Fridgelandia: A Selection from Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet (2019)

“When the next hurricane approaches New Orleans, every resident will know what to do: empty the fridge. Back in 2005, hardly anyone did that for Hurricane Katrina. Families in the city were accustomed to leaving for a couple of days during bad storms, then coming back to streets strewn with branches and trash and maybe a few shingles. When Katrina hit, the flooding was so bad that people couldn’t return for weeks. This was NOLA—New Orleans, Louisiana: The weather was sunny and hot. Because of the storm, the electricity was out. Across the metropolitan area, a quarter of a million refrigerators became inadvertent experiments in the biology of putrefaction. Despite the warnings, many homeowners opened their refrigerators. Almost everyone who did realized instantly that they could never be used again.

Throughout the fall and winter, returnees duct-taped their refrigerators shut and dragged them out to the curb. White metal boxes lined the streets like gravestones. Sometimes they were spray-painted with sardonic slogans. Feed my maggots. Caution: Breath of Satan inside. Ho ho ho NOLA—this one decorated like a Christmas tree. Occasionally people illicitly dumped their refrigerators in faraway neighborhoods and came back home to find people from those neighborhoods had dumped refrigerators on their street.

Katrina created about 35 million cubic yards of debris in southern Louisiana—an estimate that does not include, among other things, the area’s 250,000 destroyed automobiles. East of the city is the Old Gentilly landfill, shut down as a hazardous waste site. It quickly reopened and became Mount Katrina: a two-hundred-foot-tall mass of soggy armchairs, ruined mattresses, busted concrete, and moldy plywood.

By volume, refrigerators were a tiny part of this—a rounding error. Nonetheless, huge numbers came in every day. By late May the total was about 300,000. The refrigerators had their own staging area, separate from the stoves and dishwashers, in the foothills of Mount Katrina.

Fridgelandia was an amazing sight. Battered white boxes, stacked up hundreds of feet in every direction. Teams of workers in gas masks and crinkly hazmat suits, scooping out the writhing contents with plastic snow shovels. If people didn’t shovel quickly, carnivorous dragonflies would descend on the maggots in such clouds that workers couldn’t see.”—Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World (2019)