Catastrophe
JUST AS Californians have always feared ''the big one" in a devastating earthquake, residents of New Orleans have always known that they were vulnerable to a hurricane that would overwhelm the city's levees and flood its streets. At first it looked as though Hurricane Katrina had passed enough to the east to leave the city's levees intact, but the Category 4 storm was so immense that even its glancing blow broke through the city's defenses. ''The big one" has hit.
It is a natural disaster -- perhaps the greatest in US history -- and a national disaster, calling forth a national response. All the relevant federal agencies, from the Coast Guard to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have been mobilized to send staff and equipment to the city and other affected areas. Texas is opening up Houston's Astrodome to provide shelter to New Orleans residents who had sought refuge in the Superdome, which itself became flooded. Other states have made hospital beds available. Soon there will be more than enough accounts of Samaritans to balance the looters.
But even before engineers repair the damaged levees and begin the long process of pumping New Orleans out, the city's residents deserve to know whether human actions or inactions bear a share of responsibility for this catastrophe. There is strong evidence that they do and that the entire Gulf area will be at risk of future Katrinas if policies and priorities are not changed.
Wetlands are the water storage protection that nature itself offers against massive flooding. But in the past 70 years, coastal Louisiana alone has lost 1,900 square miles of wetlands, an area larger than Rhode Island. The disastrous upper Mississippi River flooding of 1993 demonstrated how little protection levees can provide when wetlands are allowed to be developed or turned into cropland.
Since its birth almost 300 years ago, New Orleans has been dependent on its levees. The city is a shallow bowl, most of which is below sea level. In the mid-1990s, the Army Corps of Engineers began an ambitious project of strengthening southeast Louisiana's levees and building new pumping stations.
But federal funding for it bottomed out after 2003, with tax cuts and other budget commitments forcing cutbacks in many domestic programs. Even though the 2004 hurricane season was the most severe in years, the federal government this year steeply reduced funding for the Corps's work in Louisiana from a targeted $36.5 million to $10.4 million.
But even if it had been completed, the project might not have been enough to protect against Katrina. One study to look at longer-term solutions had been proposed for the current fiscal year, with the federal government and Louisiana contributing equal amounts. But the Army Corps's project manager, Al Naomi, said last fall that the cost of the Iraq war had caused the federal government to order that his district not begin any new studies.
Just as Washington can now send thousands of public servants to the Gulf, it should find the money for that study. The harder decisions will come if future studies conclude that New Orleans can be saved from future storms only by giving back to nature some of the buffering land that has been claimed by development.
