Hurricanes and flooding have been a significant force in shaping the landscape and the culture of south Louisiana, and efforts to control flooding began shortly after the French settled New Orleans in the early eighteenth century. Craig Colten's Perilous Place, Powerful Storms provides a much-needed history of hurricane protection for New Orleans and south Louisiana. In the years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, accounts have been written of that storm and the failure of the levee system that protects the city, but none have provided the broader analysis of the protection system. Colten provides the historical background surrounding the development of long-term engineering efforts and how the engineering was changed and delayed in response to social, economic, and political currents.
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