The Second Anniversary — the Big Reads

August 29th, 2007

Here’s a good op/ed by a NOLA professor — an excellent three-part Mother Jones investigation by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune– and a couple of MSM pieces, including news of demonstrations, last.

Jude

Katrina, Two Years Later
10 Important Lessons
BILL QUIGLEY, CounterPunch
August 28, 2007

One. Build and rebuild community.

When disaster hits and life is wrecked, you immediately seem to be on your own. Isolation after a disaster is a recipe for powerlessness and depression. Family, community, church, work associations are all important –get them up and working as fast as possible. People will stand up and fight, but we need communities to do it. Prize women –they are the first line of community builders. Guys will talk and fight and often grab the spotlight, but women will help everyone and do whatever it takes to protect families and communities.

Powerful forces mobilize immediately after a disaster. People and politicians and organizations have their own agendas and it helps them if our communities are fragmented.

Setting one group against another, saying one group is more important than another is not helpful. Stress and distress is high for everyone, but community support will multiply the resources of individuals. Build bridges. People together are much stronger than people alone.

Two. Self-reliance.

Your community must be ready to re-settle your property as soon as possible and care for those most in need. Prioritize help for the elderly, the sick, children and women, especially the poor. The prime cure for helplessness is taking control over your own life and joining others to fight for justice.

Groups and people will want to treat you like a victim –say you are traumatized and incapable of making basic decisions about yourself. They will tell you they know best and act like they know best. Tell them to get lost.

Three. Tell your own story.

Sharing our stories, successes and failures, is a way to connect and educate ourselves. Connecting with others nationally and internationally who have been through disasters is the very best thing that you can do. Disasters and the corporations that cause them and profit from them do not respect national boundaries. Look for global justice connections. Learn from those who have been through this before. They will tell you - do not let anyone say who you are or what is best for your community –say it yourself.

Those in power will blame circumstances outside their control for what happened and inevitably they will blame the victims of the disaster. Those in power will tell the people’s story in ways that makes the powerful look good. If others do not tell the truth –you do it and get your stories out. Real allies help lift up the voices of the people.

Four. Value every single human life equally.

Every religion and human rights recognizes that every single person is entitled to human dignity. There are no forms to fill out, no criteria to meet. Every single person no matter their race or gender or economic situation has equal value. Every person has the right to participate in the response to the disaster equally. Every single person and family has the right to repair and rebuild and participate in the decisions being made.

The exact opposite occurs after a disaster. The people with economic and political power get together and decide what has to happen. They also decide which people are “worthy” of getting help first. They consider poor working people disposable and movable. Since this is an emergency, they say there is not time to allow regular people to participate in the decisions. If every single person is not treated equally before the disaster hits, they certainly should not expect to be treated fairly after.

Five. Don’t wait for a leader –become one.

Resist the tendency to think someone else is going to come save you. There is no leader out there. We must each become leaders and followers in order to bring about the change that is needed. Each of us is challenged to get beyond our pre-disaster comfort zone. New leadership is essential to avoid just repeating the mistakes that contributed to the disaster.

Those who work for human development instead of real estate development will be repeatedly criticized as “obstructionist” by those who do not value every life equally. Be prepared for these criticisms. That is what they said about Mandela, Gandhi, ML King.

Good company.

Six. Prepare for a Love-Hate Relationship with the Government.

After disaster, only the government has the resources to help fix major problems for the social good. We must hold them accountable and demand that the public sector mobilize and assist in an equitable way.

At the same time, we cannot wait for the government. Nor can we necessarily listen to the government. After a disaster, the government will immediately be manipulated by those in power. We must both critique the government and build our own alternative community supports.

Seven. Government will help businesses first and second and third, and if there is anything left, maybe fourth.

Who is in charge of government before the disaster? Governments will look to privatize the public sector –housing, health, education, transportation, every system after a disaster. That was what they wanted before the disaster, so the disaster offers them an opportunity to move their plans into action.

Corporations see disasters as opportunities. They look for valuable land that poor people were living on before the disaster. They decide that there is a better economic use for that land. Then they will push the government to come up with some excuse to take the land for other uses.

You will quickly see that those with power and money before the disaster end up with more power and more money after the disaster. You will see that 98% of the money distributed in a disaster ends up enriching corporations. Our most colorful example is the blue tarps that the government put on the roofs of houses after Katrina. The main contractor, Shaw Group, got $175 a square to put on the tarps. They subcontracted the work out to another corporation for $75 a square. The second corporation subcontracted the work out to a third corporation for $30 a square. Who in turn subcontracted it out again to guys who did the work for $2 a square. Two dollars a square for the actual worker is less than 2 percent of what the government paid out –guess who got the money.

Wonder why the Gulf Coast is not fixed up yet? This is not an accident. It is not that the system isn’t working. It is working for the benefit of those who create and fund and manipulate it. Read Naomi Klein’s THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It spells it out in detail.

If government works primarily for corporations before the disaster, after the disaster it will be a hyper corporate-friendly environment.

Eight. Disasters reveal the structural injustices in our communities in race, gender and class and are thus learning and action opportunities.

Wonder about the role of race, class and gender in society? Watch what happens when disaster strikes. Who is left behind during the disaster? Who is left behind in the repair and rebuilding and planning and decision-making? Disasters illuminate injustices.

There is tremendous educational opportunity to look at what really matters in our society after a disaster. The curtains are pulled back. The bandages are ripped off. Our histories of injustice are laid bare for all to see. International human rights create great opportunities to reframe the justice discussion.

But just looking is insufficient. Join in solidarity with the same folks who are left out. If a disaster can be an opportunity for those interested in unjust economic advantage, why cannot we change the pattern and make it an opportunity to redistribute justice in our communities and right the wrongs that created what all can now see?

Nine. A justice-based reconstruction will not be funded.

Money will flow. Charities, churches and governments will send money for charitable help. If your community is trying to create a more just community than the one destroyed by the disaster, there will not be funding for that. If you are trying to make the community fairer for and with the poor, the elderly, and those who lived in unjust circumstances before the disaster –get ready to raise your own funds for your organization. Funding for charity will come, but funding for justice will not.

We must insist on some transparency and accountability from the non-profits and foundations and others who have raised and spent billions in the names of those in distress. They cannot be allowed to operate like multi-national corporations –they must open their books and involve people in their decision-making.

Solidarity not charity is one of the great demands to come out of Katrina from the Common Ground collective. Another is “Nothing about us without us is for us” from Peoples Hurricane Relief.

After Katrina, it again became clear that decades of oil development has literally destroyed the natural protections around the gulf coast. Yet the disaster actually enriched the oil companies who helped cause it, creating their biggest year of profit in some time. Yet, do you hear the voices of those calling out for the oil corporations to be held accountable for what they have caused? Those voices are small and unfunded. But they, like so many others calling for justice, are out there and will one day be hear.

Ten. Love is the answer –justice work is a commitment for the long haul.

When disaster hits, there is a natural urge to work around the clock to try to set things right. After a few weeks or months, it will become clear that is not sustainable. Working 24 hours a day is going to make you as crazy as the government. No one likes a crank –even if they are working for justice.

Building communities of resistance and working for human development is long-term work. Love is a tremendous source of energy. But we have to love ourselves as well so we can keep living this resistance with others. We have and will continue to make mistakes. We have to get back up, dust ourselves off, forgive ourselves and others, and get back to working in community to create a more just world.

It is important to laugh too. Remember that last job held by the guy in charge of disasters for the entire US government was as head of an association of dancing horses! We can’t make this stuff up.

We have to love and laugh along with our tears and rage and keep learning new lessons. ++

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans.

Storm Warning: The Unlearned Lessons of Katrina
New Orleans and its surrounding areas are a petri dish for global climate change. What’s happening there will show up in your neighborhood sooner than you think.
John McQuaid, Mother Jones
August 26, 2007

Part one of a three-part series.

Eroding coastline, sinking land, rising seas; failing levees, poor evacuation planning; a city that would fill like a soup bowl if its flood defenses were breached. In 2002, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John McQuaid coauthored a series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, where he’d worked for more than 20 years, that predicted the fate that would befall New Orleans 3 years later. Now, in a three-part series for Mother Jones, McQuaid reports that the initial surge of attention to strengthening the Gulf Coast’s defenses has ebbed, once again, to complacency. And residents of the Gulf Coast are not the only ones who should be worried. As McQuaid reports, it’s not just the levees that are broken—it’s the entire political system by which we create disaster defenses. Climate change will bring more storms, floods, fires, and tornadoes, but Washington has done very little to get us prepared. In part one of “Storm Warning,” McQuaid visits a New Orleans landfill that is ground zero for understanding what we haven’t learned from Katrina.

—The Editors

Recently, I hiked to the top of a hurricane levee along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, a shipping channel running through the east side of New Orleans. During Hurricane Katrina, this spot had been hard hit: Easterly winds drove the hurricane storm surge straight down the canal into the center of the city, overflowing levees and floodwalls all the way. Some washed out. Some breached. In the end, the neighborhoods they shielded were mostly destroyed.

Guided by local lawyer Joel Waltzer, we walked about 50 yards, then turned and looked north, the water at our backs. In front of us was an enormous mound of construction debris, about 60 feet high and a football field long, covered with thick, gray-brown clay. Trucks rolled through a FEMA checkpoint on the far side and then up to the top of the mountain.

There, attended by bulldozers and scoopers, they dumped their cargo, the remains of the New Orleans that used to be: the Sheetrock, wood, concrete, wire, plastic, and steel that once composed the city’s wrecked buildings, which are still being torn down or gutted. Like many spots in New Orleans, the dump, called the Old Gentilly Landfill, is grimy and workaday on the one hand, elegiac on the other. “I’m thinking about how many homes are in there,” Waltzer told me. “Mine’s in there somewhere. I never did find it. I used to trudge up to the top of this son of a bitch and look.”

The view was troubling for another reason: It doesn’t take a geotechnical engineer to see that piling billions of pounds of debris next to a hurricane levee will affect its stability, which depends on a complex, poorly understood interplay between the extreme pressures of rising floodwaters and the cohesion of the squishy Mississippi delta soils. Miscalculate and your wall will breach. And even if the levee itself holds, a flood that overtops it will wash over the landfill, sending the remains of the city coursing through the streets—again.

When residents of nearby neighborhoods raised these questions in the months after the storm, the state dismissed their concerns at first. The agency that built the levee, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was in the best position to gauge the safety issues, but it stayed out of the dispute—technically, it turns levees over to local authorities after construction is complete. Frustrated residents—members of a nearby Vietnamese community, among the few damaged neighborhoods to return in force—hired Waltzer to represent them in their attempts to shut down Old Gentilly and another nearby landfill. Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California-Berkeley who had participated in a comprehensive review of the Katrina levee failures, volunteered to analyze the levee-dump relationship on behalf of the residents. He concluded that as the pile of debris grew, it would indeed cause mounting instability. The Corps still had ultimate responsibility for levee safety, so it agreed to upgrade the dump’s safety standards—though not enough, in the view of Bea or the residents, who have continued to use every bureaucratic route available to try to close the dump.

The details of this fight won’t be shocking news to anyone who has paid attention to the city’s slog over the past two years; the entire reconstruction effort has been plagued by similar bureaucratic snarls and disputes. Basic safety—that is, what New Orleans needs more than anything else to survive—seems to have gotten lost amid the infighting between agencies of the city, state, and federal governments, and the myriad contractors doing the work. The unreliable political interests and bureaucracies that set the stage for the disaster are still in place, mostly unchanged, and now charged with planning for the city’s future…

Catastrophes are supposed to nudge history in new directions. After the 1927 Mississippi River flood engulfed vast areas of the south, the Corps overhauled the river’s basic flood-control architecture, building the foundation of the modern system we have now. Katrina’s devastating blow to New Orleans raised some history-making issues: Can the damaged city be sustained—that is, can it survive not just the next few hurricane seasons, but the next 100? And as global climate change causes sea levels to rise and possibly fuels larger hurricanes, will other cities inevitably go under too? (See “A Hundred Katrinas: Climate Change and the Threat to the U.S. Coast.”)

Instead of addressing those questions, though, the national debate has stressed the idiosyncrasies of New Orleans. Some have written that French explorer Bienville made a mistake when, in 1718, he founded New Orleans on the fringe of a low-lying swamp dangerously close to Hurricane Alley. Others take it a step further and say that three centuries has been a good run, but it’s time to give up. There’s some truth to these statements—New Orleans’ location on a low-lying, sinking river delta has indeed put it in a terrible predicament. But the underlying message is that Katrina was a fluke: that New Orleans’ problems are unique and its existential concerns mostly irrelevant to the rest of the country. That may be comforting to people outside Louisiana. But it’s not realistic.

Thanks to centuries of man-made alterations to its fragile topography—levee construction, oil and gas drilling, suburbanization—New Orleans has become a place where environmental changes are accelerated, amped up. Year to year, sometimes day to day, the shape of the land is changing, and the life it supports is ever more exposed to danger, hurricanes being only the most dire on a long list of environmental threats. New Orleans and environs are a kind of petri dish for global climate change—what’s happening there will be showing up elsewhere sooner than you think.

The rest of the nation already has plenty in common with New Orleans. For decades, government agencies at all levels have subsidized development in risky areas. Along coastlines and in river plains, this arrived in the form of flood defenses, federal flood insurance, and aid for businesses (in Louisiana, for example, oil and gas drilling and refining).

Near fire-prone forestlands, road building and the marketability of nature itself drove construction of subdivisions. Katrina exposed this ad hoc approach as both lethal and unsustainable. The current wrangling over New Orleans is a preview of what will happen over the coming decades. As melting polar ice is projected to encroach on more and more coastal communities, larger hurricanes and powerful rainstorms will send floods rolling over outmoded flood defenses, and heat waves and ecological disruptions may make some now-comfortable locales unlivable. We don’t yet have any idea how, or where, we’ll draw the last lines of defense. As post-Katrina New Orleans is proving, it’s not simply a matter of building levees; far more important is constructing the basic political architecture to decide who will be protected, and how… ++

What the Dutch Can Teach Us About Weathering the Next Katrina
A 1953 storm that killed 1,835 people forced the Netherlands to change the way disaster protection is done. The same can’t be said of the U.S., where innovation has been stymied by pork-barrel politics.
John McQuaid, Mother Jones
August 28, 2007

Part two of a three-part series.

In the centuries-long battle to protect New Orleans from rising waters, the hurricane levees are an afterthought. Built over the past 40 years, they are short, weak, and ramshackle structures, especially when compared to the river levees that keep the Mississippi River in its narrow navigation-channel banks. Ports, shipping, and barge companies all have influential lobbies, and over the decades the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers became a one-stop shop for pork-barrel river projects, sometimes justified with cooked cost-benefit analyses. The Louisiana landscape is dotted with these and includes the now-infamous Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shipping channel not far from the Old Gentilly Landfill in eastern New Orleans.

Though it hasn’t received substantial traffic in decades, it did cause significant marsh erosion and turned out to be a conduit for storm surges into New Orleans. By contrast, hurricane levees have no economic benefit other than preventing disasters, and thus no constituency other than the public itself. The Corps’ now-notorious slapdash engineering in New Orleans (see “Broken: the Army Corps of Engineers”) wasn’t happenstance. It was the logical result of this dysfunctional system.

Two years after Katrina exposed the fragility of the hurricane levees and the system that made them, the city remains exposed and vulnerable. Since Katrina, the Corps has embarked on an ambitious program to repair and fortify the levee system by 2011, one whose price tag keeps rising. Last week, Corps officials announced they would be asking Congress for an additional $7.6 billion, bringing the project total to $14.7 billion of improvements: compacted clay and mud, concrete armoring, floodgates, and pumping stations. It’s a clear upgrade from the shoddy pre-Katrina system. It includes, for example, a proposed floodgate on the Intracoastal Waterway, which should provide a measure of protection for the Old Gentilly Landfill and the residents nearby.

But even if the Corps can pull this off—and it’s not clear that it can—this huge investment is still, in some sense, a mere stopgap. Statistically, the odds that any spot in this enhanced system will be overtopped in 30 years—the life of a mortgage—are about 1 in 4, and probably greater given the eroding landscape and the increased risk of severe storms that may accompany climate change.

So today Louisiana politicians are demanding “Category 5″ protection, a system of flood defenses capable of repelling the worst that a hurricane could dish out. Congress has ordered the Corps to study the matter and report back next year with some options. But what, exactly, does Category 5 protection mean? Right now, nobody knows. There is no master plan for New Orleans.

But models for this kind of endeavor already exist, and the best of them is in the Netherlands. Over the past 50 years, the Dutch have built the world’s most sophisticated system of flood defenses. I went to see them two months after Katrina. After weeks of looking at decidedly low-tech structures of mud, steel, and concrete, it was like materializing into a Star Trek episode. I was soon strolling under a giant canopy of tubular white girders in the Maeslant storm surge barrier, a gateway across a shipping channel into Rotterdam.

Completed in 1997, it’s the last piece of a massive project to fortify the coast, begun after a 1953 flood that busted hundreds of dikes and inundated the country’s south, killing 1,835 people. The barrier is both functional and beautiful: From the air, it resembles a delicate butterfly. When a storm surge approaches on the North Sea, an electronic warning system activates the barrier automatically, and the two gates—the butterfly wings—swing out into the water on ball bearings 30 feet in diameter to close the channel and block the storm surge.

But it’s not the machinery so much as the political and legal system behind it that offers lessons for America. After an intense debate following the 1953 disaster, the Dutch decided to junk the philosophy that had guided them for hundreds of years. Instead of building hundreds of miles of dikes around inhabited areas—the approach now employed in New Orleans—they decided to raise gated barriers across the three large estuaries where the sea enters Dutch territory. (North of the estuaries, the coastline is hardened with walls and gates, dunes high enough to block storm surges are scrupulously maintained, and a 20-mile seawall was built to close off a large inlet from the sea.)

Like positioning soldiers in a mountain pass, the estuary plan focused resources at the most critical places, preventing storm surges from getting near settled areas farther back. It’s a system engineered to a safety standard 100 times more stringent than the current goal (not yet achieved) for New Orleans’ most heavily populated areas. Even Dutch pasturelands have more protection than the Big Easy.

To do all this, the Dutch had to push their science in new directions. “For a hydraulic engineer, this was like putting a man on the moon,” Tjalle de Haan, a government engineer who worked on the projects, told me. But the true innovation was the acknowledgement that as environmental conditions change, humans must get out in front of them—and stay there.

As land sinks, or the sea rises, the government must upgrade its flood defenses; in the Netherlands, that’s a legal mandate, not a question to be debated, one pork-barrel project at a time, with each new legislative session.

America is not the Netherlands, of course. The differences in landscape alone make it impossible to exactly replicate the Dutch model—there is no way to build a wall around the entire Mississippi delta, nor is that advisable. But the larger, and more critical, difference is that the United States has nothing resembling the Dutch mandate for protection. The Netherlands’ approach—designing projects based on estimated risk—long ago became routine for the private U.S. nuclear, aviation, and energy industries, and for the government agencies that build bridges and other infrastructure. But not for the federal agency charged with protecting millions of people from floods, the Corps of Engineers.

Congress allocates money for water projects on the basis of political power, not a scientific accounting of who’s most at risk. This year’s Water Resources Development Act, the final version of which passed the House earlier this month and is expected to be green-lighted by the Senate in September, is a cornucopia of earmarks, including beach-replenishment projects demanded by vacation communities in New Jersey and Florida, as well as money to study the navigation impacts of one of Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young’s two infamous “bridges to nowhere.” There’s money for short-term fixes to New Orleans’ levees, and a modest provision that would require outside review of the design of big Corps projects. But there’s little funding set aside for much-needed flood defense upgrades in other vulnerable communities. The White House, which should be devising a long-term strategy for protecting the population, has also done nothing on this front. Further confusing matters, President Bush has threatened to veto the bill if Congress doesn’t cut its $21 billion price tag.

Tomorrow, the conclusion of “Storm Warning,” which examines the lax response to Katrina, the enormity of the task at hand, and why it could take another catastrophic storm for the government to finally take action.

In the video to your right, Kawana Jasper, who lived at the St. Bernard housing development before Katrina, talks about her experience trying to come back to New Orleans, and her belief that the city is trying to push out public housing residents. She expresses the anger and resilience that so many victims of this tragedy have shown and continue to show two years after many of their lives were destroyed. This video is just one of a series of several moving, honest and important short films being made by Color of Change as part of a Voices from the Gulf campaign. Check out their website here and click on the video to your right for more.
[open link to view.] ++

Never Again? The Politics of Preventing Another Katrina
The Bush administration’s lackluster response to one of the largest natural disasters in the nation’s history has been to rely on stopgap measures and incompetent contractors, rather than devising a national plan to protect the U.S. coastline. Will it take another Katrina for the government to act?
John McQuaid, Mother Jones
August 29, 2007

The conclusion of a three-part series.

The term “terraforming”—reshaping the surface of another planet for human settlement—was coined by science-fiction writers. And that’s not too far from what engineers must do for the Mississippi delta. They must resculpt a patchwork of degraded marshland, ruined city neighborhoods, and sprawling subdivisions into an integrated defense against flooding.

Part of the idea is to revive the process that built the Mississippi delta in the first place. When New Orleans was founded, rising, silt-laden water overflowed the riverbanks each spring, refreshing and expanding the marshes. The river levees constricted this flow in the 19th century, and the entire delta started slowly sinking back into the sea. Now scientists want to try strategically breaching the levees, diverting river water over the marshes to deposit silt once again. Those projects would be knit together with upgraded levees, walls, and floodgates at a cost of $50 to $55 billion spread over several decades, according to Louisiana officials.

On an array of high-resolution monitors in Joannes Westerink’s Notre Dame University lab in South Bend, Indiana, a virtual storm is taking shape and crashing into a digital New Orleans. Anyone watching the news coverage of Katrina was treated to images like these—computer programs capable of digitally recreating landscapes and weather patterns, rerunning historical storms, even rearranging the configuration of levees and wetlands to test different designs and possible outcomes. It was these simulations that back in the 1980s and 1990s revealed shocking weaknesses in the levee system—yet Corps “muddy boots” traditionalists scorned modeling and never bothered to use it to reassess their decades-old designs.

A native of the Netherlands, with a mathematician’s clinical detachment, Westerink has worked for years to bring the virtual world into ever-more precise alignment with the real world of wind, water, and barriers made of mud. Katrina provided both a wealth of new data and, in the end, funding from a reawakened Corps. Now that the Corps is finally interested, the models are revealing huge and dangerous defects in the entire delta layout.

Westerink, who has rerun his virtual Katrina hundreds of times, fires up his monitor once more for me. Speaking in a soft monotone, he explains that the river levees, which bisect the delta marshes for a hundred miles southeast of New Orleans, are the highest objects around. As Katrina approached from the south that August 29, it began pushing water against the river levees. Water built up against the walls and then moved northward with the storm, swallowing small towns. Some of that buildup flowed into metro New Orleans. Then, as Katrina passed east of the city, it propelled the rest of the huge wave straight into the Mississippi coast, where it reached a height of 30 feet, the highest storm surge ever to hit the U.S. coast. If the river levee hadn’t been there—or had been designed differently—the devastation would have been far less.

“Can you control that flow?” Westerink asks. “This becomes a huge federal problem of who gets whose water.” The hurricane risk to the Mississippi and Alabama coasts would be much lower if the river levees disappeared tomorrow. But nobody, least of all the Corps, wants to tell that to the shipping companies. Westerink and some Corps scientists say one solution is to cut big gaps in the levees, so storm surge waves would flow through and dissipate. That might preserve navigation, but it also would upend life in the delta as it’s existed for more than a century. Louisiana towns such as Venice, at the extreme southeast end of the river, would literally become islands, tethered to each other by bridges. Places left outside the hurricane protections, such as Isle de Jean Charles, a tiny community of Indians from the Biloxi-Choctaw-Chitimacha tribe southwest of New Orleans, would probably disappear.

Clearly, such big fixes will make government agencies and political jurisdictions think about things they never imagined before. But thinking big is necessary; the alternative is to face more Katrina-sized storm surges—which will be increasingly likely given warming seas and melting polar ice—with weak flood defenses.

The most ambitious piece of any coastal protection plan will be rebuilding Louisiana’s raggedy, sinking marshes. Anyone who grew up on the bayou knows that marshes help reduce storm surges. But official flood control policy has always focused on levees, so very few scientists—and no one in the Corps—had ever looked at just how that happens. That changed in 2002, when Tropical Storm Isidore nearly flooded Corps geologist John Lopez’s house on Lake Pontchartrain. Isidore was a weak storm, yet its surge was large; Lopez wondered if the area’s vanishing marshes had had anything to do with it.

Louisiana’s vast wetlands have been sinking and eroding for decades. Since the 1930s, approximately 1,900 square miles of land has vanished—a swath roughly the size of the state of Delaware. In a single year, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita washed away an additional 217 square miles, according to a recent study by the U.S. Geological Service. Since then, scientists have grown even more alarmed at the rate at which erosion has been outpacing the modest efforts at coastal restoration. Rebuilding wetlands isn’t easy, and it’s that much harder if they’re disappearing. In many places it will be possible only to slow the pace of erosion, not reverse it. Unless major progress is made in the next decade, the Times-Picayune reported in March, some coastal scientists say the delta may enter a kind of death spiral.

Taking these trends into account, and working on his own time, Lopez began examining every feature of the delta landscape that could possibly offer protection from a surge wave, starting with the continental shelf and ending with evacuation routes. Stands of cypress trees, expanses of marsh grass, elevated roadways, and clusters of fishing camps all slow down a storm surge. By the spring of 2005, he had put together something called “multiple lines of defense,” a radical yet intuitively simple new approach built on the notion that all the elements involved in flood control must work together—or they won’t work at all. In June 2005, Lopez presented his “lines of defense” outline to the chief engineer of the Corps’ New Orleans district. Nice idea, he was told. But no way the agency would implement it. “You know, the Corps tends to see itself rigidly,” Lopez recalls his boss saying. “This is a good idea. But we just don’t think we could do it.” Katrina hit two months later.

I met Lopez at the Bonnet Carré Spillway just upriver from New Orleans. A short, compact man with flecks of gray in his hair and a heavy beard, he speaks a bit haltingly, as if he’s still working things out in his head. We drove along the levee in his silver Toyota pickup, covering ground very much like the original site of New Orleans, before development covered all available space—a marsh between river and lake, part dense cypress forest, bayou waters glinting through the trees. To our right, suburban homes sat atop a low, sloping ridgeline—with both a levee and a stretch of marshland between them and Lake Pontchartrain. The lake poses the greatest threat to New Orleans, which sits on its south rim. It’s not really a lake but a big salt water lagoon, connected to the Gulf of Mexico via two deep channels. During a storm it can fill like a bathtub. If the water rises high enough to top or breach the levees, it will flood most of the metro area. We stopped and hopped out onto the gravel track, gazed toward the lake, and imagined a storm surge coming our way. “When you have a wetland in front of a levee, two things will happen,” Lopez explained. “Wetlands can reduce the actual elevation of the surge—trees, especially, will reduce waves and wind-driven water heights. This should be our model for development. Build on ridges, which are high to begin with. Then you’ll have a back levee with wetlands on the other side. In New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, they didn’t do that. They just built out to the lakefront.”

During Katrina, that pattern proved disastrous. Rather than being slowed and diverted by various natural features, floodwaters simply rose adjacent to neighborhoods until the levees collapsed. And yet the flooding is only a fraction of what could happen if the remaining coastal wetlands disappear: Right now, the New Orleans area is fringed with marshes that extend for dozens of miles, literally into the Gulf of Mexico. Without them, the ocean will lap at the hurricane levees. New Orleans will become Venice, except that Venice has no hurricanes.

After Katrina, Lopez’s plan was dusted off; it is now the basis of the state’s coastal protection plan, and the Corps has adopted a similar notion that it dubs “Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration,” or LACPR. But it will take a lot more than a new acronym to do the job.

Corps officials seem genuinely chastened by their New Orleans failures. But at the moment that it desperately needs to be innovating, the agency remains insular and plodding, driven mostly by large, wasteful projects to facilitate shipping—not hurricane protection. Neither the White House nor Congress has even tried to shake up the Corps’ management in the way NASA was following its two shuttle disasters. The Corps’ own post-Katrina investigation was purely an engineering endeavor; it delved only into the failure mechanisms in soil, concrete, and steel, ignoring the institutional problems.

And when the Corps does show a glimmer of initiative, the Bush administration seems determined to stifle it. Last summer, officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Army squelched an early draft of the Corps’ long-term flood control study; no one, including Louisiana’s congressional delegation, ever got a straight answer on why.

The draft contained some possible designs and solutions; the scrubbed version offered only something called “decision matrices” for figuring stuff out later. Lately, the Corps has even backed off its congressional mandate to design options for Category 5 protection. Officials now say that they’re instead examining ways to repel a surge from a Katrina-like storm. That would make the city safer than it is now, but would also repeat the major strategic error of the past. Levees and other flood defenses have always been built to prevent the last disaster, not the next one. Then a bigger storm comes along.

The uncertainty about the future of hurricane protection is a perceptible drag on the entire recovery effort. And in a place where government has failed so spectacularly, on so many levels, many people no longer believe the Corps or other decision makers are acting in their best interests. That distrust has sparked the creation of several vocal citizens’ groups that lobby on hurricane issues—among them the east New Orleans Vietnamese community that challenged the placement of the Old Gentilly Landfill. Its several thousand members had not been very politically active before Katrina. After the storm, disaster recovery agencies paid them little attention. In late 2005, a commission issued a controversial map, later abandoned, suggesting a moratorium on building permits in much of the city, including eastern New Orleans. “The funny thing was,” said Reverend Vien Thé Nguyen, the pastor of the local Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church, “as we have insulated ourselves so much, we weren’t even on that map. Neither were we on the Urban Land Institute map [another early planning document], nor were we on the most recent FEMA flood map. I mean literally: We were not on the map. So now we want to make sure we are on the map. So that when they do any consideration, they better count us in.”

Most New Orleanians paid little attention to the details of hurricane protection before Katrina, so this new activism can make a difference. But a process that involves congressional appropriations, the White House, the Army, the state, and a mountain of arcane engineering studies has a lot of built-in insulation against grassroots involvement.
The basic unseriousness of the federal response to Katrina has been apparent since the president addressed the nation from Jackson Square on September 15, 2005. He didn’t say “never again.” His carefully-worded promise was for a “flood protection system stronger than it has ever been.” The bar wasn’t high, and the minimalist goal has indeed been achieved.

Last winter, President Bush did sign a law granting Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states a big chunk of royalty payments from new offshore oil and gas development—money that should provide Louisiana coastal projects an estimated $13 billion over the next 30 years. But most of that money doesn’t begin flowing for another decade, and the marshes could be too far gone by then.

What’s needed beyond these opening bids is a genuine national commitment—not just to New Orleans, but to protecting the entire U.S. coastline. No one knows precisely how high sea levels will rise, but every inch makes a difference in how severe, and frequent, floods become. Structures that might do the job today won’t be up to the task in the coming decades. Low-lying cities near the coast, such as Houston and Charleston, are particularly vulnerable, as are places with already-weak levees such as Sacramento and San Francisco. If rainfalls increase, inland river communities will also face new problems.

The Corps’ old levee system was built on the assumption that all circumstances it had to confront—the land, the sea, the frequency and size of hurricanes—were more or less static. When you have all the variables accounted for, building a wall will do the trick. Today, none of the variables is stable, and they’ll be less so with each passing year.

New Orleans might have been a national lab for innovative solutions. But the approach of the Bush administration has been to throw money at the problem—or rather, at contractors. The centerpiece of the rebuilding effort, for example, is called the “Road Home,” and is intended to reimburse people for their damaged homes so they can either rebuild or cash out their property. But the $7.5 billion in federal funds flowed through the state bureaucracy and then to an incompetent contractor, Virginia-based ICF International. The result was an estimated $5 billion shortfall and long delays in distributing the money. As applications continued to come in, overwhelmed officials announced they would stop taking them effective July 31, over the objections of community groups. By then, the program had closed out only 22 percent of its applications and distributed $2.7 billion.

As new environmental threats appear, it’s going to become more and more obvious that the nation’s political levees are just as poorly designed as those that failed New Orleans two years ago. Sadly, it may take more Katrinas to get the bureaucracy reengineered. “Just as we discovered the levees are made out of crap, we discovered the whole water resources and flood protection system is also built out of crap,” said Oliver Houck, a Tulane University law professor who has followed the issue for decades. “It’s like the Wizard of Oz—you pull back the curtain and there’s nobody back there.” ++

Anger, sadness mark Katrina anniversary
CAIN BURDEAU, AP
8/29/07

NEW ORLEANS - On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, anger over the stalled rebuilding was palpable Wednesday throughout the city where the mourning for the dead and feeling of loss doesn’t seem to subside.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall south of New Orleans at 6:10 a.m. Aug. 29, 2005, as a strong Category 3 hurricane that flooded 80 percent of the city and killed more than 1,600 people in Louisiana and Mississippi. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

On Wednesday, protesters planned to march from the obliterated Lower 9th Ward to Congo Square, where slaves were once allowed to celebrate their culture. Accompanied by brass bands, they will again try to spread their message that the government has failed to help people return.

“People are angry and they want to send a message to politicians that they want them to do more and do it faster,” said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, a Baptist pastor and community activist. “Nobody’s going to be partying.”

At New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, a 21-story limestone hospital adorned with allegorical reliefs, public officials will attend a somber groundbreaking for a victims’ memorial and mausoleum that will house the remains of more than 100 victims who have still not been identified.

“It’s an emotional time. You relive what happened and you remember how scattered everyone is now. There are relationships now that are completely over,” said Robert Smallwood, a local writer. “The city has been dying this slow death. In New Orleans, you can’t escape it. It’s bad news everyday.”

In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour saw progress. He said Wednesday in Gulfport that about 13,000 of his state’s families are still living in FEMA trailers, down from a peak of 48,000, and he expects they could all be out of the temporary housing in a year.

“We made a huge amount of progress,” Barbour told NBC’s “Today” show. “The character of Mississippi was revealed and it was very positive.”

New Orleans churches planned memorial services, including one at the historic St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, and ring bells in honor of the victims. People throughout the city will hold their own private ceremonies to remember where they were when Katrina hit, and what they lost.

“Everyone who gives it any thought, and I can’t imagine who hasn’t, has to reflect on his or her own personal experience during that time, and also look at how far we’ve come,” said Larry Lorenz, a journalism professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

A candlelight vigil is scheduled in Jackson Square at dusk, right around the time the French Quarter may start getting tipsy with street parties and anniversary revelers, as happened last year.

The anniversary is an opportunity for the city to recapture media attention to tell the nation what’s happened to New Orleans since Katrina. Reporters, television crews and photographers have, once again, flocked to the city.

The day has also attracted a passel of politicians — President Bush chief among them. He and Laura Bush arrived Tuesday night and dined with Leah Chase, the Queen of Creole cooking, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees and musician Irvin Mayfield.

Several presidential contenders, including Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have visited in recent days.

While politicians have used the anniversary to pitch policy, think tanks, scholars and activists have released a steady stream of reports on the state of recovery.

Meanwhile, an international people’s tribunal has been convened to take testimony from victims. The tribunal is being spearheaded by legal activists trying to build a case under international law accusing the United States of human rights abuses during and after Katrina. ++

Anti-Govt Protests Planned to Mark Second Anniversary of Katrina Tragedy
Haider Rizvi, OneWorld via CommonDreams
Wednesday, August 29, 2007

NEW YORK - Thousands of protesters are expected to converge on New Orleans Wednesday to raise awareness about what they believe to be the Bush administration’s failure to help Americans who lost everything in the wake of a ferocious storm that hit the United States’ Gulf Coast some two years ago.

Organized by a number of civil rights and advocacy groups, the demonstration is part of a series of events taking place in New Orleans this week to mark the second anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed the beautiful city and swaths of other settlements along the Gulf Coast on the night of August 29, 2005 and the days that followed.

Organizers said they expected people would join the rally in large numbers to demand swift action from the Bush administration to create a kind of “Marshall Plan” to restore New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region.

“We are soliciting all people of conscience to join us for ‘A Day of Presence’ to show the people of the Gulf that we do care,” said Melanie L. Campbell, executive director the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.

Statements from Campbell’s group and its allied organizations suggest that, though there has been some progress in recovery efforts, a large part of New Orleans’ population remains displaced and those that have returned to their homes are still desperately seeking help.

“Too many people who want to return have not been able to do so. Emergency rooms are overcrowded and uninsured poor people find it almost impossible to obtain specialty care,” according to the Louisiana Justice Institute, one of the groups planning Wednesday’s protest.

In addition to killing 1,800 people, the hurricane left more than 800,000 homeless — most of them African Americans and poor people of European descent.

Independent researchers hold that biased and discriminatory practices on the part of some authorities have prolonged much of the deprivation and suffering of Katrina’s victims.

A recent study by the nation’s largest civil rights watchdog, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), points out that incidents of racial injustice and human rights abuses on the Gulf Coast have increased since Hurricane Katrina devastated the area in 2005.

In the report, entitled “Broken Promises: Two Years After Katrina,” the ACLU has documented numerous civil rights violations in Louisiana and Mississippi over the past two years, including a number of incidents involving racially motivated police actions, housing discrimination, and prisoner abuse.

In light of its findings, the ACLU demanded the U.S. Congress adopt legislation to address post-Katrina injustices, including racial profiling, voter disenfranchisement, and the dearth of health care facilities and low-income housing.

“Two years ago, Americans were glued to their television sets, outraged at the images of poor people of color cast aside in the aftermath of Katrina,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, in a statement. “Politicians made promises, but they failed to fix the problems.”

“The government must be held accountable for its mistakes,” he added, “rather than allowed to perpetuate the systemic racism and discrimination that only added strength to the storm.”

The ACLU report also highlights the plight of prisoners in New Orleans jails who were abandoned during the storm. The jail system is now plagued by inhumane and dangerous conditions, inadequate health care, and a lack of preparedness for possible future storms, the group said.

Protest organizers said they will demand at the rally that President Bush redirect the money being spent in the war on Iraq to rehabilitate Katrina victims.

Bush is due to arrive in New Orleans Tuesday after giving a speech about the Iraq. He is expected to examine recovery efforts in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

In addition to Bush, many other politicians, including leading presidential hopefuls, are also expected to visit New Orleans in connection with the second anniversary of the deadly storm. It’s not clear if they will also join the rally.

Organizers said they have asked all the presidential candidates to join in.

Among others invited to speak include Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network; ESSENCE magazine editorial director and entrepreneur Susan L. Taylor; the National Urban League’s Marc Morial; Thomas W. Dortch, Jr., representing 100 Black Men of America; and author and professor Michael Eric Dyson. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves