In the immediate political aftermath of the New Orleans Flood, conservative commentators fanned a myth that environmentalists blocked the Army Corps of Engineers' original plans for barrier structures and forced the federal agency to choose an alternate inferior design that could not protect the city from Hurricane Katrina's surge.
No one lances the Greenie Myth so deftly as Robert Verchick, J.D., Gauthier-St. Martin Eminent Scholar of the Loyola University and recent winner of a Fulbright.
In chapter nine of his most recent book, Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World (Harvard University Press, 2010), now available in paperback, Verchick describes how the myth developed, and then exquisitely blasts the myth with the true story.
Between 1970-75, the Army Corps issued a plan calling for massive sea gates for the coastal area east of the city -- the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Pass. A jazz photographer with a law degree, Luke Fontana accompanied by small group of conservation-minded fishermen filed suit against the Barrier Plan in 1977 over the Corps's cursory Environmental Impact Study (EIS). After three days of testimony, federal Judge Charles Schwartz said he had heard enough. He agreed with Fontana and temporarily prohibited the Barrier Plan implementation "citing inadequacies in the ...EIS analysis of the surge barrier effects on lake salinity regimes and habitat...."
Today, Verchick writes, a proper EIS can be hundreds, even thousands of pages long, but in 1970, the corps's 4-page typewritten EIS and optimistic conclusion about the barrier's effect on sea life was "based on an outdated study modeled around an obsolete version of the project." Eventually, the corps abandoned the barrier project and elected to raise the height of the city's canal walls instead.
Less than two weeks after the 2005 flood -- when over 100,000 families were trying to figure out where to live, where to work and where to send their kids to school -- the barrier plan sprang to life in a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times, "A Barrier That Could Have Been." The story claimed the superior plan was "derailed" by an environmental lawsuit. A right-winger blogger branded the levee failures a "Green Genocide."
But in reality, Judge Schwartz had simply asked the corps to return with a better EIS.
This judge was not, as the Los Angeles Times reported, stopping the Corps in its tracks. He was saying, 'Y'all come back.'
But five years later, having never completed a revised EIS, the Corps decided against the barrier option and concluded that higher levees providing hurricane protection was less costly, less damaging to the environment, and more acceptable.
In 2005, the Army Corps' levees and floodwalls breached in 53 different locations within a space of a few hours. And Verchick concludes that "it is unfair and destructive to cast responsibility for the failure of the New Orleans levee system on this small band of activists and a popular environmental law."
Furthermore, Verchick reveals, there is another "broken link in the causal chain," namely that Corps officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office a month after the storm "believe that flooding would have been worse if the original (barrier) plan had been adopted" because of the direction of Katrina's surge.
Levees.org has long believed that early myths and misinformation in the weeks and months after the New Orleans Flood were harmful because they alienated American citizens and may have prejudiced members of Congress.
So we highly recommend Facing Catastrophe which is now available in paperback and on kindle. Furthermore, while the book is required reading at several law schools and graduate programs in disaster studies, it is also remarkably accessible to lay people.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674047914
For the full book review, click here.
Today, we are pleased to announce a new Myth Buster: Had environmental concerns in the 1970s been ignored, the flooding in New Orleans during Katrina would likely have been worse.
Click here for more Myth Busters by Levees.org.
Follow Sandy Rosenthal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/LeveesOrg
Thank you, Sandy Rosenthal !!
THIS NEEDS TO BE FIXED NOW. Take it from a victim, this corruption of our constitution causes a lot of damage in the lives of the young folks witnessing it.
Kevin Lord from Lake Whitney, Texas. Son of Frank Lord, co-owner of Inland Surfside, Inc., Lake Whitney Boat Works, The Big 'B' Fishing Barge and gas dock, and the Texas Queen paddlewheel boat (from Baylor). We'd still be flourishing at Lake Whitney were it not for dishonest public officials.
Nice try.
I guess the hometown paper had it wrong, too. From the second link supplied, FrontPageMag: “As the Times-Picayune wrote, “Those plans were abandoned after environmental advocates successfully sued to stop the projects as too damaging to the wetlands and the lake's eco-system.” “
And why is Ms Rosenthal bringing this up now? Perhaps she’s running out of Katrina steam. There's not much left to write or uncover.
Those of us who were “close” to Katrina and its aftermath will never forget – but it’s time to move on. My friends who still live there will be the first to agree. They don't want to talk about it, they don’t want to think about it. They want to move on.
- we need to move on and not be diverted from ____.
- to open old wounds only re-victimizes the survivors
- too many of the voices and witnesses are either unavailable or have moved on with their lives
- we'd like to investigate, what would you suggest we spend the money on looking backward rather than building forward? And finally,
- too much time has passed. What is the point now? (Obviously avoiding the fact that all the time that passed was because of their negligence.)
People I know who died in the flood and it's aftermath would probably hate hearing someone like you say "You just need to move on," as certainly as I and pretty much everyone I know in New Orleans hate that sentiment.
You have no idea the fanatical hubris I feel coming from your entire comment. It reminds me of the professional astro-turfers deployed by the Corps to harass and belittle the citizens of New Orleans in our own local online media the Times-Picayune --over 600 documented vicious comments, many directed at Sandy Rosenthal and Levees.org. The Corps Commander had to issue a public apology to Levees.org and as well a directive within the New Orleans District Corps to cease and desist this felonious behavior on federal computers.
Of course I'm not even implying that you work for the Corps or one of its PR contractors. That wouldn't be ethical. Ethics matter -especially in Engineering Failures.
However your thinly veiled ad hominem attack does serve to illustrate what we are up against, to wit: myth busting. But let's call it what it is: Truth Telling. These engineering failures are real and in many cases have continued with the New Orleans District Corps.
I don't think you were very "close" to this man-made disaster at all.
What next, is the sun going to rise in the east or something?
It's not what commentators said so much as the damage they did by alienating American citizens and ultimately prejudicing members of Congress.
Until we start facing the problems we have created -- thru commission or omission -- we will suffer the consequences in the future. We still have levees around the country protecting cities and towns that are vulnerable to breach. Yet virtually no one in power is doing anything about it.
We need to wake up!
"If we had built the barriers, New Orleans would not be flooded," said Joseph Towers, the retired chief counsel for the Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans district.
September 09, 2005|Ralph Vartabedian and Peter Pae | Times Staff Writer
This just the beginning of the Corps image improvement campaign to blame mother nature, locals or anything but them. It worked well. They got away with it.
Thank goodness levees.org gets the truth out.
Outfall canal levees failed with over a yard of freeboard. The federal judge decided levee engineers committed gross engineering negligence and that decision was upheld in an appellate court. The judge said the corps cannot be held accountable (no normal due process) because of a law from the 20's. True dat!
I am willing to speculate that the Corps' barrier would likely have performed no better than the other flood control components. That is, it would have failed, too. Their obsolete, hidebound, wrong-headed and delusional thinking gave us the wrong soil engineering, the wrong design storm, the wrong safety factor and other blunders in all the other components they built. Why expect them to suddenly conform to conventional civil engineering practice just for that barrier?
As I recall the Mayor didn't even read his own evacuation plan and left hundreds of school buses sitting around to be flooded that could have been used to evacuate the city. Even the governor did not want to evacuate and it was Bush that told her to get off the dime and get those people out of there. She herself said so publicly when she announced the evacuate, I suppose to make sure she didn't take any heat if the evacuate was not needed.
From the corruption of city officials, the failure of the mayor, the failure of the state and the governor and the failure of the federal government there was plenty of blame to go around for Left and Right and all parties in between.
I'm thinking with Obama spending the US broke, we wont be able to do as much next time we have a disaster like this.
When will the left learn that fiscal responsibility is required, even in a socialist big-government country.
Obama spending the country broke?
Bush waged two unnecessary and unjustifiable wars while drastically reducing taxes and turning Clinton's surplus into huge deficit.
Your comment on Obama is simply wrong.
Paul Harris
Author, "Diary From the Dome, Reflections on Fear and Privilege During Katrina"