'Understanding Katrina
Everyone knew it was coming. So why couldn't disaster have been avoided?
The Corps of Engineers went to great lengths last week to point out that the specific levee walls breached in Katrina's aftermath recently passed inspection and were not slated for upgrades, and that they were designed to withstand only Category 3 storms. But the corps's New Orleans district has also faced recent budget cuts that Naomi called "drastic" earlier this year. Decreases in funding for hurricane protection began four years ago and have come fast and furious since then. This year, representatives from Louisiana asked for $27.1 million for hurricane protection, saw the request slashed by the White House, but managed to nudge it back up to nearly $6 million. "With tax cuts and terrorism on everyone's radar," shrugs a Capitol Hill staff aide, "the interest just wasn't there." Last spring, the Army Corps's Naomi told U.S. News that funding to raise levee walls had been cut by up to 75 percent, compared with five years ago--despite the fact that levees in some areas had sunk by a foot or more, through a process known as "subsidence," rendering them inadequate to protect the city's neighborhoods even from Category 3 storms. "Funds have been cut to the point that [walls] that need to be raised can't be," Naomi said, "because we don't have the federal dollars."
Self-help. Some southeastern Louisiana parishes had resorted to raising their own taxes to shore up the sinking levees. "After 9/11, our budget was squeezed," says Windell Curole, executive director of South Lafourche Levee District, who recently won support for a tax measure aimed at levee-raising. In Jefferson Parrish, district officials worked to raise levee walls to 15 feet before federal funding dried up a decade ago, leaving them around 12.5 feet high. Naomi's proposal to raise the levees to provide Category 5 protection, outlined in a slide-show presentation he created that includes slides like "Benefits of category 5 Protection: Loss of Life Prevented; Makes evacuation manageable," is still awaiting federal funding--for a feasibility study. That alone would take years. Naomi says the Category 5 upgrade work would have needed to be started more than a decade ago in order to have been completed before Katrina.
Post-Katrina, the issue of funding may have become moot. "Now people are going to say, 'Why do we need more studies?' " says Roy Dokka, professor of civil and environmental engineering at LSU. "Why not just raise the levees?" In its defense, the cash-strapped Army Corps points out that a $37 million project to strengthen flood protection along New Orleans's West Bank was one of just two federal flood-prevention programs it operates that received full federal funding this year.
While New Orleans would have probably had a better chance of surviving Katrina with higher levees, it's also the leveeing of the Mississippi River--begun by the Army Corps in the 1930s--that has destroyed the wetlands and barrier islands that once provided the city with significant storm protection. Levees prevent the Mississippi from depositing the silt necessary to maintain southeast Louisiana's wetlands; since the 1950s, scientists estimate that Louisiana has lost an area the size of Rhode Island. Ivor van Heerden, director of LSU's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, says that every mile and a half of wetlands stands to lower a storm surge--the wind-fueled spike in water level likely responsible for last week's levee breaches--by a foot or so. "The loss of these areas has been recognized as a growing problem for the last 20 years and almost nothing has been done about it beyond conducting feasibility studies," says Timothy Kusky, author of a textbook called Geological Hazards.
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