Katrina and the Waves

Anyone watching television news is familiar with the muddy mess left in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. While these disastrous images invade our homes and our consciences, another storm is ravaging in the pressrooms of the left and right winged media.

Rescue efforts had barely begun when the finger pointing from the political poles started; the left blasting President Bush and the right blaming everybody else but the president. There’s no doubt that much of damage to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast might have been prevented, but realistically, there is no one public official or agency to blame. Disasters like this usually happen because of a confluence of mismanagement and incompetence.

The levees holding in Lake Pontchartrain are a perfect example. Parish officials started noting the need to strengthen the levees nearly twenty years ago. The Lake Pontchartrain area comes under the rubric of the federal Flood Control Act of 1928, and improvements to flood control are funded through the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project. Parish authorities sited the history of hurricane activities in the Gulf Coast region as a reason for continued improvement to the Lake Pontchartrain levees. But no one anticipated that a Level 5 storm could possibly hit the area. So the Army Corps of Engineers, which carries out planning and construction of improvements, fortified the levees to protect against Level 3 storms, the designation given many of the hurricanes that affected the area in the past. This is the dance of bureaucracy city and federal officials across the country have performed for years. The fed gives you what is indicated rather than what you think you need.

So who’s to blame for the levee collapse? Is it the Parish officials who didn’t insist on better fortification, the state for not lobbying the fed for better protection for its citizens, or the federal government for only performing minimum improvements? The answer: all three. Parish officials had a number of options to fund further improvements of the levees, including bond initiatives, borrowing, and increasing bed and sales taxes. The state had the opportunity to lobby the federal government for increased funding and its congressional representatives for legislation which would have improved the level of funding inherent in the Flood Control Act. And the fed could have listened more to the concerns of the local residents and commissions, studied the meteorological history of the area better and provided maximum improvements rather than minimums. This scenario isn’t a result of what individual republicans or democrats failed to do- it’s a result of institutional thinking. Everyone involved recognized the problem, but no one came up with an adequate solution.

Article Author: Larry Sakin

Larry Sakin is a former music executive and non-profit medical organization administrator. He advocates for literacy issues and provides advocacy training for grassroots and non-profit groups around the country.

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