Despite the currently popular cant about everything from Katrina to Iraq that we "can't look back, we have to look forward", we have evidence this week that knowing what went wrong is essential to know how to proceed constructively. The jury in the case of the tragic deaths of the frail and sick elderly residents of St. Rita's nursing home in St. Bernard Parish rendered its verdict, siding with a defense that blamed, with the help of expert testimony, the federal government for the shoddy and unprofessional design and construction flaws that doomed the levee and floodwall system. And the Dutch government announced its plan for a new 200-year plan for water defenses in an age of rising sea levels. Money quote from this article:
But the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina also spurred the Dutch into a new round of reflection and preparations, including drawing up worst-case scenario plans for evacuations -- unthinkable politically just a few years ago.
Somehow the Dutch found it useful to look back in order to plan two centuries into the future. Is there any institution in this country, private or public, that can even conceive of planning in that kind of time frame? This is a next-quarter, next-election culture, private and public, and--as the St. Rita's jury found--that kind of short-range thinking can and will have tragic consequences for us.
I am here tonight to express my country’s desire to help you – with our expertise (and our business community!) -- rebuild your city and state. That is simply what old friends do. They share burdens. They work together.
Rotterdam is the world’s second largest port. It is the lifeblood of the Dutch economy and a key transit point for European trade. It is also 23 feet below sea level. Amsterdam is our Capitol, the cultural and financial heart of the country. It is about 12 feet below sea level.
Indeed, 70% of Dutch GDP is produced at or below sea level.
The Netherlands, ladies and gentlemen, was the first country to recognize the newly independent United States of America, shortly after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. No other nation has a longer unbroken relationship with the US than the Netherlands.
The Dutch smuggled arms to the revolution. Our bankers financed the purchase – yes! – of Louisiana.
Help us to help you. My country, my government, our business community, has unique scientific, engineering, and public policy expertise with water management. And that may be useful to you as you rebuild this region.
http://www.netherlands-embassy.org/article.asp?articleref=AR00001808EN
Three months after the levees failed...
...whaahaaapen?
(and these days our politicians are still a bit...jumpy, on the subject of water boards:)
I only wish the same were true of the health system here.
As for blaming the Army Corp of Engineers, you can blame any person or group you want, however the true culprits are the politicians who didn't spend the money to do it right the first time or correct the mistakes made many years ago. Better yet, blame the people who voted them in office and kept them there for so many years.
The only problem with that is that you'd have to blame both democrats and republicans and the vocal society on this site (and others) are so entrenched in their beliefs that they would never accept that both sides are equally responsible.
I enjoy reading your blog Mr. Shearer and I've enjoyed your work in entertainment for many years. Thank you for all of the laughs you've provided for our amusement.
"I would like to applaud Mr. de Waals post for it's honesty. The Dutch Waterschappen is efficient almost exclusively because they keep the politicians out of it."
But, Doodoes...when you contradict yourself:
"As for blaming the Army Corp of Engineers, you can blame any person or group you want, however the true culprits are the politicians who didn't spend the money to do it right the first time or correct the mistakes made many years ago."
I strongly disagree with this commonly placed argument misplacing blame for the negligent building of the levees in New Orleans.
It is the Blame Game which Cheney used in Gulf Port, very similar to the Plame Game in that you seek to spread the responsibility around for an obvious crime that has in fact very definable and prosecutable criminal perpetrators.
You may not blame whoever you want in a court of law! You can play that game only in the court of public opinion.
However, in more than one court of law now the Corps has been forced to admit that they originally built the levees substandard, and disregarded even basic engineering advise and principles. This case of blame against the US Army Corps of Engineers is, at the very least, a grotesque product liability lawsuit. At its worst it represents criminally negligent homicide.
Please ask your elected representatives to convene the 8/29 Commission, http://levees.org/ , with the same mandate the 9/11 Commission.
Do it today of all days. Please.
Thank you, from the bottom of my
back hand path
All of us--voters, non-voters, politicians--trusted the Corps, a decidedly non-political animal on its surface, to build and maintain levees as they were required by Federal law to do.
It was a total shock to most of us,including the Levee Boards, that the Corps simply did not do that on the north and eastern sides of New Orleans. That the river levees have never had a problem testifies to the fact that it's possible. The Corps just did not do it along the outfall and shipping canals.
The Corps did turn out to be more political than we realized, especially given the very political nature of the Bush administration. Still the direct blame falls on civil servants, who report only indirectly to politicians.
That's why independent oversight of the Corps, accountable *only* to elected politicians, is essential.
A fundamental requirement of good design and engineering is a unified sense of purpose and objective. That to appears to be the huge hurdle facing the reconstruction of New Orleans.
One advantage the Dutch have is that they are a small very densely populated nation with out any land to spare. This fact has played wonders on their ablity to focus their wealth, intellegence and national will to the problem at hand. Besides the have already spent centuries reclaiming this land from the North Sea and now it is a part of their very national identity.
The Smithsonian
The Library of Congress
NASA
US Army Corps of Engineers
US Census Bureau
HARRY INQUIRES: The Army Corps of Engineers? And you'd base that conclusion on, what, their fine, long-range work on the New Orleans-area hurricane protection system, which failed catastrophically even before it was completed?
HARRY RESPONDS: Next time, let them send us the charter and keep their levees.
The Corps designed the levees to fail so they could fix them wrong later, just as they do with every project they have ever touched. I did not mean to imply that cultural longevity engendered wisdom. However that does not mean that I misuderestimate the US Army Corps of Engineers' time-scales of planning, the depth of their evil machinations or their ad budget.
It hasn't been built because - guess what? - neither Congress or successive Administrations have felt any political compulsion to fund it.
As to local corruption - the flood walls that failed might well have held (or not failed quite so catastrophically) had the surveys of the sites where they were built been competently (and/or hinestly) carried out and the walls' foundations actually been buil;t to spec, instead of skimped in the good old NOLa tradition of graft.
HARRY RESPONDS: The Corps controlled the construction of the floodwalls, and the Corps reacted in the negative when its own contractor said the walls' specs called for them to be driven to an inadequate depth to anchor them in solid soil.
To answer a post:
1. Do you support rebuilding section 8 / bailed out / welfare housing in NOLA or anywhere else?
2. Do you support repeating the mistake of putting buildings in flood prone locations such as areas that are built below sea level?
1- Do you support corporate welfare?
2- will you explain Florida- it gets help in a big hurry, even from Bush himself, every time the hurricanes come through, and you do not ask why not bulldoze the whole state?
HARRY RESPONDS: No, I'm sure the Dutch are saints. And, since most responsibility for the levees and for the wetlands lies with the feds, I'm not sure how relevant your question is in any case.
Where is the outrage?!!! We are Americans!
Again, just let us have one tenth of what we give Iraq. Rebuild OUR schools, OUR hospitals. Please.
1. Do you support rebuilding section 8 / bailed out / welfare housing in NOLA or anywhere else?
2. Do you support repeating the mistake of putting buildings in flood prone locations such as areas that are built below sea level?
If the answer is yes, my friend, to either then I suggest you please think again and try to find some solutions that are more economically sane, sensible, responsible and practical.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/05/AR2006030500976_pf.html
I guess there is no 'market' anymore for certain parts of the good ol' US of A.
I'm interested because the Dutch officially offered their hand, in downtown New Orleans, three months after the storm...TWO YEARS AGO!
(see my comment below)
It's a cooperative of irresponsibility. Everybody -- the press, the government, the public -- ignores the problem, denies it, or refuses to deal with it. The victims of the problem, whatever it is, are left to suffer. They become the soundless trees falling in the forest. Since nobody hears them, are they really there?
But simply becoming a refugee has not made me invisible, just a moving target. Right now we're harder to see but there will be more.
I can't seem to settle down enough to run barefoot through grass.
However I pass through New Orleans monthly to have my coffee with the roots. dj2u has it right. They have enough to deal with in the City That Care Forgot and the Presidente left for Dead. Americans can either leave New Orleans alone or go there yourself. Otherwise you folks are never really going to know. These days you just have to trust your own lyin'eyes. When you get there you will find all kinds of people doing all kinds of things to get it on.
Here's one, http://levees.org/
There are others.
Thank God that they were better engineers than they were politicians and placed their people and their subjects above individual interests and developed long term infrastructure plans.
As a former municipal engineer and planner in the U.S., I know that infrastructure planning is at the bottom of the list of priorities because it does not give political advantage to politicians, who trive on the surficial and pomp.
Reepu D. Singh
Mr. Shearer asks, "Is there any institution in this country, private or public, that can even conceive of planning in that kind of time frame?"
That institution must come from within...within the levees.
Sad to say, the Democrats are not much better; it's more a difference of degree than kind.
Sounds like the Dutch take a serious, mature, thoughtful approach to planning for the common welfare. In Amerika, even the politicians subscribe to what was once called "social Darwinism"; planning, such as it is, facilitates the rich getting richer, and getting the hell out when everything finally and inevitably comes crashing down. (C. Montgomery Burns' personal escape pod comes to mind.)
The poor (i.e., the rest of us)? Well, first of all, the poor are always with us. Second of all-- if they had like to die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
That's the basis for planning public works in the Greatest Country in the World, sad to say.
Yucca Mountain, anyone?
It appears we can look into the future only to do something monumentally stupid.