Gazing at Breached Levees, Critics See Years of Missed Opportunities

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
September 2, 2005

As federal flood-control officials directed efforts to block the 17th Street
Canal, the source of most of the water swamping New Orleans, they faced growing
criticism yesterday over decades of missed opportunities to prevent precisely
this type of disaster.

In interviews and a telephone conference call with reporters, senior officials
and engineers from up and down the ranks of the Army Corps of Engineers conceded
that they had no ability to detect quickly small breaches in the matrix of 350
miles of levees around New Orleans.

Unless such holes can be blocked early, the water will almost invariably rip
away at the edges, widening the breach.

The officials and engineers said that after they had found the widening gap in
the concrete wall on the eastern side of the canal, they had no quick-response
plan to repair it.

Even as they tried to improvise a solution while water continued to pour into
neighborhood after neighborhood, their efforts were hampered by a lack of heavy
helicopters, most of which had been dispatched by federal emergency officials to
rescue stranded residents.

"The first priority of the rotary-winged aircraft was to rescue people,"
Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the corps, said in the conference
call. "Plugging the gap was a lower priority."

The accumulation of 40 years of compromises of that sort resulted in a mixture
of grief, frustration and defensiveness from the corps, which has long been
given a mission far broader than its budget.

Ultimately, the corps is directed, along with 15 other agencies, by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency. "It is FEMA who is really calling the shots and
setting priorities here," General Strock said.

He defended the Bush administration against the charge that spending on the war
in Iraq had diminished the capacity to deal with domestic threats like the
hurricane.

"I do not see that to be the case," General Strock said. "We deeply regret the
loss of life associated with this. We are committed to doing whatever we can
right now to stop the flow of waters and get the city on the road to recovery."

Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager in the New Orleans district of the
corps, said the New Orleans protection system was a vexing mix. It met the
standards that were agreed on long ago, but was known to be inadequate.

"This storm was much greater than protection we were authorized to provide,"
Mr. Naomi said.

Current and former local officials expressed anger at the lack of preparedness.

"I'm just shocked," said Martha Madden, who was the Louisiana secretary of
environmental quality in the late 1980's and is now a consultant in strategic
planning in Washington and New Orleans.

The Corps of Engineers, Ms. Madden said, should have arranged access to supplies
like sandbags and concrete barriers, the way environmental planners reserve
access to materials for oil spills.

"You'd have all that on contract," she said. "You have contractors with all
those potential needs in place."

Since 1965, when the first large federal project was started to bolster New
Orleans's levees and other defenses, there has been a tug of war over how
sturdy, and expensive, to make a system that might, or might not, be needed.

Most aspects of the $732 million Lake Pontchartrain project have been completed,
but the project remains behind schedule and underfinanced. Although Congress
appropriated more than $4.7 billion for the Corps of Engineers this year, the
spending on New Orleans levees was relatively small.

The Pontchartrain project drew about $5.7 million, almost $2 million more than
what was earmarked for it in President Bush's budget. For five years, Congress
has repeatedly increased the sum for New Orleans levees over Mr. Bush's
requests, Senate Republicans' figures show. The White House on Thursday referred
budget questions to the Office of Management and Budget, where officials did not
return calls for comment.

From the project's early days, there were vivid reasons to push for the greatest
level of protection. One was Hurricane Betsy, a midgrade storm that swamped much
of New Orleans in 1965. In 1969, Hurricane Camille, the second-most-powerful
Atlantic storm recorded, passed within 60 miles and demolished the Mississippi
coast.

The initial plan was deemed robust, yet affordable, General Strock
said. Government engineers and budget officials settled on designing for what
meteorologists calculated would be a once-in-200-year event, he said. That would
mean a storm like Hurricane Betsy, a Category 3 storm on the five-step intensity
scale.

General Strock said tradeoffs between costs and protection levels were a result
of a "complex process involving the intersection of a lot of people from the
local, state and national level."

Adam Hughes, an analyst at OMB Watch, said such tradeoffs erred far too often on
the side of serving short-term needs and discounting long-term risks. Now,
Mr. Hughes said, the devastation in New Orleans made an earlier investment in
bigger berms and other protections all part of that gray universe of what
bureaucrats call infrastructure look like a bargain.

"This is a classic example of what underfunding infrastructure can do,"
Mr. Hughes said.

Not all of the problems leading to such a calamity lay at the federal level,
said Bob Sheets, a meteorologist who directed the National Hurricane Center
until retiring in 1995. Dr. Sheets said that even as a firmer understanding of
the danger for New Orleans became evident in the late 70's, some local officials
tended to discount the risks.

At the time, Dr. Sheets and other federal forecasters ran the first computer
simulations, using a program that simulated how Lake Pontchartrain and
surrounding waters might behave under strikes by big storms.

Much of the lake is a shallow pan where huge amounts of water can quickly pile
up on a lee shore, like that facing New Orleans. The computer simulations made
clear that certain storms could swamp the platterlike city, wedged between a
great river and a broad lake, Dr. Sheets said, adding, "The risk obviously in
New Orleans was greater than in any other community."

He and other federal forecasters gave hundreds of talks about storm risks, and
New Orleans was always the case study for catastrophe.

Dr. Sheets had many tabletop exercises with the city's emergency officials, and
when a storm loomed, they always started an evacuation, in the thought
experiment.

But in 1992, he said, when Hurricane Andrew, just behind Hurricane Camille on
the all-time intensity list, headed to the Gulf Coast, and the National
Hurricane Center advised New Orleans to start evacuations, he said of the city
officials: "Essentially they did nothing. The conventions and other business
went on."

Dr. Sheets said a 20-year lull in Atlantic storm activity from 1970 until the
early 90's could have contributed to communities' sense of ease. "The longer you
go without something like this, the less you think it will happen," he
said. "The risk was there," he said. "And now, obviously, it has come to pass to
a great degree."

Mr. Naomi noted that since 2000, Congress had financed the corps request for a
study to increase New Orleans's protections for the strongest hurricanes. But he
acknowledged that the sum was a fraction of the request and that the study would
take years to complete.

"To effectuate what would have made any difference in this storm," he said, such
a study would have had to have started 20 or 25 years ago.

Glen Justice and Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington for this
article.

----------------------------------

Ben Franklin Had the Right Idea for New Orleans

By JOHN TIERNEY
September 3, 2005

Why is New Orleans in so much worse shape today than New York City was after the
attacks on Sept. 11?

The short answer is that New York was attacked by fire, not water. But then why
are urbanites so much better prepared to cope with fire than with flooding?
Mostly because they learned to fight fire without any help from the Army Corps
of Engineers or the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

For most of history, fire was far more feared than flooding. Cities repeatedly
burned to the ground. Those catastrophes occurred sporadically enough that
politicians must have been tempted to skimp on fire protection - like levee
maintenance, it was a long-term investment against a calamity that probably
wouldn't occur before they left office.

But urbanites learned to protect themselves through two innovations Benjamin
Franklin introduced to America. He started a fire department in Philadelphia, as
well as its first fire insurance company. Other cities followed, often with the
firefighters organized by insurance companies with a vested interest in
encouraging public safety.

Their customers had a vested interest, too, because they had to pay higher
premiums if they lived in homes or neighborhoods that were prone to fire. As
fire insurance became a standard requirement for homeowners, they and their
insurance companies kept pressure on politicians to finance firefighting and
tighten building codes.

As a result, the risk of a fire leveling a city like New York is lower than
ever. Although the number of fires has dropped so much that experts routinely
advise cities to close firehouses, voters' fondness for the stations makes local
politicians loath to close any.

But as we've learned this week, few people seem to care passionately about
maintaining levees or preparing for a predictable flood. They've left that to
Washington, which promised to hold back the waters and absolved coastal dwellers
from worrying about hurricanes.

Starting in the 1960's, the federal government took over the business of
insuring against floods. It offered subsidized insurance to people in
flood-prone areas, encouraging seaside homes that never would have been built
otherwise. Even at bargain rates, most people went without flood insurance -
only about a third of the homes in New Orleans carried it.

People don't bother to protect themselves because they figure - correctly - that
if disaster strikes they'll be reimbursed anyway by FEMA. It gives out money so
freely that it has grown into one of the great vote-buying tools of the modern
presidency. Bill Clinton set a record for declaring disasters, and then
President Bush set the single-state spending record in Florida before last
year's election.

Now it's New Orleans's turn. Since Washington didn't keep its promise to protect
the city, the federal government should repair the damage and pay for a new
flood-control system. But New Orleans and other coastal cities will never be
safe if they go on relying on Washington for protection. Members of Congress
will always have higher priorities than paying for levees in someone else's
state.

The federal government has a role in coordinating flood control among states and
in organizing outside disaster relief, but the locals should fight floods much
the same way they fight fires. Fifteenth-century Dutch burghers didn't have the
financial or technological resources of today's Louisianians, but they managed
to hold back the sea without the Army Corps of Engineers.

Here's the bargain I'd offer New Orleans: the feds will spend the billions for
your new levees, but then you're on your own. You and others along the coast
have to buy flood insurance the same way we all buy fire insurance - from
private companies that have more at stake than do Washington bureaucrats.

Private flood insurance has come to seem quaint in America, but in Britain it's
the norm. If Americans paid premiums for living in risky areas, they'd think
twice about building oceanfront villas. Voters and insurance companies would put
pressure on local politicians to take care of the levees, prepare for the worst
- and stop waiting for that bumbling white knight from Washington.

Email: tierney@nytimes.com

* * *

For Further Reading

"Paying the Price: The Status and Role of Insurance Against Natural Disasters in
the United States" (http://www.nap.edu/catalog/5784.html) Edited by Howard
Kunreuther & Richard J. Roth, Sr., (Joseh Henry Press, 1998).

"Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the
Clinton-Gore Years," by James Bovard (Palgrave, 2000).

"Fire Insurance in the United States,"
(http://www.eh.net/encyclopedia/?article=Baranoff.Fire.final) by Dalit Baranoff
(EH.Net).

--------------------------------

United States of Shame

By MAUREEN DOWD
September 3, 2005

Stuff happens.

And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal
stuff happens.

America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting,
raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a
gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent
government planning. But this time it's happening in America.

W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye,
American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he
told Diane Sawyer.

Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about
his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly
moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the
runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that
I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided
by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the
floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the
terminal.

Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who
could have known?" excuses.

Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying
planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11
intelligence briefs.

Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a
brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any
official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk
from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over
the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish,
fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "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."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the
National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers
asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last
year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and
Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet
projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan
island.

Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they
would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans
residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not
prepared.

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by
running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted
he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated,
hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala.,
yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was
vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth
Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington;
and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But
it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency
that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our
respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they
sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the
victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the
back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the
Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in
American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com