Two Years After Katrina, Government Still Bungling

[Cookiely]

Tampa Tribune Editorial
Two Years After Katrina, Government Still Bungling
Published: Aug 27, 2007

It's been two years since Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and caused a storm surge of government bungling at the federal, state and local level. A ton of money has been spent to repair the region, though the results are hard to see.

Along with wasting money, the recovery effort has failed to make sufficient progress on the region's two core safety challenges: bolstering the city's levees and restoring the coastal wetlands that once buffered the Crescent City and Louisiana against hurricane threats.

Oh, sure, the Army Corps of Engineers is spending billions in New Orleans, but the additional flood protections in vulnerable, mostly poor neighborhoods are measurable only in inches. No wonder citizens are reluctant to return to neighborhoods that could submerge again if a Category 5 comes barreling by.

But rather than rebuild Louisiana's wetlands, the Corps wants to erect huge levees - essentially a man-made wall - along the Gulf Coast.

Not only would this wall be enormously expensive to build and maintain, it would be catastrophic to the state's environment.

Remember, it was the re-engineering of the Mississippi River that caused much of Louisiana coastal wetlands to wash away. As author Michael Tidwell, whose "Bayou Farewell" predicted a Katrina-like disaster, says, it's the "catastrophic land loss that allows the hurricanes to come so far inland, whereas before, the natural speed bumps of barrier islands and wetlands slowed these hurricanes down."

Thanks to ill-designed flood control projects promoted by the Army Corps, Louisiana was losing more than 25 square miles of coastal wetlands a year before Katrina. The man-made dikes and levees kept the Mississippi from depositing the mud and nutrients needed to naturally replenish the marshes.

At the same time, the oil industry was allowed to build a checkerboard of canals through the wetlands, hastening the erosion. Coastal lands are now so vulnerable that Katrina and Hurricane Rita wiped out 217 square miles of coastal marshes in just one month.

Scientists estimate that every two miles of marsh between New Orleans and the Gulf reduces a storm surge by half a foot. Had the state's coastal buffer not been destroyed, the tragedy might have been averted.

Yet the Corps continues to promote variations of its failed flood-control plan, now with a proposal to essentially wall off the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet as everyone knows, the man-made levee walls in New Orleans cracked, separated and let in so much water that people drowned in their homes.

Congress should encourage the Corps to reconsider its approach.

To protect New Orleans, the Corps should focus on rebuilding the levees in the strongest way possible, even if it means having to buy people's waterfront properties. And rather than a wall, it should focus on rebuilding coastal wetlands to form a natural protective buffer. This could be done by allowing river sediment to flow to the coast in selective areas and by filling many of the coastal canals dug by oil companies.

A blind faith in engineering and a lack of respect for nature created horrible consequences in New Orleans.

To get people to return to their homes and keep them safe, the federal government should forego the coastal wall and invest instead in restoring coastal marshes that provide the best - and most economical - defense against tragedy.