It Wasn’t Katrina

A Spike Lee documentary currently running on PBS is a lengthy and searing series of interviews that contrast the neglect and failure by government with the courageous reaction by New Orleanians caught in the city during Katrina. The New Republic also recognized Katrina’s anniversary in articles about the past year and in Michael Grunwald's review of five recent books about the disaster. Grunwald, is a Washington Post reporter and the author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. The reviewed books focus on what happened during and after the disaster, but concentrate less on why it occurred. Grunwald’s conclusion about the latter is that the drowning of New Orleans was a man-made disaster, not the result of a massive hurricane that was much smaller than the supposed Category Five storm when it hit New Orleans. Specifically, the Army Corps of Engineers with Congress playing a major supporting role was the primary cause of the destruction. Following are excerpts from Grunwald’s review, which illustrates an all too common story in the history of the United States: powerful interests satisfying their needs at the expense of the poor and less influential. It has some of the same elements described by John Barry in his book, Rising Tide, on the 1927 Mississippi flood, which prior to Katrina was the most destructive natural disaster in the United States.

On Monday, August 29, 2005, New Orleans paid the price for the Corps's dysfunction, when Hurricane Katrina toppled the floodwalls that were supposed to protect the city, including those along the Industrial Canal. [A $750 million boondoggle built despite studies that predicted it was economically infeasible.] Katrina turned a vibrant city into an Atlantis, Michael Brown into a laughingstock, and Kanye West into a social critic. Its name became synonymous with bad government.

Unfortunately, America has concluded that what went wrong in Katrina was the government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage--even though its commander finally admitted in April that his agency's "design failures" inundated New Orleans. America is now well versed in the deterioration of FEMA, but it hasn't noticed that in the years before Katrina, investigations by the Pentagon, the Government Accountability Office, and the National Academy of Sciences had all documented the Corps's follies.

In fact, in the year since Katrina, Congress has given the Corps even more money and power. The Corps is a congressional plaything; its budget consists almost entirely of "earmarks," individual pet projects requested by individual congressmen. The recent corruption scandals on Capitol Hill have prompted constant demands for "earmark reform," but little recognition that the Corps is the ultimate earmark agency. The failures of the Corps are also failures of Congress.

The drowning of New Orleans was a tragedy of priorities, and protecting this low-lying soupbowl of a city was no one's priority. The Corps spent more in Louisiana than in any other state, but it wasted most of the money on ecologically harmful and fiscally wasteful pork that kept its employees busy and its political patrons happy, while neglecting hurricane protection for New Orleans. One of its pork projects, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, actually intensified Katrina's surge.

The devastation of Katrina, in other words, was a direct result of America's water resources policy, which is not a policy at all, but an annual scramble for appropriations. Louisiana's congressional delegation always fared exceptionally well in that scramble, but it never cared as much about averting a theoretical disaster as it cared about bringing home actual bacon. And the Corps cared about whatever Congress cared about.

Katrina was a Murphy's Law fiasco; the screw-ups kept on coming. Mayor Ray Nagin was slow to declare a mandatory evacuation. His buses evacuated residents to the Superdome instead of outside the city. Many of his police officers went AWOL after the storm hit, and some seized the opportunity to relieve Wal-Marts of their merchandise. The floodwalls failed that morning, but poor communications left officials thinking New Orleans had dodged the bullet until Tuesday. FEMA was unprepared for the scope of the disaster, so survivors waited in vain for food, ice, and buses, and corpses rotted in the heat. Brown dithered while New Orleans drowned, pestering his aides about his wardrobe. The Superdome and the convention center became squalid hellholes. Nagin's police chief made matters worse by passing along myths about babies raped in the dome, and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff publicly admitted he had no idea what was going on at the convention center. Bush seemed clueless, jetting to a fund-raiser, speechifying about immigration reform, continuing his vacation until several days into the crisis. And then his response was tone-deaf: his Air Force One photo-op 30,000 feet above New Orleans, his insistence that no one had anticipated a breach of the levees, and finally the immortal words, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."


For all the complexities of the catastrophe, two basic things went wrong during Katrina. The levees broke, and the response was slow. But while both of those failures were government failures, the first was much more important.

The levees failed in a matter of moments when no one was watching, while the response failed over the course of an agonizing week when the world was watching. Katrina's aftermath produced dramatic stories of narrow escapes and tragic deaths, heroism and ineptitude, mass devastation and mass migration. But the most important thing to remember about Katrina is that it was not a very powerful storm when it hit New Orleans--no stronger than a Category Two, and maybe only a Category One--so those stories were all made possible by the failures of the Corps.

New Orleans was founded by French pioneers in 1718 on a "natural levee" overlooking the Mississippi, a crescent of high ground formed by the river's overflowing silt. That is why it is known as the Crescent City, and why its historic French Quarter remained relatively dry during Katrina. But New Orleans was always vulnerable to the whims of Mother Nature: its early settlers immediately built a three-foot-tall levee to protect against the frequent mutinies of the Mississippi. They did not build levees against the Gulf--perhaps because they were buffered by hundreds of square miles of coastal swamps and marshes that served as hurricane speed bumps, perhaps because hurricanes were less of a presence in their lives. Still, it must be acknowledged that New Orleans was in harm's way long before the Corps came along.


But the levees were not really in Katrina's path, and their collapse was not the result of geography. Their failure was the result of the Corps. In fact, the Corps betrayed New Orleans in five different ways.

Over the last two centuries, the Corps has gradually expanded into America's dominant civil engineering force, run by a small cadre of military officers but staffed by more than thirty thousand civilians, supposedly overseen by an assistant Army secretary but really reporting to congressional overseers. It used to build bridges and hospitals, as well as the Washington Monument and the Library of Congress, but today the heart of its civil mission involves water.

The Corps eventually developed much of America's water transportation network, dredging harbors for ships, manhandling unruly rivers into reliable ribbons of commerce, providing the shock troops in the nation's war on nature. Water resources were considered useless in their natural form, so Congress assigned the Corps to "improve" them into useful engines of economic development. For most of American history, that was the very definition of conservation, the "wise use" of natural resources.
Flood control was still seen as a local responsibility, but after the Civil War an egomaniacal Corps commander named Andrew Humphreys, who had lost a thousand men in fifteen minutes during a charge at Fredericksburg, coordinated a similarly disastrous assault on the Mississippi River, bullying local officials into adopting his "levees-only" policy. As levees began rising on both sides of the river--each town had an obvious incentive to build higher than the one opposite--the constricted Mississippi lashed out with increasing force, blasting crevasses through weak spots in the dikes. As John McPhee has noted, the Corps proclaimed that the river was under control "before the great floods of 1884, 1890, 1891, 1897, 1898 and 1903, and ... again before 1912, 1913, 1922 and 1927."

That last one was the big one, leaving almost one million people homeless and ending the reign of New Orleans as the financial capital of the South. The flood threatened to end New Orleans altogether, but the city's bankers persuaded the Corps to dynamite a levee upstream, so two poorer parishes were wiped out instead. The Corps and its "levees-only" policy had created a catastrophic mess. Naturally, Congress assigned the agency full responsibility for controlling the river's floods, and dramatically increased its budget. It would not be the last time the Corps failed upward.

Even during Katrina, New Orleans faced no danger from the river that had harassed its original settlers. But as with most human efforts to control nature, there were unintended consequences. The caged and armored Mississippi no longer carried as much silt from its banks and its floodplain down to its delta, so it no longer created as many of the coastal wetlands that helped to absorb storm surges from the Gulf. As the Corps choked off the river's natural land-building process, marshes began disintegrating into open water at a rate of twenty-five square miles per year. Meanwhile New Orleans began to sink, as the tremendous infusions of silt that had shored up the city's foundations no longer arrived to serve as natural fill. Overall, scientists believe the land losses raised Katrina's surge by several feet. That is the first way the Corps war on nature set the stage for last year's disaster.

Water projects became a form of currency on Capitol Hill, a conduit for congressmen to steer jobs and other goodies to constituents and contributors. And the Corps gained influential allies in the shipping, dredging, farming, and building industries, the "customers" who reaped the benefits of its work. That work often had disastrous environmental effects

But nobody ever claimed that it was a Corps of Biologists. And there was not much that the executive branch could do to thwart congressional pork. One example was the $62 million Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a seventy-six-mile navigation shortcut to the Port of New Orleans. According to a Corps history, "the costs were shown to be high and the benefits ... speculative." Opponents denounced it as a storm-surge shotgun pointed at New Orleans, a hydrological Trojan horse that would transport the Gulf into the city. But under pressure from its friends in the port and Congress, the Corps concluded the outlet was justified. In 1965, the outlet helped Hurricane Betsy ravage St. Bernard Parish, exactly as the critics had warned.

The outlet went on to destroy more than twenty thousand acres of surrounding marshlands, and never attracted much freight. But the Corps continued to spend $13 million a year dredging it. And in 2004, a Corps study predictably concluded that it should remain open, a study so shoddy the Bush administration ordered the Corps to redo it. But Katrina arrived first. And Louisiana State University researchers believe the outlet amplified its surge by as much as 40 percent. That is the second way the Corps did in New Orleans.

In the 1950s, after a series of powerful storms, Congress directed the Corps to start studying hurricane protections around the country. Congress authorized a project to protect New Orleans from the Gulf. But there were two serious problems with the project, and they turned out to be the third and the fourth ways Congress and the Corps shafted New Orleans: it was not built in the right place, and it was not built to withstand a storm as fierce as Billion-Dollar Betsy.

One might think that an agency assigned to protect New Orleans from a hurricane would set out to build the best possible protection for its residents. Not so. Congress required the Corps to come up with the plan with the highest economic benefits compared to costs--regardless of who got those benefits, or the cost of destroying wetlands, or even the cost of human lives. And when the Corps ran the numbers in 1965, it concluded that the best way to produce economic benefits would be to build levees around low-lying wetlands on the city's outskirts, which would "hasten urbanization and industrialization" in unpopulated areas, which would make some landowners and developers rich.

Only 21 percent of the land the Corps project aimed to protect was already developed. The rest was soggy. The Corps would make it dry, encouraging the development of thousands of homes in a vulnerable floodplain. Katrina would put it all back underwater.

In recent years, the Corps has been repeatedly caught manipulating its studies to justify waterworks for its "customers," from the lock on the Mississippi River that was exposed by [Corps Economist] Don Sweeney to a deepening of the Delaware River that was savaged by the GAO.

One might also think that the agency assigned to protect New Orleans from hurricanes would plan for a worst-case scenario. Again, not so. The Corps was only authorized to plan for a "Standard Project Hurricane," a two-hundred-year storm. (By contrast, the Mississippi River levees are designed for an eight-hundred-year event.)

In truth, one qualification must be entered against all this Corps- and Congress-bashing: the New Orleans Levee District, the city's representatives on flood-control issues, did not even want Category Three protection. In 1982, the district urged the Corps to "lower its design standards to provide more realistic hurricane protection," suggesting that one-hundred-year defenses would be fine. That is because unlike the river levees, which were fully funded by Uncle Sam under the MR&T, hurricane levees required a local cost-share. And the levee district preferred to spend its hard-earned cash on such necessities as riverboat gambling schemes and a $2.4 million Mardi Gras fountain.

The levee district's stinginess also forced the Corps to change its strategy for keeping Lake Pontchartrain's waters out of New Orleans. The Corps wanted to build floodgates across three drainage canals that stretched from the lake into the city, but the district did not want to pay the maintenance costs for the gates. So the district persuaded Senate Finance Chairman Russell B. Long of Louisiana to enact language that forced the Corps to build higher floodwalls along the canals instead of gates that could have kept lake water out of the canals in the first place. The new plan invited the enemy to the city's doorstep, assuming that the Corps would keep it out. That was a fatal assumption.

Failing to build floodgates across the three drainage canals was probably the most serious error; the floodwalls along two of the canals collapsed during Katrina, even though they were never even overtopped. Those floodwalls were also built in overly mushy soils, without appropriate reinforcement. All these flaws were the Corps's fifth contribution to the catastrophe. And so New Orleans drowned.

The Corps initially claimed that its levees had been overtopped and overwhelmed, then refused to address its culpability until New Orleans was off the front page. [Senators] Vitter and Landrieu organized a "working group" of lobbyists for ports, shipping firms, energy companies, and other corporate interests to assemble Louisiana's relief request; the inflation-adjusted result would have cost more than the Louisiana Purchase. It included $40 billion for Corps projects, including the Industrial Canal lock, the New Iberia port-deepening, and other hurricane unrelated pork. A list of "outstanding questions" from one working-group call included such pressing questions as "How much can I bill my client?"

This time the looters went too far. Congress sent the delegation back to the drawing board. A year after its aggravated assault, New Orleans remains in intensive care. The Corps is rebuilding its failed levees to their original Category Three strength. And the Big One is still on the way.