One of the tragedy's nauseating aspects is that in recent years, the Louisiana delegation and the Corps began to see it coming, and considered action to try to prevent it. A bipartisan coalition of Louisiana politicians and interest groups launched a crusade to revive the region's coastal wetlands and worked with the Corps on a $14 billion restoration plan. Representative Tauzin took a break from chemotherapy to testify for the plan in 2004. "We'll be faced one day with thousands of our citizens drowned and killed, people drowned like rats in the city of New Orleans," he said. But Tauzin's support for the plan had not stopped him from leading the Republican push to dismantle federal wetlands protections. Similarly, at a hearing two months before Katrina, Senator Vitter showed a simulation of a Category Four hurricane drowning New Orleans under eighteen feet of water, but Vitter's support for the plan had not stopped him from writing legislation designed to help logging companies deforest Louisiana's cypress swamps.
The restoration plan went nowhere before Katrina; in fact, Vitter helped hold it up with his logging provision. The Corps is already struggling with a $10 billion restoration plan for the Everglades, which is inflaming doubts about the agency's ability to fix its ecological mistakes. Meanwhile, coastal Louisiana still loses a football field worth of wetlands every thirty minutes.
Wetlands were clearly a priority, but not a top priority. And the same was true of levees. During the Clinton administration, Tauzin got the Corps to assess the possibility of Category Five protections, and in 2002 the Corps recommended a five-year, $12 million feasibility study. Congress never funded it. In fact, on the eve of Katrina, the Corps was still a decade away from completing its original Category Three project; it warned on its website that the New Orleans levees might not even "withstand the design storm." And it is true that the Bush administration was stingy with the Corps. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu requested $98.7 million for the project in the five years before Katrina, while the administration proposed only $22.4 million.
At least the Bush administration was consistent: it also proposed zero funding for most of the few dozen most egregious Corps boondoggles. Somehow, though, the Louisiana delegation managed to override Bush's cuts when their pork was at stake. Congress poured $1.9 billion into Corps projects in Louisiana in those five pre-Katrina years, by far the most of any state. If the delegation's top priority had been protection instead of pork, it could have gotten what it wanted. When a Corps study concluded that the cost of a New Iberia port-deepening project would be three times the benefits, Landrieu tucked a provision into an emergency funding bill for the Iraq War that ordered the Corps to redo its analysis. She didn't do that for Category Five levees. So Katrina did not change everything. It still may not have changed anything.
The Corps initially claimed that its levees had been overtopped and overwhelmed, then refused to address its culpability until New Orleans was off the front page. Vitter and Landrieu organized a "working group" of lobbyists for ports, shipping firms, energy companies, and other corporate interests to assemble Louisiana's relief request; the inflation-adjusted result would have cost more than the Louisiana Purchase. It included $40 billion for Corps projects, including the Industrial Canal lock, the New Iberia port-deepening, and other hurricane-unrelated pork. A list of "outstanding questions" from one working-group call included such pressing questions as "How much can I bill my client?"
This time the looters went too far. Congress sent the delegation back to the drawing board. A year after its aggravated assault, New Orleans remains in intensive care. The Corps is rebuilding its failed levees to their original Category Three strength. And the Big One is still on the way.
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