Critics See Years of Missed Opportunities for Levees
The New York Times
September 2, 2005
Gazing at Breached Levees, Critics See Years of Missed Opportunities
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
As federal flood-control officials directed efforts to block the 17th Street Canal, the source of most of the water swamping New Orleans, they faced growing criticism yesterday over decades of missed opportunities to prevent precisely this type of disaster.
In interviews and a telephone conference call with reporters, senior officials and engineers from up and down the ranks of the Army Corps of Engineers conceded that they had no ability to detect quickly small breaches in the matrix of 350 miles of levees around New Orleans.
Unless such holes can be blocked early, the water will almost invariably rip away at the edges, widening the breach.
The officials and engineers said that after they had found the widening gap in the concrete wall on the eastern side of the canal, they had no quick-response plan to repair it.
Even as they tried to improvise a solution while water continued to pour into neighborhood after neighborhood, their efforts were hampered by a lack of heavy helicopters, most of which had been dispatched by federal emergency officials to rescue stranded residents.
"The first priority of the rotary-winged aircraft was to rescue people," Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the corps, said in the conference call. "Plugging the gap was a lower priority."
The accumulation of 40 years of compromises of that sort resulted in a mixture of grief, frustration and defensiveness from the corps, which has long been given a mission far broader than its budget.
Ultimately, the corps is directed, along with 15 other agencies, by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It is FEMA who is really calling the shots and setting priorities here," General Strock said.
He defended the Bush administration against the charge that spending on the war in Iraq had diminished the capacity to deal with domestic threats like the hurricane.
"I do not see that to be the case," General Strock said. "We deeply regret the loss of life associated with this. We are committed to doing whatever we can right now to stop the flow of waters and get the city on the road to recovery."
Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager in the New Orleans district of the corps, said the New Orleans protection system was a vexing mix. It met the standards that were agreed on long ago, but was known to be inadequate.
"This storm was much greater than protection we were authorized to provide," Mr. Naomi said.
Current and former local officials expressed anger at the lack of preparedness.
"I'm just shocked," said Martha Madden, who was the Louisiana secretary of environmental quality in the late 1980's and is now a consultant in strategic planning in Washington and New Orleans.
The Corps of Engineers, Ms. Madden said, should have arranged access to supplies like sandbags and concrete barriers, the way environmental planners reserve access to materials for oil spills.
"You'd have all that on contract," she said. "You have contractors with all those potential needs in place."
Since 1965, when the first large federal project was started to bolster New Orleans's levees and other defenses, there has been a tug of war over how sturdy, and expensive, to make a system that might, or might not, be needed.
Most aspects of the $732 million Lake Pontchartrain project have been completed, but the project remains behind schedule and underfinanced. Although Congress appropriated more than $4.7 billion for the Corps of Engineers this year, the spending on New Orleans levees was relatively small.
The Pontchartrain project drew about $5.7 million, almost $2 million more than what was earmarked for it in President Bush's budget. For five years, Congress has repeatedly increased the sum for New Orleans levees over Mr. Bush's requests, Senate Republicans' figures show. The White House on Thursday referred budget questions to the Office of Management and Budget, where officials did not return calls for comment.
From the project's early days, there were vivid reasons to push for the greatest level of protection. One was Hurricane Betsy, a midgrade storm that swamped much of New Orleans in 1965. In 1969, Hurricane Camille, the second-most-powerful Atlantic storm recorded, passed within 60 miles and demolished the Mississippi coast.
The initial plan was deemed robust, yet affordable, General Strock said. Government engineers and budget officials settled on designing for what meteorologists calculated would be a once-in-200-year event, he said. That would mean a storm like Hurricane Betsy, a Category 3 storm on the five-step intensity scale.
General Strock said tradeoffs between costs and protection levels were a result of a "complex process involving the intersection of a lot of people from the local, state and national level."
Adam Hughes, an analyst at OMB Watch, said such tradeoffs erred far too often on the side of serving short-term needs and discounting long-term risks. Now, Mr. Hughes said, the devastation in New Orleans made an earlier investment in bigger berms and other protections all part of that gray universe of what bureaucrats call infrastructure look like a bargain.
"This is a classic example of what underfunding infrastructure can do," Mr. Hughes said.
Not all of the problems leading to such a calamity lay at the federal level, said Bob Sheets, a meteorologist who directed the National Hurricane Center until retiring in 1995. Dr. Sheets said that even as a firmer understanding of the danger for New Orleans became evident in the late 70's, some local officials tended to discount the risks.
At the time, Dr. Sheets and other federal forecasters ran the first computer simulations, using a program that simulated how Lake Pontchartrain and surrounding waters might behave under strikes by big storms.
Much of the lake is a shallow pan where huge amounts of water can quickly pile up on a lee shore, like that facing New Orleans. The computer simulations made clear that certain storms could swamp the platterlike city, wedged between a great river and a broad lake, Dr. Sheets said, adding, "The risk obviously in New Orleans was greater than in any other community."
He and other federal forecasters gave hundreds of talks about storm risks, and New Orleans was always the case study for catastrophe.
Dr. Sheets had many tabletop exercises with the city's emergency officials, and when a storm loomed, they always started an evacuation, in the thought experiment.
But in 1992, he said, when Hurricane Andrew, just behind Hurricane Camille on the all-time intensity list, headed to the Gulf Coast, and the National Hurricane Center advised New Orleans to start evacuations, he said of the city officials: "Essentially they did nothing. The conventions and other business went on."
Dr. Sheets said a 20-year lull in Atlantic storm activity from 1970 until the early 90's could have contributed to communities' sense of ease. "The longer you go without something like this, the less you think it will happen," he said. "The risk was there," he said. "And now, obviously, it has come to pass to a great degree."
Mr. Naomi noted that since 2000, Congress had financed the corps request for a study to increase New Orleans's protections for the strongest hurricanes. But he acknowledged that the sum was a fraction of the request and that the study would take years to complete.
"To effectuate what would have made any difference in this storm," he said, such a study would have had to have started 20 or 25 years ago.
Glen Justice and Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/national/nationalspecial/02levee.html?pagewanted=print
September 2, 2005
Gazing at Breached Levees, Critics See Years of Missed Opportunities
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
As federal flood-control officials directed efforts to block the 17th Street Canal, the source of most of the water swamping New Orleans, they faced growing criticism yesterday over decades of missed opportunities to prevent precisely this type of disaster.
In interviews and a telephone conference call with reporters, senior officials and engineers from up and down the ranks of the Army Corps of Engineers conceded that they had no ability to detect quickly small breaches in the matrix of 350 miles of levees around New Orleans.
Unless such holes can be blocked early, the water will almost invariably rip away at the edges, widening the breach.
The officials and engineers said that after they had found the widening gap in the concrete wall on the eastern side of the canal, they had no quick-response plan to repair it.
Even as they tried to improvise a solution while water continued to pour into neighborhood after neighborhood, their efforts were hampered by a lack of heavy helicopters, most of which had been dispatched by federal emergency officials to rescue stranded residents.
"The first priority of the rotary-winged aircraft was to rescue people," Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the corps, said in the conference call. "Plugging the gap was a lower priority."
The accumulation of 40 years of compromises of that sort resulted in a mixture of grief, frustration and defensiveness from the corps, which has long been given a mission far broader than its budget.
Ultimately, the corps is directed, along with 15 other agencies, by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It is FEMA who is really calling the shots and setting priorities here," General Strock said.
He defended the Bush administration against the charge that spending on the war in Iraq had diminished the capacity to deal with domestic threats like the hurricane.
"I do not see that to be the case," General Strock said. "We deeply regret the loss of life associated with this. We are committed to doing whatever we can right now to stop the flow of waters and get the city on the road to recovery."
Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager in the New Orleans district of the corps, said the New Orleans protection system was a vexing mix. It met the standards that were agreed on long ago, but was known to be inadequate.
"This storm was much greater than protection we were authorized to provide," Mr. Naomi said.
Current and former local officials expressed anger at the lack of preparedness.
"I'm just shocked," said Martha Madden, who was the Louisiana secretary of environmental quality in the late 1980's and is now a consultant in strategic planning in Washington and New Orleans.
The Corps of Engineers, Ms. Madden said, should have arranged access to supplies like sandbags and concrete barriers, the way environmental planners reserve access to materials for oil spills.
"You'd have all that on contract," she said. "You have contractors with all those potential needs in place."
Since 1965, when the first large federal project was started to bolster New Orleans's levees and other defenses, there has been a tug of war over how sturdy, and expensive, to make a system that might, or might not, be needed.
Most aspects of the $732 million Lake Pontchartrain project have been completed, but the project remains behind schedule and underfinanced. Although Congress appropriated more than $4.7 billion for the Corps of Engineers this year, the spending on New Orleans levees was relatively small.
The Pontchartrain project drew about $5.7 million, almost $2 million more than what was earmarked for it in President Bush's budget. For five years, Congress has repeatedly increased the sum for New Orleans levees over Mr. Bush's requests, Senate Republicans' figures show. The White House on Thursday referred budget questions to the Office of Management and Budget, where officials did not return calls for comment.
From the project's early days, there were vivid reasons to push for the greatest level of protection. One was Hurricane Betsy, a midgrade storm that swamped much of New Orleans in 1965. In 1969, Hurricane Camille, the second-most-powerful Atlantic storm recorded, passed within 60 miles and demolished the Mississippi coast.
The initial plan was deemed robust, yet affordable, General Strock said. Government engineers and budget officials settled on designing for what meteorologists calculated would be a once-in-200-year event, he said. That would mean a storm like Hurricane Betsy, a Category 3 storm on the five-step intensity scale.
General Strock said tradeoffs between costs and protection levels were a result of a "complex process involving the intersection of a lot of people from the local, state and national level."
Adam Hughes, an analyst at OMB Watch, said such tradeoffs erred far too often on the side of serving short-term needs and discounting long-term risks. Now, Mr. Hughes said, the devastation in New Orleans made an earlier investment in bigger berms and other protections all part of that gray universe of what bureaucrats call infrastructure look like a bargain.
"This is a classic example of what underfunding infrastructure can do," Mr. Hughes said.
Not all of the problems leading to such a calamity lay at the federal level, said Bob Sheets, a meteorologist who directed the National Hurricane Center until retiring in 1995. Dr. Sheets said that even as a firmer understanding of the danger for New Orleans became evident in the late 70's, some local officials tended to discount the risks.
At the time, Dr. Sheets and other federal forecasters ran the first computer simulations, using a program that simulated how Lake Pontchartrain and surrounding waters might behave under strikes by big storms.
Much of the lake is a shallow pan where huge amounts of water can quickly pile up on a lee shore, like that facing New Orleans. The computer simulations made clear that certain storms could swamp the platterlike city, wedged between a great river and a broad lake, Dr. Sheets said, adding, "The risk obviously in New Orleans was greater than in any other community."
He and other federal forecasters gave hundreds of talks about storm risks, and New Orleans was always the case study for catastrophe.
Dr. Sheets had many tabletop exercises with the city's emergency officials, and when a storm loomed, they always started an evacuation, in the thought experiment.
But in 1992, he said, when Hurricane Andrew, just behind Hurricane Camille on the all-time intensity list, headed to the Gulf Coast, and the National Hurricane Center advised New Orleans to start evacuations, he said of the city officials: "Essentially they did nothing. The conventions and other business went on."
Dr. Sheets said a 20-year lull in Atlantic storm activity from 1970 until the early 90's could have contributed to communities' sense of ease. "The longer you go without something like this, the less you think it will happen," he said. "The risk was there," he said. "And now, obviously, it has come to pass to a great degree."
Mr. Naomi noted that since 2000, Congress had financed the corps request for a study to increase New Orleans's protections for the strongest hurricanes. But he acknowledged that the sum was a fraction of the request and that the study would take years to complete.
"To effectuate what would have made any difference in this storm," he said, such a study would have had to have started 20 or 25 years ago.
Glen Justice and Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/national/nationalspecial/02levee.html?pagewanted=print
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