I DEAD IN ATTIC
By Chris Rose
(Chris Rose Books, 158 pp., $13)
BREACH OF FAITH: HURRICANE KATRINA AND THE NEAR DEATH OF A
GREAT AMERICAN CITY
By Jed Horne
(Random House, 412 pp., $25.95)
THE STORM
By Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan
(Viking, 308 pp., 25.95)
THE GREAT DELUGE: HURRICANE KATRINA, NEW ORLEANS, AND THE
MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST
By Douglas Brinkley
(William Morrow, 716 pp., $29.95)
PATH OF DESTRUCTION: THE DEVASTATION OF NEW ORLEANS AND THE
COMING AGE OF SUPERSTORMS
By John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein
(Little, Brown, 386 pp., $26)
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDGE: A MEMOIR OF WAR, DISASTERS, AND SURVIVAL
By Anderson Cooper
(Harper Collins, 212 pp., $24.95)
IN 1980, THE ARMY CORPS OF Engineers had a problem in New Orleans, the kind of problem that America's water resources agency encounters all the time. Its friends in Louisiana's congressional delegation wanted the Corps to build a massive new lock on the Industrial Canal, a shipping shortcut to the Port of New Orleans, and so did its friends at the port. The Corps was eager to oblige them; it is, at heart, a public works brigade, run by engineers trained to move dirt and pour concrete. Its motto is essayons, "let us try."
And so it tried. The problem was that its numbers were not adding up. Before the Corps can build a project, it must certify to Congress that the economic benefits to anyone--in this case, the port and a few well-connected shipping firms--would exceed the cost to taxpayers. But even the agency's reliably optimistic economic models failed to nudge the lock's benefit-cost ratio above 0.5; the predicted private benefits, in other words, were less than half the expected public cost. So on June 18 the men of essayons convened a high-level meeting to work the problem. "No one feels that additional study could ever justify higher than a 0.5 [ratio]," said the top Corps planner from New Orleans, according to a transcript. "Is this correct?" "That is generally correct," replied the top Corps economist from New Orleans. "Benefits are less than 0.5 to 1," agreed the top economist from St. Louis. Staff economists Larry Prather and Don Sweeney were even more dubious of the lock. "There's no way you can economically justify that," Prather said. "The data we have will not support that," Sweeney added.
Colonel Tom Sands, the Corps commander in New Orleans, was not looking forward to telling Louisiana's power brokers the bad news. But the chief of planning for the entire Corps reminded him that when it came to evaluating projects, economy was not necessarily destiny. "There are two things to consider," he said. "1. There are regulations we must follow. 2. You can recommend a plan based on political progmation. The choice is the regular decision process or the political decision process." The planner probably meant "pragmatism," but Sands, who later retired from the Corps as a major general, had enough progmation to get the point. "Let's throw in the political considerations," he announced. And a $750 million boondoggle was born.
It has survived to this day, despite local opposition, environmental lawsuits, federal deficits, and a persistent lack of cargo on the canal. The Corps justified the lock by predicting spectacular increases in traffic--even though traffic had been plummeting for years, a fact omitted from the Corps study--but traffic has kept dropping. Still, thanks to port lobbyists such as former House Appropriations Chairman Robert Livingston, Congress and the Corps agreed in 2000 to waive most of the port's $100 million cost-share, so American taxpayers will foot almost the entire bill. "As you know, this agreement with the Corps is the result of Herculean efforts by the Louisiana delegation," another port lobbyist wrote in an internal memo. The memo singled out congressional advocates such as Republican David Vitter, who received $40,000 from the project's beneficiaries in that campaign cycle, and Democrat-turned-Republican Billy Tauzin, who was about to take over the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Democrat William Jefferson, who pushed the project even though most of his constituents in the African American neighborhood abutting the canal opposed it.
Vitter is now a U.S. senator; Tauzin is the drug industry's chief lobbyist; Jefferson is the FBI target whose $90,000 freezer gave new meaning to the phrase "cold cash." And for the Corps, the "regular decision process" is now the "political decision process." Sweeney exposed that process in 2000 when he blew the whistle on another study that his bosses had skewed to justify an even more expensive lock project--as part of a secret "Program Growth Initiative" designed to boost the Corps budget by rubber-stamping pork. Prather joined that process as he rose up the Corps ranks to become the agency's top lobbyist, but he revealed his disgust in private e-mails he had to disclose during a lawsuit, which described his agency's politically inspired projects as "swine" and "economic duds with huge environmental consequences." "We have no strategy for saving ourselves," Prather wrote. "Someone needs to be supervising the Corps."
ON MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2005, New Orleans paid the price for the Corps's dysfunction, when Hurricane Katrina toppled the floodwalls that were supposed to protect the city, including those along the Industrial Canal. Katrina turned a vibrant city into an Atlantis, Michael Brown into a laughingstock, and Kanye West into a social critic. Its name became synonymous with bad government.
Unfortunately, America has concluded that what went wrong in Katrina was the government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage--even though its commander finally admitted in April that his agency's "design failures" inundated New Orleans. America is now well versed in the deterioration of FEMA, but it hasn't noticed that in the years before Katrina, investigations by the Pentagon, the Government Accountability Office, and the National Academy of Sciences had all documented the Corps's follies.
In fact, in the year since Katrina, Congress has given the Corps even more money and power. The Corps is a congressional plaything; its budget consists almost entirely of "earmarks," individual pet projects requested by individual congressmen. The recent corruption scandals on Capitol Hill have prompted constant demands for "earmark reform," but little recognition that the Corps is the ultimate earmark agency. The failures of the Corps are also failures of Congress.
The Industrial Canal project may seem irrelevant to those failures, since the $750 million lock had nothing to do with the flood-control system that collapsed--but that is precisely why it stands as a perfect symbol of Katrina. The drowning of New Orleans was a tragedy of priorities, and protecting this low-lying soupbowl of a city was no one's priority. The Corps spent more in Louisiana than in any other state, but it wasted most of the money on ecologically harmful and fiscally wasteful pork that kept its employees busy and its political patrons happy, while neglecting hurricane protection for New Orleans. One of its pork projects, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, actually intensified Katrina's surge.
The devastation of Katrina, in other words, was a direct result of America's water resources policy, which is not a policy at all, but an annual scramble for appropriations. Louisiana's congressional delegation always fared exceptionally well in that scramble, but it never cared as much about averting a theoretical disaster as it cared about bringing home actual bacon. And the Corps cared about whatever Congress cared about. "Generally speaking, there was less than moderate interest in hurricane protection," Sands told me.
Katrina was a Murphy's Law fiasco; the screw-ups kept on coming. Mayor Ray Nagin was slow to declare a mandatory evacuation. His buses evacuated residents to the Superdome instead of outside the city. Many of his police officers went AWOL after the storm hit, and some seized the opportunity to relieve Wal-Marts of their merchandise. The floodwalls failed that morning, but poor communications left officials thinking New Orleans had dodged the bullet until Tuesday. FEMA was unprepared for the scope of the disaster, so survivors waited in vain for food, ice, and buses, and corpses rotted in the heat. Brown dithered while New Orleans drowned, pestering his aides about his wardrobe. The Superdome and the convention center became squalid hellholes. Nagin's police chief made matters worse by passing along myths about babies raped in the dome, and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff publicly admitted he had no idea what was going on at the convention center. Bush seemed clueless, jetting to a fund-raiser, speechifying about immigration reform, continuing his vacation until several days into the crisis. And then his response was tone-deaf: his Air Force One photo-op 30,000 feet above New Orleans, his insistence that no one had anticipated a breach of the levees, and finally the immortal words, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."
The chaos on the ground prompted a frenzy of recriminations. Nagin spewed venom at the feds. White House leakers slagged Democratic Governor Katherine Blanco. Blanco's team shot back at Bush, but also at Nagin, a fellow Democrat who had endorsed her Republican opponent. Bush eventually fired Brown, who first pointed fingers at Nagin and Blanco, and then at his bureaucratic rival Chertoff. The Corps was barely mentioned, except when some of the agency's defenders had the chutzpah to attack Bush for under-funding it. As if the problem with the rathole was insufficient cheese.
For all the complexities of the catastrophe, two basic things went wrong during Katrina. The levees broke, and the response was slow. But while both of those failures were government failures, the first was much more important. If the levees had not breached, the New Orleans bowl would not have filled, and no one would have cared about Brownie's job experience with Arabian horses. FEMA's incompetent response to Katrina did reveal the federal government's lack of preparation for a potential terrorist attack, and the disarray at the Department of Homeland Security; but it was not what killed 1,000 people and inflicted $100 billion in damage. And while it is legitimate to blame Bush for the problems at FEMA and DHS, most of his administration's proposed budget cuts for the Corps were uncharacteristically responsible efforts to block wasteful spending--which is why Congress routinely ignored them.
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