In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA,
ranked a major hurricane hit on New Orleans as among the three
likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing the United States.
The other two were a massive San Francisco earthquake and,
prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City.
Hurricane Georges barely missed New Orleans in September 1998,
and the city’s century-old levee system barely held back the
waters. “Georges, a Category 2 storm that only grazed New Orleans,
had pushed waves to within a foot of the top of the levees,”
reported Times-Picayune writers Mark Schleifstein and John
McQuaid in a 2002 article. “A stronger storm on a slightly
different course — such as the path Georges was on just 16 hours
before landfall — could have realized emergency officials’
worst-case scenario: hundreds of billions of gallons of water
pouring over the levees into an area averaging five feet below sea
level with no natural means of drainage.”
Schleifstein and McQuaid projected the consequences: “Amid this
maelstrom, the estimated 200,000 or more people left behind in an
evacuation will be struggling to survive. Some will be housed at
the Superdome, the designated shelter in New Orleans for people too
sick or infirm to leave the city. Others will end up in last-minute
refuges that will offer minimal safety. But many will simply be on
their own, in homes or looking for high ground.”
Additionally, envisioned Schleifstein and McQuaid, “Thousands
will drown while trapped in homes or cars by rising water. Others
will be washed away or crushed by debris. Survivors will end up
trapped on roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by
water, with no means of escape and little food or fresh water,
perhaps for several days.”
Writing in Editor & Publisher on Aug. 31, the day
Katrina was moving north of New Orleans, Pulitzer Prize winning
journalist Will Bunch explained that Congress, 10 years earlier,
authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or
SELA, when flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six
people.
“The Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA,
spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping
stations,” writes Bunch. “But at least $250 million in crucial
projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin
increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans
continued to subside. Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars
toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the
fact that the spending pressure of the war in Iraq, as well as
homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts —
was the reason for the strain.”
In early 2004, reports Bunch, the Bush administration proposed
spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was required
for key repairs at Lake Pontchartrain. In June 2004, Walter
Maestri, the emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish,
Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: “It appears that the
money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland
security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we
pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and
we’re doing everything we can to make the case that this is a
security issue for us.”
In early 2005, the Bush administration came back with “the
steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New
Orleans in history,” writes Bunch. “Because of the proposed cuts,
the Corps office in New Orleans has imposed a hiring freeze.”
All told, the full $250 million that was needed to complete the
levee projects is just about equal to what we’re spending in Iraq
per day — just for military operations, not counting the price of
reconstruction.
At FEMA, George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh,
assumed the top position in 2001. In congressional testimony, after
stating that FEMA was viewed by many as “an oversized entitlement
program,” Allbaugh explained that President Bush’s goal was to
“move away from the expectation that the federal government is the
option of first resort to the option of last resort.”
Asserting that “disaster mitigation and prevention activities
are inherently grass roots,” Allbaugh recommended that cities and
states look more to “faith-based organizations,” like “the
Mennonite Disaster Service” and “the Baptist Church mobile feeding
kitchen.”
Unfortunately, the Mennonites never got around to fixing the
levees.
Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics
at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
