Program, which is designed to manage
building in flood-prone areas but which has wound up encouraging vast
development in areas too risky for private insurers to support. The
hurricane’s destruction has, as well, underscored the insufficiency of
Houston’s city planning (“Boomtown, Flood
Town” was the title
of a prescient report last year by the Texas Tribune and ProPublica)
and the inadequacy of the reservoirs built to manage flooding (“If the
Addicks and Barker Dams
Fail”
was the headline of a sharp Houston Press report published five years
ago). Behind everything, escalating the stakes, is the willful ignorance
of climate change that many local and national political leaders still
cling to. In contrast to this, the actions of the Cajun Navy and other
groups are celebrated. The heroism of the boaters is so vivid and so
moving that it obscures the most important question about them: Why are
they so needed in the first place?

This winter, I spent time in Denham Springs, Louisiana, at the home of a
woman named Teressa Bell, who is in her seventies and lives with her
daughter Donna. Donna has been a quadriplegic since the age of fifteen, when she was in a car
accident. One morning last August, when a historic
accumulation of rain caused the nearby Amite River to surge, the ground
floor of the Bells’ home filled up with water, nearly to the ceiling, in
the course of an hour. Teressa and her son carried Donna up to the
second floor and laid her at the top of the stairs, on a sheet, where
she laid her head against the floor and watched the water rising, step
by step. She heard the floodwaters pull the refrigerator from the wall
and throw it around the kitchen. A friend of the Bells contacted a
boater named Kevin Lawson, who was out trying to help people, and asked
him to check on the Bells. He arrived, and pulled Donna, wrapped in a
sheet, off the second-floor landing of the house, just as the flood was
on the verge of swallowing it.

Of the hundred and fifty thousand Louisiana homes that were washed out
by the great rains of 2016, the vast majority–eighty-two per cent—were
not insured against floods. The Bells’ home was in this majority. When I
met the family this winter, their house was stripped to the studs, moldy
and uninhabitable, and their damaged belongings were being held in a
little trailer in the driveway. The Bells themselves were living in a
white trailer supplied by FEMA (after storms, the agency deposits them
on the lawns of the flooded, like condolence boxes), which they were
entitled to use for only eighteen months. They did not know what they
would do after FEMA took the trailer back. They had exhausted the
generosity of family and friends, and their house, which represented
much of their savings, was worth much less than it had been—the market
was saturated with similarly damaged properties. They had been rescued, but, like many others in the Baton Rouge area, they were, in deeper
ways, still stranded.

After the floods, the Cajun Navy became heroes in Baton Rouge.
Newspapers celebrated them; they were the grand marshals of local
parades; the lieutenant governor of Louisiana took a special interest in
their project. There were hundreds of families like the Bells, who felt
that they owed their safety not to the distant forces of government but to a
neighbor who had put himself at risk to help them. There was a social
elegance in the idea that working-class families were rescued by
working-class heroes in boats, in episodes that not always, but
sometimes, cut across racial lines. “Floodwaters don’t discriminate,”
was a slogan that circulated after the Baton Rouge floods.

At the time, the Baton Rouge floods seemed like they might trigger a
greater awakening to the chaos of climate change. Now they seem a
prelude to Harvey. In Texas, too, there has been devastation, and then
heroism, and there will be, surely, a longer-gestating devastation to
come. There is a cyclic pattern to the erosion of faith in government,
in which politics saps the state’s capacity to protect people, and so
people put their trust in other institutions (churches; self-organizing volunteer
navies), and are more inclined to support
anti-government politics. The stories of the storm and the navies exist on
a libertarian skeleton. Through them, a particular idea of how society
might be organized is coming into view.