American and Dutch Coastal Engineering: Differences in Risk Conception and Differences in Technological Culture

As part of a special journal section on the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, the coastal engineering strategies of the US & the Netherlands are compared. The author argues that it is their different approaches to risk management rather than any structural or human weaknesses that contributed to the failure of flood control efforts in New Orleans. Key papers on the history of coastal engineering in each country are examined & differences in their policies toward natural disasters are revealed: "prevention" in the Dutch case & "hazard mitigation" in the American one; these differences are linked to variations in the technological cultures of these two societies. References. K. Hyatt Stewart