Is Bush to Blame for New Orleans Flooding?

[Matt]

Is Bush to Blame for New Orleans Flooding?
He did slash funding for levee projects. But the Army Corps of Engineers says Katrina was just too strong.

September 2, 2005
Modified:September 2, 2005
Summary

Some critics are suggesting President Bush was as least partly responsible for the flooding in New Orleans. In a widely quoted opinion piece, former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal says that "the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature," and cites years of reduced funding for federal flood-control projects around New Orleans.

Our fact-checking confirms that Bush indeed cut funding for projects specifically designed to strengthen levees. Indeed, local officials had been complaining about that for years.

It is not so clear whether the money Bush cut from levee projects would have made any difference, however, and we're not in a position to judge that. The Army Corps of Engineers – which is under the President's command and has its own reputation to defend – insists that Katrina was just too strong, and that even if the levee project had been completed it was only designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane.

Analysis

We suspect this subject will get much more attention in Congress and elsewhere in the coming months. Without blaming or absolving Bush, here are the key facts we've been able to establish so far:

Bush Cut Funding

Blumenthal's much-quoted article in salon.com carried the headline: "No one can say they didn't see it coming." And it said the Bush administration cut flood-control funding "to pay for the Iraq war."

He continues:

Blumenthal: With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico . But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

…By 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year…forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze.

We can confirm that funding was cut. The project most closely associated with preventing flooding in New Orleans was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Hurricane Protection Project, which was “designed to protect residents between Lake Pontchartrain and the Missisippi River levee from surges in Lake Pontchartrain,” according to a fact sheet from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. (The fact sheet is dated May 23, long before Katrina). The multi-decade project involved building new levees, enlarging existing levees, and updating other protections like floodwalls. It was scheduled to be completed in 2015.

Over at least the past several budget cycles, the Corps has received substantially less money than it requested for the Lake Pontchartrain project, even though Congress restored much of the money the President cut from the amount the Corps requested.

In fiscal year 2004, the Corps requested $11 million for the project. The President’s budget allocated $3 million, and Congress furnished $5.5 million. Similarly, in fiscal 2005 the Corps requested $22.5 million, which the President cut to $3.9 million in his budget. Congress increased that to $5.5 million. “This was insufficient to fund new construction contracts,” according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ project fact sheet. The Corps reported that “seven new contracts are being delayed due to lack funds” [sic].

The President proposed $3 million for the project in the budget for fiscal 2006, which begins Oct. 1. “This will be insufficient to fund new construction projects,” the fact sheet stated. It says the Corps “could spend $20 million if funds were provided.” The Corps of Engineers goes on to say:

Army Corps of Engineers, May 23: In Orleans Parish, two major pump stations are threatened by hurricane storm surges. Major contracts need to be awarded to provide fronting protection for them. Also, several levees have settled and need to be raised to provide the design protection. The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs.

The Corps has seen cutbacks beyond those affecting just the Lake Pontchartrain project. The Corps oversees SELA, or the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control project, which Congress authorized after six people died from flooding in May 1995. The Times-Picayune newspaper of New Orleans reported that, overall, the Corps had spent $430 million on flood control and hurricane prevention, with local governments offering more than $50 million toward the project. Nonetheless, "at least $250 million in crucial projects remained," the newspaper said.

In the past five years, the amount of money spent on all Corps construction projects in the New Orleans district has declined by 44 percent, according to the New Orleans CityBusiness newspaper, from $147 million in 2001 to $82 million in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

A long history of complaints

Local officials had long complained that funding for hurricane protection projects was inadequate:

October 13, 2001: The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that “federal officials are postponing new projects of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Program, or SELA, fearing that federal budget constraints and the cost of the war on terrorism may create a financial pinch for the program.” The paper went on to report that “President Bush’s budget proposed $52 million” for SELA in the 2002 fiscal year. The House approved $57 million and the Senate approved $62 million. Still, “the $62 million would be well below the $80 million that corps officials estimate is needed to pay for the next 12 months of construction, as well as design expenses for future projects.”
April 24, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that “less money is available to the Army Corps of Engineers to build levees and water projects in the Missisippi River valley this year and next year.” Meanwhile, an engineer who had direct the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Study – a study of how to restore coastal wetlands areas in order to provide a bugger from hurricane storm surges – was sent to Iraq "to oversee the restoration of the ‘Garden of Eden’ wetlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,” for which President Bush’s 2005 gave $100 million.
June 8, 2004: Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the Times-Picayune:
Walter Maestri: It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq , and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.

September 22, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that a pilot study on raising the height of the levees surrounding New Orleans had been completed and generated enough information for a second study necessary to estimate the cost of doing so. The Bush administration “ordered the New Orleans district office” of the Army Corps of Engineers “not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money.”
June 6, 2005: The New Orleans CityBusiness newspaper reported that the New Orleans district of the Corps was preparing for a $71.2 million reduction in overall funding for the fiscal year beginning in October. That would have been the largest single-year funding loss ever. They noted that money “was so tight" that "the New Orleans district, which employs 1,300 people, instituted a hiring freeze last month on all positions,” which was “the first of its kind in about 10 years.”
Would Increased Funding Have Prevented Flooding?

Blumenthal implies that increased funding might have helped to prevent the catastrophic flooding that New Orleans now faces. The White House denies that, and the Corps of Engineers says that even the levee project they were working to complete was not designed to withstand a storm of Katrina's force.

White House Press Secretary Scot McClellan, at a press briefing on September 1, dismissed the idea that the President inadequately funded flood control projects in New Orleans :

McClellan: Flood control has been a priority of this administration from day one. We have dedicated an additional $300 million over the last few years for flood control in New Orleans and the surrounding area. And if you look at the overall funding levels for the Army Corps of Engineers, they have been slightly above $4.5 billion that has been signed by the President.

Q: Local people were asking for more money over the last couple of years. They were quoted in local papers in 2003 and 2004, are saying that they were told by federal officials there wasn't enough money because it was going to Iraq expenditures.

McClellan: You might want to talk to General Strock, who is the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, because I think he's talked to some reporters already and talked about some of these issues. I think some people maybe have tried to make a suggestion or imply that certain funding would have prevented the flooding from happening, and he has essentially said there's been nothing to suggest that whatsoever, and it's been more of a design issue with the levees.

We asked the Corps about that “design issue.” David Hewitt, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said McClellan was referring to the fact that “the levees were designed for a category 3 hurricane.” He told us that, consequently, “when it became apparent that this was a category 5 hurricane, an evacuation of the city was ordered.” (A category 3 storm has sustained winds of no more than 130 miles per hour, while a category 5 storm has winds exceeding 155 miles per hour. Katrina had winds of 160 mph as it approached shore, but later weakened to winds of 140 mph as it made landfall, making it a strong category 4 storm, according to the National Hurricane Center.)

The levee upgrade project around Lake Pontchartrain was only 60 to 90 percent complete across most areas of New Orleans as of the end of May, according to the Corps' May 23 fact sheet. Still, even if it had been completed, the project's goal was protecting New Orleans from storm surges up to "a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane,” according to the fact sheet.

We don't know whether the levees would have done better had the work been completed. But the Corps says that even a completed levee project wasn't designed for the storm that actually occurred.

Nobody anticipated breach of the levees?

In an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on September 1, President Bush said:

Bush: I don’t think anyone anticipated breach of the levees …Now we’re having to deal with it, and will.

Bush is technically correct that a "breach" wasn't anticipated by the Corps, but that's doesn't mean the flooding wasn't forseen. It was. But the Corps thought it would happen differently, from water washing over the levees, rather than cutting wide breaks in them.

Greg Breerword, a deputy district engineer for project management with the Army Corps of Engineers, told the New York Times:

Breerword: We knew if it was going to be a Category 5, some levees and some flood walls would be overtopped. We never did think they would actually be breached.

And while Bush is also technically correct that the Corps did not "anticipate" a breach – in the sense that they believed it was a likely event – but at least some in the Corps thought a breach was a possibility worth examining.

According to the Times-Picayune, early in Bush's first term FEMA director Joe Allbaugh ordered a sophisticated computer simulation of what would happen if a category 5 storm hit New Orleans. Joseph Suhayda, an engineer at Louisana State University who worked on the project, described to the newspaper in 2002 what the simulation showed could happen:

Subhayda: Another scenario is that some part of the levee would fail. It's not something that's expected. But erosion occurs, and as levees broke, the break will get wider and wider. The water will flow through the city and stop only when it reaches the next higher thing. The most continuous barrier is the south levee, along the river. That's 25 feet high, so you'll see the water pile up on the river levee.

Whether or not a "breach" was "anticipated," the fact is that many individuals have been warning for decades about the threat of flooding that a hurricane could pose to a set below sea level and sandwiched between major waterways. A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report from before September 11, 2001 detailed the three most likely catastrophic disasters that could happen in the United States: a terrorist attack in New York, a strong earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane strike in New Orleans. In 2002, New Orleans officials held the simulation of what would happen in a category 5 storm. Walter Maestri, the emergency coordinator of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans , recounted the outcome to PBS’ NOW With Bill Moyers:

Maestri, September 2002: Well, when the exercise was completed it was evidence that we were going to lose a lot of people. We changed the name of the [simulated] storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B... kiss your ass goodbye... because anybody who was here as that category five storm came across... was gone.

--by Matthew Barge


Sources



Sidney Blumenthal, “No one can say they didn’t see it coming ,” salon.com, 31 August 2005

Deon Roberts, “Bush budget not expected to diminish New Orleans district’s $65 million,” New Orleans CityBusiness, 07 February 2005

Manuel Torres, “Flood work to slow down; Corps delays new projects,” Times-Picayune, 13 October 2001

Mark Schlefistein, “Corps sees its resources siphoned off; Wetlands restoration officials sent to Iraq ,” Times-Picayune, 24 April 2004

“Mark Schleifstein, “Ivan stirs up wave of safety proposals; Hurricane-proofed stadium is one idea,” Times-Picayune, 22 September 2004

Deon Roberts, “Bush budget not expected to diminish New Orleans district’s $65 million ,” New Orleans CityBusiness, 07 February 2005

Mark Schleifstein, “Bush budget cuts levee, drainage funds; Backlog of contracts waits to be awarded,” Times-Picayune, 08 February 2005

“Bush budget fails to fund flood control in New Orleans ,” New Orleans CityBusiness, 14 February 2005

Deon Roberts, “ New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers faces ,” New Orleans CityBusiness, 06 June 2005

Will Bunch, “Did New Orleans catastrophe have to happen? ‘Times-Picayune’ had repeatedly raised federal spending issues,” Editor & Publisher, 31 August 2005

Toby Eckert, “Could disaster have been prevented?,” Copley News Service, 02 September 2005

Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker, “ Critics say Bush undercut New Orleans flood control ,” Washington Post, 02 September 2005

“The City in a Bowl ,” Transcript, NOW, Public Broadcasting Service, 20 September 2002

Jon Elliston, “ A Disaster Waiting to Happen ,” bestofneworleans.com, 28 September 2004

Scott Shane and Eric Lipton, “ Government saw flood risk but not levee failure ,” New York Times, 02 September 2005

Paul Krugman, “ A can’t-do government ,” New York Times, 02 September 2005

“Lake Pontchartrain, LA and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project, St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Charles Parishes, LA ,” Project Fact Sheet, US Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District, website, 23 May 2005

“Fiscal Year 2006: Civil Works Budget for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ,” Department of the Army, February 2005

“Press Briefing by Scott McClellan ,” whitehouse.gov, 01 September 2005

Karen Turni, “Upgrade of levees proposed by corps; gulf outlet levee may be too low, officials worry,” Times-Picayune, 12 November 1998

John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, “The big one: A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It’s just a matter of time,” Times-Picayune, 24 June 2002

[Rspaight]

While I certainly think that levee reinforcement for New Orleans would have been a better investment than upper-class tax cuts and Iraq, I agree that in the face of a Category 5 (or even strong 4) hurricane, New Orleans was doomed even with better levees. The city is just a big bowl, largely below sea level. You can't change that with levees.

That said, it speaks volumes about the priorities of this administration that the funding got cut. Sure, it might not have changed the outcome of Katrina significantly, but it might have made a huge difference in a weaker storm. The government is tuned to the needs of the wealthy, corporations and PNAC foreign policy goals, not the needs of citizens. *That's* the point here.

For me, though, the bigger scandal is the staffing of FEMA and Homeland Security with unqualified campaign donors instead of experienced professionals...

Ryan

[Patrick M]

For me, though, the bigger scandal is the staffing of FEMA and Homeland Security with unqualified campaign donors instead of experienced professionals...

You mean guys like Allbaugh?

Sounds vaguely like some scandal I heard of recently in "clean up the mess" Fletcha-ville.

[MK]

There's enough blame to pass around, at the very least Bush should've gotten off his ass and had the people he hired to take up the slack when it became apparent that NOLA needed outside help that the state/local gov't couldn't or would not provide.

What really pisses me off is how this could've been prevented, but I get the feeling it was shrugged off like most environmental issues because people have a bad habit shrugging off the ounce of prevention, mobilizing only when the ton of problems is imminent and also more costly and possibly too difficult to solve. Look at global warming, you don't have to do that much of a long period of time, but instead you have guys like the former oil lobbyist over at Fox News making bullshit exaggerations about how it'll ruin our economy (it won't), and ignoring the enormous cost global warming could have by the end of the century.

Here's that Scientific American article from 2001 I was talking about in another post:

THE BOXES are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. “As the water recedes,” says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, “we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.”

New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh — an area the size of Manhattan — will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would
cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn’t go very far.

A direct hit is inevitable. Large hurricanes come close every year. In 1965 Hurricane Betsy put parts of the city under eight feet of water. In 1992 monstrous Hurricane Andrew missed the city by only 100 miles. In 1998 Hurricane Georges veered east at the last moment but still caused billions of dollars of damage. At fault are natural processes that have been artificially accelerated by human tinkering — levying rivers, draining wetlands, dredging channels and cutting canals through marshes [see map on pages 80 and 81]. Ironically, scientists and engineers say the only hope is more manipulation, although they don’t necessarily agree on which proposed projects to pursue. Without intervention, experts at L.S.U. warn, the protective delta will be gone by 2090. The sunken city would sit directly on the sea — at best a troubled Venice, at worst a modern-day Atlantis.

As if the risk to human lives weren’t enough, the potential drowning of New Orleans has serious economic and environmental consequences as well. Louisiana’s coast produces one third of the country’s seafood, one fifth of its oil and one quarter of its natural gas. It harbors 40 percent of the nation’s coastal wetlands and provides wintering grounds for 70 percent of its migratory waterfowl. Facilities on the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge constitute the nation’s largest port. And the delta fuels a unique element of America’s psyche; it is the wellspring of jazz and blues, the source of everything Cajun and Creole, and the home of Mardi Gras. Thus far, however, Washington has turned down appeals for substantial aid.

Fixing the delta would serve as a valuable test case for the country and the world. Coastal marshes are disappearing along the eastern seaboard, the other Gulf Coast states, San Francisco Bay and the Columbia River estuary for many of the same reasons besetting Louisiana. Parts of Houston are sinking faster than New Orleans. Major deltas around the globe — from the Orinoco in Venezuela, to the Nile in Egypt, to the Mekong in Vietnam — are in the same delicate state today that the Mississippi Delta was in 100 to 200 years ago. Lessons from New Orleans could help establish guidelines for safer development in these areas, and the state could export restoration technology worldwide. In Europe, the Rhine, Rhône and Po deltas are losing land. And if sea level rises substantially because of global warming in the next 100 years or so, numerous low-lying coastal cities such as New York would need to take protective measures similar to those proposed for Louisiana.

Seeing Is Believing

Shea Penland is among those best suited to explain the delta’s blues. Now a geologist at the University of New Orleans, he spent 16 years at L.S.U.; does contract work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which builds the levees; sits on federal and state working groups implementing coastal restoration projects; and consults for the oil and gas industry. His greatest credential, however, is that he knows the local folk in every little bayou town, clump of swamp and spit of marsh up and down the disintegrating coast — the people who experience its degradation every day.

Penland, dressed in jeans and a polo shirt on a mid-May morning, is eager to get me into his worn red Ford F150 pick-up truck so we can explore what’s eating the 50 miles of wet landscape south of New Orleans. The Mississippi River built the delta plain that forms southeastern Louisiana over centuries by depositing vast quantities of sediment every year during spring floods. Although the drying sands and silts would compress under their own weight and sink some, the next flood would rebuild them. Since 1879, however, the Corps of Engineers, at Congress’s behest, has progressively lined the river with levees to prevent floods from damaging towns and industry. The river is now shackled from northern Louisiana to the gulf, cutting off the sediment supply. As a result, the plain just subsides below the encroaching ocean. As the wetlands vanish, so does New Orleans’s protection from the sea. A hurricane’s storm surge can reach heights of more than 20 feet, but every four miles of marsh can absorb enough water to knock it down by one foot.

The flat marsh right outside New Orleans is still a vibrant sponge, an ever changing mix of shallow freshwater, green marsh grasses and cypress swamp hung with Spanish moss. But as Penland and I reach the halfway point en route to the gulf, the sponge becomes seriously torn and waterlogged. Isolated roads on raised stone beds pass rusted trailer homes and former brothels along now flooded bayous; stands of naked, dead trees; and browned grasses and reaches of empty water.

Down in Port Fourchon, where the tattered marsh finally gives way to open gulf, the subsidence and erosion are aggressive. The lone road exists only to service a collection of desolate corrugated buildings where oil and natural-gas pipe-lines converge from hundreds of offshore wellheads. Countless platforms form a gloomy steel forest rising from the sea. To bring in the goods, the fossil fuel companies have dredged hundreds of miles of navigation channels and pipeline canals throughout the coastal and interior marshes. Each cut removes land, and boat traffic and tides steadily erode the banks. The average U.S. beach erodes about two feet a year, Penland says, but Port Fourchon loses 40 to 50 feet a year — the fastest rate in the country. The network of canals also gives saltwater easy access to interior marshes, raising their salinity and killing the grasses and bottomwood forests from the roots up. No vegetation is left to prevent wind and water from wearing the marshes away. In a study funded by the oil and gas industry, Penland documented that the industry has caused one third of the delta’s land loss.

Alligator Science

The Duet brothers know first-hand how various factors accelerate land loss beyond natural subsidence. Toby and Danny, two of Penland’s local pals along our route, live on a 50-foot beige barge complex anchored in the middle of 15 square miles of broken marsh, some 20 miles northwest of Port Fourchon.

Their family leased the land from oil companies, for fishing and hunting, 16 years ago when it was merely wet. Now it lies under five to eight feet of water. They filter rain for drinking water, process their own sewage, catch the food they eat and make money hosting overnight fishing parties for sportsmen. A dozen wellheads dot the marsh where Toby picks us up by boat. Heading out to the barge through one canal, he says, “I used to be able to spit to the mud on either side. Now they run big oil containers through here.”

Inside the barge’s wide-open room, Danny offers other measures: “Two years ago we drove a wooden two-by-four into the mud on the edge of a canal, to stake our alligator trap. I went past it the other day; the edge has receded 18 feet from the stake. Doesn’t much matter, though. The gators are gone. Water’s too salty.”

With the marsh disappearing, the delta’s only remaining defense is some crumbling barrier islands that a century ago were part of the region’s shoreline. The next morning Penland and I travel an hour down the coast to the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, a scientific outpost in Cocodrie, an encampment of scientists and fishermen on the coast’s edge. From there we head out in one of the consortium’s gray research boats.

The boat pounds across what appears to be choppy sea for 50 minutes before we reach Isles Dernieres (“last islands” in French). But the open surf is never more than seven feet deep. The vast reach of shallow water was once thick with swaying grasses, parted occasionally by narrow, serpentine waterways full of shrimp, oysters, redfish and trout. Penland beaches us in the bayside mud. We walk across a mere 80 yards of barren sand before we toe the ocean. A similarly diminutive outcrop is visible in the distance to either side. They are what remains of a once very long, staunch island lush with black mangroves. “It broke up ocean waves, cut down storm surges and held back saltwater so the marsh behind it could thrive,” Penland says in mourning. Now the ocean rushes right by.

Louisiana’s barrier islands are eroding faster than any around the country. Millions of tons of sediment used to exit the Mississippi River’s mouth every year and be dragged by longshore currents to the islands, building up what tides had worn away. But in part because levees and dredging prevent the river’s last miles from meandering naturally, the mouth has telescoped out to the continental shelf. The sediment just drops over the edge of the underwater cliff into the deep ocean.

Back in New Orleans the next day it becomes apparent that other human activities have made matters worse. Cliff Mugnier, an L.S.U. geodesist who also works part-time for the Corps of Engineers, explains why from the third floor of the rectangular, cement Corps headquarters, which squats atop the Mississippi River levee the Corps has built and rebuilt for 122 years.

Mugnier says that the earth beneath the delta consists of layers of muck — a wet peat several hundred feet deep — formed by centuries of flooding. As the Corps leveed the river, the city and industry drained large marshes, which in decades past were considered wasteland. Stopping the floods and draining surface water lowered the water table, allowing the top mucks to dry, consolidate and subside, hastening the city’s drop below sea level — a process already under way as the underlying mucks consolidated naturally.

That’s not all. As the bowl became deeper, it would flood during routine rainstorms. So the Corps, in cooperation with the city’s Sewerage and Water Board, began digging a maze of canals to collect rainwater. The only place to send it was Lake Pontchartrain. But because the lake’s mean elevation is one foot, the partners had to build pumping stations at the canal heads to push the collected runoff uphill into the lake.

The pumps serve another critical function. Because the canals are basically ditches, groundwater seeps into them from the wet soils. But if they are full, they can’t take on water during a storm. So the city runs the pumps regularly to expel seepage from the canals, which draws even more water from the ground, leading to further drying and subsidence. “We are aggravating our own problem,” Mugnier says. Indeed, the Corps is building more canals and enlarging pumping stations, because the lower the city sinks, the more it floods. In the meantime, streets, driveways and backyards cave in, and houses blow up when natural-gas lines rupture. Mugnier is also worried about the parishes (counties) bordering the city, which are digging drainage canals as they become more populated. In St. Charles Parish to the west, he says, “the surface could subside by as much as 14 feet.”

The Scare

Humankind can't stop the delta’s subsidence, and it can’t knock down the levees to allow natural river flooding and meandering, because the region is developed. The only realistic solutions, most scientists and engineers agree, are to rebuild the vast marshes so they can absorb high waters and reconnect the barrier islands to cut down surges and protect the renewed marshes from the sea.

Since the late 1980s Louisiana’s senators have made various pleas to Congress to fund massive remedial work. But they were not backed by a unified voice. L.S.U. had its surge models, and the Corps had others. Despite agreement on general solutions, competition abounded as to whose specific projects would be most effective. The Corps sometimes painted academics’ cries about disaster as veiled pitches for research money. Academia occasionally retorted that the Corps’s solution to everything was to bulldoze more dirt and pour more concrete, without scientific rationale. Meanwhile oystermen and shrimpers complained that the proposals from both the scientists and the engineers would ruin their fishing grounds.

Len Bahr, head of the governor’s Coastal Activities Office in Baton Rouge, tried to bring everyone together. Passionate about southern Louisiana, Bahr has survived three governors, each with different sympathies. “This is the realm in which science has to operate,” Bahr says. “There are five federal agencies and six state agencies with jurisdiction over what happens in the wetlands.” Throughout the 1990s, Bahr says with frustration, “we only received $40 million a year” from Congress, a drop compared with the bucket of need. Even with the small projects made possible by these dollars, Louisiana scientists predicted that by 2050 coastal Louisiana would lose another 1,000 square miles of marsh and swamp, an area the size of Rhode Island.

Then Hurricane Georges arrived in September 1998. Its fiercely circulating winds built a wall of water 17 feet high topped with driven waves, which threatened to surge into Lake Pontchartrain and wash into New Orleans. This was the very beast that L.S.U.’s early models had warned about, and it was headed right for the city. Luckily, just before Georges made landfall, it slowed and turned a scant two degrees to the east. The surge collapsed under suddenly chaotic winds.

A Grand Plan

The scientists, engineers and politicians who had been squabbling realized how close the entire delta had come to disaster, and Bahr says that it scared them into reaching a consensus. Late in 1998 the governor’s office, the state’s Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and all 20 of the state’s coastal parishes published Coast 2050 — a blueprint for restoring coastal Louisiana.

No group is bound by the plan, however, and if all the projects were pursued, the price tag would be $14 billion. “So,” I ask in the ninth-floor conference room adjacent to the governor’s office in Baton Rouge, “give me the short list” of Coast 2050 projects that would make the most difference. Before me are Joe Suhayda, di-
rector of L.S.U.’s Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute, who has modeled numerous storm tracks and knows the key scientists, Corps engineers, and city emergency planners; Vibhas Aravamuthan, who programs L.S.U.’s computer models; Len Bahr; and Bahr’s second-in-command, Paul Kemp. All were involved in designing Coast 2050.

First and foremost, they decide, build a river diversion at several critical spots along the Mississippi, to restore disappearing marshland. At each location the Corps would cut a channel through the river levee on its south side and build control gates that would allow freshwater and suspended sediment to wash down through select marshes toward the gulf. The water could disrupt oyster beds, but if the sites were carefully selected, deals could be made with landowners.

The second step: rebuild the southern barrier islands using more than 500 million cubic yards of sand from nearby Ship Shoal. Next, the Corps would cut a channel in the narrow neck of the river delta at about halfway down. Ships could enter the river there, shortening their trip to interior ports and saving them money. The Corps could then stop dredging the southern end of the river. The mouth would fill with sediment and begin overflowing to the west, sending sand and silt back into those longshore currents that could sustain the barrier islands.

The channel plan might be integrated into a larger state proposal to build an entire new Millennium Port. It would provide deeper draft for modern container ships than the Port of New Orleans and its main channel, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO, pronounced Mr. Go), which the Corps dredged in the ear-
ly 1960s. The outlet has eroded terribly — from 500 feet across, originally, to 2,000
feet in places — and let in a relentless stream of saltwater that has killed much of the marsh that once protected eastern New Orleans against gulf storms. If the channel or the Millennium Port were built, the Corps could close MRGO.

A remaining chink in the delta’s armor is the pair of narrow straits on Lake Pontchartrain’s eastern edge where it connects to the gulf. The obvious solution would be to gate them, just as the Netherlands does to regulate the North Sea’s flow inland. But it would be a tough sell. “We’ve proposed that in the past, and it’s
been shot down,” Bahr says. The project’s costs would be extremely high.

This list of the most promising Coast 2050 projects is only one small group’s vision, of course, yet other established experts concur with its fundamentals. Ivor van Heerden, a geologist who is deputy director of L.S.U.’s Hurricane Center, concurs that “if we’re going to succeed, we’ve got to mimic nature. Building diversions and reestablishing barrier-island sediment flows are the closest we can come.” Shea Penland pretty much agrees, although he warns that the Mississippi River may not carry enough sediment to feed multiple diversions. U.S. Geological Survey studies by Robert Meade show that the supply of suspended sediment is less than half of what it was prior to 1953, diverted mostly by dams along the river’s course through middle America.

As far as the Corps is concerned, all of the Coast 2050 projects should be implemented. The first to become a reality is the Davis Pond diversion, due to begin
operating by the end of this year. Project manager Al Naomi, a 30-year Corps civil engineer, and Bruce Baird, a biological oceanographer, brought me to the construction site on the Mississippi’s southern levee, 20 miles west of New Orleans. The structure looks like a modest dam, in line with the levee. Steel gates in its midsection, each large enough to drive a bus through, will open and close to control water flowing through it. The water will exit into a wide swath of cleared swamp that extends south for a mile, forming a shallow riverbed that will gradually disperse into boundary-less marsh. The structure will divert up to 10,650 cubic feet per second (cfs) of water from the Mississippi, whose total flow past New Orleans ranges from less than 200,000 cfs during droughts to more than one million cfs during floods. The outflow should help preserve 33,000 acres of wetlands, oysterbeds and fishing grounds.

The Corps is bullish on Davis Pond because of its success at Caernarvon, a smaller, experimental diversion it opened in 1991 near MRGO. By 1995 Caernarvon had restored 406 acres by increasing the marsh’s sediment and reducing its salinity with freshwater.

Who Should Pay?

The Corps of Engineers is hiring more scientists for projects such as Davis Pond, a signal that the fragmented parties are beginning to work better together. Bahr would like to integrate science and engineering further by requiring independent scientific review of proposed Corps projects before the state signed on — which Louisiana would need to do because Congress would require the state to share the cost of such work.

If Congress and President George W. Bush hear a unified call for action, authorizing it would seem prudent. Restoring coastal Louisiana would protect the country’s seafood and shipping industries and its oil and natural-gas supply. It would also save America’s largest wetlands, a bold environmental stroke. And without action, the million people outside New Orleans would have to relocate. The other million inside the bowl would live at the bottom of a sinking crater, surrounded by ever higher walls, trapped in a terminally ill city dependent on nonstop pumping to keep it alive.

Funding the needed science and engineering would also unearth better ways to save the country’s vanishing wetlands and the world’s collapsing deltas. It would improve humankind’s understanding of nature’s long-term processes — and the stakes of interfering, even with good intentions. And it could help governments learn how to minimize damage from rising seas, as well as from violent weather, at a time when the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts more storms of greater intensity as a result of climate change.

Walter Maestri doesn’t welcome that prospect. When Allison, the first tropical storm of the 2001 hurricane season, dumped five inches of rain a day on New Orleans for a week in June, it nearly maxed out the pumping system. Maestri spent his nights in a flood-proof command bunker built underground to evade storm winds; from there he dispatched police, EMTs, firefighters and National Guardsmen. It was only rain, yet it stressed the response teams. “Any significant water that comes into this city is a dangerous threat,” he says. “Even though I have to plan for it, I don’t even want to think about the loss of life a huge hurricane would cause.”

Mark Fischetti is a contributing editor.

More to explore
Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana. Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, 1998. Available at www.coast2050.gov/report.pdf

Holding Back the Sea: The Struggle for America’s Natural Legacy on the Gulf Coast. Christopher Hallowell. HarperCollins, 2001.

Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change. Edited by Craig E. Colten. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.

Every 24 minutes Louisiana loses one acre of land.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
OCTOBER 2001
Overview/Why Save a Sinking City?
* The New Orleans area is home to more than two million people, and it fuels a unique part of America’s national psyche.
* The Mississippi Delta is the poster child for problems threatening the world’s deltas, coastal wetlands and cities on the sea.
* Southern Louisiana produces one third of the country’s seafood, one fifth of its oil and one quarter of its natural gas.
* The state’s coastline harbors 40 percent of the nation’s coastal wetlands and provides wintering grounds for 70 percent of its migratory waterfowl.
* Facilities along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge constitute the nation’s largest port.

Human beings have dramatically increased the rate of land loss in
southeastern Louisiana — and made themselves more vulnerable to hurricanes — by restricting certain natural processes and accelerating the delta’s natural subsidence. Even now, vast portions of the region lie only a few feet above sea level, and another 60 acres disappear every day. At this rate, New Orleans will be exposed to the open sea by 2090.

Levees inhibit the river’s natural ability to sustain marshes with sediment and freshwater during spring floods. Without this supply, marshes subside and erode, and ocean water moves inland. This intrusion raises the salinity of marsh waters, killing trees and grasses that would otherwise prevent erosion.

SOLUTION: REBUILD MARSHES
Cut one or more channels through the river levee on its south side and build control gates that would allow freshwater and sediment to exit and wash down through select marshes toward the Gulf of Mexico.

LIKE ANY RIVER, the mighty Mississippi changes course over time. Over the past 4,600 years it has built four distinct deltas by depositing vast quantities of sediment each year during spring floods.

LAND LOSS is exacerbated by human-made levees that shackle the river from northern Louisiana to the Gulf of Mexico and cut off the supply of sediment to surrounding marshlands. Between 1932 and 1990, the delta lost more than 1,000 square miles of land.

NAVIGATION CHANNELS and PIPELINE CANALS carve land from the marshes, and boat traffic and tides steadily erode their banks further. They also allow saltwater to creep inland, poisoning the marshes.

SOLUTION: CLOSE CHANNELS
Close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. Without the dredging and boat traffic, the channel would begin to fill in.

RIVER DREDGING and LEVEES have caused the Mississippi River to telescope out into the gulf instead of its mouth opening laterally farther north, robbing the barrier islands such as Isles Dernieres of sustaining material.

SOLUTION: NEW CHANNEL
Cut the narrow neck of the delta to make a new navigation channel. Ships could enter the river here instead of farther south; then dredging could be halted at the end of the delta. The channels would fill with sediment and begin overflowing to the west, sending sand and silt back to the barrier islands. Engineers could also mine the
vast store of sand at Ship Shoal to rebuild the island.

NEW ORLEANS is ringed with levees that fend off the river from the south and the lake from the north. Most of the city has sunk below sea level, forming a bowl that fills even during routine rainstorms. A hurricane-driven sea surge from the east would make the lake overflow, drowning the city.

SOLUTION: BLOCK A SEA SURGE
Build gates to block the Gulf of Mexico’s access to Lake Pontchartrain.

COMPUTER MODELS by researchers at Louisiana State University predict that the counterclockwise winds of a slow-moving, Category 4 hurricane (characterized by winds of up to 155 mph with storm surges) crossing the Gulf of Mexico from the southwest would drive a sea surge 30 miles inland, right to New Orleans’s back door. Surging water would also fill Lake Pontchartrain, which would then overflow its western bank and pour into the city. At the height of the flood, the downtown would be under more than 20 feet of water only about 33 hours after the first storm winds touched the southern barrier islands.

[Chris M]

Yes.

[Rspaight]

You mean guys like Allbaugh?

Allbaugh, Brown and Chertoff all fit that description. Plus lots more.

All the President's Friends

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 12, 2005

The lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina revealed to everyone that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earned universal praise during the Clinton years, is a shell of its former self. The hapless Michael Brown - who is no longer overseeing relief efforts but still heads the agency - has become a symbol of cronyism.

But what we really should be asking is whether FEMA's decline and fall is unique, or part of a larger pattern. What other government functions have been crippled by politicization, cronyism and/or the departure of experienced professionals? How many FEMA's are there?

Unfortunately, it's easy to find other agencies suffering from some version of the FEMA syndrome.

The first example won't surprise you: the Environmental Protection Agency, which has a key role to play in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, but which has seen a major exodus of experienced officials over the past few years. In particular, senior officials have left in protest over what they say is the Bush administration's unwillingness to enforce environmental law.

Yesterday The Independent, the British newspaper, published an interview about the environmental aftermath of Katrina with Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst in the agency's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, whom one suspects is planning to join the exodus. "The budget has been cut," he said, "and inept political hacks have been put in key positions." That sounds familiar, and given what we've learned over the last two weeks there's no reason to doubt that characterization - or to disregard his warning of an environmental cover-up in progress.

What about the Food and Drug Administration? Serious questions have been raised about the agency's coziness with drug companies, and the agency's top official in charge of women's health issues resigned over the delay in approving Plan B, the morning-after pill, accusing the agency's head of overruling the professional staff on political grounds.

Then there's the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose Republican chairman hired a consultant to identify liberal bias in its programs. The consultant apparently considered any criticism of the administration a sign of liberalism, even if it came from conservatives.

You could say that these are all cases in which the Bush administration hasn't worried about degrading the quality of a government agency because it doesn't really believe in the agency's mission. But you can't say that about my other two examples.

Even a conservative government needs an effective Treasury Department. Yet Treasury, which had high prestige and morale during the Clinton years, has fallen from grace.

The public symbol of that fall is the fact that John Snow, who was obviously picked for his loyalty rather than his qualifications, is still Treasury secretary. Less obvious to the public is the hollowing out of the department's expertise. Many experienced staff members have left since 2000, and a number of key positions are either empty or filled only on an acting basis. "There is no policy," an economist who was leaving the department after 22 years told The Washington Post, back in 2002. "If there are no pipes, why do you need a plumber?" So the best and brightest have been leaving.

And finally, what about the department of Homeland Security itself? FEMA was neglected, some people say, because it was folded into a large agency that was focused on terrorist threats, not natural disasters. But what, exactly, is the department doing to protect us from terrorists?

In 2004 Reuters reported a "steady exodus" of counterterrorism officials, who believed that the war in Iraq had taken precedence over the real terrorist threat. Why, then, should we believe that Homeland Security is being well run?

Let's not forget that the administration's first choice to head the department was Bernard Kerik, a crony of Rudy Giuliani. And Mr. Kerik's nomination would have gone through if enterprising reporters hadn't turned up problems in his background that the F.B.I. somehow missed, just as it somehow didn't turn up the little problems in Michael Brown's résumé. How many lesser Keriks made it into other positions?

The point is that Katrina should serve as a wakeup call, not just about FEMA, but about the executive branch as a whole. Everything I know suggests that it's in a sorry state - that an administration which doesn't treat governing seriously has created two, three, many FEMA's.

Here's what Chertoff's been up to:

Chertoff delayed federal response, memo shows

BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY, ALISON YOUNG AND SHANNON MCCAFFREY

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.

Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the "principal federal official" in charge of the storm.

As thousands of hurricane victims went without food, water and shelter in the days after Katrina's early morning Aug. 29 landfall, critics assailed Brown for being responsible for delays that might have cost hundreds of lives.

But Chertoff - not Brown - was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government's blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.

But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn't shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.

"As you know, the President has established the `White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Response.' He will meet with us tomorrow to launch this effort. The Department of Homeland Security, along with other Departments, will be part of the task force and will assist the Administration with its response to Hurricane Katrina," Chertoff said in the memo to the secretaries of defense, health and human services and other key federal agencies.

On the day that Chertoff wrote the memo, Bush was in San Diego presiding over a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Chertoff's Aug. 30 memo for the first time declared Katrina an "Incident of National Significance," a key designation that triggers swift federal coordination. The following afternoon, Bush met with his Cabinet, then appeared before TV cameras in the White House Rose Garden to announce the government's planned action.

That same day, Aug. 31, the Department of Defense, whose troops and equipment are crucial in such large disasters, activated its Task Force Katrina. But active-duty troops didn't begin to arrive in large numbers along the Gulf Coast until Saturday.

White House and homeland security officials wouldn't explain why Chertoff waited some 36 hours to declare Katrina an incident of national significance and why he didn't immediately begin to direct the federal response from the moment on Aug. 27 when the National Hurricane Center predicted that Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast with catastrophic force in 48 hours. Nor would they explain why Bush felt the need to appoint a separate task force.

Chertoff's hesitation and Bush's creation of a task force both appear to contradict the National Response Plan and previous presidential directives that specify what the secretary of homeland security is assigned to do without further presidential orders. The goal of the National Response Plan is to provide a streamlined framework for swiftly delivering federal assistance when a disaster - caused by terrorists or Mother Nature - is too big for local officials to handle.

Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, referred most inquiries about the memo and Chertoff's actions to the Department of Homeland Security.

"There will be an after-action report" on the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Perino said. She added that "Chertoff had the authority to invoke the Incident of National Significance, and he did it on Tuesday."

Perino said the creation of the White House task force didn't add another bureaucratic layer or delay the response to the devastating hurricane. "Absolutely not," she said. "I think it helped move things along." When asked whether the delay in issuing the Incident of National Significance was to allow Bush time to return to Washington, Perino replied: "Not that I'm aware of."

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, didn't dispute that the National Response Plan put Chertoff in charge in federal response to a catastrophe. But he disputed that the bureaucracy got in the way of launching the federal response.

"There was a tremendous sense of urgency," Knocke said. "We were mobilizing the greatest response to a disaster in the nation's history."

Knocke noted that members of the Coast Guard were already in New Orleans performing rescues and FEMA personnel and supplies had been deployed to the region.

The Department of Homeland Security has refused repeated requests to provide details about Chertoff's schedule and said it couldn't say specifically when the department requested assistance from the military. Knocke said a military liaison was working with FEMA, but said he didn't know his or her name or rank. FEMA officials said they wouldn't provide information about the liaison.

Knocke said members of almost every federal agency had already been meeting as part of the department's Interagency Incident Management Group, which convened for the first time on the Friday before the hurricane struck. So it would be a mistake, he said, to interpret the memo as meaning that Tuesday, Aug. 30 was the first time that members of the federal government coordinated.

The Chertoff memo indicates that the response to Katrina wasn't left to disaster professionals, but was run out of the White House, said George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at FEMA during the Clinton administration and the co-author of an emergency management textbook.

"It shows that the president is running the disaster, the White House is running it as opposed to Brown or Chertoff," Haddow said. Brown "is a convenient fall guy. He's not the problem really. The problem is a system that was marginalized."

A former FEMA director under President Reagan expressed shock by the inaction that Chertoff's memo suggested. It showed that Chertoff "does not have a full appreciation for what the country is faced with - nor does anyone who waits that long," said Gen. Julius Becton Jr., who was FEMA director from 1985-1989.

"Anytime you have a delay in taking action, there's a potential for losing lives," Becton told Knight Ridder. "I have no idea how many lives we're talking about. ... I don't understand why, except that they were inefficient."

Chertoff's Aug. 30 memo came on the heels of a memo from Brown, written several hours after Katrina made landfall, showing that the FEMA director was waiting for Chertoff's permission to get help from others within the massive department. In that memo, first obtained by the Associated Press last week, Brown requested Chertoff's "assistance to make available DHS employees willing to deploy as soon as possible." It asked for another 1,000 homeland security workers within two days and 2,000 within a week.

The four-paragraph memo ended with Brown thanking Chertoff "for your consideration in helping us meet our responsibilities in this near catastrophic event."

According to the National Response Plan, which was unveiled in January by Chertoff's predecessor, Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security is supposed to declare an Incident of National Significance when a catastrophic event occurs.

"Standard procedures regarding requests for assistance may be expedited or, under extreme circumstances, suspended in the immediate aftermath of an event of catastrophic magnitude," according to the plan, which evolved from earlier plans and lessons learned after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "Notification and full coordination with the States will occur, but the coordination process must not delay or impede the rapid deployment and use of critical resources."

Should Chertoff have declared Katrina an Incident of National Significance sooner - even before the storm struck? Did his delay slow the quick delivery of the massive federal response that was needed? Would it have made a difference?

"You raise good questions," said Frank J. Cilluffo, the director of George Washington University's Homeland Security Planning Institute. It's too early to tell, he said, whether unfamiliarity with or glitches in the new National Response Plan were factors in the poor early response to Katrina.

"Clearly this is the first test. It certainly did not pass with flying colors," Cilluffo said of the National Response Plan.

Mike Byrne, a former senior homeland security official under Ridge who worked on the plan, said he doesn't think the new National Response Plan caused the confusion that plagued the early response to Katrina.

Something else went wrong, he suspects. The new National Response Plan isn't all that different from the previous plan, called the Federal Response Plan.

"Our history of responding to major disasters has been one where we've done it well," Byrne said. "We need to figure out why this one didn't go as well as the others did. It's shocking to me."

Chertoff's Aug. 30 memo is posted at www.krwashington.com

To read the National Response Plan, go to: http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRP(underscore)FullText.pdf

Ryan

[Matt]

No matter how extentsively New Orleans will be rebuilt, I bet a lot of funding will come from taxpayers.

Should we even rebuild New Orleans?
Steve Chapman
Published September 13, 2005

Of all the ideas I've heard about what to do with New Orleans, the best one came from former U.S. Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), who said we should "put somebody like former President Jimmy Carter in charge of rebuilding New Orleans."

As president, Carter distinguished himself by failing to free the hostages in Iran, failing to vanquish inflation and failing to solve the energy crisis. Were he to fail to rebuild New Orleans, he'd be doing the country a great service.

If you were looking for a place expressly designed to endanger people and property, it would look a lot like New Orleans. No one today would ever think of building a city on a plot of ground below sea level, surrounded by water, endlessly vulnerable to floods and hurricanes. So why would anyone think of rebuilding a city in exactly the same place?

New Orleans was a unique and wonderful creation, and I'd give my eyeteeth for the chance to go back to the city I got to visit only once. But neither I nor anyone else will ever be able to return to that place: It's gone. Whatever comes next will not be the same. You can't flood most of the buildings in the city, immerse it in a toxic stew, empty out its residents for months, and expect it to blossom anew like a perennial flower in the spring.

Restoring New Orleans to anything like its former self would take an astronomical amount of money--to rebuild infrastructure, clean up horrendous pollution, resettle people, and replace many or most of the 150,000 properties that were flooded. That doesn't count the vast sums that would be needed for levees and other flood-prevention projects that were too expensive to undertake before Hurricane Katrina.

No amount of money will change the fact that this is no place for a large urban population. Most of the city is below sea level, and it continues to sink, even as the ocean is rising. Over the next century, it's expected to drop by a full meter. Virginia Burkett of the United States Geological Survey told National Public Radio, "Within the next century, the areas that didn't flood this time will be likely to flood under a similar hurricane situation."

But anticipating "a similar hurricane situation" is overoptimistic. Katrina was not the worst-case scenario: Had a Category 5 storm smashed into New Orleans head-on, the flooding, destruction and death toll would all have been much worse.

Over time, the question about a Category 5 storm is when, not if. To guard against it, the city would need greater and more expensive protections than were ever contemplated.

Yes, we could spend whatever it takes trying to re-create the New Orleans we once knew. But why would we want to, given the other ways that money could be spent? Much of what the city offered is not worth resurrecting--such as widespread poverty, high unemployment, a backward economy and rampant crime.

Much of what is worth resurrecting, such as its vibrant culture and street life, may be fatally compromised. After hundreds of thousands of people have moved elsewhere for months and taken jobs, many are unlikely to return to a city that will be even shorter on economic opportunities than it used to be.

Before the hurricane, New Orleans had one of the poorest and least mobile populaces in the country. You could have made a case before Katrina that the best thing most residents could do is leave for someplace with higher living standards and a better job market.

Now, most of them have done exactly that. It's hard to see why they would be better off returning to New Orleans six months or a year from now. It's even harder to see why the government should encourage them to do so. There's a whole continent where they can settle, most of it above sea level.

Some of New Orleans will doubtless survive, starting with the areas that didn't flood. But the message to those who want to remain there is that while the rest of us stand ready to help them begin new lives, we aren't going to bail them back into a city that will always be a disaster waiting to happen. If they want to resurrect the New Orleans of old, they should bear the full cost of making it safe and livable.

For a long time, New Orleans has been fighting a war with nature, and it finally lost. Why fight that war again?

[Rspaight]

It's a valid question. New Orleans is in such a vulnerable location, it seems sure that this sort of event will happen again eventually. I don't think it's wise to invest heavily in rebuilding a major city there, no matter how much fondness people have for it.

Ryan

[CitizenDan]

Plus, consider who gave the city so much of its character: Musicians, street hustlers, the many varied eccentrics and oddball characters wandering all over the place. Most of them were poor and/or black. If the city's rebuilt, guess who won't be able to afford to live there?

I suspect a rebuilt New Orleans will be like any other new urban development, full of pricy prefab homes, faceless franchise businesses...and a few casinos for the tourists. No thank you.