Is Katrina a Natural Disaster or a Crisis in Public Policy?\r\n\r\nSeptember 2, 2005\r\n\r\nBy Brian Azcona and Jason Neville\r\n\r\nIn the wake of this devastating Hurricane, when the thousands of stranded people have finally been moved to dry ground, people will rightly question how such a disaster could occur; they will wonder how our home town of New Orleans could simply fill up like a bowl and wash away almost our entire human habitat. Some may point figures at government, blaming the Army Corps of Engineers for faulty construction. Others may attribute the disaster to the power of the storm that the USA Today labeled the \"160 mile/hr Monster.\" In reality a single cause cannot explain much of anything; but if we wish to learn something from this nightmare, it makes sense to concentrate on those actors over which we can exert some influence: the environmental and urban planning/engineering dimensions. To do so, we must evaluate critically and honestly the policy decisions we made leading up to the disaster, so we can plan wisely and sustainably when we rebuild our much-loved home.\r\n\r\nPoliticians, policy-makers, academics, and committed citizens have long recognized the dangers of a potentially disastrous hurricane. President Carter created FEMA in 1979 to address the country\'s worst-case disaster scenarios, and New Orleans has consistently been at the top of that list. In 1995 International Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations identified New Orleans as the most vulnerable North American city to global climate change, because sea-level rise and elevating temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico intensify the frequency and power of hurricanes. The recent destruction of human life, property and one this nation\'s greatest historic and cultural treasures demands a critical assessment of how authorities confronted and prepared for a hurricane strike that was seen as inevitable. For the crisis of New Orleans is the quagmire of unsustainability, which is a problem the entire nation faces. Sadly enough, after the realization of the worst-case scenario, it seems the best case scenario might be that we pause, question and prepare a plan that will work this time around.\r\n\r\nWorking from 2001-2003 as research assistants and independent contractors for research center at the University of New Orleans, we were focused on integrating social science into emergency management. Along with a number of other academics and with the collaboration of active citizens and some dedicated policy-makers, he studied the social dynamics of flooding in southeast Louisiana. Their team of researchers drafted evacuation studies, participated in the construction of government reports, and wrote scholarly articles. While our limited experience does not represent a full insider\'s perspective into the larger policy-making machine of Louisiana, it provides an appreciation of the central problems and major obstacles to addressing them that precluded any serious correction to the problem.\r\n\r\nMedia commentators treat Katrina as the culmination of the bad idea called New Orleans: a city whose precarious existence is the fault of poor site selection in 1699 by French explorers. They ignore the more recent history of dramatic landscape alternations, which exacerbated the city\'s exposure to floods. The reality is that in the last century, over 1.2 million acres of land have disappeared, in large part, as a consequence of land-misuse—that includes oil, gas, and timber extraction; industrial, commercial, agricultural, and residential development.\r\n\r\nThese economic activities required erosion-causing modifications to the landscape such as canals, levees, and drainage. Historically, these wetlands provided invaluable flood protection by acting as a sponge to soak-up the menace of storm surge. In fact, before these new \'protections\' were built, healthy periodic floods depositing nutrient-rich sediments were actually increasing out coastal areas. Where land once stood is now open water, providing fuel to the furry of hurricanes. And because the developed land—compacted soils, pavement and concrete—cannot hold water from rains and floods, all water must eventually go back to the Gulf. In effect, this combination constituted a hydrological contradiction to growth in southeastern Louisiana: development reduced the absorbent capacity of the region, while simultaneously increasing runoff and toxicity. In other words, economic growth translated into more water, more danger, and a greater and increasingly imminent catastrophe.\r\n\r\nFor this reason, flood mitigation—not to be confused with the traditional methods of flood protection (e.g., levees and pumps)—largely took the form of coastal restoration. Policy-makers acknowledged the only way to save southeast Louisiana and New Orleans was to rebuild the coastal wetlands. Early initiatives began in the early 1980\'s, but a comprehensive framework and rational was laid out in 1998 in a plan called Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana The plan marked a moment of inter-agency collaboration on federal, state, and local levels of government and constituted an attempt to devise a \"clear vision\" for all management and restoration activities concerning the Louisiana coastal zone. On the level of appearances, all interest groups in the state, including big oil, supported restoration, or at least, the quest for $14 billion of federal funds to finance restoration construction projects. Shell Oil sponsored a public relations blitz to mobilize national support called the \"America\'s Wetlands\" campaign. The president of one of the region\'s largest banks joined the Governor\'s task force to garner the political will at the local, regional and national levels. An army of scientists and engineers carried out the research and planning for one of the largest public works projects in history. It was believed that the only way save southeast Louisiana and New Orleans was to rebuild the coastal wetlands. To date, over a billion dollars has already been dedicated to actual projects since the first efforts began.\r\n\r\nAlthough the effectiveness of these works is debatable, the hypocrisy coastal restoration euphoria is not. Many people tirelessly worked for this mission (e.g. Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana) but unsustainable development continued unabated, and the most critical government agency (i.e. Army Corps of Engineers) refused to correct previous mistakes refused to correct previous mistakes that made erosion and flooding worse.\r\n\r\nBy far the most offensive example of government hypocrisy—in addition to a total disregard for public safety on the part of business interests—involves a canal called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR-GO). The MR-GO is 70 mile ship channel that connects the Port of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico in a route as straight as a ruler.\r\n\r\nEyewitness accounts and hydraulic models suggest this waterway brought in Katrina\'s storm surges which broke the levee in eastern New Orleans. This water has saturated the 9th Ward, eastern New Orleans, and St. Barnard Parish. In these areas have seen the most severe flooding; some 40,000 homes have been destroyed. At the time of this writing, nobody knows how many people have lost their lives.\r\n\r\nAt the behest of Board of Commissioners of the Port of New Orleans, locally known as the Dock Board, the Corps initiated construction in the late 1950s. Boosters for the Port claimed that the MR-GO would convert New Orleans into the next Rotterdam and encourage an \"industrial renaissance\" in St. Bernard Parish. These lofty ambitions never materialized and though the canal excelled in generating controversy, it failed to stimulate economic growth or draw much ship traffic even though it cuts 40 miles off the trip by water from New Orleans to the Gulf by traversing the marshes of St. Bernard Parish. The only growth locals witnessed occurred in the canal itself, which expanded from its original width of 500 feet to 2500 feet in some places because the wake of giant ships causes the canal\'s banks to collapse. Critics attributed over 40,000 acres of wetland loss to this \"marsh-eating monster\" and described it as a \"hurricane superhighway\" that would exacerbate the risk of deadly floods.\r\n\r\nIn response, a number of committed individuals and organizations across cultural, economic and racial lines demanded that the Corps close the MR-GO (e.g. Coalition to Close MR-GO, Gulf Restoration Network, Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, and St. Bernard Sportsman\'s League). While the Corps preached the virtues restoration to Congress, it refused to correct its own deeds of environmental destruction. It ignored the public outcry; it failed to seriously take into account public safety; its policy protected not people but the economic interest of port industry and steamship companies. Officials from the Dock Board and the Corps argued of a new lock system on the Mississippi River could permit the closure of the MR-GO. This economically and ecologically unjustifiable scheme would have cost $700-800 million and could not be complete until 2017. Critics called these locks an unjustified waste and drew attention to social and ecological impacts (Taxpayers for Common Sense and the National Wildlife Federation report on the Army Corps of Engineers identify lock expansion as one the twenty-five most wasteful Corps\' projects in the country: http://www.taxpayer.net/corpswatch/).\r\n\r\nAfter years of fighting, nothing changed and the worst predictions of catastrophic floods have turned to be true.\r\n\r\nThe MR-GO represents the most egregious tension between the money-making imperative of businesses with environmental protection and public safety. Since the problem of land loss with all its consequences for flooding have been acknowledged, government agencies have made no real attempt to mediate this conflict. With all attention on building new land, government shirked its responsibility to protect what still existed. More vacation homes were constructed on the shores of the barrier island and in the marshes. Also against citizen protest, plans were made to extend Interstate 49 through the southeast part of the state, which would stimulate sprawl further into flood prone areas. Paradoxically, local politicians marketed a new highway to Port Fourchon, the nation\'s largest oil and gas port, as a restoration initiative. Subdivisions filled wetlands on the shores of Lake Ponchartrain; suburban houses replaced that invaluable natural sponge that provided strong hurricane storm surges. Today, that lake is situated on my hometown New Orleans.\r\n\r\nThe catastrophic flooding of New Orleans this week—decades in the making—was more preventable than has been acknowledged by portrayals of Katrina as an invincible natural disaster.\r\n\r\nAs New Orleanians, we must take certain responsibility for the policy decisions that exacerbated this week\'s already-infamous disaster. The Army Corps was just following orders when it constructed it\'s vast network of canals and levees—the orders of our policymakers who were awash with the patronage of industrialists who wanted to use our coastal zone to facilitate the extraction of \'resources\' while leaving whole cities and towns in harm\'s way.\r\n\r\nProjects such as wastewater processing wetlands in New Zealand, the DeltaPlan in Netherlands (established asfter a remarkably similar flood in 1953 which killed 1,900 people and displaced 40,000) and creation of flood-directing recreational lakes in Curitiba, Brazil could all be models for re-development of the Southeast Louisiana coast and the city of New Orleans. Imagine a regional public works project to reclaim land, built a series of small-scale levees and canals, preserve our unique cultural heritage, re-establish bountiful resources for fishing and hunting—all of which could facilitate a ambitious and cooperative spirit among all of the peoples of Southeast Louisiana.\r\n\r\nThough campaigns such as \"America\'s Wetlands\" have tried with varying degrees of success to gain the nationwide attention to this looming national crisis, the entire country—the entire world—is paying attention now. Let\'s ensure the same mistakes aren\'t made when we rebuild our state, as we must. Let\'s rise to the monumental challenge—with creativity, enthusiasm, optimism, future focus, and prudence—of building an equitable and sustainable future for Southeast Louisiana and the people living here.\r\n\r\nIt is impossible to say if even the most revolutionary thinking in planning and environmental management could have quelled to destruction of Katrina, but it is certain that business as usual guaranteed it.\r\nhttp://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/4096.php\r\n