'Understanding Katrina
Everyone knew it was coming. So why couldn't disaster have been avoided?
By noon Monday, it was clear there was trouble. It was at the levee along the industrial canal that separates New Orleans from St. Bernard Parish to the east. The breach was obvious and, for the moment, irreparable. On Tuesday morning, there were two more gaps, both along a floodwall of the city's 17th Street Canal. It was the beginning of the end, just a matter of time. The waters rushed in.
At the worst moment of the worst week in New Orleans's history, the water downtown was 20 feet deep. How could it have happened? The city's levees, many decades old, had been built to withstand only a Category 3 storm. Katrina was a 4. A high 4. The local authorities knew that. But they had no comprehensive plan to evacuate people from even the lowest parts of a city whose virtually every corner lies below sea level. Nor were there plans for an enhanced police presence on the streets after Katrina struck. In Washington, too, there was a curious lassitude, both as the massive storm bore down on the Gulf Coast and in the immediate aftermath of the levees failing. At week's end, an obviously stricken President Bush said: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
But why not? The potential failure of the city's 350-mile levee system had been studied for years. The extensive network was built to keep floodwaters out, but it can also lock them in when the levees are breached or "overtopped" by surging water on the other side. This is what old New Orleans hands refer to as "flooding the bowl." And it's the very reason the Red Cross listed a direct hurricane hit on New Orleans as the nation's most deadly natural-disaster threat a few years ago. Everyone, it seemed, knew the risks. Scientists at Louisiana State University had warned that even a Category 3 storm could dump up to 27 feet of water in some neighborhoods. "Everybody knew this was coming," says Walter Maestri, director of emergency preparedness for Jefferson Parish (a parish is akin to a county), which borders downtown New Orleans. "But we all hoped it wouldn't be in our lifetime." John Harrald, codirector of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., agrees. "To paraphrase the 9/11 commission," he said, "we are seeing a failure of imagination."
Shared blame. The failure, however, was not on everyone's part. For years, officials in the New Orleans district office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built and administers the levee network, pushed to raise the protection level from Category 3 to Category 5. "We have the ability to protect this city [from Category 4 and 5 storms] for a 2-to-3-billion-dollar investment," Al Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps, told U.S. News in June. "It's not rocket science; its concrete and steel." Environmental groups, meanwhile, lobbied for more than a decade to restore southeastern Louisiana's vanishing wetlands, which once provided New Orleans with a robust, natural hurricane buffer. They got nowhere.
advertisement
