LEVEES NOT TO BLAME FOR RESPONSE MANAGEMENT FAILURES

By Diane M. Grassi

Louisiana was founded at the mouth of the Mississippi River by French explorer Sieur de La Salle in 1682 and named after King Louis XIV of France. La Nouvelle-Orleans, or New Orleans, became a city in 1718, named after the French colony regent, Phillipe Duc D’Orleans. In 1763, La Nouvelle Orleans became a Spanish Colony with the execution of the Treaty of Paris which Spain later ceded to France in 1801. The Louisiana Purchase signed in December of 1803 between Napoleon Bonaparte and the United States included territory from the Gulf of Mexico and northward between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. It covered over 600 million acres, later carved into 13 U.S. states, which included the port city of New Orleans.

New Orleans from its inception was considered a strategic center of trade and a major seaport. However, even in 1803, when it was still geographically limited to a rare bit of high ground, 100 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, it was always a target of the flood-prone mouth of the Mississippi River. What grew to a city of close to 500,000 by the late 20th century, New Orleans’ fate largely wrested on the integrity of its levee system, established in the 1880’s by Congress and known as the Mississippi River Commission. Forty years later after the flood of 1927, the Commission’s engineers re-evaluated the levee system to incorporate floodways, channels, dams, reservoirs and pumping plants not previously utilized.

The federal government has had an official capacity in working with state and local governments in the region since the late 1960’s in securing the levees. In May of 1995 as the result of a massive rainstorm in which six people lost their lives, the U.S. Congress authorized the Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA). Over the past ten years, the Army Corps of Engineers spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building their requisite pumping stations.

However, it has been documented that at least $250 million in crucial projects still remained to be done as of 2003, at the same time hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased and levees were subject to failure. The Army Corps of Engineers also requested additional spending for Lake Pontchartrain. On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, the head of emergency management of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana said that of the $15 million requested “it appears that the money has been moved from the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the War in Iraq. 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.”

Also in June 2004, the Corps’ project manager, Al Naomi, went before the East Jefferson Levee Authority and urgently requested $2 million, which the federal government had denied. “The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. If we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement,” Naomi said. “The problem is the federal funds have dried up.”

This past spring, following the 2004 hurricane season, the worst one in decades, the federal government proposed the steepest cuts in the history of New Orleans for hurricanes and flood-control. The Army Corps of Engineers was forced to impose a hiring freeze and their requested funding from the SELA project was cut from $36.5 million to $10.4 million. At the same time, more research was required to protect New Orleans from a category 4 or 5 hurricane.

The present levees were admittedly only built to withstand a category 3 hurricane. A study was proposed for the necessary ways in which the levees were to be fortified. It was to cost $4 million, but only $300,000 was to be provided in the federal budget for fiscal year 2005 and the study was completely halted. However, such research was estimated to take an additional four years. Sadly, funding for flood control has not been a priority since President Carter’s administration, and that includes conflicts between state, local and federal entities.

So the combination of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of two breached levees were supposedly responsible for putting New Orleans under water on August 29, 2005. However, as shown, it was a well-known nightmare waiting to happen. Given such facts about its history, the chaos which ensued in New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath is all the more remarkable.

Americans have been hearing about preparation against disaster since the bombings of September 11, 2001. Since that date, the U.S. perhaps did what it does best; creating more bureaucratic gridlock. In its rush to appear efficient and powerful, especially in the eyes of terrorists intent on destroying the U.S., our federal government went into overkill mode, and seemingly destroyed an agency which had finally learned to become effective. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), at one time a failed agency, had finally come together in the 1990’s, after Hurricane Andrew’s decimation of Florida.

FEMA’s self-sufficiency was its asset, and since absorbed by the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003, it appears to have lost its way. With billions of dollars at its disposal, the DHS was to provide greater funding for FEMA in the event of natural disasters including acts of terrorism. Unfortunately, FEMA has become a victim of less funding, less latitude and less leadership, no longer granted a presidential cabinet position.

FEMA is charged with guiding disaster response and the DHS is charged with its oversight in the event of catastrophe, whether man-made or from Mother Nature. Clark Kent Ervin, former Inspector General of the DHS commenting on Hurricane Katrina said, “This is what the department was supposed to be all about. Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It’s a devastating indictment of this department’s performance four years after 9/11.” Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, said as much himself. “It was as if an atomic bomb had been dropped.”

Failures in the aftermath of Katrina include: unsuccessful plans for evacuating residents of limited resources, having unsupplied respites for evacuees upon arrival, lack of communication systems for first-responders, lack of communication between local, state and federal officials, insufficient communication between and lack of response from federal agencies. These are just but some of the areas which will be investigated by the president, Congress and perhaps outside agencies and commissions. Demands for answers now are understandable as homeland security is crucial to the survival of Americans.

As former Congressman Timothy Roemer, a member of the 9/11 Commission, put it, “We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and have not made nearly enough progress. With Katrina, we had some time to prepare. When it’s a nuclear, chemical or biological attack there bill be no warning.” And we must now accept the facts that this time we had ample warning of failing levees and of an approaching hurricane, estimated to be the biggest in the history of the U.S. And this time in our quest for answers we can no longer afford to create new problems or new bureaucracies in our zeal to untangle this latest web of astronomic failures and profound losses.