August 16, 2009

The Katrina flood was a man-made disaster, part XXIII

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Today’s New York Times Book Review cover piece by Timothy Egan is on Dave Eggers’s new book Zeitoun, a nonfiction narrative of one family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina. So far so good. I haven’t read it yet, but the Eggers book sounds like a fantastic addition to the corpus of Katrina books.

But the review contains a couple of errors. It says the storm hit on Sunday, Aug. 28; actually it made landfall the morning of Aug. 29. Maybe this isn’t a mistake as such – the wind was already blowing pretty hard on Aug. 28. But the second error is significant: “Day 2, the world changes. Zeitoun wakes to a sea of water, after the levees have been overtopped. He’s neck-deep in a city of a thousand acts of desperation.”

As any New Orleans resident will tell you, the levees around central New Orleans, including the area where Zeitoun lives, were never overtopped. Rather, badly-designed floodwalls collapsed and breached in several places before Katrina’s storm surge got anywhere near the top. There was some overtopping in more-exposed areas to the east, but the vast majority of the flooding was caused by those breaches – in other words, human error by the Corps of Engineers.

This is not a minor semantic point. The responsibility for most of the damage to New Orleans and the awful events immediately following the storm lies with the Corps – that is, the federal government. This is not in dispute; three distinct investigations have laid the blame on the Corps, including the Corps’s own study. In any assessment of what happened – scientific, political, historical – this is crux of what went wrong, a terrible failure American know-how whose broader implications are alarming and remain mostly unexamined. New Orleanians and Louisiana politicians and media types do their best to remind the powers that be of these scandalous facts. Harry Shearer has been tireless in making this point. To his credit, Brad Pitt made it on Bill Maher’s HBO show Friday night.

But for some reason, this never quite sunk in with many in the media world, or for that matter the nation as a whole. The shorthand of “New Orleans levees overtopped” – with its underlying associations of “natural disaster swamps city below sea level – what the heck are those people doing living down there?” seems to have been dropped into the review without much thought. I’m assuming that Egan – whose work I like and respect – made the error and not Eggers; but even if it was Eggers, it was up to Egan and his editors not to repeat it in the NYT.

 

July 31, 2009

The reslience of New Orleans

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This week’s TPM Cafe Book Club discussion on Cheryl Wagner’s New Orleans memoir Plenty of Suck to Go Around was interesting, and shows that like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, post-Katrina New Orleans is a living, changing, endlessly complex phenomenon not easily reduced to a single idea.

But the common theme is the resilience of people like those Cheryl depicts in the book – including herself – who slog onward, rebuilding their homes, dealing with broken bureaucracies, and sometimes having fun, because, well, this is still New Orleans.

In fact, New Orleans culture seems to have turned out to be more resilient than its own residents may have anticipated. “Suck” does an amusing job of sorting through the overlapping hierarchies of property damage and dedication: people with homes in sodden Mid-City naturally feel some jealousy toward residents of unflooded Uptown neighborhoods, but are also proud of enduring a struggle the Uptown folks can never know. Some people in Cheryl’s cohort of friends and acquaintances take the opportunity to alight for other funky, granola-friendly towns like Austin and Portland, while others double down on the Crescent City. Out of this churn, as Harry Shearer pointed out, New Orleans has seen a renaissance of civic engagement. People actually get up in the morning and think about how to improve community they live in – they have to! Louisiana residents have always taken an outsized interest in politics, but far less in the functioning of government and making things work. Katrina has altered that seemingly unalterable feature of New Orleans civic life.

This is a good thing, obviously, and not just for New Orleans. The city and its environs may be cultural and geographical outliers, but its predicament isn’t really so unique. It’s just on an accelerated timetable. Most of us are accustomed to a degree of environmental stability: summers are hot, winters cold. But that’s starting to change, and as the changes spread we’re going to be seeing more big storms, more floods – and more man-made systems failing. This on top of broader alterations in patterns of rainfall and drought that will affect food production, water consumption. In other words, things are already changing, and those changes will accelerate beyond the capacity of governments to keep pace. As everybody could see from Day 1 in New Orleans, the nation as a whole moves very slowly to address these kinds of threats. We’re likely to stumble from one disaster to another for quite a while.

I think the federal government needs to get out in front of these problems – and New Orleans should be (or ought to have been) the ideal opportunity to do so. But if that’s not going to happen, the kinds of resourcefulness and community-building we see in Cheryl’s book will provide a good model of its own. There’s no one-size-fits all solution for a lot of the problems we face, and many solutions will be local, and flexible. That doesn’t excuse the nation from shirking the challenges of climate change, but the example of New Orleans does offer some rays of hope.

 

December 16, 2008

Fedora and beeper at the ready

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The Times-Picayune’s Angus Lind has a great column recapping the career of Walt Philbin, the TP’s talented and endlessly colorful cops reporter, who just retired. When I went to work for the TP in the 1980s, Walt – who was in his early 40s at the time and had only been there about a decade – looked like something out of an earlier era, or, more precisely, one man’s cockeyed interpretation of the way things had been 30 or 40 years earlier. In a newsroom with more than its share of eccentrics, he stood out for his sense of style (rumpled, yes, but inimitable) his gentleness and sense of humor, and his uncanny talent at working sources at the most appalling crime scenes imaginable. If you went anywhere with Walt, his beeper – on the loudest possible setting – was constantly going off, and he’d whip it off his belt in a near-frenzy. Sometimes it was a source. But two thirds of the time, it was one of his relatives checking in.

Lind recalls an iconic Philbin anecdote, a deadline situation with editor Billy Rainey:

On one infamous occasion, Philbin came back into the newsroom very animated after covering some story andRainey asked him, “Whatcha got, Walt?” Philbin pulled out a notebook, looked down at his illegible chicken scratch, began to stammer and stutter and was running all the facts together in his inimitable stream-of-consciousness, free-flow, out-of-order sequence.

So Rainey, ever resourceful, took a drag on his cigarette and shouted at him: “Philbin, go back to your desk and pick up the phone!”

“No,” Walt continued, “but you know, and then, but after, but before, I mean, this is what happened, and then they . . .”

“Philbin, dammit, get back to your desk and pick up the (bleeping) phone!” Rainey shouted.

Philbin dutifully headed back to his desk, mumbling and muttering the whole way. When he got to his desk, he picked up the phone.

Rainey shouted across the newsroom, “Now call me!”

Which is what Philbin did. Back then, we were all much more comfortable dictating from the field, and he was much better on the phone. The words flowed, he had his facts, the best rewrite guy put it into a story, and the two miraculously met another tough deadline amid a loud, raucous and sometimes tense newsroom — where people smoked cigars and cigarettes, cussed and yelled, and laughed and drank together after work . . . and sometimes during.

By the time Walt Philbin started out, this world was already fading, and now it’s long gone, the stuff of old movies. But for some reason, he never seemed out of place as journalism changed around him.

(Times-Picayune photo)

 

November 11, 2008

Restoring coastal restoration

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In my previous post on the bureaucratic inflighting over Louisiana’s coastal restoration efforts, I took a “the system’s broken” point of view. Chris Macaluso, a spokesman for the state’s coastal restoration efforts, sent me an email that elaborates on some of the ways the system is broken. The state government – which ought to have strong voice in how billions of dollars is spent to rebuild, well, a large area of the state – is effectively marginalized by the Corps of Engineers, which is jealously guarding its own turf and funding.

In a nutshell: A federal task force in which the Corps plays a major role says a marsh-rebuilding project that diverts silt-laden water from the Mississippi into the wetlands must be shut down because it’s piling up silt in a ship anchorage. That requires dredging, and there’s no money for dredging. So, no marsh rebuilding. Macaluso:

I assure you, there is no one more upset and disgusted with this decision to shut down this diversion than the state of Louisiana and we will do all we can to keep it from being closed. We feel there was no definitive evidence shown that this diversion was the cause of the situation. The Corps said repeatedly that the river is a dynamic system, which means the sediment could have come from any number of sources, especially considering the multiple flood events in the Mississippi River this year.

The state has offered $10.9 billion for dredging, but it also wants a scientific study to determine the source of the silting.

But to put things in perspective: the Corps has been building levees and dredging channels in the Louisiana marshes for 150 years – something that has greatly accelerated the erosion of those marshes. Now that those huge errors are being addressed – with state and federal money – the Corps wants the state to pony up the dredging money, a price tag that could run into the billions. Among the arguments: the Corps has no authority to dredge anchorages – only waterways. That leaves it up to local harbors. And so on down the bureaucratic rabbit hole.

Rebuilding Louisiana’s marshes is a difficult enough task on its own – one that will likely fail if it isn’t done right, and done fast. If the agencies involved – particularly the Corps – can’t exercise a little leadership and avoid this kind of endless, mind-numbing brinksmanship, it’s just not going to happen.

This is an ominous sign for another reason. If the signals are right, the Obama administration is likely to spend a lot of money on infrastructure as part of its economic stimulus package. The Corps of Engineers is one of the nation’s biggest infrastructure agencies, and it has repeatedly shown it doesn’t have its priorities straight.

 

November 7, 2008

A diversion on coastal restoration

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It seems that in the fraying marshes of southern Louisiana, we can’t afford to maintain shipping and coastal restoration at the same time. Louisiana’s biggest freshwater diversion project – essentially, a set of gates in the Mississippi River levees that let river water to flow over marshlands, depositing much-needed silt – must be closed because it’s affecting ship anchorages nearby. That requires dredging, which would cost $140 million over the next 15 years, and there’s no money available for that:

The West Bay diversion allows 20,000 cubic feet per second of sediment-laced water to flow into the bay, with a goal of creating 10,000 acres of wetlands during its first 20 years of operation. The original plan was to expand it to 50,000 cubic feet per second in a few years to speed the filling process.

A Plaquemines Parish official warned the state board that threatening the diversion sends the wrong message to Congress at a time when Louisiana needs billions of federal dollars for coastal restoration projects.

“If you send out this message that you are considering closing the largest diversion in Louisiana, what you’re looking at is a political disaster in Congress, ” said P. J. Hahn, the parish director of coastal zone management.

Obviously, something must be worked out here – and probably will be. The coastline is disappearing at an alarming clip, and there’s no room for error on coastal restoration. If New Orleans and surrounding towns are to remain viable places to live, ambitious projects must get underway immediately. And the ones already in place must stay open. This snag, however, is huge; if marsh-rebuilding projects must pay their own freight on dredging, their price tags increase sevenfold, from $700 million to $4.9 billion.

The real problem here is not deciding who will pay that extra $4 billion, however. It’s the dearth of leadership on this pressing national issue. Currently, these decisions are in the hands of … no one, really. They’re shared between the Army Corps of Engineers and various local, state and federal agencies and commissions. The Corps, which does the actual work of coastal restoration and dredging, is notorious for its logy decision-making and its deference to shipping interests. The other agencies wrangle amongst themselves and with the Corps over funding and priorities. But there’s no strategic political vision of how all this works, no one who can line everybody up and say “jump.” It’s an example of a much bigger challenge: the sorry mismatch of our current government institutions to looming, giant environmental problems. Paging President Obama.

Note: The above quote from the Times-Picayune story incorrectly describes the task force that voted to shut the marsh project as a “state board.” The task force is composed of representatives of various federal agencies. The state has non-voting participation.

 

October 28, 2008

The media’s epic Katrina fail

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In a comment on the previous post about the AP and media neutrality, Harry Shearer makes an excellent point – that, in addition to the Iraq war runup and political coverage, the media also failed in its post-Katrina coverage:

Framing it as a natural disaster–as opposed to the ‘greatest engineering disaster since Chernobyl’–and further framing it as a basically black tragedy (because the black people in the Dome and Convention Center were easier to reach and tape than the white people stranded on their roofs in St. Bernard Parish–was compounded by media folks patting themselves on the back for their “ballsy’ coverage.

I agree. New Orleans’ post-Katrina trajectory could have been a lot different had the media taken a more aggressive role in reporting what actually happened (a civic/government failure to secure citizens’ safety) as opposed to the misleading shorthand version of it that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the storm (heckuva job, Brownie).

But I’d draw a distinction between the media treatment of post-Katrina New Orleans and the two other examples. Pre-Iraq reporting and campaign coverage are both examples of the successful co-optation and/or exploitation of the mainstream media’s “neutrality” by the Bush-Rove political project. That project turned out to be not just misleading, but substantively disastrous. So the media have deservedly lost credibility along with Bush. And, like Bush, many media outlets won’t acknowledge anything was or is amiss. You can’t be “neutral” if you’re living in a fantasy.

The failure to protect New Orleans is both more profound and literally more dangerous than the Iraq misadventure or the rise of Drudge-style politics. More profound because it was a breakdown at all levels of government that led to the levee failures, and those institutional problems haven’t been fixed. More dangerous because it killed a lot of people, and because more will likely die in the future – in New Orleans and elsewhere – as sea levels rise and storms likely grow more intense. But the media failure to “get” this isn’t so much an failure of neutrality undermined by ideology (though there is an element of that) as it is just general media stupidity and short-sightedness, reflecting American society’s stupidity and short-sightedness. Which is sad, and scary. But maybe some new political leadership can begin to address that problem.

 

September 3, 2008

After Gustav

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I have a piece up on the Guardian site with some post-Gustav reflections:

The fact is, due to feedback from human activities, nature has begun to change faster than US government institutions can keep up. There’s a healthy scientific debate over the potential role of global warming in hurricane activity. Some scientists believe a warming atmosphere will lead to more powerful storms. Others say the effects will be minimal. But most everyone agrees that hurricane activity in the Atlantic is in a dangerous, possibly decades-long upswing.

If it is indeed amplified by global warming, we’re going to see some storms unlike any in the past in the coming years. Meanwhile, the lure of living on the coast (and along riverbanks) has put many millions more people in the path of danger, along with their valuable properties, increasing the risk of huge, Katrina-scale losses that will test the insurance industry and the federal government’s budgetary limits.

In order to deal with this, we’re going to have to make some basic changes in how the government operates. Right now, it’s reactive – a major disaster happens (whether a natural catastrophe, or a crash in the financial system, or the food system, or … ) requiring some kind of federal intervention – not just a cleanup operation but some genuine reforms. Congress and the president do something (or not). But I’m guessing that global warming will accelerate the speed at which the environment is changing and quickly outpace all the systems we have in place to make sure people can go on living their lives. We’ll need a government that processes information faster, and acts more quickly.

 

September 2, 2008

Why did the Industrial Canal fill up?

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There’s a question I’d like to know the answer to. Hurricane Gustav dealt New Orleans a glancing blow, passing it by on northwest course. Yet as the world saw yesterday, the city’s Industrial Canal – the large waterway that runs north-south – filled nearly to the top, and there was some alarming if mostly harmless overtopping due to wind and waves. Why did this happen, and what does it say about the city’s vulnerabilities in future storms?

I sort-of know the answer to this. The Industrial Canal is connects to both the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the notorious Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or MRGO. The latter is slated for closure because of its role in coastal erosion and (though this is controversial) as a conduit for storm surges into the city. Both these waterways run adjacent to open marshes that are rapidly eroding, and Lake Borgne, which is essentially a large lagoon open to the Gulf. So it’s very easy for a lot of water to get into the heart of New Orleans. It happened in Katrina. Now it has happened in Gustav. The Corps of Engineers plans to build a gate across both waterways where they meet in a giant “V.” That area also became notorious after Katrina because storm surge water flowing into the vertex of the V can rise up very high and overtop levees. And from that point, it’s a straight shot to the Industrial Canal, alongside neighborhoods of the St. Bernard, the Lower 9th Ward and eastern New Orleans.

But if the large flow into the Industrial Canal, and its near overtopping Monday, is due partly to the diminished protection of disappearing marshes, this whole area may be getting even more dangerous. Building a gate may offer a good solution, but it also seems we’re getting closer to a New Orleans-as-Venice scenario, in which Gulf waters are lapping against levees, gates and other structures – a risky scenario indeed.

 

September 1, 2008

Whew

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Hurricane Gustav has spared New Orleans. The levees held. The wind never reached hurricane strength. The evacuation of an estimated 95 percent of the population wasn’t perfect (there were heavy traffic delays) but it worked. Hundreds of buses picked up people without transportation and got them to safety by road or rail.

But consider how lucky New Orleans was. Gustav dealt the city only a glancing blow; its northwesterly course took it over mostly-rural Acadiana. As a result the storm surge never penetrated deep into the city, as it did during Katrina. But a shift of a few degrees east, or a slight change in the angle of approach, and things would have been very different.

New Orleans is still very much in the crosshairs, a city routinely in all-out peril. We are in an “up” cycle for hurricanes, one that may be pumped up further by global warming. Sea levels are rising and New Orleans is sinking. All of this is happening faster than the Corps of Engineers and other institutions can keep up with.

The other question is how much damage Gustav has done to the wetlands that ring the city. Every time a storm hits, it accelerates the erosion process. It undoes painstaking restoration work. It brings the whole Mississippi delta region a step closer to its inevitable death.

 

September 1, 2008

The Plaquemines levee

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A levee in Plaquemines Parish has apparently been overtopped and may be in danger of breaching. This is obviously a serious problem, but to put things in perspective, the affected area, Braithwaite, is quite small, and outside the federal hurricane levee system. Plaquemines runs from east of New Orleans down to the end of the river. As in most of the parish, there’s Mississippi River levee on one side, a road/homes, and then a “back levee” abutting the marshes. It’s this back levee that’s endangered by floodwaters coming from the south and east. Those waters ought to be subsiding now, so the danger may abate.

Interestingly, Braithwaite abuts the Caernarvon Fresh Water Diversion Project, a gate in the Mississippi River that’s opened at strategic times during the year to send river water over the marshes, depositing silt and slowing the progress of coastal erosion. Now the Corps plans to open the gates and allow floodwaters to flow in the opposite direction – into the river instead of out – in order to ease the pressure on the affected levee.

The site is also notorious: during the 1927 Mississippi River flood, Louisiana officials dynamited the river levee at Caernarvon, flooding Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes in order to save New Orleans. Residents were promised restitution, but got almost nothing afterward. And blowing up the levee turned out to be pointless – thanks to levee breaks upstream, New Orleans would not have flooded. This is one source of the persistent rumors about dynamiting levees that resurfaced during Katrina.

Update: MSNBC is reporting that opening the Caernarvon gates worked; the water level has dropped and the levee is intact.

 

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