Two Years

An important point seems to be getting glossed over in today's media coverage. The Gulf Coast was devastated by a natural disaster. New Orleans was devastated by failed infrastructure. The worst of the storm didn't hit New Orleans. When dawn broke August 30th, the city was battered, but not destroyed. Then the levees broke.

And then the social contract broke.

Eighty percent of the city of New Orleans was flooded because the infrastructure failed, despite previous warnings. A historic American city was turned into a third-world hellhole because, as a later investigation would show, the walls had flawed foundations.

Katrina took out Mobile and Pass Christian, but it took the Army Corps of Engineers to drown New Orleans.

After Hurricane Betsy pummeled New Orleans in 1965, Congress assigned the Corps to protect the city from a 100-year storm. The agency's first mistake was calculating that 100-year event as a modest Category 3 hurricane, even though Betsy had been a 4, and the National Weather Service later proposed a more severe 4. The Corps then made such egregious engineering errors that it wasn't even ready for a smaller storm. For example, its levees sagged as much as 5 ft. (1.5 m) lower than their design because the Corps miscalculated sea level and then failed to adjust for subsidence. Some were built in soils with the stability of oatmeal. "These were inexcusable, lethal mistakes," says University of California, Berkeley, engineering professor Robert Bea, who led a post-Katrina investigation for the National Science Foundation.

We need to help rebuild countless shattered lives, which is a process that has gone far too slowly. We also need to make sure that, come the next disaster, our rescue and relief systems are not as 'heckuva-job' pathetic as they were two years ago.

But we also need to acknowledge that lives, not just in New Orleans but in Minneapolis and everywhere else in this country, depend on the quality of design, construction and maintenance of critical infrastructure. As we saw two years ago, once the infrastructure goes, the social fabric can unravel awfully fast. Yet in our political system, infrastructure is too easily ignored until too late. Why fix the hole in the roof when it's not raining?

Today is a day for remembering when the storm hit, and for acknowledging the shameful disaster that came after, which persists today. But we must also consider the part of the disaster that happened before the storm hit: the plans that were made cheaper, the construction that wasn't supervised properly, the projects that were talked about but never started, the appropriations that were redirected, the multiple warnings that were ignored.

Let's take the tragedy of New Orleans as our lesson, so that the next awful American disaster is just the fault of nature, not also that of man.


(TIME has a good article about the Corps and New Orleans, worth reading.)