Overflow and Containment in the Aftermath of Disaster

Abstract

In reflecting on Hurricane Katrina, so soon after it struck the Gulf Coast,
I want to consider what one might expect from the public inquiries and
official investigations of the disaster. Prediction, whether of meteorological
or social phenomena, is a risky business, but by now the field of science
and technology studies (STS) has produced a substantial literature on the
investigations and official inquiries that follow in the wake of notable disasters,
accidents, technological failures, and other breakdowns of sociotechnical
order. This literature is diffuse and the interests and theoretical
perspectives of various authors differ, but the relevant work includes studies
of knowledge-making in the aftermath of such failures as the Windscale
nuclear accident, the Bhopal disaster, the Challenger explosion, the bovine
spongiform encephalitis (BSE) episode, and the debacle of the Florida vote
in the 2000 US Presidential election.To summarize (very briefly and
admittedly inadequately) some major themes of this rich literature, I will
list seven points. In the final section, I relate them to the Katrina case, and
advance several tentative predictions.

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Social Studies of Science
DOI: 10.1177/0306312706069439
2007; 37; 153 Social Studies of Science
Stephen Hilgartner Overflow and Containment in the Aftermath of Disaster
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Overflow and Containment in
the Aftermath of Disaster
Stephen Hilgartner
Keywords accidents, Hurricane Katrina, politics, public inquiries, risk, risk society,
sociology
In reflecting on Hurricane Katrina, so soon after it struck the Gulf Coast,
I want to consider what one might expect from the public inquiries and
official investigations of the disaster. Prediction, whether of meteorological
or social phenomena, is a risky business, but by now the field of science
and technology studies (STS) has produced a substantial literature on the
investigations and official inquiries that follow in the wake of notable dis-
asters, accidents, technological failures, and other breakdowns of socio-
technical order. This literature is diffuse and the interests and theoretical
perspectives of various authors differ, but the relevant work includes stud-
ies of knowledge-making in the aftermath of such failures as the Windscale
nuclear accident, the Bhopal disaster, the Challenger explosion, the bovine
spongiform encephalitis (BSE) episode, and the debacle of the Florida vote
in the 2000 US Presidential election.1To summarize (very briefly and
admittedly inadequately) some major themes of this rich literature, I will
list seven points. In the final section, I relate them to the Katrina case, and
advance several tentative predictions.
1. There are no natural disasters, only sociotechnical ones, in advanced techno-
logical societies, such as the USA. Disasters are typically perceived as abnor-
mal, deviant events, but in many ways they are ‘normal’ occurrences that
stem from the particular vulnerabilities that social institutions and
actions build into the heterogeneous networks of technological systems
and infrastructures (Perrow, 1984; Jasanoff, 1994). Thus, even disasters
widely classified as ‘natural’ will inevitably implicate human artifacts,
organizations, and choices. Moreover, the sociotechnical networks
intended to monitor, manipulate, and manage risk have reached a level
of density where today any disaster – whether attributed to the agency of
natural or unnatural forces – will fall under the jurisdiction of some set
of technical experts and organizations (e.g., Beck, 1992). All major dis-
asters therefore demand a social accounting.
Social Studies of Science 37/1 (February 2007) 153–158
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2. The vision of orderly, manageable sociotechnical systems is critical to political
legitimacy in the contemporary world. The organizations that operate com-
plex technologies tend to present them publicly as orderly, rule-governed
systems that achieve acceptable levels of safety by virtue of the rational-
ity of their design. Legitimacy depends in no small part on the mainte-
nance of a cosmology in which people can expect the institutions that
operate and govern technological systems, especially the state, to pre-
dict, prevent, or at least partially mitigate any number of hazards (Wynne,
1982). The political stakes in accounting for disasters are therefore
extremely high.
3. Disasters and accidents create profoundly disturbing collective experiences that
challenge the managerial vision of orderly systems. Disasters evoke horror
not only because they make chaos and suffering visible but also because
they reveal shocking disorder in sociotechnical systems. Tangled com-
munications, failures to act on available knowledge, and socially struc-
tured ignorance make the crisp linearity of the organizational chart seem
like a naive fantasy.2The messy, ‘unruly’ character of technology is dra-
matically displayed, revealing ad hoc judgments, informal practices, and
other deviations from the formal procedures that supposedly guide
action (Wynne, 1988). Similarly, disasters often suggest that social order
in general depends on more fragile machinery, such as the fallible sys-
tems that distribute electrical or police power, than many might like to
believe.3Amid such dramatic displays of vulnerability, people find it
easy to imagine disorder of an even greater magnitude, with problems
overflowing their boundaries and spreading into new domains.
4. Officials and citizens alike typically perceive reestablishing order to be a cen-
tral priority, but accomplishing this depends not merely on containing the dis-
aster on the ground (regaining control, rescuing people, rebuilding systems),
but also on containing it discursively. Public authorities must address the
meaning of a disaster as well as the materiality of it. Reclaiming a sense
of normalcy may depend on placing the episode securely within a narra-
tive frame that restores confidence in the capacity of social institutions,
especially the state, to protect the citizenry. Moreover, when state insti-
tutions fail to reassure, people may experience profound anxiety, leading
them to experience a sense of ‘civic dislocation’ as they look to other
institutions as sources of reassurance (Jasanoff, 1997).
5. Public inquiries often play an important role in efforts to contain disasters within
a reassuring storyline, although their capacity to reassure is potentially problem-
atic. Disasters typically precipitate a public process of inquiry and investi-
gation aimed at assessing cause and blame, defining specific entities (for
example, artifacts, individuals, organizations) as deviant, identifying pre-
ventive strategies, punishing wrongdoers, and aiding or compensating
victims. The process of public investigation typically begins with media
coverage when disaster first strikes. Later, much of the action usually
moves to official inquiries or public commissions set up by the state.
Public inquiries serve as a device for managing the disorder and discord
that disasters produce, and at an abstract level the inquiry process follows
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a general structure of ‘social drama’ described in the processual anthro-
pology of Victor Turner (1974). In Turner’s scheme, a social drama begins
with a normative ‘breach’ that produces a ‘schism’ in the community and
proceeds through a period of ‘crisis’, a phase of ‘redress’, and finally to
‘reintegration’ if the redress is successful, or to continued schism if it is not
(Turner, 1974; Wynne, 1982; Hilgartner, 2000).
Public inquiries thus offer a ritualized process for collectively ‘moving
on’, but they do not have a guaranteed capacity to reassure. On the one
hand, public inquiries have the potential to contain disasters within durable
narrative frames, recreating the collective experience of a manageable
world by fixing cause, focusing blame, meting out justice, taking strong
action. On the other hand, the process of investigation has the potential to
produce cascades of revelations that display additional layers of messiness,
thus undermining further the managerial imaginary and leading the sense
of breakdown to overflow its extant boundaries. These contradictory
potentials generate a dynamic tension between overflow and containment
that in principle can produce varying mixtures of reassurance and anxiety.
6. The inquiry process typically features a contest to control how causal and moral
responsibility for the disaster is framed. Public inquiries aim to establish what
caused disaster, who is to blame, and what should be done about it. But
responsibility can be allocated and distributed in many ways among the
nodes of a sociotechnical network. Following an accident, investigations
may transform the heterogeneous links that hold together a technological
system into ‘traps hooking people and things together in a network of cause
and blame and guilt’ (Gieryn & Figert, 1990: 87). However, actors often
strenuously resist being implicated, seeking to deflect attention to other
network components. As competing factions seek to fix responsibility on
different entities, opposing parties work to emplot the history of the disas-
ter in incompatible ways, presenting varied casts of characters (for exam-
ple, heroes, victims, villains) and offering a variety of strategies for redress.4
7. The most important moves in aftermath struggles are those that influence the
kinds of questions the inquiry process considers and the evidence available to
it. Among the most important moves are those that contain the inquiry
itself, blocking or channeling investigation, or that open the floodgates
to new lines of questioning. As they struggle to control how the disaster
will be framed, actors deploy a wide range of discursive, legal, and infor-
mation control techniques aimed at shaping the scope of the inquiry
and the evidentiary record it relies on. Efforts to shape the documentary
record of a disaster and the response to it often begin long before the
official inquiries do. Indeed, because actors can anticipate lines of
inquiry that investigators might pursue in the future, they frequently
create documents (such as the ubiquitous ‘cover-your-ass memo’ or
even the false chronologies of the Iran-Contra affair) specifically designed
to influence future efforts to discover what really happened. Such strate-
gically informed moves quite literally constitute the documentary record,
which consequently cannot itself be understood as independent of the
struggles to interpret it (Lynch & Bogen, 1996).
Hilgartner: Overflow and Containment 155
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Katrina and its Future
In its immediate aftermath, the Katrina case conformed to many elements
of this general description of knowledge-making in the aftermath of disas-
ters. The destruction was instantly perceived as having organizational and
technological causes as well as natural ones, and efforts to assign and evade
responsibility began at once. Managerial visions of adequate flood control
infrastructure, effective evacuation planning, and reliable police power were
swept away by waves of evidence of breakdowns. Political damage was also
immediate (Mukerji, 2007). The failure of the federal government to respond
effectively outraged many Americans, and President George W. Bush’s
slow reaction and initial public statements seemed to display a shocking
aloofness or an incapacity to grasp the scope of what was happening. State
and local governments also proved incapable of providing protection.
News coverage and media investigations implicated a growing number of
individuals, organizations, artifacts, and decisions. The plight of victims,
who were disproportionately African American, cast a spotlight on inequal-
ity in American society, bringing often neglected issues of race and class to
center stage and focusing rare attention on the politics of infrastructural
investment (Star, 2005). Officials struggled to deflect blame or to assign it
to agencies beyond their control. Before long, multiple official inquiries
were initiated, for example, by the Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers,
the National Research Council, and other agencies. Prominent in these
inquiries were struggles over claims of executive confidentiality, conflicts
over the scope of investigations, and other procedural moves.
At present, the public inquiry process remains fully in play. However, it
is already possible to offer a few modest predictions about how this process
will turn out. First, given the scale of the disaster and the many actors
involved, we can expect a prolonged period of inquiry, featuring a series of
investigations and counter-investigations that allocate responsibility differ-
ently. Moreover, redressive measures – which will be costly, controversial,
messy, and often deemed inadequate – are likely to continue producing
second-order overflows, as failures to find clean solutions to the daunting
tasks of aiding victims and rebuilding infrastructures generate additional
media coverage, litigation, and investigations. The wave of scrutiny and blame
that Katrina unleashed will prove impossible to contain quickly or neatly.
Even so, it already seems safe to predict that Katrina will not inspire a
durable increase in attention to the politics of infrastructure or other struc-
tural inequalities in American society. Instead, as this wave of attention to
these issues sloshes through the arenas of public discourse, it is likely to
grow increasingly diffuse. Its residue will largely be absorbed into the insti-
tutionalized modes of action that have long contained concerns about
poverty and inequality in the USA. The cascades of overflows in the after-
math of Katrina will disperse responsibility over many actors. But although
some officials will pay a political price, ultimately, the disaster will be dis-
cursively contained within conventional narratives about ‘bad manage-
ment’ and ‘government inefficiency’.
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Notes
1. See Wynne (1982) on Windscale; Jasanoff (1988, 1994) and Fortun (2000) on Bhopal;
Gieryn & Figert (1990) and Vaughan (1996) on the Challenger; Jasanoff (1997) on
BSE; Miller (2004), Lynch et al. (2005), and the special section in the June 2001 issue
of this journal on the 2000 election. Studies of breakdowns of social technologies, such
as science advisory systems (Hilgartner, 2000), can also be understood in this light.
Such work on risk as Beck (1988), Perrow (1984), and Douglas & Wildavsky (1982)
are also centrally relevant, as are studies of public inquiries, such as Lynch & Bogen’s
(1996) analysis of the Iran-Contra hearings.
2. See Jasanoff (1988) on politics of ignorance at Bhopal.
3. Miller (2004); Sims (2007); see also Shrum’s (2007) comments on crime, rumor, and
media coverage.
4. On the fixation of cause, see Gieryn & Figert (1990); see also Gusfield (1981) and
Hilgartner (1992).
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Stephen Hilgartner is Associate Professor in the Department of Science &
Technology Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Science on
Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Stanford, 2000), which won the
Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science. He is
currently completing a book on ownership regimes in genome research.
Address: Department of Science and Technology Studies, 304 Rockefeller
Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA; email shh6@cornell.edu
158 Social Studies of Science 37/1
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