Meanwhile the government, under pressure from shipping interests, dredged channels, including the granddaddy of them all, the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. It was built in the early 1900s, and eventually grew to connect the Rio Grande at Brownsville, Texas, with Apalachee Bay near Tallahassee, Florida. Along some stretches, the Intracoastal route followed natural waterways, but in the New Orleans section it was man-made, a cement-sided canal cut into the soft marshland. Blocking the natural ebb and flow of the water, the Intracoastal and other channels weakened the delicate ecology of the wetlands. Ongoing maintenance caused further damage. Together, industrial factors contributed to as much as 40 percent of Louisiana’s total land loss.23 “The amazing part was how little was done to expedite the wetlands reconstruction process, even after Hurricane Ivan in 2004,” John W. Sutherlin, an environmental professor at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, wrote after Katrina. “The state and local government (with a noticeably absent federal government) seemed to stare reality in the face and pretend that the good times would just continue to roll.”24
No less a conservation authority than Theodore Roosevelt, in fact, took a special interest in the Louisiana coast. He established Breton Island, off the eastern shore of the Louisiana “toe,” as the second U.S. National Wildlife Refuge in 1904, insisting that it must be protected if near extinct bird species were to thrive again and New Orleans was to be spared massive flooding. He visited the Louisiana barrier islands for four days in 1915 as ex-president, enjoying the sight of dolphin schools and bird rookeries. As a Harvard-trained naturalist, he kept field notes about the brown pelicans, caspain terns, roseate spoonbills, and laughing gulls he encountered. He enjoyed watching the shrimp boats trawl and the egrets swoop down from the sky looking for minnows to eat. Roosevelt chronicled the trip in his 1916 travelogue, A Booklover’s Holiday in the Open, and told readers about conservation conclusions he made upon visiting the pristine Gulf island. “Birds should be saved because of utilitarian reasons; and, moreover, they should be saved because of reasons unconnected with any return in dollars and cents,” he wrote. “A grove of giant redwoods or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral.”25
Over the decades, groups including the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, National Wetlands Research Center (Lafayette), and the organization America’s Wetlands, tried to sound alarms. Scientists believed that miles of coastal wetlands could reduce hurricane storm surges by over three or four feet. Sometimes politicians listened. The Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act of 1990, known as the Breaux Act for its primary author, John Breaux, then a Democratic senator from Louisiana, brought ongoing funding to needed projects, but the modest appropriations were never in the billions of dollars that the dire situation called for. The Breaux Act gave $50 million annually (one-eighth of the money was provided by the states and the rest came from the federal government) for wetlands restoration projects. But the funding was done in piecemeal fashion, not project by project. It was not a comprehensive, holistic engineering effort. The historical record shows that Louisianans and certain responsible corporations, like Royal Dutch Shell, did care—but alas not enough. Task forces were created and blue-ribbon commissions forged. Gorgeous photography books were published showcasing shorebirds flying over the Chandeleur Islands, and baby alligators being hatched at the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge. But for all the Save the Wetlands fanfare, these legislative gestures remained largely hollow.
Louisiana’s ecosystem was dying, weakening every year with no miracle remedy in sight. Starting in the 1950s, millions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas were tapped from the Gulf of Mexico. Wetlands were lucrative. “Pork barrel projects for the oil-gas industry and Port of New Orleans always won the cash prizes,” Louisiana Sierra Club representative Daryl Malek complained in late 2005. “The port lobby was unreal. There was not the same political push for wetlands. The politicians’ view was: out of sight, out of mind.”26 Turbulent seawater was eating away the marshes and barrier islands—New Orleans’s hurricane protection—but that was generally considered a “tomorrow problem” for the world’s largest port system. Louisiana wetlands restoration was perceived as a squishy “green” issue, a flashpoint for environmental-minded citizens and tree huggers who needed to be placated even as the cause was denied sufficient funding. Massachusetts would not have tolerated Cape Cod’s disappearing, nor would Virginia have let the Chesapeake Bay vanish without a fight. As Tulane University environmental law professor Oliver Houck framed the issue: “If Texas annexed fifty square miles of Louisiana’s coast, we would go to war! Yet the political community doesn’t even notice as it sinks away.”27
Two million Louisiana residents, about 50 percent of the state’s population, lived in coastal parishes, according to the 2000 census. Some people thought of coastal Louisiana as a watery marsh at best, a dumping zone at worst. They underestimated its importance to the business of seafood. In 2001 commercial fishing in Louisiana brought in $343 million dollars, about 27 percent of the U.S. fishing industry. Whether it was Gulf shrimp or blue crabs or Louisiana oysters, the coastal parishes of America’s Wetlands were a seafood lover’s nirvana (menhadan fishing alone was a major industry in the area). Louisiana’s license plates may have read “Sportsman’s Paradise”—but Louisiana wouldn’t fit that description for long if the recreational fishing industry was decimated. And there was more to it than fish. As the Audubon Society liked to point out, more than 5 million migratory birds—70 percent of avians that migrate through the Mississippi Flyway—rested in Louisiana’s coastal habitat.28 To the frustration of modern ecologists, Theodore Roosevelt continued to be the only powerful politician to understand, or care, about the Louisiana coast. “Roosevelt was a president committed enough to his dream of conservation that he traveled to a distant group of barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana to see firsthand the affected land and wildlife,” U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu said in May 2005. “Unfortunately, even with the efforts of conservation visionaries like Roosevelt, the past [century] has been one of continued coastal and wildlife losses.”29
If America’s Wetlands continued to vanish, New Orleans, which was fifty-five miles from the Gulf of Mexico, would soon be only twenty-five miles away. Given this precarious geographical reality, the city of New Orleans desperately needed the levees and flood walls provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. According to research scientists at the University of New Orleans, the city had been sinking at the rate of three feet per century, due in part to the destruction of barrier islands and coastal wetlands.30 In addition, the ongoing effort to keep the city free of excess rainwater, through the use of massive pumps, had weakened the underlying geology, accelerating the process engineers call “subsidence.” Basically subsidence was the sinking effect that had taken hold of coastal Louisiana through a number of contributing factors both natural (invasive flora-eating insect species, shifting subsurface faults), and man-made (dredging, canal digging, polluting). The net result was that instead of being slightly above sea level, as in Bienville’s day, New Orleans had sunk to an average of six feet below the waterline, and as much as eleven feet in some parts of the Ninth Ward and Lakeview. In New Orleans East the elevation was eight feet below sea level.31 The real threat to New Orleans came from Lake Pontchartrain, north of the city, and from the primordial swamps that bordered it on the east and the west. Remarkably the Mississippi wasn’t much of a concern because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had built high-quality, sturdy levees along the river.32 The levees along the lake, however, were known to be more unstable. You could tell that by just looking at them. They resembled the tall cement protective fences that safeguarded Los Angeles from forest fires, not from fourteen-foot storm surges. “For every 2.7 miles of marshes/swampland that disappeared, there was a corresponding increase of one foot of storm surge,” Whitney Bank President and America’s Wetlands spokesperson King Milling explained. “Storm surges that used to be in the
neighborhood of ten to twelve feet could suddenly be eighteen to twenty feet. It’s scary and real.”33
In geographical terms, New Orleans was no more stable than a delicate saucer floating in a bowl of water. Any turbulence in the surrounding water is bound to flood the saucer. (Humorist Roy Blount Jr. preferred the analogy of the oyster, “the half-shell being the levees that keep Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River from engulfing the city.”34) In view of the city’s close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, turbulence in the surrounding area was inevitable. Most experts ranked a hurricane in New Orleans with an earthquake in California and a terrorist attack on New York as the gravest threats to the nation. To make matters worse, the escalating carbon dioxide in the Gulf of Mexico, some scientists believed, was causing the ferocity of hurricanes to increase. “In a paper published in Nature just a few weeks before Katrina struck, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that wind-speed measurements made by planes flying through tropical storms showed that the ‘potential destructiveness’ of such storms had ‘increased markedly’ since the nineteen-seventies,” Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker, “right in line with rising sea-surface temperatures.”35
III
Locals were certainly not ignorant of the looming danger of lethal hurricanes and storm surges jumping the levees, which formed the lip of the saucer. A steady stream of so-called doomsday treatises on the inevitability of a major hurricane laying waste to New Orleans were published in recent years. Pulitzer Prize–winning author John McPhee’s 1989 book The Control of Nature, for example, explained in elegant detail how the Army Corps of Engineers’ levees would ultimately prove futile against the wrath of Mother Nature.36 A Scientific American article published in October 2001—“Drowning New Orleans,” by Mark Fischetti—offered a truly grim prognosis for the city. “New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen,” Fischetti predicted. “The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms.”37 Then there was a landmark five-part series by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein published in June 2002 in the local Times-Picayune, titled “Washing Away.” The reporters didn’t mince words: the “Big One” would “turn the city and the east bank of Jefferson Parish into a lake as much as thirty feet deep, fouled with chemicals and waste from ruined septic systems, businesses, and homes. Such a flood could trap hundreds of thousands of people in buildings and in vehicles. At the same time, high winds and tornadoes would tear at everything left standing.” The series also warned of the high probability of the levees breaking.38
Others joined the doomsday choir. In October 2004 National Geographic published “Gone with the Water,” a frightening description of the havoc that a herculean Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricane would wreak on New Orleans. Written by Joel K. Bourne Jr., the article imagined a deadly Lake Pontchartrain storm surge thundering into New Orleans, “the car-less, the aged and infirmed, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party” left behind. Bourne’s piece wasn’t just descriptive writing—it was prophetic.39
In 2001, Houston Chronicle science writer Eric Berger attended an American Meteorological Society meeting and first heard the startlingly dire endgame for New Orleans if a major hurricane ever struck. A trained astronomer with a master’s degree in journalism, Berger started researching the gradual “sinking” of New Orleans. His frightening story appeared in the Chronicle on December 1, 2001; he didn’t pull any punches. “In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of ten left behind as the city drowned under twenty feet of water,” Berger wrote. “Thousands of refugees could land in Houston. Economically, the toll would be shattering…. The Big Easy might never recover.”40
As Katrina drew a bead on New Orleans, Berger, at home in Houston, feared that his bleak sinkhole article was about to become a reality. “I knew that New Orleans dodged a bullet with Ivan in 2004,” he recalled thinking as Katrina’s menacing radar track appeared on his television screen. “They were lucky to survive a direct hit for as long as they did. And—although it’s unfathomable—in the city proper they had established no Hurricane Command Center for police and city officials to cope with what was going to be a certain future reality. They had no communication network established in advance. Go figure.”41
Historian John Barry’s 1998 Rising Tide was almost mandatory reading for the college-educated class in the Crescent City.42 In fact, it was the 2005 selection for One Book One New Orleans, an annual community-wide reading program encouraging all New Orleanians to read and discuss the same literary work. In exacting detail Barry explained the social, economic, racial, and political firestorm that accompanied the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Rising Tide was particularly tough on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the so-called Carnival class, who worried more about Mardi Gras floats than flood protection. “The blame,” Barry told the Harvard University Gazette, referring to New Orleans’s vulnerability to hurricane flooding in modern times, “lies with the companies that have constructed gas and oil pipelines and shipping channels through coastal Louisiana, making the area more subject to erosion and providing less protection to the city.”43
For decades, university professors all over Louisiana were desperately trying to get government officials to wake up to the dire threat. “Many scenarios had been run prior to Katrina years ago,” Gregory Stone of Louisiana State University’s Coastal Studies Institute told BBC World Service, “and with that type of storm, the scenarios should have been taken seriously. We’d been telling people all over the world that New Orleans was a nightmare waiting to happen.”44 But New Orleans had so many urban problems (e.g., inadequately funded schools, political corruption, and collapsing infrastructure) that it was near impossible to get locals to focus on barrier islands, wetlands rebuilding, and coastal erosion. Their view was, by and large, that the Louisiana coastal parishes had to lead the charge on those regional problems. It was a tall order to try to save the seventh-largest delta on earth when you weren’t safe on your block. Billions would be needed for coastal erosion; what New Orleans needed was millions to pay better wages to teachers and the street cleaners who pick up rubbish after parades. Besides, people liked to believe they were safe behind their Category-3-proof levees. New Orleans was a fortress—so what if it was surrounded by a moat?
IV
The idea of categorizing hurricanes into five ascending classes originated in 1969, the brainchild of Herbert Saffir, a consulting engineer in Coral Gables, Florida, and Robert Simpson, then the director of the NHC. Their classification, known as the Saffir-Simpson Damage Potential Scale, was based on myriad criteria that indicate the likelihood of a storm surge. The dominant consideration, however, was wind speed. It grew out of the experience the two men had had with Camille, the 1969 hurricane that killed 172 people along the eighty-six-mile coast of the state of Mississippi (256 was the eventual death toll, including Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia). According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), hurricane intensity on the Saffir-Simpson Scale ranged from Category 1, with winds of 75–94 mph (“No real damage to building structures. Damage primarily to unanchored mobile homes, shrubbery, and trees. Also, some coastal road flooding and minor pier damage.”), through Category 3, with winds of 111–130 mph (“Some structural damage to small residences and utility buildings with a minor amount of curtain wall failures. Mobile homes are destroyed. Flooding near the coast destroys smaller structures with larger structures damaged by floating debris.”), to the rare and monstrous Category 5, with winds in excess of 155 mph (“Complete roof failure on many residences and industrial buildings. Some complete building failures with small utility buildings blown over or
away. Major damage to lower floors of all structures located less than fifteen feet above sea level and within 500 yards of the shoreline. Massive evacuation of residential areas on low ground within five to ten miles of the shoreline may be required.”).45 In recent years, hurricane ratings according to the Saffir-Simpson Scale have become the central factor in determining whether to evacuate in advance of a hurricane. Due to the scale’s proven value in the United States, countries like Japan and Australia adopted it as well.46
New Orleans engineers learned to think in terms of the Saffir-Simpson Scale. With the protection of their system of levees and pumps, the city was considered just barely safe in the face of a Category 3 hurricane, specifically a fast-moving Category 3 storm. A slow-moving Category 3, crawling along at 7 mph or less, would be even more treacherous, drenching the coast with a greater amount of rain than a fast-moving storm. As for Category 4 or 5 hurricanes, the city was simply not prepared to withstand them. And yet they occurred with frightening regularity in the Gulf of Mexico. As the commonplace New Orleans refrain went, “It’s not if, you know…it’s when.” The parlor game, come hurricane season, was to wish the cursed storm away, praying it would hit Panama City or Biloxi or Galveston, or a foreign country like Mexico or Nicaragua—anywhere but Louisiana’s fragile 397 miles of shoreline.
While New Orleans residents often mused about the possibility of cataclysmic destruction, even if they were just whistling in the dark, their city remained starkly vulnerable. In 2005, it could not boast of a single shelter certified by the Red Cross. Not one. That nonprofit behemoth, based on E St. NW in Washington, D.C., refused to operate a facility in New Orleans (or Key West) because none of the commonly used emergency sites (schools, hospitals, gymnasiums, etc.) was much above sea level. The Red Cross would open up shelters outside the flood zone, but not in the saucer. Meanwhile, New Orleanians didn’t even protest as their flood-prone hometown became a dumping ground for toxic waste, the location of thirty-one Superfund sites.* The collective nonchalance in the face of such omens triggered novelist James Lee Burke to deem New Orleans “an insane asylum built on a sponge.”47 Novelists couldn’t quite agree on the nature of New Orleans’s problem—to wit, whether it was dysfunctional or just nonfunctional. Or as the forty-four-year-old New Orleans native Michael Lewis—author of best sellers like Liar’s Poker and The Next Next Thing—wrote in the New York Times Magazine on October 9, 2005, “There’s a fine line between stability and stagnation, and by the time I was born, New Orleans had already crossed it.”48
The Great Deluge Page 3