Katrina by Andy Horowitz

Author:Andy Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

THE NEW LEVEE SYSTEM

In a city rent by divisions of personal experience and political vision, this was the one principle that seemed to unite everyone: New Orleans needed a levee system that would protect it from another hurricane like Katrina. A 2006 survey found that 98 percent of New Orleanians wanted levees “rebuilt stronger to withstand a category 5 hurricane, even if that will cost substantially more.” That fall, a group of women activists organized as Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans gathered over 50,000 signatures on a petition calling for the State Legislature to reform the levee board system. The legislature endorsed their plan, and a subsequent constitutional amendment passed with 94 percent of the vote in New Orleans, again reflecting the consensus that the city needed credible flood protection.138 The state created the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to serve as a unified agency for coastal restoration and hurricane protection. “Make levees, not war,” read the slogan on t-shirts and bumper stickers.139 Without the ability to prevent another flood, all the other debates seemed moot.

At first, Washington seemed to agree. “The Army Corps of Engineers will work … to make the flood protection system stronger than it has ever been,” President Bush announced in September 2005. Then, in December, Congress directed the Army Corps to “consider providing protection for a storm surge equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane,” and to produce a plan for “Category 5 protection” within two years. But the Corps missed Congress’s deadline by a year and a half. When it finally did issue its final report in August 2009, four years after the hurricane, the Corps estimated that building “Category 5 risk reduction” for metropolitan New Orleans—a string of defenses that would defend against storms that had a 1 in 400 chance of happening each year—might cost anywhere from $59 billion to $139 billion. The National Academy of Sciences, charged with peer review, criticized the Corps for not offering a plan at all, but rather a vast list of options, thousands of pages of alternatives, without a path for action.140

In the meantime, New Orleans faced an immediate problem: the need for flood insurance. Without flood insurance, New Orleanians would be unable to secure mortgages, no homes would be rebuilt, and any possible recovery would stop dead in its tracks. But in order to remain covered by the National Flood Insurance Program, FEMA, which administered the NFIP, would have to certify that the region was protected against a so-called “100-year storm.” (Statistically, an event that has a one in one hundred chance of occurring each year has a 26 percent chance of occurring over the course of a thirty-year mortgage, and a 63 percent chance of occurring over the course of a century.) In March 2006, the White House announced that the Army Corps’s initial repairs, completed in advance of the 2006 hurricane season, would not meet the NFIP standard.141 FEMA agreed to maintain New Orleans’s NFIP coverage temporarily, in anticipation of improved levees, but Bush administration officials began to hedge on their initial commitment to Category 5 protection.

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