Levees Still Broken

Anya Kamenetz

August 29, 2006

Anya Kamenetz is the author of Generation Debt, now out with Riverhead Books. More of her work can be found at AnyaKamenetz.com. Kamenetz graduated from Ben Franklin High School in New Orleans.

Dr. Stephen Nelson, a Tulane University geologist, often leads field trips of the six major levee breaches that flooded 80 percent of New Orleans a full day after Hurricane Katrina passed.

"People are always amazed at the extent of the destruction," he says. "Miles and miles of empty streets with houses gutted or partially gutted, and dead vegetation everywhere."

His visitors all have the same questions, and he has the same unsettling answers:

Q: Are the levees safe today?
A: No, they probably aren't. The Corps [the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] says they're back to pre-Katrina strength. Well, pre-Katrina strength wasn't that good.
Q: Was Katrina the worst-case scenario for a storm?
A:No.

A year after the hurricane, we have thousands of pages of independent autopsies of south Louisiana's flood protection system, and they point to a single conclusion. The American Society of Civil Engineers (PDF report here),  the Independent Levee Investigation Team led by U.C. Berkeley, and Team Louisiana, a group of local experts, each reported that the "catastrophic structural failure" after Katrina wasn't just a matter of crumbling mud. The real weakness was in the structure of the Army Corps of Engineers itself. Immediate reform of our nation's most hubristic, yet intransigent, federal bureaucracy is needed to keep a majority of Americans—not just Louisianians—safe.

Ivor Van Heerden, deputy director of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University, has emerged as the tireless Cassandra of the flood protection system. His May 2006 book The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina, is an indispensable guide to the politics as well as the physics of levee-building over the last 40 years. He is scathing on the Corps.

"The bottom line," he says, "if you want an idea of the Corps' 'success,' is this:

In 1965 we had Hurricane Betsy—a much stronger storm than Katrina—which killed 75 people and flooded parts of New Orleans. In response, Congress came up with the Flood Control Act [of 1965] to protect New Orleans from the most severe meterological conditions that could reasonably be assumed to occur.

The system of levees, canals and locks, authorized when Lyndon Johnson was president, went through years of bureaucratic delays and, incredibly, was not finished when Katrina struck. It was never meant to provide protection against Category 5 hurricanes, the strongest possible storms; Katrina, at landfall, was only a Category 3, yet the levees still failed. Van Heerden says:

Now, here we are 40 years later. The system is not complete, it's underdesigned, underbuilt, there were numerous errors in the design process. Katrina brought a twentyfold increase in deaths and a hundredfold increase in the cost of infrastructure damage and untold misery now for maybe half a million people.

The Corps failed catastrophically, and I think one of the most surprising things has been this: While they've admitted that they had design failures, and just now finally admitted that the systems aren't safe and the repairs aren't good enough to withstand a major storm, they haven't taken responsibility.

The levee system failed because of the Corps of Engineers' failure.

In 2000, a major Washington Post series by Michael Grunwald  detailed the Corps' dysfunction. With no budget of its own, it relies on Congressional earmarks, making pork the priority. Skewing its cost-benefit analyses in favor of short-term growth, the Corps often deepens commercial navigation channels even when port traffic is declining. One major example, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, acted as a strengthening funnel for the storm surge that hit New Orleans. Charged with wetlands protection and enforcement of environmental regulation, the Corps falls short of EPA standards in its own projects. In short, wrote Grunwald, "the agency is converting its strong congressional relationships into billions of dollars' worth of taxpayer-funded water projects, many with significant environmental costs and minimal economic benefits."

Legislation has been introduced during each of the past four Congresses to try to reform the Corps of Engineers, but its political allies—ironically including Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran of hurricane-devastated Mississippi—have protected it. Now, that tide may be turning. This February, Sens. Feingold and McCain introduced The Water Resources Planning and Modernization Act of 2006.

The bill would update the Corps' planning guidelines, force them to submit a prioritized list of their projects to Congress for comprehensive review, strengthen environmental strictures and most importantly, trigger an independent scientific review of Corps projects over $25 million. Moreover, the Corps would be charged for the first time with formally assessing the risks posed by future natural disasters. And they're coming. As Mike Tidwell, the journalist who predicted Katrina in frightening detail in Bayou Farewell, argues in his new book The Ravaging Tide, coastal cities from New York to Miami face the prospect of their own Katrinas due to global warming and sea level rise.

Van Heerden sees an opportunity for Corps reform when the new Congress takes office in January, ideally eager to redeem the worst domestic failure of the Bush administration. In the meantime, he will be lobbying Louisiana's government for authorization to assemble a team of experts to come up with a real plan for Category 5 hurricane protection, the strongest storms—protection that the city has never had. The Corps has spent $8 million dollars on its own planning effort already—not to be confused with the $20 million it spent on its own postmortem levee investigation. Yet, its July deadline has come and gone with no results and nothing forthcoming. On Monday, August 28, The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported on the Corps' glacial progress :

Although the Army Corps of Engineers has spent more than $352 million to bring levees, floodwalls and drainage systems in the New Orleans area back to where they were before Hurricane Katrina hit a year ago, crucial improvements aimed at upgrading the system to the level long ago authorized by Congress are barely past the planning stages.

Van Heerden, on the other hand, already sketched the outlines of his own solution in The Storm . Category 5 protection is possible, he says, for a total outlay of $30 billion over 10 years—the same amount we spend in Iraq in one month. The Netherlands has the model system of canals and locks. The solution also includes the side benefits of a healthier environment, through the restoration of the Gulf Coasts' wetlands and barrier islands. He says:

We know we have to combine coastal restoration with levees. Some of our recent research has shown that three and a half miles of healthy wetlands can knock down a storm surge by a foot.

You can get involved in the fight for Corps reform and full coastal protection at levees.org .