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Michael Davis February 24, 2006

Getting an Ethics Charge out of Current Events: Some Doubts about Katrina1

On August 29, 2005, “Katrina” was still only the name of an unusually large cyclonic storm (a “category-4 hurricane”). A few days later, it had become shorthand for a complex economic, political, and social disaster. A long stretch of the Gulf coast had become more or less uninhabitable. The convenient measure of time necessary to undo the damage would, it seemed, be years rather than weeks or months. New Orleans, one of the oldest cities in North America, a major port, had all but ceased to exist, many of its million residents seeking refuge far from home. State governors and federal administrators were blaming each other both for the slow response to the disaster—and for the severity of the disaster itself. The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was soon to resign in disgrace. There is no doubt that Americans in general, and our students in particular, did find—and continue to find—Katrina “interesting”, even “relevant”. And, unlike much that they find interesting or relevant, Katrina clearly has connections with engineering. As one professor of civil engineering said: "Nothing this big has ever happened before in civil engineering." 2 At perhaps $300 billion in destruction, Katrina is certainly the biggest engineering disaster in the history of the United States. Yet, I doubt that Katrina is a good case for teaching engineering ethics—for now at least. There are at least three distinct reasons for doubt. First, there is the question of what happened. For a number of crucial decisions, we still do not know what their consequences were or what was thought to justify them. Second, there is the question of what part engineers had in what happened, which decisions were theirs and which belonged to elected or appointed officials who were not engineers. Third, there is the question of what part engineering ethics had, or should have had, in the decisions engineers did make (whatever those were). So far we lack any dramatic moment such as

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Davis, M., & Luegenbiehl, H. (2006, June), Engineering Ethics And Contemporary Issues: Katrina In The Classroom And Beyond Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--299