The Drowning of New Orleans

"Fact is, the Corps drowned New Orleans, and maybe forever." Those stark words come last week from a distressed senior colleague, a well-known and internationally respected professor at Tulane. The distance of three months is bringing some clarity to the disaster of New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We are now finding that it was less of a hurricane than originally projected, only Category 2 when it actually reached New Orleans, and that the failures of the levees were due largely to shoddy construction, poor design, Bush Administration cuts to New Orleans levee projects, and critically important engineering mistakes that exacerbated the storm surge.

The critical element of the levee failure however, was an Army Corps project known as the New Orleans Industrial Canal. This barge canal is a long narrow waterway that runs to the levee system. Among other problems, the canal acts as a surge amplifier as the waves travel down its long narrow channel directly to the base of the levees. Simply put, the greatly amplified storm surge undermined and washed out the base of the levees, overtopped them and led to their collapse in key areas.

This perhaps is the ultimate insult to a Mississippi River system that has suffered mightily from 135 years of abuse from the Army Corps, Bureau of Reclamation and other entities right up to the current administration. For anyone who doubts this lineage I highly recommend three books among many others on the subject. The first is the last work by an engineer and philosopher whose own efforts to transform river systems have led to some problems as well. The first book is Dams and Other Disasters: A Century of the Army Corps of Engineers in Civil Works by Arthur Morgan, published in 1971 when Morgan, the first chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority, was 93 years of age.

The author of 15 books and president of Antioch College in the 1920s, Morgan first came to national prominence after the Dayton /Flood of 1913 with his Miami Conservancy flood control district. Though some of Morgan’s own prescriptions for the lower Mississippi were at odds with what we now know about the flood control values of braided river systems, the thrust of his book regarding the all concrete and channelized decision-making structure of the Corps remains useful today.

While Morgan gives an overview of disasters in various places throughout the Mississippi watershed, reporter Mike Tidwell focuses on the result of all the engineering madness in his recent book, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Lives and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast. Tidwell documents not only the rich culture of the region; he eerily and beautifully describes the speedy and extreme disappearance of the Louisiana coast as it is starved from the normal delta building sediment of the Mississippi systems by the channelized and straightened concrete of the Corps and other misfortunes of the region. It is a remarkable work that helps show sensible ways out of the mess.

The third is John Barry's Barry's book chronicles that previous drowning disaster of the lower Mississippi, as well as many other Mississippi River floods including the upper river flood of 1993, in the context of the engineering battles that arose after the 1927 flood and the resulting problems with the implemented solutions. Rising Tide is a great companion to Morgan's earlier work.

Ok, I can't resist one more reference for the Mississippi watershed so let's make it a quartet. Paul Vandevelder's Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes and the Trial that Forged a Nation, is a true tour de force on many levels and one of the best books I have read in many years, but the context here is its coverage of the Pick-Sloan plan for irrigation and flood control on the Missouri River. If there were ever a sorrier tale of bureaucratic rivalries, injustice and the gall of the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers it would be hard to find. This book gives one pause and, though the book does not even mention this possibility, it makes clear that it is time to start a campaign for the removal of the poorly conceived and massively unjust Garrison Dam.